Utahn's 65% idea would improve education
The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district's education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.
Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reaches the classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts to $13 billion. Only four states (Utah, Tennessee, New York, Maine) spend at least 65 percent of their budgets in classrooms. Fifteen states spend less than 60 percent. The worst jurisdiction — Washington, D.C., of course — spends less than 50 percent.
Byrne, who lives in Utah and has made a bundle in various business ventures, was once advised by Warren Buffett to pretend he is a batter at the plate with no one calling balls and strikes, so he can wait for a perfect pitch — a perfect idea. The 65 Percent Solution is perfect because it wins 80-plus percent support in polls and torments people Byrne thinks should be tormented.
Buffett also advised him to ask himself this: If you had a silver bullet, what competitor would you shoot, and why? Byrne says he would shoot the National Education Association — the largest teachers union. Byrne is pugnacious — after graduating from Dartmouth, studying moral philosophy at Cambridge and earning a Stanford doctorate, he tried a boxing career — and relishes the prospect of the 65 percent requirement pitting teachers against other union members who are in the education bureaucracy.
"Educrats," he says, "have become what city hall was 50 or 60 years ago" — dens of patronage and corruption.
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