Reform Welfare Before Raising Taxes

Below is my full response to the Riverside Press Enterprise newspaper's recent article regarding polls showing California voters are likely to approve tax hikes to help support our public schools.

As someone who has spent the last twenty-eight years teaching in three different school districts in three different parts of our state, I want to urge voters to reject any proposals to increase taxes to improve public education.

Over the last three years, the state has been brutal to public education. Budget cuts have resulted in massive teacher layoffs, the elimination of performing arts programs, and the realization that our public schools are not getting the job done.

This mess is the result of decisions made by our elected leaders who now want to see hard working taxpayers clean it up by increasing their taxes. This is not a solution to a problem as much as it is a punishment for being employed in this state.

If our leaders want to create more money and ear mark it for public education, they can start by ending the incentive to be a life long recipient of welfare. Rather than rewarding welfare recipients for bringing more children into the state who flood our schools with their low skills, lack of desire to improve, and even less parental support, we need to cut their benefits and encourage them to find another state to live off of.

Student enrollment would quickly decrease relieving school districts of the pressure to hire more teachers and implement programs for people who give us little to no return on our tax payer investment.

Test scores would also increase as would graduation rates and our state could marvel at seeing the percentage of college ready students go through the roof. California might even return to the top tier of states on the education front rather than remain at the bottom.

Ridding the state of its massive welfare population will also allow school districts to place a halt on new construction and allow them to better utilize existing campuses. With fewer campuses also comes the need for fewer administrators whose six figure salaries dwarf those of any teacher and save districts even more money.

Our schools can no longer be education centers for children from supportive and motivated families while also serving as glorified day care centers for parents who are unfit to have children in the first place.

If we eliminate the welfare problem that is sucking this state of much needed resources and replace it with a system that is designed to help those in temporary need rather than reward people too lazy or unskilled to work at all, we instantly improve our public schools.