A small victory, but mine own

by David Safier

Starlee Rhoades wrote The Goldwater Institute's Daily Email. It's about how ridiculous it is to vote for Prop 100, because the money won't make it into the classroom. Apparently, there's so much waste to cut in the schools, they don't need another penny. Last in the country in per student spending? An unimportant detail, I guess.

Here's my small victory. These two sentences.

For every teacher in Arizona, there is almost one “non-teacher” on the payroll.

[snip]

Beyond excessive numbers of “non-teachers,” money is spent on all sorts of other non-classroom related items.

See that term, "non-teachers" which, for some strange reason Rhoades puts in quotes? I'm taking credit for the fact that it doesn't repeat Matthew Ladner's Bus Drivers are Bureaucrats lie. Instead of using Ladner's claim there is an "almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio," Rhoades has to satisfy herself with the more honest but far less potent term "non-teachers."

Oh, and about that 1-to-1 ratio of teachers to non-teachers, which includes necessary support services like bus drivers, maintenance workers and cafeteria workers. It's the same ratio as states all over the country. Even in the ed-miracle state, Florida, they have the same "wasteful" 1-to-1 teacher to non-teacher ratio.

If Rhoades cared to present an honest argument about what she sees as waste in schools, she needs to do some research and calculate how many of the non-teachers are essential to running schools and school districts and how many are excess baggage.

But "honest arguments" are not G.I.'s forte. "All the facts that fit our foregone conclusions." That's G.I.'s motto.