Educating our children hinges on Prop 100, or does it really?

Star feature headline continues scare tactics on school cuts even if Prop. 100 passes. The inside Editorial Page continues with scare tactics “to preserve help for the elderly”. Yesterday’s “Fitz’s Tucson” spends half of the editorial deriding voters who dare VOTE NO on Prop 100. Doom and gloom for our children’s education is posted everywhere we turn, especially if we believe everything that the proponents of Prop 100 puts out there; including the mass print contributed by the Star, a major supporter.

But let’s just take a minute and review the facts. Prop 100 is supposed to go a long way in continuing the quality of education we offer our children, or so say the proponents. But just what is a quality education here and in the rest of the United States. Lets take a look. I gathered the following data from NationMaster.com, specifically under their “Statistics” section and I think you will find them rather interesting to say the least. You will also find other similar or equal statistics at OECD, but I used NationMaster since they are very clear.

The overall assessment gained from this research is that we only rank in the top 5, worldwide, in 4 categories of the 10 categories reviewed. We are 5th in Primary teacher starting salary, Primary teacher salary(after 15 years), “Dislike school” categories and 2nd in the “Find school boring” category.

Its all down hill from here as we place 14th in Scientific literacy and Grade 12 advanced math: 15th in Reading literacy, Grade 12 advanced science and 18th in Math literacy.

I next looked at spending as a percentage of GDP and one of the interesting things was that, although we did rank #1 in GDP, we ranked 37th, tied with Austria and Estonia, when it comes to spending for education as it relates to GDP. We spend 5.7% of our GDP towards education.

While you are reviewing these sites pay close attention to all of the countries that just beat the living day lights out of the “quality education” we are depriving our children from if we don’t spend more money. Quite clearly we throw more dollars at educating our children than any other country in the world, yet we can only finish in the top 14 in “disliking school”, “school is boring”, “Paying both our primary and tenured teachers”.

If per chance you recall an earlier publication I put out wherein we see that our students rank dreadfully poor in all of the above categories, except perhaps, disliking and finding school boring.

Do you honestly believe that spending a billion dollars a year more; actually only 2/3 of a billion, will give our children the help they need to learn more than they currently do?

VOTE NO ON PROP 100 and lets get on with finding a real solution to sparking their interest.