Teachers’ unions and their allies on school boards in big cities continue to raise taxes with little accountability for results.
As school winds down across the state, school board directors are busily passing budgets for the coming school year. More often than not, especially as the Biden Administration’s inflationary policies drive up the cost of everything, this means tax increases for homeowners. As these tax increases are proposed, and usually passed unanimously with little debate, it is important to pause and ask how these school districts are doing at their job of educating students and how they are factoring in the influx of illegal immigrants into the budgetary process.
Philadelphia City school district is a behemoth, spending $4.5 billion to educate a little less than 200,000 students, or about $23,000 per-pupil. For all that spending, Philadelphia students are woefully behind their big city peers across the country, behind by double digits in most categories on the NAEP, the “Nation’s Report Card ”. While the recent turbulence of COVID may be a tempting excuse, Philadelphia has lagged other big cities and the nation as a whole going back to at least 2009, with consistently underwhelming scores.
At nearby Catholic schools, education costs a third as much. One K-12 Catholic school in the Philly suburbs charges $8,400 (but gives $2,000 in financial aid on average) while sending 100% of graduates to college, according to online database Niche.com. On the NAEP assessment, Catholic school 8th graders score well above big city public school students (scale score of 279 vs 255). For a fraction of the cost, these students are far outperforming lavishly-funded city school districts.
Since 2021, the Biden Administration has only worked with teachers’ unions and their bosses, like Randi Weingarten, over Covid policies, transgender issues, and opposition to school choice. Instead of focusing on parents as the primary decision-makers over a child’s safety and learning environment, Biden’s Department of Justice labeled some parents as domestic terrorists for exercising their First Amendment Rights.
