One of my friend’s in Mississippi sent this column by Bill Crawford in Meridian.
Crawford says the Governor and Legislature regularly complain about federal mandates, and he agrees with them.
But unlike them, he asks why the Governor and Legislator passed a law for charter schools that takes tax money away local districts without their consent. Isn’t this what they complain about when Washington does it?
He writes:
Let’s take a look at the lawsuit against charter schools now pending in the Mississippi Supreme Court.
The state established charter schools outside the normal public school domain. They do not answer to local elected school boards and have their own state agency, not the Mississippi Department of Education. In setting them up, the state mandated that local schools transfer funds to charter schools, so much per local student attending the charter school. This includes a share of local tax revenue as well as state revenue.
Now, remember that local elected school boards set property tax millage rates based on what the regular public schools need to operate. Maximum millage and annual increases are also limited by state mandates.
Parents of students in Jackson public schools have sued the state for taking their local tax money and giving it to charter schools in the city.
The state contends school money, state and local, should follow the students.
Local school advocates contend, since neither local voters nor local school boards had a say in the establishment or operation of these charter schools, just the state, tax money local school boards authorized should stick with the schools for which the money was intended.
Hmmm.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Any state that elects a right wing conservative as governor is suffering from the same state overreach. Florida is experiencing the same usurping of local governance as it is neutralizing the control that local communities had over its education tax dollars. The state is taking taking this function away from the local communities. There is no pretense of any thing remotely related to democratic input in this power/money grab. They are counting on newly minted conservative judges that will stave off any challenges to this overreach. This is a new era of taxation without representation.
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I beginning to see that the extreme right wing isn’t the party of small government, but the party of how much can I control for myself and the heck with everyone else.
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Exactly. They are not conservatives. They are vandals.
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When ESSA was passed, I kept asking the question; are state mandates any different then federal mandates? We now know part of that answer. What us going on with charters are a heist, transferring the assets from public schools–funds, students, building and power. All without minimal accountability and transparency
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When ESSA was passed, I kept asking the question; are state mandates any different then federal mandates? We now know part of that answer. What is going on with charters are a heist, transferring the assets from public schools and districts–funds, students, building and power. All with minimal accountability and transparency
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YES.
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Yep. The Utah state legislature CONSTANTLY complains about “unfunded mandates” from the feds, and then routinely sends unfunded mandates to cities and school districts.
And not a bit of self-awareness that they are doing the thing they rail about.
In my mind, the policy should be that for every education law passed in the state, that two should be repealed. Maybe then we could actually get somewhere.
My two “favorite” mandates from the legislature deal with how I can display flags of other nations in my classroom (I teach geography). I can’t have flags larger or higher in the room than the U.S. flag, because…? And, I have to teach my students that the U.S. political system is a, “Compound Constitutional Republic.” What’s the “compound” part, you ask? It took me two years of asking the Utah State Office of Education and every legislator I could track down to find out. It means federalism. But, in Utah the word “federal” is a bad word, so we have to teach it as “compound” instead.
I wish I was making up these laws, but I’m not. And those two just scratch the surface of the micromanaging of teachers by the Utah legislature. No wonder that 42% of teachers in Utah leave teaching within five years.
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