Owens:
Education industry on the run
Sunday, May 08, 2005
• Express-Times Editorial
It seems clear in
Pennsylvania that Act 72 is a bad law.
Welcome to
Harrisburg.
In case you missed it, your
elected officials in the state capital decided to open the
floodgates to big business by approving slot machine
gambling at horse racing tracks and selected "parlors"
across Pennsylvania. It creates a money pit that helps the
rich get richer and generates a new revenue stream for
politicians who find themselves in costly campaigns every
few years.
Oh, and it began as an
effort to lower property taxes, which it will not do. By the
time any of this money starts rolling into state coffers,
your taxes will be higher than they are today by a margin
wider than any alleged savings, and a higher earned income
tax will allow another path for government to reach into
your pocket.
Nonetheless, cast a wary
eye toward any local school board member who votes against
Act 72. Slovenly school board members and fatcat
administrators in the education industry are the reason
we're in this pickle.
The bloated education
industry, nearly suffocated by featherbedding and incest, is
screaming bloody murder about the possibility of Act 72
becoming law in local districts.
That alone is reason to
wholeheartedly support it.
You see, if you've checked
your mailbox in the last 20 years, nearly every district in
our area has seen annual increases the likes of 5, 8 and 10
percent on projects such as rock-climbing walls, sporting
arenas and stadium skyboxes. Those items are small potatoes
when compared to compensation packages approved for
superintendents, assistant superintendents, principals,
assistant principals and assistant-assistant principals.
It's no wonder the full-time district employee in charge of
painting lines on ball fields and the assistant district
employee in charge of painting lines on ball fields are in
such a bad mood.
Someone might begin looking
over their shoulders.
Act 72, it turns out,
includes a provision that would require tax increases above
the rate of inflation to be approved by local residents who
show up at polling places on election day. It's a
teeney-weeney measure of accountability the likes of which
terrifies the education industry.
Somewhere along the line
the idea of providing good public education was lost. For
that, you cannot blame Harrisburg. It began in Nazareth,
Easton, Bethlehem, Norristown, North Penn, Parkland and
every other place that just had to have the latest and
greatest of everything. Local public officials took a blank
checkbook and spent your money as if there was no tomorrow.
They're still doing it.
Now, the featherbedders are
leaning on the most time-honored tactic of all -- the fear
factor. They've convinced every band parent that the music
department budget will dry up. They told the starry-eyed,
scholarship-driven elementary school parents that the third
grade lacrosse program is in jeopardy.
It's all a lie. No one is
snatching Johnny's bugle.
Act 72 doesn't really fix
any of this. Legalizing slot machines and generating money
from gamblers created another revenue stream, but at the end
of the day lawmakers in Harrisburg had no stomach for
standing up against North America's greatest superpower, the
education lobby.
So we have this, a flawed
mechanism that won't do much of anything, good or bad,
except offer a slim chance of finally getting accountability
in public education.
School boards should do the
right thing and vote it in.
They won't.
If they had done the right
thing all along, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Joseph P. Owens is editor of The Express-Times. E-mail him
at jowens@express-times.com.
Copyright 2005 The Express-Times. Used with
permission.
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