Fraters Libertas

Starve The Beast?

A New York state school district is having some accounting problems:

A small group of public school employees in Roslyn, a prosperous Long Island community, embezzled $11.2 million since 1996, a state audit found.

State Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi said Wednesday he had never before seen such a "systematic misappropriation of taxpayer money" by school officials.

Logic dictates, of course, that a school district hemorrhaging cash like that means that the quality of the kids' education would necessarily suffer. That's all we've been hearing lately, right? If only we could feed the public school system more money...and more money...and more...

Quite the contrary in this case:

The schools in Roslyn, 20 miles from Manhattan, are among the best in the state. The district sends 95 percent of its high school graduates to college. Foreign language education begins for all students in kindergarten, and SAT scores rank among the best in the nation.

Hey, if it works in Roslyn...