School District Transparency Coming to Idaho
After missing an opportunity to make progress on state spending transparency last session, the Idaho Legislature has now passed a piece of legislation that would shed a light on local school district expenditures.
Rep. Phil Hart's bill requires all schools, (public and charter) with enrollment of 300 students or more to post their expenditures online, in one of the four following formats:
- database
- spreadsheet
- searchable PDF
- or non-searchable PDF
We certainly would have liked to see the expenditure information by the end of this year, and are also not too keen on the non-searchable PDF documents (the gold standard for school district spending transparency at this point is probably JeffcoCounty's transparency database), this is a positive development for Idaho taxpayers - especially given how much of a tough sell it has been for Rep. Hart to convince his peers of what we could consider a no-brainer.
I don't know too much about elementary and secondary education, but I do know about higher education. In l970 most boards of trustees went to a corporate style government of universities. That meant a huge increase in the number of administrators (and a decrease in the number of professors). Payrolls became bloated with vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, assistants to each of the above, each with a fancy office, a fancy secretary, and a fancy salary, and of course they all made themselves "honorary professors" (with tenure) under the new designation "non-teaching faculty". Many of them were incompetent relatives of politicians (in public universities). Mostly what these people did was lord it over professors and get in the way. Taxpayers need to ask, not only how much money these "educators" are spending, but what they are spending it for.
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