Running Hard Until the Halfway Mark

I decided to do a full post on this one rather than just link from another post. First, the AP article. I heard about this on Fox Business this morning, and then Hot Air kindly found me the article so I didn’t have to go looking.

The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half of the district’s schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy.

The board voted 5-4 after parents and community leaders made final pleas to spare the schools even as the beleaguered district seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The approved plan calls for shuttering 29 of 61 schools – a striking amount even as public school closures rise nationwide while the recession eats away at academic budgets.

On Fox Business this morning, Tracy Morgan took a firm stance that this doesn’t solve much since none of the teachers’ pensions are getting cut.  Reality of how to do that aside, she’s got a point.  If you’re holding a bunch of sunk cost in your budget that doesn’t actually, you know, enable students to learn, then the overhead kills your budget.

I found this one farther down, though…

Covington has stressed that the district’s buildings are only half-full as its population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores. The district’s enrollment of fewer than 18,000 students is about half of what the schools had a decade ago and just a quarter of its peak in the late 1960s.

Many students have left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs.

So, the population has been going down, and you’ve been propping the schools up anyway.  Well, I’m glad that you’re keeping teachers employed, I guess.  White-collar welfare is always a fun thing to explain.  But look at that next line.  THERE’S AN OPTION, and parents are choosing to use that option to ensure their kids get a better education.  That sentence alone tells me that the system is actually working.

See, it’s not a fundamental right that teachers get to keep their government jobs.  It might be a fundamental right that kids get educated, but we’ll debate that some other time.  If you want another take from another source, go check out this post on the Hit and Run Blog at Reason.  It’ll get you giggling.  It asks a great question, though: “why fire a single teacher when the stimulus package will pay for all of them?”

So, in the end… a failing system with overburdened costs is doing what it can to cut, but it’s over-burdened.  In the mean time, a competitive system is opening up and at least saving some of the students.  Too bad we can’t overhaul it all, but at least there’s progress.