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7/6/2010
Why I’m skeptical about school finance ‘reforms’
Something’s not right about this school funding reform stuff. State Superintendent Tony Evers last month introduced “Fair Funding for Our Future,” which is supposed to “make it fairer for districts [and] provide them with more financial stability”
… so that every Wisconsin child can graduate ready to succeed in further education and the workplace….Fair, sustainable, and transparent funding also requires education leaders at all levels to commit to investing taxpayer dollars in programs that show results.
Evers – and many others – seem to be honing in on the bucks when it’s much more critically important to hone in on that “showing results” part.
Heritage does great work on countering the “Education Spending Fallacy,” i.e., that more money means better performance. The latest piece countered Paul Krugman’s plea to throw more money at the system.
Education spending in America is at an all-time high. Taxpayers now pay close to $10,000 per student per year – or, over the course of their time in public school, more than $120,000 for a child entering first grade today. Yet pundits such as Krugman would rather advocate throwing more dollars into an education system that fails millions of children each year than promote substantive ideas for reform.
The Post-Crescent last week did a Q&A with Superintendent Evers about his reform-proposal-with-no-details-just-yet. The very first question we and the Post-Crescent need to be asking is “Does spending more on education improve academic achievement?”
The answer: No. But you wouldn’t know it to read the interview with Evers – performance and that business of showing results weren’t even mentioned.
The folks at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy offered their own perspective on [Michigan] school funding in a piece yesterday.
The real reason for school money troubles is not "underfunding," but a failure to contain employee costs that comprise about 80 percent of operational budgets. As long as school boards continue to agree to contracts that grant school employees, particularly teachers, automatic pay increases and lavish benefits packages that outpace comparable private-sector averages and the ability of taxpayers to support, schools will never have "adequate" funding.
The beneficiaries of those unsustainable benefits have a strong incentive to promote the "underfunding" myth, but taxpayers should exercise a healthy measure of skepticism.
Skepticism. Just what Alan Borsuk is looking for in a helpful piece over the weekend.
The notion of standards-based reform is simple: Set strong goals for what students are supposed to learn in each subject each year, test the students to find out if they reached the goals, and, if they haven't, find ways to change that. Hold people - school leaders, teachers, kids - accountable, in both positive and negative ways.
There are places that did this well. There are places that didn't. Wisconsin is in the latter group.
Borsuk looks at research that suggests Wisconsin policy-makers and legislators haven’t had the courage to make real change, but rather have “churned” reforms that didn’t and don’t work. He also suggests more resources may be part of the answer.
Mackinac suggests that taxpayers should be skeptical when administrators start to talk about finding new ways of equitable school funding. And they offer a solution of their own – that would surely work in Wisconsin as well as in Michigan.
There is in fact a means to provide equal funding for all students no matter where they live — it's called school vouchers. Interestingly, those who complain the most about "inequitable funding" — like representatives of school employee unions and school boards — are also the loudest opponents of eliminating inequity by giving parents the choice of where to school their children.
I don’t imagine any mention of school vouchers will end up in those specifics Superintendent Evers will be providing us later this year. It’s all about more revenue. What it must be about instead is markedly better performance in Wisconsin’s schools.
Jo Egelhoff, FoxPolitics.net
COMMENTS
Jo,
As you often do-----you are treading on "sacred ground". When building of taxable property was happening, good milk prices, wage increases, etc in the 80's school budgets were able to soar.
Jo-----tell me what is realistic? Can "business as usual" continue? Or should we be looking at a complete overhaul of the education system? Maybe the school day should be shortened so students have 4 academic periods and one elective instead of 7 or 8 periods per day. The European models call for, and have shorter days.
What would the difference on ACT/SAT scores be if we had shorter days?
Maybe it is time to have more educational assistants and fewer teachers. I would love to see some good empirical data on the above suggestions.
Lets start a Charter School Jo and return 30% of the allotted money to the district, and yet show good test scores. How is that for a challenge.
David (Tue Jul 06 09:48:38 2010)
Another point to my earlier post.
Lets return 30% of the money for the Charter School to the Board of Education, and keep teachers at their current pay rate.
David (Tue Jul 06 09:51:29 2010)
Another point to my earlier post.
Lets return 30% of the money for the Charter School to the Board of Education, and keep teachers at their current pay rate.
David (Tue Jul 06 09:51:36 2010)
While we "tread" sacred ground today----I would like to see data about how effective Physical Education classes are at keeping children from obesity etc.
Physical Education is required at all grade levels. Lets have a Master teacher provide the lesson plans and oversee the program. Then have educational assistants oversee the classes. We could save lots of money there.
RE: Special education. Lets have Master Teachers oversee the Special Ed. programs and direct educational assistants to do a lot of the teaching. Do we really need the low student/teacher ratios?
David (Tue Jul 06 09:57:21 2010)
The Belgians have good schools because the money follows the student, and does not come from property tax. Therefore, academic standards, and teaching standards, are automatically higher than here, as the students will leave bad schools to go to good ones. All the schools compete for that student-attached money.
Unfortunately, we've already degenerated so far that most students don't care whether they do well or not. Parents demand grade inflation; nobody gets Cs anymore, and the only ones that get Fs are those who don't turn up to class at all--and it better be documented that they didn't show up!
Students shout out in class who they had sex with the night before. Armed police are in the hallways. Kids commit suicide in the parking lot. Teachers are hauled before the administrators for daring to tell their students that they actually believe in a religion. And some (science) teachers don't even know how to do simple mental math!
This is no exaggeration; it's life as usual for my husband, one of the last GOOD teachers left. (By good I mean he doesn't allow swearing, he actually KNOWS his subject inside and out and doesn't depend on flashy "methods" to "teach" what he doesn't really know, his classrooms are QUIET, he demands a lot from his students...)
emily matthews (Tue Jul 06 16:42:54 2010)
Why is Fixing our schools always an issue of spending more money?
Let’s apply some logic here.
If your car is not starting, do you call the tow truck on the other side of town to help, knowing it will cost more? Of course not.
You want results for your money.
If you call the local Service guy and he can't start the car, do you pay him?
I hope not
Let’s say he "set" a service call price beforehand, so you have to pay him ---for not doing the job.
The same thing happens the following day.
Are you going to call the guy who couldn't do the job--I doubt it?
Would you call him if he said "Pay me more and I will "try" to fix the problem”? I doubt it!
Again, that is totally foolish and yet that is exactly what we are doing with our children!
Test scores have continuously fallen and yet we belly up to the bar and pay everyone's bills. What a farce!
I run into parents that have absolutely no clue about the lack of progress we should be enjoying. The schools have computers and the latest technologies and yet do not perform.
In the private world, raises are given for performance.
In the Educational world no such thing exists, and true scholastic contributions given by many fine teachers are never recognized.
That is where Mr. Evers should be
focused....but don't count on it !
Rich Carlstedt (Wed Jul 07 17:57:58 2010)
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