Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Ask the $8,700 Question on Schools by JOHN HOOD It was a dark time in the history of North Carolina education. Grossly underfunded public schools struggled just to keep the doors open. Tens of thousands of teachers lost their jobs, while tens of thousands of neglected students simply wandered out of their schools to form the core of a new socio-ed- ucational underclass. Ignorance bred unemployment, civil unrest, and widespread book-burnings — although perhaps North Carolinians were just trying to keep warm by burning discarded textbooks. Let’s shine a light on that dark time: 1998. In that year, a Democratic governor and legislature approved a budget that spent an average of about $8,700 per student (in today’s dollars) on North Carolina elementary and secondary education. What was the result? Did public education experience “generational damage,” as Gov. Beverly Perdue might have put it? Indeed, as a member of the state senate at the time, Perdue helped put the education budget together. Did she offer any ominous words of warning about the coming educational apocalypse? Of course not. To spend $8,700 per student in state, local, and federal dol- lars was to make a significant investment in public schools. It represented a 16 percent increase in education funding from just five years before, after adjusting for inflation and enrollment growth. And $8,700 was far more than the average per-pupil spending of North Carolina’s charter or private schools. As it happens, $8,700 per pupil is a low-ball estimate of how much money North Carolina would spend on its public schools if the House Republican budget were to become law. Reportedly the Senate budget will allocate a somewhat- higher amount. Yes, that would represent a real decline from a peak of about $9,500 in 2007- 08. But $8,700 per pupil remains a sizable sum. Anyone who claims that it repre- sents the end of public education as we know must explain how North Carolina’s public schools survived 1998, when the real funding level was about the same. The problem with North Carolina’s education system is not a lack of funding. It is a lack of productivity. With nearly 20 percent more funding than public schools spent in the mid-1990s, do today’s public schools perform that much better? Not even close. While the state’s math scores have slightly exceeded the national average since the late 1990s, our reading scores and graduation rates remain substandard. Perdue and her allies argue that Republicans should renege on their 2010 campaign promise and extend the sales-tax hike now scheduled to expire in July. Democrats point to recent polls showing public support for the sales tax if it saves public schools from massive cuts. This is an old, old story. Most voters have no idea how much government al- ready spends on public schools. Because virtually everyone thinks that educating the next generation should be a high fiscal priority, poll respondents frequently re- spond to simplistic questions about taxes and education in ways that the education establishment welcomes. But when pollsters go beyond simplistic questions to probe what voters really think about the tradeoff between education budgets and taxes, the results are sig- nificantly different. For example, when Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance conducted its nationwide survey on education issues last year, it first asked voters if they favored an increase in “government funding for public schools in your district.” Nearly two-thirds of respondents said yes. Then respondents were told how much money their public schools currently spent per pupil, and asked again. Fewer than a third still said they favored more funding. Similarly, a new Civitas Institute poll shows that when North Carolina voters are told how much the extended sales-tax hike would cost, they express overwhelm- ing opposition. If North Carolina voters knew that their public schools spent about $9,000 per student, it is highly unlikely that most would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in sales taxes to keep the figure from falling to $8,700. That’s why the education establishment, furiously spinning reality in an attempt to pocket more of the taxpayers’ money, avoids any mention of budgetary specifics. Public ignorance is in their interest. JOHN HOOD, Columnist COMMENTS? editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com An Aerotropolis in North Carolina? by D.G. MARTIN But what about North Carolina airports? How do our major airports and associated metropolitan areas fit into the concepts for the future of the world’s mega airport cities discussed in the new book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by UNC-Chapel Hill’s John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay? Does any one of our “airport cities” have the potential to be a real “aerotropolis”? In an earlier column about this book, I promised to try to respond to these questions. Aerotropolis is a word that Kasarda popularized. It describes an airport-city where the airport is hub of a surrounding urban area. The urban area provides nearly “frictionless” connectivity for the airport’s passengers and freight. The urban area’s business, manu- facturing, and brainpower élites thrive on the convenient and speedy global connectivity the airport provides. Several North Carolina airports have some of the attributes of an aerotropolis. Charlotte stands out in passenger boarding and ranks as one of the world’s major airports in this category. It is a major hub. Some people in Charlotte assert that this major hub status costs them money because tickets cost more than at non-hub airports. But, as Kasarda explains, the time saved is valuable in a just-in-time world, more valuable than the extra money spent on tickets. Businessmen can leave Charlotte in the morning, have face-to-face meetings with clients during the day, and get home in time to sleep in their own beds. Close to downtown, the airport is minutes from the major offices. The city’s transportation network makes it conve- nient for business travelers. If Charlotte had a stronger freight operation, one that was coordinated with close-by manufacturers and distributors, some people might begin to refer to the city and its airport as an aerotropolis. Piedmont Triad (Greensboro Winston-Salem High Point) is not even close to Charlotte in passenger boardings, but it already has a much stronger freight WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM operation than Charlotte’s, and it is growing, as FedEx’s opera- tion expands. Kasarda points out that Piedmont Triad is located at a transportation “sweet spot” right in the middle of a network of interstate highways. The Global TransPark (GTP) in Kinston is, on paper, an ideal aerotropolis with planned room for nearby just-in-time manufac- turing and related business. But just because you build it does not mean that they will come. GTP has lacked the priceless and essen- tial interstate access like that serving Piedmont Triad. The success of the Research Triangle Park inspired the GTP effort. Kasarda was the idea man. Governor Jim Martin provided the initial political muscle. Quoted in the new book he says, “North Carolina has had success with radical ideas when they were able to hold off the critics long enough to get on their feet…When I heard Kasarda’s idea, I thought it would be the next one.” Comparing the Global TransPark to the success of RTP, the new book ex- plains, “But if one venue in the area has the hallmarks of an aerotropolis, it is Research Triangle Park. What distinguished the two, Kasarda understood belat- edly, is that the latter was blessed with both highways and growing cities around it (not to mention flights across the country only ten minutes away). RTP may be an economic engine, but its cogs are able to sleep in their own beds at night.” The strong Raleigh-Durham (RDU) airport’s close relationship with RTP serves both entities in an aerotropolis-type relationship. No North Carolina airport city is, by itself, an aerotropolis. But if we could combine in one location the Global TransPark plans, the re- search and related operations that surround RDU, the business- es and talented people of Charlotte, and the sweet spot location of Piedmont Triad, we would have an aerotropolis that would compete with any in the world. D.G. MARTIN, Columnist COMMENTS? editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com JUNE 1-7, 2011 UCW 17