I thought readers may enjoy this post by the PE's Shirin Parsavand about the California teachers unions deceptive new radio ad on the state budget.

In this one, a mother and child listen to a car radio news report: "California is still facing a $15 billion budget crisis with local schools facing cuts of $4.3 billion."  Shirin points out that the, "Mom seems to forget entirely that she's talking to a child when she says that politicians should 'put partisanship aside and make education a real priority again.' Or maybe the kid just has very strong vocabulary skills."

Shirin also points out that their really is not a cut to the education budget.  It just doesn't grow as fast as the teachers union would like.  The ad ignores that schools and community colleges would get more funding under the governor's revised budget proposal for 2008-09 than last year, although the increase is slight for K-12 schools.

The radio spot also talks about teacher layoffs, but many of those teachers were called back, hundreds of them in the Inland area alone.

My Mom and wife are both teachers and they always have co-workers who get caught up in this layoff bluff.  The education budget has grown by leaps and bounds every year since 1998, but we have not seen the results.  Our test scores and facilities have remained stagnant while the bureaucracy and administration budget has grown and grown.

Even when we are in a $24 billion dollar budget crisis, they won't even slow their growth.  This Tom McClintock article from 2005 always reminds me of what we are actually paying for vs. what our students get.  In it McClintock suggests cutting the administration budget by asking if, "Maybe - as a temporary measure only - we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures." He goes on to describe a school with luxury commercial office space, executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators, new desks, associate professors from the California State University, an annual membership at a private health club with a trained and courteous staff of nutrition and fitness counselors, aerobics classes and the latest in cardiovascular training technology, an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary, $75 new books - plus an extra $5 to have the student's name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.

McClintock then asks the obvious question that the California public has not yet cared to ask. "The school I have just described is the school we're paying for. Maybe it's time to ask why it's not the school we're getting...there's an old saying that you can't fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it. Maybe it's time to fix the bucket."

No wonder India and China are leaving us in the dust in math and science education.  The bureaucracy and administration budget has to be cut so that we can get these dollars into the classroom where they belong.