Late this past week, the Milwaukee Public Schools board voted 6 to 3 in favor of “examining” the possibility of dissolving the district. This would be a sort of bankruptcy situation, and basically that is where the district is headed eventually. The teachers are so grossly overpaid and the administration is so excessively wasteful with taxpayer money, that the taxpayers simply can’t afford to let this continue.

Of course, MPS officials aren’t blaming themselves for being incompetent and having an awful school system:

Andrekopoulos began the meeting by saying, “The state finance system to fund Milwaukee Public Schools is broken,” then repeating the sentence for emphasis.

The funding system is broken? No, MPS is broken. I’m not sure why public officials in the Milwaukee area always see cuts in spending as a bad thing:

He presented the board with a set of choices it could make involving property taxes and spending, generally involving large property tax increases or major cuts in spending.

The path he supported would cut the budget proposal approved by the board in June by $2.5 million, but still bring a 13.95% increase in property taxes.

No! Let’s cut the spending more! Why is that such a foreign concept? Businesses do it all the time. Money is obviously not the answer. MPS wastes $1.2 billion of taxpayer money each year with little to show for it, and I think it’s reasonable to force the district to cut all non-essentials. And they don’t get to decide what’s essential or not. I do.

But since the district won’t do that, I think it’s fair to consider dissolving the district. What other option is there? The taxpayers can’t shoulder this burden anymore.

Why I’d love it if MPS dissolved:

Those involved in MPS are wasting taxpayer money at an alarming rate.The district spends over $14,000 per student, and in return, we get 60% of students unable to read or add and subtract. Something needs to be done about it. The district constantly justifies the need for more more more but we never see any results from the money.

Legitimate private schools in the area are educating students for an average of $5,000 to $8,000 per school. It would seem to make much more sense to give each child a voucher to attend the private school of their choice.

Now I’m not talking about letting storefront schools educate our children. A lot of those have sprung up because of the voucher program, and their quality is poor. They’re run by people who have no business heading up schools, but who see dollar signs in the voucher program.

I’m talking about legitimate private schools that have real administrators, real curriculums, and have some level of oversight. Those are the kinds of schools we should send our children to.

Even if we budget $6,000 per child for private school and $1,000 per child to put in place a system to oversee the program, we’ve still cut the cost to the taxpayers in half. What a novel idea! Reducing taxpayer burden!

And since the private schools have much better rates of actually educating our students, we’d have better results for our money. Focus on quality education? What a plan!

Why it’s nothing more than a scare tactic:

Schools love to manipulate taxpayers this way. Make them panic. Have them believe that the helpless children will no longer have resources available to them, and any compassionate taxpayer will say TAX AWAY!

Of course, the first thing we’re going to hear is how poor children won’t be educated anymore. (Newsflash: They’re not really being educated by MPS now!) But taxpayers wouldn’t have to worry. Poor children would be offered every opportunity to go to school with a voucher program, and they’d actually have a chance at receiving a far superior education to what’s offered to them now.

School districts in Wisconsin have used scare tactics in the past to coerce taxpayers into voting for ridiculous tax hikes for themselves. One school district threatened to cancel all after-school sports activities. *gasp* We can’t have that! How much money do you want? (Yes, referendum approved.)

Tactics like this are often successful at taking the focus off the real issue: overspending.

Student enrollment is down about 5%, yet MPS wants just as much money from taxpayers (resulting in a big property tax increase because of the way the tax shell game is currently being played).

What will likely happen:

The district will spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on “consultants” and a “study” to evaluate this option. They will decide it can’t happen. Taxpayers will be screwed even more. End of story.