Literacy Rates of High School Graduates

[Josh]

What specifically about JBG’s description of his school do you find to be problematic?

I am opposed to a transition to "professionalism", where the belief becomes entrenched that people need to have Bachelor's or Master's degrees in order to do a good job or be worthy of being a teacher.

I am opposed to turning a school into a pre-college pre program that measures its success based on how many college applicants it produces.

In the last 6 years I am so proud (in a good way) of what our community has accomplished. We are College Board approved to offer AP courses, PSAT/SAT exams, CLEP tests, etc. We have full accreditation from MSA and highly functioning professional teacher teams.

JBG and I simply have very different visions of success. If I shared his vision, I wouldn't be a conservative Mennonite. I'm guessing I would have stuck around a Lancaster Conference-style type of church or MC USA type of church, which already went through "professionalisation". I see zero value in trying to turn conservative Anabaptists into worldly people seeking things that are highly esteemed in the world.

[Josh]

Well...our belief is that the CA vision has nothing to fear from education and professionalism. Suffice it to say our views on everything from sexual ethics to veilings are in a vastly different spot from LMS.

Yet, Lancaster Conference had identical views to Keystone or BMA on sexual ethics and veilings just a few decades ago. Indeed, Keystone was part of Lancaster Conference within my lifetime.

In the distant past, conservative Anabaptist identified that modernism and education and professionalism would cause them to drift away from traditional Anabaptist values. Some tried to embrace education and professionalism; these people founded Goshen and later EMU; the founders of EMU hoped they could establish a conservative university that wouldn't turn as liberal as Goshen.

Professionalism represents seeking worldly esteem and seeking the things that are lofty and respected by man. It shows a path away from the simple path of following Jesus. Jesus wasn't a professional, and he didn't need to be one. He didn't need to attend AMBS or Fuller Theological Seminary for 4 years after competing his Bachelor's before he could minister to the needy.

I don't think the board, to whom I report and whom hired me, desires to destroy the school...and neither do I. I do think it is an open question yet to what extent the CA world is fully behind valuing a high quality professional education. Sattler College is exploring this angle as well methinks...

Sattler College exists at the fringes of the conservative Anabaptist world and there is plenty of concern they are moving in a direction very different from CA values. They seem to mostly be catering to the most liberal end of the CA world, basically, harvesting BMA and Keystone and liberal Beachy students.

EMU and Goshen managed to remain much more conservative than Sattler for much longer. Sattler wasn't able to be open for more than a year before they devolved to joining in political street protest movements.

Lastly, I also value brass instruments and other stringed instruments. We had some students taking brass lessons and violin family lessons also. I have a vision of an EMS CA orchestra.

I fail to see how this vision is any different than the vision found at basically any worldly school, public school, or elite secular private school. The end effect of promoting professional musicianship is churches full of people who can't sing, with the professionals on stage, and families who no longer know how to sing together. It's not progress.

[Josh]

I see some disdain towards the need for people to gain advanced degrees but I personally am very grateful for those who have done the work, and my family has benefited from that work. And as JBG mentions, they are often paid far less than they should be paid by the CA community.

I think it is okay for worldly people to seek worldly things. "After these things even do the Gentiles seek." But the Christian does not need to seek to get a Ph.D.

Having several children with varied educational needs, we’ve found a local anabaptist school psychologist with a masters degree to be very helpful.

The history of the psychological profession is it promoting many things that are contrary to Christian values. Perhaps some worldly-trained psychologists may be helpful for now, but in the past, they promoted very bad, anti-Christian ideas such as Freudian psychology; and in the future, they are going in a bad direction, such as promoting children as young as 4 identifying as transsexual.

The Christian will need to find other resources than seeking worldly wisdom, unless he plans to become polluted by the world himself.

[temporal1]

Josh:
.. In other words, destroy a conservative Mennonite school and turn it into an expensive, overpriced private school that is simply a mirror of the same kind of public school you find in a wealthy school district.

No question, accept gov funds, comply with gov regulaions.
No need to go to Belgium, Canada experiences this. lesterb shared an example of their school being pressed to conform, they are prepared with documents proving they are financially independent.

In the U.S. and Canada, Catholics are involved with accepting gov funds, to do so, they compromise.

[PeterG]

Rents are determined by the housing market in your area. Not by itemizing your own individual costs and then adding a profit margin on top. You might be able to completely recoup your property taxes through your rents and pocket an additional 50% profit. Or you might lose money every month. The market doesn't care.

Yes, but a landlord who loses money every month is going to exit the market, diminishing supply and driving up the cost of rent. Indirectly or not, renters absolutely end up paying property taxes.

[Ken]

Rents are determined by the housing market in your area. Not by itemizing your own individual costs and then adding a profit margin on top. You might be able to completely recoup your property taxes through your rents and pocket an additional 50% profit. Or you might lose money every month. The market doesn't care.

Yes, but a landlord who loses money every month is going to exit the market, diminishing supply and driving up the cost of rent. Indirectly or not, renters absolutely end up paying property taxes.

Maybe, maybe not. Lots of landlords are hanging onto properties with negative cash flow because they intend eventually to cash in on the equity sometime down the road. And most apartment buildings that are sold stay in the rental market so the owners change but the supply of rentals does not.

I do agree that generally speaking property taxes are part of the cost of running a rental business and that landlords are going to want to try to recoup those costs. But it is in no way a direct 1:1 relationship in any way shape or form.

If I am renting an apartment and I vote for a school bond that increases the mill rate for my neighborhood, is my rent going to go up? Almost certainly not immediately if I have a lease. And only if the market supports it. But the local rental market is controlled by many many factors only one of which is property tax rates. Likewise, if my landlord refinances the building I'm renting and his costs go down with a lower interest mortgage, am I going to see a rent reduction because his costs have fallen? Almost certainly not.

[PeterG]

Rents are determined by the housing market in your area. Not by itemizing your own individual costs and then adding a profit margin on top. You might be able to completely recoup your property taxes through your rents and pocket an additional 50% profit. Or you might lose money every month. The market doesn't care.

Yes, but a landlord who loses money every month is going to exit the market, diminishing supply and driving up the cost of rent. Indirectly or not, renters absolutely end up paying property taxes.

Maybe, maybe not. Lots of landlords are hanging onto properties with negative cash flow because they intend eventually to cash in on the equity sometime down the road. And most apartment buildings that are sold stay in the rental market so the owners change but the supply of rentals does not.

I do agree that generally speaking property taxes are part of the cost of running a rental business and that landlords are going to want to try to recoup those costs. But it is in no way a direct 1:1 relationship in any way shape or form.

If I am renting an apartment and I vote for a school bond that increases the mill rate for my neighborhood, is my rent going to go up? Almost certainly not immediately if I have a lease. And only if the market supports it. But the local rental market is controlled by many many factors only one of which is property tax rates. Likewise, if my landlord refinances the building I'm renting and his costs go down with a lower interest mortgage, am I going to see a rent reduction because his costs have fallen? Almost certainly not.

Yes, property taxes are only one of many factors in a rental market. Nobody's arguing for a direct 1:1 relationship of property taxes to rents in every single case. There are sure to be anomalies and exceptions here and there, and landlords will not always pass 100% of a property tax increase on to their tenants. But the aggregate effect of higher property taxes, both theoretically and empirically, is higher rents. See here (concerning commercial rents as opposed to residential rents, but still), here, and here.

[ken_sylvania]

Even if you rent you pay property tax. In most localities investment house property taxes are much higher. That cost is figured into the rent payments. I myself once owned two rental properties and that tax cost I passed along to the tenants. You have to. So I disagree that renters don't pay property taxes.

Words have meaning. The word "rent" does not mean "property tax." So unless a tenant is paying the property taxes as a separate amount from the rent he is not paying property tax.

I understand the concept you have in mind, but using that theory, what is there that exists anywhere that you aren't paying for. Such a theory would mean that you are paying for everything that your dollars ever flow to in the future, while also insisting that the people you got your money from are also paying for everything that your dollars go to.

[Ken]

Yes, but a landlord who loses money every month is going to exit the market, diminishing supply and driving up the cost of rent. Indirectly or not, renters absolutely end up paying property taxes.

Maybe, maybe not. Lots of landlords are hanging onto properties with negative cash flow because they intend eventually to cash in on the equity sometime down the road. And most apartment buildings that are sold stay in the rental market so the owners change but the supply of rentals does not.

I do agree that generally speaking property taxes are part of the cost of running a rental business and that landlords are going to want to try to recoup those costs. But it is in no way a direct 1:1 relationship in any way shape or form.

If I am renting an apartment and I vote for a school bond that increases the mill rate for my neighborhood, is my rent going to go up? Almost certainly not immediately if I have a lease. And only if the market supports it. But the local rental market is controlled by many many factors only one of which is property tax rates. Likewise, if my landlord refinances the building I'm renting and his costs go down with a lower interest mortgage, am I going to see a rent reduction because his costs have fallen? Almost certainly not.

Yes, property taxes are only one of many factors in a rental market. Nobody's arguing for a direct 1:1 relationship of property taxes to rents in every single case. There are sure to be anomalies and exceptions here and there, and landlords will not always pass 100% of a property tax increase on to their tenants. But the aggregate effect of higher property taxes, both theoretically and empirically, is higher rents. See here (concerning commercial rents as opposed to residential rents, but still), here, and here.

Sure, but this is all kind of a side-argument from my main point that for the bulk of public school students in the US (which are majority poor and majority non-white) a voucher is not simply the return of their own taxes that they paid to the government. Most families pay nothing close in taxes to what it costs to educate their children. So a national voucher program would be a massive redistribution of public dollars towards people who, by in large, did not contribute most of it.

Josh's argument that vouchers would simply be giving people back their own money is simply not be true except for perhaps those at the top 20% or so of the income scale. Who represent a small minority of public school students. In fact, in many school districts, the bulk of property taxes are not paid by families at all, they are paid by businesses and corporations who own commercial properties in the district, as well as by Federal taxpayers. In district where I currently teach, the largest school taxpayers BY FAR are Georgia-Pacific, WaferTech, and Fisher Investments. And some large real estate syndicates who own a lot of the commercial property around here. At the district I used to teach at in Texas the largest school taxpayers were Mars Candy, Amgen Pharmaceuticals, Caterpillar, and Sherwin Williams, who all had large manufacturing plants in the district. Any voucher program would be distributing THEIR money more than that of any individual family.

[justme]

...I say this as a somewhat accomplished former custom guitar shop owner ...

is there ANYTHING that you aren't an expert in?