Surcharge To Fund Education

[VancouverIslander]

As someone who has worked in Education my whole career, I can agree wholeheartedly with anyone who is in favour of reducing any bloated administration. It doesn't always exist, but when it does it's as much of a cancerous growth as anything you can find in government or business. It can't always be cured from the inside, but if someone from the outside were to be sent in to trim the bureaucracy it might help. All you have to ask yourself is how any of these positions improve class room learning more than spending on something else like learning resources or teaching staff. I'm all for providing teachers with the means to do a good job (although I confess to a bit of bias on the matter having done the job for almost 30 years). I also believe you need a certain amount of mentoring and supervision from school based administration. I've rarely seen any of the senior administration (above the school level) have any effect at all on class room learning. You do need a few bodies at this level to supervise principals, allocate funding and resources and set policy direction. Some times you will have a specialist in technology or other area that is good to provide training and guidance for class room teachers. However, a lot of it is just cronyism - creating jobs for people who are tired of working in the class room, and a lot of it is empire building. A board hires an HR manager, who then 'needs' to hire more people to create an HR department, which justifies a raise because they are now supervising a staff. This further justifies those above the HR manager to want a raise because they have more employees to supervise. In the mean time, the system had functioned quite well before any of these people had been brought on board.

I once had the spouse of a superintendent tell me that the superintendent couldn't do a lot of the HR and other duties because they spent all of their time responding to complaints from parents. I replied that when I started teaching, the policy was to send those with complaints to the source - back to the school or the teacher - before moving up the chain. Since most complaints are misunderstandings in the first place, they are better resolved by discussing them directly. The superintendent's secretary could literally filter 98% of the work by checking to see if the chain of command had been followed. As a class room teacher I'm appalled that anyone wouldn't talk to me first since I'm in the best position to respond to any questions about what happens in my classroom.

Now with all of that said, I have no problems paying more for property taxes IF IT ACTUALLY IMPROVES THE EDUCATION SYSTEM rather than merely create a further bloated bureaucracy. Property taxes likely isn't the best solution for raising money. Income tax is probably a better bet. We all benefit from a better educated populace, but I'd only embrace higher taxes if better educated students was a guaranteed result.



Me ka ha`aha`a,
Mike