Local Politics

Parents of students in Boston public schools are protesting plans to bypass the city’s school system when handing out federal “stimulus” funds. They claim the schools are underfunded:

Parents spoke of how their kids’ schools, already depleted of arts teachers and librarians and lacking modern facilities, will be further crippled by the $812 million budget that the Boston School Committee approved Wednesday. The package calls for eliminating 536 education positions, including 212 classroom jobs (134 teachers and 78 teacher aides).

So, they’re spending more than three-quarters of a billion dollars and they’re talking about cutbacks and how it “cripples” the students’ education. How much should we spending? What are we spending all that money on? And yes, even though I don’t live in the city of Boston, I said “we”: the city school system—like all public school systems in Massachusetts—receives an enormous amount of money from the commonwealth.

The Boston public school system has 56,000 students. That means they spend $14,500 per student each year. In 2006, the average per-pupil spending in the United States was $8,287. Massachusetts spent the third most of any state at $10,693. Yet Boston spends $14,500 and that’s not nearly enough! In national achievement and accountability assessment, Boston falls short of the standard in nearly every category.

Parents say the schools are falling apart, the athletic fields are crummy, the textbooks are old. Let’s set aside the fact that Massachusetts has had an unprecedented boom in school construction in the past decade or so—maybe Boston has been left out of that a little—where has all the money gone?

Back in 1994, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby identified the culprit: “In the Boston system, 40 percent of the budget never gets to the classroom; it is absorbed by the School Department bureaucracy.” If you look at this story about 2008’s budget woes for the school district, you get the sense that the percentage never improved: The fact that there are 80 unfilled jobs in the bureaucracy available to be cut indicates how much bloat there really is in the system.

(On a side note, in 1996 Boston Mayor Tom Menino called school reform his top priority and said in his January 17 State of the City address: “I want to be judged as your mayor by what happens now in the Boston Public Schools. I expect you to hold me accountable. … If I fail, judge me harshly.” The schools are still a mess more than a decade later. Voters have never held him accountable.)

What we see here is that government is the worst entity for educating our children because in an environment without accountability and a free rein to dump money on cronies and pet projects and ideological indoctrination, actual education suffers. It also shows that the standard metric of per-pupil spending is meaningless when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of schools. Yet spending money is about the only tool most politicians have.

Which is yet another reason we’re going to homeschool our kids. I just wish I wasn’t wasting my taxes on schools that don’t educate other peoples’ kids.

Photo credit: Flickr user kevindooley. Used under a Creative Commons license.

When we moved to Holbrook last November, I wrote about how I considered the town’s solution to the expensive problem of trash disposal to be quite fair. At the time, homeowners paid what was essentially a consumption tax on the trash. You could throw out as much trash as you needed, as long as it was all contained in special bags that cost $3 each. In addition, recycling was included, but you had to separate paper from plastics and put them in paper bags and tie up cardboard with strings. It was kind of a pain.

Then at the end of the year, the town changed the deal. They lowered the price of the bags slightly and instituted a per-household fee because they weren’t raising enough money to pay for the cost of trash disposal. (The town had passed an ordinance a couple of years ago that trash disposal had to pay for itself, not rely on other taxes.) So the bags went down from $3 per bag to $2.10 per bag, but we now have a $240 annual fee. Based on our household’s consumption, that would raise our cost for trash disposal by $150 per year. Not a devastating amount, but I could find other uses for that $12 per month. Still, I wasn’t so motivated that I was actively seeking alternatives.

But the alternative came to me. Last Saturday I found a flyer stuck to our door advertising a local independent trash hauler. They would supply two 96-gallon bins, one for trash and one for recycling. The recycling is single-stream, which means no more sorting and bundling. Everything goes into the bin. They pick up every other week, trash and recycling on different days, and pick-up is not affected by holidays, except when it falls on the actual holiday itself. (This year it’s just July 4 that’s affected.) And the best part? I would pay a little less than I did under the old town-run system before they raised the prices. Plus I get a lot more convenience.

... [P]roving in the process once again that in most areas of society private enterprise can provide a superior product/service at a competitive price over government’s efforts.

Of course, I called on Tuesday and signed up right away, proving in the process once again that in most areas of society private enterprise can provide a superior product/service at a competitive price over government’s efforts, which usually have little incentive for cost-cutting and inefficiency. After all, when government needs more money it just raises taxes. Except in this case, there is an escape hatch for the taxpayers.

I do recognize that the reason they can’t cover costs is that people like me opt out of the system, thus placing the structural costs upon fewer shoulders. But what they don’t recognize is that they provide no incentive to keep us from leaving the system. They provide an inferior service at a higher cost because they make me subsidize a bunch of people who get abatements as well as the inefficiencies inherent in any government bureaucracy.

The best part is that the town just signed an agreement with a company that wants to set up a regional trash transfer station with a rail-link in town and part of the agreement is free trash and recycling pickup for all residents, plus a huge annual payment-in-lieu-of-taxes to the town’s coffers. So if all goes well, in 2 years, I switch to the no-cost-to-me service and save the $300 I’m spending on private trash disposal. Until then, I’m looking forward to a good relationship with the private company and not having to worry about special trash bags and sorting my recycling.

Photo credit: Flickr user feministjulie via a Creative Commons license.

Our new hometown of Holbrook is one of the smallest municipalities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in both population and land area. It’s a classic New England small town, with a representative town meeting, which sounds like fun. Maybe I’ll run.

There are lots of small-town changes to get used to, but one there’s one I want to point out. Trash disposal has become an expensive problem for cities and towns, large and small. Most just bite the bullet, pay exorbitant fees, and spread the pain among all property owners, large and small, however much trash they actually produce. But Holbrook has come up with a solution that—while it seemed initially to be a pain—is actually quite fair.

In this town, your trash will only be picked up if it’s in a special blue trash bag, marked “Town of Holbrook” that you can can buy in local stores. The bags cost about $3 each, which sounds like a lot for a trash bag, but is quite economical for trash disposal.

What we have here is, in fact, a consumption tax. If you’re someone who doesn’t recycle and who creates lots of trash, then you pay for the waste you produce, whereas people like the elderly folks who live around me who throw away maybe half a bag per week pay only for their consumption. And if you don’t like the systems at all, you can pay a private contractor to take it all away for you, no special bags required.

Yes, there are inconveniences. Making sure that everything you throw out ends up in the blue bag can be tiresome. We’re still using regular kitchen trash bags for everyday use and then putting two of those in one of the big town bags. And I understand that just before we moved in the price of the bags doubled from $1.50 to $3. That could be a bit of sticker shock.

But the idea is itself a fairly conservative, small government way of doing things. You often find that on the local level, even in a very liberal area like eastern Massachusetts.

Photo credit: Flickr user feministjulie via a Creative Commons license.

Something tells me there’s going to be some awkward silence around this family’s Easter dinner table. From the letters to the editor in the Salem Evening News, here in Salem, Mass.:

When a co-worker showed me the edition of The Salem News with the high-paying cops salaries in Salem, I bet him anything my sister, Sgt. Kathleen Makros, was in the top five. When he looked, he said I was right.

I just shook my head. If I was a taxpayer in Salem or the mayor, I would be outraged! People are suffering with bills and cops making salaries like that? Thank God I live in a town where the people were brave enough to stand up to the police and the town administrators and say no to more cops and overtime!

 

Ouch! For those outside of Massachusetts, state law requires private companies to hire off-duty cops at overtime rates to be present at job sites in public areas, unlike most states that only require a flagman or other regular company employee to direct traffic. That little law tends to inflate payrolls, and even if they don’t come out of taxes, they do come from companies who pass on the costs to consumers anyway.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino has a column in the local newspaper Boston Post-Gazette. Last week he recalled that March 17 is not just St. Patrick’s Day, but also the Suffolk County holiday of Evacuation Day—Boston City workers get the day off, essentially— which recounts, well, let’s let the mayor tell you.

“On March 17, 1776 the British Army finally left ‘the colonies,’ by way of Boston Harbor after being beaten in the American Revolutionary War.”

I’m not sure what Washington was doing at Yorktown but apparently the British had been gone for years. I wonder if Washington had held up a big billboard after the Battle of Bunker Hill: “Mission Accomplished.” I guess the years between 1776 and 1783 only count as a “quagmire” for the American troops.

Way to set an example for all those kids in school, Mr. Mayor. Maybe they should administer MCAS to politicians before they can take office.