June 10, 2005

Report Card

I don't really have a dog in the fight over whether or not to raise Nashville's property and sales tax rates and give more money to the Metro Nashville Public Schools. I don't live and would never let my children go to its lousy public schools - I'm one of the growing number of former Nashville residents who have fled or are fleeing its high taxes and lousy schools and heading to the suburbs for better schools and lower taxes. Still, I'm going to lob this grenade in from the cheap seats...

Nashville's Metro Council representative Eric Crafton has blown a big hole in the side of the Good Ship Tax Increase "For The Children", with a powerful 11-slide PowerPoint presentation demonstrating how Nashville taxpayers over the last several years have been paying more and more money for schools and getting less and less performance.

The bottom line is that Nashville is spending double on its schools per pupil what it was spending just five years ago, and more than any other city in the state, and getting sub-mediocre results. Nashville's public schools have the second-lowest graduation rate in Tennessee, and the lowest ACT test scores and State Report Card grades in its eight-county region and when compared to the other large cities in Tennessee.

Even more devastating to the pro-tax-increasers and the Metro Nashville Public School System's plea for more money is that Crafton demonstrates that the school system's leadership doesn't seem able to provide an accurate count of how many teachers the system has.

Blake Wylie is all over the Nashville tax increase debate, and summarizes the data in Crafton's PowerPoint presentation very well:

From the looks of it, the Metro school system doesn't need additional funding...it needs better leadership. The teacher to student ratio is low, teachers are paid the second most in the state, spending per student is the highest in the state (and above the national average), but the performance is utterly pathetic compared to schools in the rest of the state.

UPDATE: I used Photoshop to create a "web photo gallery" of the slides in Crafton's presentation for those of you who can't read a PowerPoint on your PC or laptop, but I can't figure out how to get it properly uploaded to my server.

So... I've gone ahead and uploaded each of the slides here. Just click them in order to see the presentation.

If anyone knows how to upload an Adobe Photoshop "web photo gallery," please let me know.

Meanwhile, if you are a Nashvillian who is opposed to the proposed double-whammy increase of both the sales tax and the property tax rates, you might want to visit SaveNashville.org.

And if you know Eric Crafton, please tell him if he's going to do that kind of great research on public policy issues facing Nashville, he really ought to have a blog to publish it on.