Proposed Property Tax Increase for Schools?

[Anonymous]

The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids. It is a game of satistics and you can influnce the outliers but the core will remain static. The myth of economic mobliity in the country is a drug that makes people underestimate the work needed to leave behind their station in life. The entire system simply is not designed to promote young black kids into elite academics and prepare them to take on leadership posistions in this country. Instead social systems create concentrations of poverty where school systems push testing designed for rich kids on them and then use that to hold back funds form under achieving schools causing a cycle of under performance. The few who beat the odds and excel in the system have to pass through disproportionate policing and a college system that rewards generational wealth and credit as much as grades for admission both which are systems that favor "other" demographics to put it kindly.

Even though it is a bad word around here, gentrification shows the true path to better schools. Two simple things must happen; Eradication of poverty inside the boundaries of said system and a politically and economically involved parent base that does not accept the scraps.

That said you can either displace the poor people or lift them up but the latter takes generations. And to be politically taken serious you must be affulent to hold an elected officals audience. I see no easy path to this for African American communities who typically get lip service during election years at best.

Truth is PG needs to mobilize and get people elected at the governors level if we ever want to change anything. We could learn from Northern Va on how they turned around and started flexing their political weight with their state politics. If we think we can tax our way out of a social hole we will continue to lose. The tax burden will be another feather in the cap of the anti PG crowd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids.

This makes me think of this cartoon:

http://www.vagabomb.com/This-Comic-Will-Forever-Change-the-Way-You-Look-at-Privilege/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids.

This makes me think of this cartoon:

http://www.vagabomb.com/This-Comic-Will-Forever-Change-the-Way-You-Look-at-Privilege/

Great cartoon and exactly my point. Didn't say it was fair but where you start is THE indacator and where you will finish and the people who start in the front and hold power have no incentive to change that. Don't let the few examples of people who move up from the bottom or fall from the top make you think it is all one big meritocracy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

.


Ur catholic school gets to pick n choose who attends, ur neighborhood school doesn't

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

How can you tell the school is outperforming the public school? Kids in Catholic schools do not take the same tests as those in public school so how can you compare?

My neighbor has a daughter in Catholic school who was asked to leave the school because they were not able to educate her due to behavior issues. Guess where she went? That's right, public school had to take her. And she's doing fine, but now the public school teachers have to do the hard work of the remedial teaching that the Catholic school teachers just "couldn't" seem to manage. Public school teachers manage it, because they have to. They don't have the option of counseling students out who aren't doing well or aren't a good fit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I propose:

1) Close down the bottom 10% of underperforming schools

2) Once there's a rigorous and independent process in place to approve good charter schools, lease those school building to them.

3) Give parents a $12,000 voucher per kid to decide where they want to send their children (before you ask -- that is LESS than it costs now to "educate" a kid in PG using the system we have today

HORRIBLE idea. Charter schools that do well, only do so because they hire young, idealistic teachers and make them work many hours. A great model, but one that burns through young teachers at an incredible rate. This model works well for the few charter schools it works for, but is not replicable for more than a few schools in any one area. MANY charter schools in fact are failing schools.

PGCPS spends more like $10,000 per pupil. And guess what? Your private schools and religious schools do not want the 10% of our student population that comes from underperforming schools. You know why? The vast majority of underperforming schools (by which I presume you mean, schools which do not meet targets for AYP on state tests) have many students are not passing state tests because they are English Language Learners. There simply aren't enough private schools willing to take $10,000 (or even $12,000) dollars to educate large numbers of ELLs. And even if they did, they would not have any more success bringing these children up to grade level quickly.

Of course, you would never know that the private schools were failing to educe the ELLs because private school do not have to take part in state testing.

If you changed your proposal to require all private schools to take all applicants, and participate in state testing, in order to get that tuition money, I might agree with it. But the private schools never would. They KNOW they cannot educate all students.

Private schools do a good job for the population they are willing to educate. But they wouldn't be able to continue their model if they were help to greater accountability for all students (take away their ability to counsel out kids who are failing for example.)

[Anonymous]

12 problems with charter schools:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/20/a-dozen-problems-with-charter-schools/

Charter Schools are cheating your kids

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/07/charter_schools_are_cheating_your_kids_new_report_reveals_massive_fraud_mismanagement_abuse/

What's good and bad about charter schools:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/03/16/why-charter-schools-work-or-dont

Where charter authorizers do their jobs, charters vastly outperform traditional public schools, with far less money. Where authorizers fall down on the job, letting failing charters live on just like traditional schools, the average charter performs no better, and sometimes worse.

The original charter idea was to open the public school monopoly to competition from new schools, operated on contract by other organizations: nonprofits, teacher cooperatives, universities, even for-profit businesses. The charter was usually a five-year performance contract, laying out the results expected from the school. Charter authorizers – typically school districts or state boards of education – would reject charter applications from groups that did not appear equipped to succeed, and they would close schools if students did not learn as promised.

If you already think pgcps can't be trusted with money to fund better public schools, what makes you think they are going to be able to be able to provide oversight to charter schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
3) Give parents a $12,000 voucher per kid to decide where they want to send their children (before you ask -- that is LESS than it costs now to "educate" a kid in PG using the system we have today

What's wrong with vouchers? a LOT.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/report-slams-d-c-s-federally-funded-school-voucher-program/

Report slams D.C.’s federally funded school voucher program

A new U.S. General Accountability Office report says that the local agency that administers the program — which has used $152 million in federal funds since 2004 for more than 5,000 students from low-income families — lacks the “financial systems, controls, policies, and procedures” to ensure that federal funds are being spent legally. It also says the U.S. Education Department has not exercised its oversight responsibilities well enough.

Created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Program has been kept alive by Republican leaders in Congress who have ignored every report of mismanagement of the program, as well as opposition from the Obama administration. Last year, legislators even threatened to cut funding to D.C. public schools if the voucher program was shut down.

You think PG County is going to do better at overseeing voucher programs than it apparently does with its current schools?

ALso -- you can't give vouchers to religious schools. What miracle, non religious schools will pop up to educate the bottom 10% of our county? Where will you find all he teachers willing to work for these schools that HAVE to take kids who don't speak English, kids with behavior problems, and kids with parents who don't give a damn? And all for private school teacher pay?

The big trade off in teaching for working at the public schools is that the pay is usually a lot less, not such great benefits -- but you don't have to deal with as much pressure for test scores, and usually your school will counsel out difficult children or not allow them in in the first place. SO teachers enjoy teaching at private schools more, and they are willing to work for less pay.

Remove those conditions, though… who do you think is going to be willing to staff all these $10,000 year schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids.

This makes me think of this cartoon:

http://www.vagabomb.com/This-Comic-Will-Forever-Change-the-Way-You-Look-at-Privilege/

That cartoon is the sad truth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids. It is a game of satistics and you can influnce the outliers but the core will remain static. The myth of economic mobliity in the country is a drug that makes people underestimate the work needed to leave behind their station in life. The entire system simply is not designed to promote young black kids into elite academics and prepare them to take on leadership posistions in this country. Instead social systems create concentrations of poverty where school systems push testing designed for rich kids on them and then use that to hold back funds form under achieving schools causing a cycle of under performance. The few who beat the odds and excel in the system have to pass through disproportionate policing and a college system that rewards generational wealth and credit as much as grades for admission both which are systems that favor "other" demographics to put it kindly.

Even though it is a bad word around here, gentrification shows the true path to better schools. Two simple things must happen; Eradication of poverty inside the boundaries of said system and a politically and economically involved parent base that does not accept the scraps.

That said you can either displace the poor people or lift them up but the latter takes generations. And to be politically taken serious you must be affulent to hold an elected officals audience. I see no easy path to this for African American communities who typically get lip service during election years at best.

Truth is PG needs to mobilize and get people elected at the governors level if we ever want to change anything. We could learn from Northern Va on how they turned around and started flexing their political weight with their state politics. If we think we can tax our way out of a social hole we will continue to lose. The tax burden will be another feather in the cap of the anti PG crowd.

Agree with what you are saying. Sad, but true. The eastern shore seems to have more clout than Prince George's does, at the state level and they're not even as densely populated. That's an imbalance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What pg county doesn't need is a bunch of scattered charter schools like DC. Most of those school test scores are below average and parents move to one part of the city to try to get their kids into 3 or 4 good schools. Improve upon the existing schools in pg first by creating programs and implementing them in the local neighborhood school. Also focus on business revenue not just taxes based upon housing. That way of thinking needs to die. Pg school system has improved drastically over the last 15 years. They have a done a good job with little funds

And that improvement has come while middle class folks have mostly shifted their kids to private schools, thus removing a solid base of learners to begin with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am against this as it will slow PG real estate appreciation that is already lagging behind other areas in the Metro area. I don't think an infusion of capital will be the silver bullet for the schools but I would rather see them increase transit and amenities that would raise our propriety values which would bring in more $$$$ tax wise without affecting our rates.

We have a hard enough time attracting middle class residents without a discount to our area and if the taxes eat up the savings it will only get worse. This could be a growth inhibitor and still not do much for our schools.

It's hard have brtter transit options she. Our governor is slashing or deleting things like the purple line budget.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic school in my neighborhood outperforms my neighborhood PGCPS by a mile. The high performing Catholic school received significantly less money per pupil than the public school. Money is not the problem.

It is not the schools it is the parents and the kids but nobody will admit that. Poor undereducated parents produce poor undereducated kids the majority of the time. Kids who have checked out but are forced to attend then become distractions and drag down a percentage of the engaged kids. It is a game of satistics and you can influnce the outliers but the core will remain static. The myth of economic mobliity in the country is a drug that makes people underestimate the work needed to leave behind their station in life. The entire system simply is not designed to promote young black kids into elite academics and prepare them to take on leadership posistions in this country. Instead social systems create concentrations of poverty where school systems push testing designed for rich kids on them and then use that to hold back funds form under achieving schools causing a cycle of under performance. The few who beat the odds and excel in the system have to pass through disproportionate policing and a college system that rewards generational wealth and credit as much as grades for admission both which are systems that favor "other" demographics to put it kindly.

Even though it is a bad word around here, gentrification shows the true path to better schools. Two simple things must happen; Eradication of poverty inside the boundaries of said system and a politically and economically involved parent base that does not accept the scraps.

THIS. All day long. This.

That said you can either displace the poor people or lift them up but the latter takes generations. And to be politically taken serious you must be affulent to hold an elected officals audience. I see no easy path to this for African American communities who typically get lip service during election years at best.

Truth is PG needs to mobilize and get people elected at the governors level if we ever want to change anything. We could learn from Northern Va on how they turned around and started flexing their political weight with their state politics. If we think we can tax our way out of a social hole we will continue to lose. The tax burden will be another feather in the cap of the anti PG crowd.