[Nitack]

Originally Posted by Buffy

A sad and ironic datapoint on this debate:

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, has been well known among the high tech industry leaders claiming that there must be increases in visas for immigrant programmers because our educational system simply can't provide enough of them.

A few months ago though, he went crying to the county tax board, claiming that because his property is now overvalued, that he should pay $3 million per year LESS in property taxes. For those of you unfamiliar with US funding for education, property taxes supply the vast majority of the money, and will cost the San Mateo County school system approximately $1.4 million per year.

That's a lot of teachers.

Of course we know that the real motivation for all those immigrant visas is that they hold the immigrants hostage--they lose their visa, they go home--so they can easily be forced to take pay that is far less than the market rate for such talent.

Its just so sad to see these leaders of society deceitfully and disingenuously paying lip service to the needs of education while working to ensure its failure for their own avaricious desires.

It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are,
Buffy

Buffy,

Your point about the loss of money in the school system is well taken. I actually grew up in the San Mateo County School District and graduated from San Mateo High School. That being said, there is an enormous amount of waste in the public school systems on bureaucrats. In Freakonomics, Stephen D Levitt, does an interesting comparison of the public school systems in both New York and Chicago. He compares the student counts in the public schools and the catholic schools and then compares the size of the staffs that have no contact with students. I don't have the exact figures, but remember being both shocked and outraged when he cited that the Catholic School System of New York had 1/4 of the student population in New York City, however only had something like 5% of the staff that were not teachers or school specific administrators. Lets think just absorb that for a moment. They have three times the students, but need 20 times as many staff members. Do we sense just a wee bit of waste?