I could have titled this “Revenge of the Jebi” but you’ll get the point.  Many states have processes to revise their constitution, including regularly scheduling referenda on whether to create a constitutional convention. Florida is a bit different. Every twenty years a committee of elders (aka the Tax and Budget Reform Commission) gets appointed to decide on placing amendments regarding budget and tax policy before the people. No need to gather signatures, or for the legislature to approve.  If the panel decides, it goes on the ballot.

The St Pete Times has a nice rundown on how this is the latest ugly gift from the Bush family to Florid's families. A sequel if you will.  And the Miami Herald Blog has some of the inside scoop on the process. With things first being voted down and then resurrected, there’s enough back room arm twisting to make Joe Williams faint. The Herald Blog quotes state rep Dan Gelber as saying the commission's work was "ideological pork.'' It’s going to be a busy ballot season in Florida. 

We’ve got two initiatives related to the court ruling eliminating the voucher program. The first of these would weaken the protections on the separation of church and state. The second would eliminate the requirement for a "uniform efficient, safe secure, and high quality system of free public schools."  Way to go, guys. And there's some 65 percent deception language still floating out there. As we’ve blogged before, 65 is the MSG of Jeb Bush education reform schemes. It’s designed to make everything taste better, but it’ll give you a headache.  

There’s also a tax swap.  It would cut about a quarter of most homeowners’ property tax bills. The roughly $9 billion cut to school funding would be balanced out through the Legislature imposing at least a one cent sales tax increase, elimination of some of the 246 sales tax exemptions currently found in state law, and most likely further cuts to the state budget. A tax swap to make Florida less reliant on the property tax is probably a good idea. Broadening the sales tax base might be a good idea as well. Given the other stuff this commission has put out, you’ll forgive me for not just accepting their math.  And moving from a regressive tax to a more regressive tax isn’t what people struggling with a recession need.  The property tax is less popular, but in a dollar-for-dollar shift, switching from property to sales taxes is a tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the poor.  Thanks, Jeb.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve just finished a big bit of research on the ramifications for the current economic downturn on services AFT members provide. Stunning fact: at the end of the “recovery,” we managed to give 300,000 fewer kids health insurance than at the start.  The recovery hasn’t been good for working people, and it hasn’t allowed state finances to get ahead of where they were in 2001.  The best one-shot look at the perhaps now departed "recovery" comes from the invaluable Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (See here for the slideshow this comes from.)

The net result is that most of us aren't in as good shape to weather a recession as we'd like. It also looks to me like, between the Fed itself, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and this, that the bailout of the financial markets is already somewhere past the value of the bailout of the S&Ls in the first Bush era. I’m unclear on how the strings attached to the Fed’s loans differ from the S&L case and just how bad the securities they are buying up are, but it gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Especially if we’re not done.

So we've got a recovery that was not deep or widely shared, coupled with some big storm clouds. How will it affect the states? As a share of gdp, their budgets still are a tick behind where they were in 2000 and about 2/10 of one percent of gdp behind where they were in 2001. And many states'  accumulated reserves are less than 4 percent.

The overall picture is distorted by the subset of states that benefit from $10 a bushel wheat and $100 a barrel oil. But every revenue estimate I'm seeing outside of North Dakota, Alaska and Texas is down. According to CBPP there are 28 states with projected deficits averaging 9 percent for 2009. California leads the way with a 15 percent projected deficit. NCSL will soon publish their semiannual look at budgets, and I'm waiting with growing concern.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to a reader who passed along this AP story about soon-to-be-released recommendations for California's schools.  The lead:  "Overhauling California's schools will require tougher teacher standards and lots of money - as much as a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion per year, according to studies released Wednesday."

$1.5 trillion.  Annually.  If California has 30 million people, that's $50,000 in taxes from every citizen.  Yes, that's "mind-boggling."  And apparently it's not an early April Fool's hoax. 

The article attempts to put the $1.5 trillion figure in perspective: "...one estimate in the documents obtained by the AP says California might need to spend as much as $1.5 trillion a year to meet its performance goals, an amount equal to about half the annual federal budget."

Half the annual federal budget.  Not half the annual federal budget for education.  I'm trying to come to terms with this:  The recommendation is for California to fund its schools to the tune of half the TOTAL annual federal budget.

Nope, I still can't wrap my head around it.

UPDATE:  The LA Times tackles the $1.5 million figure: "The most eye-catching detail in three funding reports was the calculation that $1.5 trillion more each year would be needed to make all students academically proficient under the current system. That's about 25 times more than present spending for the K-12 and community college systems, which consumes about half of the state budget."  UPDATER:  MassParent comments: "Hey, I think I can achieve 98% proficiency at 20% of that cost.  Can I get the contract?"

Posted by John at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’ve been remiss in my blogging about Wal-Mart.  The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago on the Arkansas behemoth’s use of real estate investment trusts to avoid paying state corporate taxes.  

Wal-Mart did make a good move in Cleveland this week. They had gotten involved in a real estate development project on some formerly-polluted land, putting them in line for a substantial local property tax credit under a state development law. The city of Cleveland was unaware that this was the case. Surprisingly, Wal-Mart is now foregoing the credit and paying the city.  Good for them. One of the issues highlighted by this case is that state government is often quite happy to give away school districts’ tax bases without giving the district the right of refusal.  It’s a major problem and one that Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First has taken on.

For Wal-Mart, the move in Cleveland was good PR that comes after a Wall Street Journal story on their use of a complex tax avoidance scheme that prevents states from collecting millions in corporate taxes that Wal-Mart would otherwise be paying. The strategy involves creating a subsidiary to actually own the property that Wal-Mart uses for its stores.  Wal-Mart then pays the subsidiary “rent” for the use of its stores. This “rent” is then counted as a business expense when filing corporate income taxes, allowing Wal-Mart to utilize the tax benefits of being a renter and an owner all at the same time. If you could get a tax break by reaching into your pocket, taking out a quarter, and putting it in a different pocket and calling it a transaction, you’d be working the same game.

The Journal got a hold of some internal documents from Wal-Mart’s advisors at Ernst and Young on this strategy. They included the following Q&A:

Q: What's the business purpose?

A: Reduction in state and local taxes.

Q: What if the press gets wind of this and portrays us as a "tax cheat"?

A: That's a possibility....If you are concerned about possible negative publicity, you can counter it by reinvesting the savings in the community.

Corporate tax avoidance based on this sort of practice has reached epidemic proportions. It's getting so that one tax lawyer I know compares the state corporate tax to a charity, meaning that corporations, not the people, decide how much they will contribute to the civic coffers.  If you want to know more about this, check out Citizens for Tax Justice’s look at how the most profitable companies in America pay no corporate income tax.  (Hat tips to State Tax Notes and Wal-Mart Watch).

Special Wal-Mart followup: I see from Ezra Klein that economist and Tobacco Institute hired gun Richard Vedder has a book out about the virtues of Wal-Mart published by the American Enterprise Institute press.  I wonder if you get more or less money for this sort of research than for research on climate change?  Also in the news, the AFL-CIO is asking the New York Stock Exchange to investigate Wal-Mart's compensation practices. This is part of the AFL's campaign for corporate responsibility on behalf of participants in union pension programs.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Awhile back, Education Sector released Frozen Assets, a bit of researchiness claiming there were billions of dollars for education that could be better spent if only it weren't for those !@#$%^ collective bargaining agreements.  The report claims to identify several pockets of hidden dollars: Teacher salary increases based on experience and education, professional development days, sick leave and personal leave, class-size limitations, salaries of teachers' aides, health and insurance benefits, and retirement benefits.

We were tempted at first to let it lie, since it didn't get much media pickup and the average shelf life of this type of report is about a day and a half.  But, because so many of the claims hit close to home -- and because there were so many problems with the details and premise of the report -- we've written about it several times.

Here's a recap:

• On sick leave.  Michele writes that the documentation of Frozen Assets' calculations is transparent as mud.  (By the way, did Frozen Assets consider the billions lost to presenteeism?)
  
• On health care.  Michele writes that Frozen Assets seems to imply "that teachers should pay their actual health insurance costs in July and August when schools are closed."
• On teacher pensions.  Ed writes, "A lot of Americans in unions bargain the details of their pension plan with their employer. Teachers don't -- pensions are covered by state law."
  
• On teacher pay and benefits.  Guest blogger Larry Mishel points out, among other things, that Frozen Assets uses teachers' salaries -- lower than other professionals -- to inflate the value of their benefits: "[B]because teachers earn less salary, a dollar in benefits will count as a larger share of teacher compensation than it will for other professionals."
• On teacher's aides.  Ed points out what Frozen Assets' underlying research support really says -- and doesn't say -- about the effectiveness of teacher's aides.
• Also, Edwize's Leo Casey did a great job of analyzing the report's take on experience-based salary increases and class-size reduction.
  

Even if you were to accept the calculations and assumptions in this report, you'd be left with what?  A series of recommendations -- larger class size, lower pensions, less "generous" health care benefits, etc. -- that would make the profession less attractive to good teachers, newbies and veterans alike.

Posted by John at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NCLBlog welcomes guest blogger Larry Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute.*

Thanks to the NCLBlog for letting me borrow some electronic real estate to add some analysis to the question of teacher pay and benefits. In 2004 I did a book with Sylvia Allegretto and Sean Corcoran called “How Does Teacher Pay Compare?”. We found that teacher pay had eroded relative to that of comparable workers (those in comparable occupations or those similarly educated, experienced etc.) so that by 2003, teachers earned roughly 14 percent less per week than these workers. Teacher benefits (defined as insurance, pensions and payroll taxes such as Social Security) were higher, but this didn’t change the picture much because benefits are only about 20 percent of compensation. If teacher benefits were reduced so that they were the same share of compensation as for other professionals, this would still leave teachers at a 12.5 percent disadvantage in terms of overall weekly compensation.

I have updated our calculations on benefits (see original here) with BLS data for June 2006.

Shares of Total Compensation for K-12 Teachers and Professionals, June 2006

Source: Larry Mishel, EPI**

A few points:

1. It seems to me that one wants to look at the complete picture of wages and benefits. In particular, the starting point is that teachers are paid less than comparable workers, something that is both true and common sense to most people (excepting my old friend, Michael Podgursky, and his followers. I do not find Podgursky particularly persuasive. See our debate with Podgursky and the book). Simply put, because teachers earn less salary, a dollar in benefits will count as a larger share of teacher compensation than it will for other professionals. So comparing the cost of benefits as a percentage of these uneven salary bases or total compensation can be rather misleading.  That is, if we raised teacher wages by 14 percent, then teacher non-wage benefits would comprise essentially the same share of compensation as among professionals.

2. Michele is right that one of the reasons that teacher insurance costs are higher as a share of compensation is that these benefits are year-round by nature while teacher wages are for about 9.5 to 10.0 months. This explains much of the "health gap" (ignoring point #1). If you adjust the teacher share by 10/12, assuming teachers work 10 of 12 months, then the teachers’ share is 8.2% versus the professional share of 7.6%, not really a gap worth writing about. This implies, of course, that teachers get health coverage during their unpaid leave in the summer, though the whole topic of ‘summers off’ and hours worked is quite nettlesome.

3. The Ed Sector’s Frozen Assets report and NCEE’s Tough Choices or Tough Times suggest that reducing pension benefits can fund large increases in teacher wages. Frozen Assets relies on Podgursky’s calculations of pensions as a share of salaries (see point #1!). However, an analysis of teacher retirement must also include social security because some teachers don’t get social security (which is why payroll taxes for teachers are a lower share of compensation, conveniently ignored by many analyses). When payroll taxes and pensions are combined they comprise the SAME share for professionals and K-12 teachers: 11.5 percent. Even if you believed that the comparison of pension costs alone was decisive, the difference would be sufficient to raise teacher wages by just 1.7 percent ((6.1-4.8)/78.5), if you do not get this calculation make a ‘comment’ and I will explain). Tough Choices claims that it can cut employer contributions to retirement in half and save 6% of salaries—this is simply off the charts.  Tough Choices makes no comparison between the retirement costs for teachers and other professionals.

4. As for sick days, personal days and so on, it is interesting to note that paid leave for teachers comprises 5.1 percent of compensation while professionals receive 7.5 percent of their compensation in paid leave. Talking about particular types of paid leave in the absence of the overall picture seems, well, not appropriate.

* The AFT provides some support to EPI, and AFT President Ed McElroy sits on the EPI Board of Directors.

** Technical Notes: Analysis of BLS data found at: EMPLOYER COSTS FOR EMPLOYEE COMPENSATION—JUNE 2006, Table 2. Employer costs per hour worked for employee compensation and costs as a percent of total compensation: Civilian workers, by occupational and industry group, June 2006.  I calculate W-2 wages because this is the definition of wages that non-technical folks have and also because it parallels the wage measures found in other data sets like the Current Population Survey.

Posted by Guest at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm full-time back from leave, which gives me an opportunity to make some points about Ed Sector’s Frozen Assets report (it really is a target-rich environment).  I’ll start with pensions, and if this hasn’t been blogged to death, I’ll add another later.  A lot of Americans in unions bargain the details of their pension plan with their employer. Teachers don't--pensions are covered by state law. You might bargain early retirement buyouts when the district is trying to cut staff, a supplemental program or retiree healthcare. But the legislature determines the basic value of the pension plan. This, for example, is the sum of the contract language between the UFT and New York City on teacher retirement issues. It is simply impossible, within the context of collective bargaining, to address the sort of benefit cuts Ed Sector is proposing (and they are cuts).

Teacher pensions were created as state programs in the immediate wake of the Great Depression, well before teachers achieved collective bargaining. Although I worry that Ed Sector doesn’t get the issues, there are real pension issues. I'm happy to talk about these issues all day long (I'm funny that way). But we really shouldn’t be doing this in the context of a discussion of collective bargaining. I'd think Ed Sector would, you know, as a research based organization, have already understood something as basic as this. 

Posted by Ed at AFT at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Crooks and Liars has a post up about a great Daily Show clip featuring a state legislator who wants to prevent school shootings by arming the teachers, and a school administrator in Oklahoma who wants to give the kids Kevlar book covers.  On viewing it, my first thought was “Hey, that’s the Wisconsin TABOR guy on TV.”  That’s because Rep. Frank Lasee is one of Wisconsin’s most ardent supporters of my least favorite tax policy.   And now, it turns out, of my least favorite school safety policy. I know there's a punch line there somewhere, and I am pained that I can't quite find it, but the Stewart clip is more than funny enough by itself. 

This, by the way, is an example of what’s called “the garbage pail” theory of public policy.  There are policy solutions that just hang around and eventually find a policy problem they match up with.  The first time I heard about this policy concept was in an episode from All in the Family, back in the 1970s, when Archie Bunker wanted to solve the rash of skyjackings by arming all the passengers on every flight.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Beth 

I’m happy to report that over the past two weeks I read a few good books, watched a lot of bad MTV, and let the stack of education reports gather dust on my desk. Thus I am a little behind in my reading.

I haven’t gotten past page four of the latest EdTrust report on funding, but, so far, it’s not adding up. The first part of the report contends the funding gaps between states are exacerbated because of the Title I formulas. Here’s what I know (and I am cribbing a lot of it from this piece by EdSector’s Kevin Carey):

• Since the enactment of NCLB, Congress has put much more money into the two (of the four) Title I formulas that favor states with concentrated poverty and those that make an effort to concentrate their own money where the poverty is, rather than putting the money into the formulas that spread the money around.
• This makes sense, as research shows that concentrated poverty is a problem that needs to be addressed with concentrated resources. Schools with deep, concentrated poverty often don’t have the resources to address their needs, while those schools with marginal or small percentages of poverty can often reallocate resources to address their needs.
• The federal government can offer carrots or sticks to get states to do what they want. The Title I formula is a carrot to get states to spend their money wisely. (Much of the rest of NCLB is a stick.) Ed Trust is advocating sticks—that Title I not reward states’ efforts to spend their own money properly.
• Ed Trust also argues that Title I funds aren’t enough to change states’ behavior. As much as states grumble about NCLB’s unfunded mandates, they’re not turning down the money. Twelve billion or so per year—even spread out across the country—is still nothing to sneeze at.

Getting rid of the funding carrots would reward bad behavior and potentially widen funding gaps. I can’t understand how an organization whose explicit mission is to close achievement gaps would offer a proposal to widen gaps.

Posted by Guest at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I previously blogged on the perspective of Michael Rebell, Executive Director of the Campaign for Educational Equity, on the Fordham Foundations' Fund the Child proposal, also known as the "100 Percent Solution."  In a commentary in Ed Week($), he is explicit in his critique of the proposal, identifying three major flaws:

1. It ignores the biggest funding problem facing public schools: the lack of adequate funding.
2. It ignores the objective cost studies that have been completed in many states to guide the setting of pupil weights.
3. It plan links two proposals that should be separated: the decentralization of governance of large city school districts, and a formula for allocating financial resources to individual schools so that those resources may be managed flexibly by principals.

My prediction: look for a rebuttal in Ed Week in the coming weeks from somone at the Fordham Foundation.

Posted by Michele at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have blogged in the past about the Fordham Foundation's "100 Percent Solution" (here and here) and weighted student funding (here and here). Edspresso is currently featuring these funding issues in an ongoing "blog debate" between Masie Macaddo, who writes for Edwize, and Eric Osberg of the Fordham Foundation.  The online debate, which began on Monday, extends through December 1st.

Posted by Michele at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eduwonk and I have had a bit of a back and forth on pensions.  Since Andy’s apparently gone fishing or is on another top secret ed-refom mission I thought I’d add that  Max Sawicky has been learning about the Chilean system.  Under that system, if your private account didn’t stack up, you ended up getting a minimum pension from the government.  In other words, a costly bail out.  If we’re explicitly going to bail out investors who don’t do well in private accounts here in the USA, then depending on the bail out, I might say let the good times roll.  I’ll note that sixty percent of people in the Chilean system ended up with the minimum pension.  Cueca, by the way, is the national dance of Chile.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by guest blogger Donna Chiera, President of the Perth Amboy Federation/AFT 

As a teacher, union official and a resident of one of the New Jersey school districts that has benefitted from the state's Abbott school finance ruling, I’d like to respond to the recent New York Times article “In New Jersey, System to Help Poorest Schools Faces Criticism”.  The article does what many of the politicians and citizens of New Jersey do, place all the Abbott Districts in one category--receiving extra money but showing no results.  This story makes gross generalizations about what is really going on in the Abbott districts, and I would like to set the record straight.

Perth Amboy is an urban district educating about 10,000 students, and close to 90 percent of them are Latinos.  Our Abbott funding is spent in the classroom, supporting our efforts to educate students.

• We have a district preschool program for all three and four year olds.  The program employs certified teachers who are protected and paid in accordance to the contract negotiated by Local 857.
• The district also hired paraprofessionals to assist elementary teachers in overcrowded classes. 
• We also have reading and math specialists who work with both students and staff in developing best practices. 
• All schools have school nurses, guidance counselors, parent coordinators and security guards. 
• Classroom teachers have classroom libraries of at least 300 titles and math manipulatives for every conceivable concept there is to teach. 

The district not only used its Abbott funding for staff and materials, they committed to on-going professional development so the staff knew how to implement strategies and techniques that are research-based and proven best practices.  And what did the citizens of the State of New Jersey gain from investing in Perth Amboy Public Schools?  Last year, all of the elementary schools in the district met AYP.

Being an Abbott District did bring monies into our schools, but with the funding came strings--documentation and accountability. Each school building has binders of reports, data, surveys and other documentation mandated--although rarely reviewed--by the state. The district also had to purchase and adopt a whole school reform model.  Staff were trained in the selected program, additional non-instructional staff were hired, and consultants were paid to come into district.  (In Perth Amboy, the provider made a lot of money, but the implementation of the model had no educational impact on the district.)

Have there been financial abuses in Abbott Districts? Do some politicians lobby their friends
in the statehouse to keep or put their district on the list of Abbott Districts?  Do some communities create jobs and fill them as political favors?  Has the system of funding the Abbott Districts created educational hardships for other middle class districts?  Yes, yes, yes and yes--but where has the state been for the last few years?  Why didn’t the state go after the districts that keep spending the extra funds but are not showing progress?  Now after years of abuse, mismanagment and not watching the store, the state is going to punish all Abbott districts?  Is it best practice to punish the class because four students act up?  There are districts where great things are happening for kids thanks to Abbott.  My message to the State of New Jersey: go after the districts that took the money and are not showing results, but reward the districts who are doing the right things for kids and public schools.

Posted by Guest at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ed

We’ve written a fair bit about First Class Education and their so called “65% solution.”  If you haven’t been following the debate, the 65% solution is an effort to frame public education as inefficient by claiming that more than 35% of spending is for bureaucratic costs outside the classroom and proposing that we cap those costs at 35%, leaving 65% for the classroom. The most important thing to know about this policy proposal is that the real number for actual administrative spending is closer to 10%. First Class Education gets from 10% to “more than 35%” by treating services such as school libraries, nurses, security guards, guidance counselors, school nutrition, transportation, teacher training, maintenance and curriculum development as “administration.”

It’s a classic bait and switch. Voters think they are getting efficiency, but they are getting fewer services that kids need and nothing that might be actually wasteful is targeted. The idea that public spending and bureaucracy are out of hand are reinforced and people who speak out against the proposal can be easily made to appear to be defending the indefensible.  A new and timely report from the Oregon Center for Public Policy revisits the policy issues of 65 as they pertain to Oregon. For AFT’s take, see here.

As we’ve discussed before, this effort was never about kids.  It was about politics, despite George Will's scribbling.  And this week the mask slipped in Oregon.  First Class Education, the group that is sponsoring the 65% limit, has filed an initiative for the 2007 the state ballot. Ballot committees, unlike candidate committees, are typically allowed enormous latitude both in the money they can collect and in how they can spend.  And First Class Education's committee is, here in the fall of 2006, distributing literature and, I’m told, buying television time in Oregon ostensibly to influence a late 2007 referendum vote.  Of course, all of the activity appears to correspond with close state legislative races in this election.  And the literature all seems to highlight candidates in those races who are "co-chairs" or associate poobahs of First Class Education.  While the tag line in the literature is about the web site you can go to for signing the petition, the candidates’ names and pictures are the dominant thing. So the 2007 initiative seems to have become a vehicle for supporters of these candidates in Oregon to avoid disclosure and contribution limits in the 2006 state races. 

And for those of you keeping score, this isn't the first time the people behind First Class Education have done this sort of work late in an election year. In 2004, Pat Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com and the "chairman" of FCE (why am I always reminded of this guy when I type that?)  put $500,000 into a 527 committee called Save American Medicine.  The focus of this committee was to keep John Edwards and other trial lawyers from ripping the IV's out of patients’ arms or some other such calamity that would occur if he was elected.  The only other contributors to the committee were Byrne's dad, also for $500,000 and a guy who gave $200 (i.e. “the grassroots”).   A look at the expenditure reports indicates that Tim Mooney was a consultant for this operation.  Mooney is now the honcho of First Class Education. 

Posted by Guest at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Ed 

Paul Hill and the Koret task force have a new missive on the plight of charter schools in America. I haven't read the whole thing, but I just read the chapter on money, written by Eric Osberg. And, once again, I find myself giving more credit to the people who work in charter schools than to the people who advocate for them. Osberg does hit a lot of the right theoretical points (see here for my thoughts on these points). And he is kind enough to mention some of my colleagues and mine own work on finance -- a set of peer reviewed studies done for the Department of Education. He seems happy to cite our data that shows that charter schools do in fact typically get less revenue than the districts they are located in. However, when it comes time to look at why that happens -- because districts have responsibilities that charters schools don’t have, provide services to charters that are counted on district books and, most importantly, typically serve a different population than charter schools -- Osberg goes to a different set of data without acknowledging that this too is an issue we've dealt with in our work. I think this is a mistake.

Osberg uses SRI data which compares charter school populations to state averages. Nationally, charter schools serve a special education load that is about 3/4 of what public schools serve. Osberg uses this ratio to look at the cost differences between a charter school and a school district and finds that special ed enrollment explains 14% of the average gap, as he's determined it. But urban school districts, where charter schools tend to locate, typically have higher than average special education enrollment. So a charter school could serve a special ed population that was exactly in proportion to the national average and still serve a far lower special education population (proportionally) to the district in which it is located. For example, in Texas we found charter schools had a 4.4 percent special education population and the districts they were located in had an 11.3 percent special education population. That means Osberg is underestimating the impact of special ed enrollment for Texas by about half.

Special ed kids are not all the same and we found that those with disabilities that were costlier to cope with were more likely going to be a district's responsibility rather than a charter schools’. Yet Osberg treats them all the same, which is another shift in the goal posts.

Osberg says the funding gap on special ed nets out to about 14% of the overall funding gap between charters and school districts. In the four states where data allowed us to calculate a special education expenditure gap we found that in fact expenditure differences were a larger proportion of the funding gap. In Arizona, the expenditure gap in special ed was equal to a somewhat Osbergish 21% of the total expenditure gap. But in Minnesota it was 50%. In Michigan, Texas and North Carolina it was larger than the overall gap -- their special education costs put them at a relative funding advantage to school districts.

Osberg notes the fact that our data is from '98 as reason not to use it. Its true that the data is from ’98. But I haven’t seen a more comprehensive look at these issues. Moreover, why then cite the details that help prove the point you want to make? Simply put, if you're going to cite our data on funding, you owe it to us and your readers to acknowledge that, hey, we've got special ed data too and it tells a very different story in part because it makes a different (and we believe more focused) comparison. Otherwise you are being shifty. And you are bending the fact that we work for AFT to sophistic ends which is almost as lame as quoting the late Albert Shanker out of context. No one likes to be objectified or pigeonholed in this way.

Osberg also doesn't come to grips with something that seems incredibly obvious to me. Charter schooling, all else being equal, is going to be a more expensive reform than traditional public schooling. This is what happens when you try to run a streamlined school district operation on the scale of a small small school. Its why we found charter schools had higher administrative spending per pupil than traditional public schools. As a result charter schools often can’t handle the unfunded mandate that students like special ed kids and English Language Learners create. So they get less revenue by not attracting these students, but their costs are lowered by a somewhat greater factor, offsetting some-- but not all - of the innate problems in their fiscal model. Acknowledging that charter schools are more expensive – and hence under a lot of financial pressure -- and finding an equitable way to do something about that (ie. get them more money while not creating a separate and priviledged school system) seems to be the proper task for school finance inquiry.

Posted by Guest at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ed

I’ve put some time into blogging about the right wing/libertarian effort to pass state spending caps based on Colorado’s Taxpayers Bill of Rights.  (For previous posts see here, here, and here).  TABOR, as it stands now, is going to be on the ballot in Maine, Nebraska and Oregon.  Pending legal action, it may be on the ballot in Montana as well.  (Montana’s lower courts have thrown it off, and the supreme court is expected to rule imminently).

There’s a lot at stake in these elections, but it could have been even worse. At the start of the year there were bills to refer TABOR to the ballot in more than twenty state legislatures.  And signatures were gathered to place it on the ballot via citizen’s petition in Oregon, Oklahoma, Ohio, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Missouri, Nevada and Nebraska.  No legislature placedTABOR on the ballot, although Ohio did pass a statutory spending cap. The courts in many of the petition states decided that TABOR’s sponsors had violated the process for placing initiatives on the ballot. For example, the Montana lower court ruled that the signature gathering effort there was “permeated by a pervasive and general pattern and practice of deceit, fraud, and procedural non-compliance.”   The PBS program NOW ran a report about this which is worth watching.   

Its good to know that the money and power of opponents of public services don’t always win the day. But this fight is a long way from over this year in Montana, Nebraska, Oregon and Maine.  And the proponents of TABOR have given signs that they will pursue this campaign with the same fervor that they did the term limits movement of the 1990s.  Which means win or lose on election day, they will be back next year. 

Posted by Guest at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ed 

Edwize has a great post up about New York City's adult education programs that are run through the school system. You should read it.  And then you should ponder how it is that under the rubrics of the so called 65% solution, this work counts as administration and not instruction.

Posted by Guest at 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ed

Update: I forgot one thing. Earlier this year I debated Tim Mooney of First Class Education. The tag line on his powerpoint: "It wins at the ballot……and so will its supporters!"

This isn't about fixing schools, its about politics. George Will should be ashamed.

George Will recently wrote a piece about the “65 Percent solution,” a poll-tested effort to paint schools as bureaucratic and inefficient by pointing out that 37 percent of spending takes place outside of the classroom and the football field. That most of this 37 percent takes place in the library, the lunch room, the guidance counselors’, truant officers’ and nurses’ offices, on the school bus, at the security desk and in the boiler room doesn’t matter.  All of it counts as “bureaucracy” in the eyes of First Class Education, the people responsible for this campaign.  AFT has prepared a lot of information on this effort and why it’s not a good idea.

Just so you know, the Education Research Service finds that 5.5 percent of school spending is at the central office. Another 6.1 percent of district spending is for school level administration. The rest goes for programs that provide services directly to kids or keep schools heated, clean and in good repair.  Now that NCES separates out administration from the other not-in-the-classroom categories, they find that 11 percent is spent on actual administration.  George Will calls it “opacity” to report this.

If Will read this blog he would have known in August that the National Center for Education Statistics was changing its reporting. And that it was a good idea. Also, there isn’t any monkey business here.  NCES is collecting the same data as before, and you can still figure out the measurement used by First Class Education.  You just have more information.

Will's spin is that there is real momentum behind a reform that everyone from me to Chester Finn thinks is stupid. (For a better delivery of this line see Kevin Carey).  Will points to legislatures that, when  faced with 65, decided to symbolically tip their hats to it, before turning their attention back to adequacy, accountability and property taxes, as in the case of Kansas and Louisiana. You can argue that a legislature shouldn’t finesse issues, but when the sophists (purveyors of spurious learning that leads to political success) come knocking, sometimes it’s wise to brush them off. 

The only governor to push this legislatively is Sonny Perdue of Georgia. At the same time he was trying to mandate that schools hire guidance counselors, who his 65 percent proposal treats as administrative overhead, Purdue was simultaneously calling for limiting and for mandating higher “administrative spending.”  I’m left wondering why Will didn’t call Purdue’s logic “remarkable in its consistency” and “clear as a bell.” 

The 65 Percent Solution is an effort to portray the public schools as faceless bureaucracies that waste one-third of the dollars entrusted to them.  And it doesn’t do a thing to actually fix any of the things that might be wrong with how schools spend their money, it just creates a hoop to jump through. Why George Will has bought into it is beyond me. For more on the political uses of 65 and a look at the research showing the importance to kids of the work done by different members of the school team, see my very first post on the blog.

Posted by Guest at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Ed 

I've managed to like Joe Williams, despite the fact that he blogs for a union busting organization. But he is pushing a button with this "charters don’t drain school district" stuff. Hence the length of this post.

Any given charter school may or may not be a drain on its host district’s budget. It’s also true that in high-growth states like Arizona or Nevada, there is often no felt effect from charters, and they may in fact relieve districts of a capital finance burden. (That this burden too often goes into the ether and charter kids end up in schools with poor infrastructure is another issue--where I am sympathetic to charterific complaint.) But in a district with a stable or declining population, there is tremendous potential for financial drain from charter schools, which can be as simple as the lost economy of scale. But if the charter finance system is based on the weights in the state funding formula rather than on actual costs (i.e. if it isn’t Minnesota’s funding system--and Minnesota’s isn’t perfect), or if the system gives out lump sums no matter the pupil--as used to be done and may sort of still be done in Massachusetts–-there can be real harm.

Harm is particularly likely if the charter school has a lower enrollment of higher-cost students than the host district(s). Many charter schools have good and large special education programs, but on average they have fewer special ed students with less severe IEPs than the districts they draw from. The same goes for English Language Learners (ELL) and, to a lesser extent, low income kids. These are programs that can draw extra dollars in finance formulas, but those extra dollars are typically not enough to cover the actual costs districts incur when really working to provide adequate educational services. That means that money from the basic per pupil allotment for everyone else covers those costs. (See how Seattle’s weighted student formula works for a sense of this).

To the extent charter schools don’t mirror the district, they are affecting this balance. Given the state of many inner city communities, a charter could serve what we would all agree is a high number of special ed, ELL and low-income student enrollment and still not match the host district. And we can all agree that there are some cases where the charter school serves a more at risk population, and in those cases it is actually relieving the district of some financial burden. Yes, that happens, but it is rare.

Harm is done not because charter schools are evil (the people I’ve met who actually work in them--including one yesterday from here--can be very impressive), but because the school finance assumptions that went into them were unrealistic. Charter schools are typically small. And as such, they are more costly. Research shows running a small district high school can cost $400 more per pupil more than a typical school, and that’s deosn't include the addtional overhead of district level responsibilities. Charter schools’ per pupil administrative spending is typically higher than that of neighboring schools (yes, charter schools create a net shift to administration--such that, in an effort to gain scale, we are seeing the rise of parallel virtual school districts in the charter world). So charter schools are running an inherently more expensive educational model at the same cost as a larger district. And, the school finance system penalizes charter schools for taking on high cost kids, because they don’t have the scale to absorb the excess out of their regular education per pupil allotments. It instead rewards them for taking on regular education kids.

When you shoehorn a model that, all things being equal, will be inherently more expensive into the current school finance system, all things won’t be equal. And when your funding system gives clear incentives to start to solve the problem by building a program to attract lower cost kids and penalizes you for the higher cost ones, stuff happens. I’m quite sympathetic to this problem. I don’t know how I’d handle it if I were running a charter school. But the fact of the matter is it means that charter schools often choose missions and hence enrollments that do drain resources from districts, and this is a serious issue in the context of declining or low growth enrollments. Just because it isn’t likely to be the charter school founder’s intent, doesn’t mean that it isn’t real and doesn’t cause problems for students in the districts that are feeling the effect. The technical term for this is "adverse selection," and the net result is that many charter schools have an effect that is analogous to that of HMOs on other insurance pools. Within this context, talk about how "a school that loses kids deserves to be closed" strikes me as either stupid or ignorant.

If you really want to dig into what I and my wonderful co-authors think about the policy on this issue, I’d suggest reading Venturesome Capital: State Charter School Finances and Paying for the Vision: Charter School Revenue and Expenditures. A shorter, but less rich discussion, can be found here.

Posted by Guest at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've already written a couple of posts (here and here) to introduce readers to the efforts of a group of well heeled Libertarians and their astroturfy support system to use the ballot process to pass spending limits (aka Taxpayers Bills of Rights, aka TABORs) in about a dozen states. These limits would, in time, seriously undercut the provision of public services.

Others in the blogosphere have also written about the people behind TABOR. For some of this discussion, see here, here and especially here. I'm as interested in the history of the Libertarian Party as the next blogger, and am astounded at the array of organizations that are connected back to Howard Rich and his cronies at Americans for Limited Government (ALG). But I want to blog about the nexus of TABOR and vouchers, because a lot of the stars of the TABOR firmament have important voucher connections.  I've already written about Rich’s role in pushing vouchers in South Carolina. There are two voucher specific groups: Legislative Education Action Drive  (LEAD) and Parents in Charge that are affiliated with ALG.   

Another member of Rich’s network is Eric O'Keefe. He's on the board of ALG and was part of the Libertarian Party's structure with Rich. He is the honcho of LEAD.  I'm told that he played a leading role at ALG’s recent "action conference" on TABOR. And if this article is correct, O'Keefe is the president of All Children Matter.  All Children Matter is the voucher movement's main political funding commitee. They have spent millions of dollars, mostly in efforts to defeat anti voucher Republicans in GOP primaries.

Most important, these aren’t the only taboristas with ties to the voucher movement. Right wing state think tanks like the Mackinac Institute that are part of the State Policy Network advocate for both TABOR (called Stop Over Spending in MI) and tuition tax credits. The Club for Growth, on whose board both Howard Rich and Milwaukee voucher touter George Mitchell sit, is another TABOR advocate.  In Ohio, voucher mogul turned charter school mogul David Brennan was one of the lead sponsors of that state's TABOR initiative.  And according to campaign filings, the Missouri TABOR campaign got its legal advice from Clint Bolick's Institute for Justice.  

Why does this matter?  When the primary political muscle behind the movement to change the delivery of public education is dedicated to disinvesting public education it is going to have a major effect both on the political choices the movement makes and on the specific policy prescriptions around which they coalesce.  The effect this influence has had on the voucher movement is obvious.  Its largely become a means to a TABORish end. Less obvious – but I suspect quite real - are the constraints that this dynamic puts on the charter school movement -- which, needless to say, is far more progressive than the voucher movement.  And it explains why suburban school superintendents and anyone with a job in a service that could be privatized on the cheap reached for their wallets when the 100 Percent Solution was rolled out because it, like charter schools, includes a subset of good concepts and a whole lot of looseness as to what the finished policy will be.

Posted by Guest at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For those with access to the Peabody Journal of Education($), check out the latest article by Karen Hawley Miles and Marguerite Roza on weighted student funding.  This article is the first they have written on the topic that has appeared--as far as I have seen--in a high-quality peer-reviewed journal.  Backers of Fund the Child should take note of this commentary included in the article:

[W]hereas student weighted allocation might decrease per pupil spending differences across schools, it has no impact on two other sources of spending differences not reflected in school-level budget analysis: those attributed to differences between real and average teacher salaries and those resulting from staff located in the school but reported centrally managed budgets.

Note that the authors say "staff," not just teachers.  And, the authors also point out--as they have previously--but the point has been overlooked:

Analysis of school budgets suggests differences in funding levels are generally caused by school size, nonformula magnet or other special program staff, resources for special student populations, and costs of physical plant differences.

Resource inequity between schools is caused, in part, by several factors that have nothing to do with average teacher salaries. I wonder if the backers of Fund the Child plan to start going after magnet schools or small schools?

Posted by Michele at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Center for American Progress hosted a lively debate Friday on the Fordham Foundation's Fund the Child proposal, which calls on states and districts to adopt weighted student funding (WSF) models because they provide more resource equity within and between districts.  It was a heavy-weight panel--including Arlene Ackerman, Rod Paige, John Podesta and Michael Rebell--moderated by John Merrow and, as far as these events tend to go, sparked some controversey that kept it interesting for the audience. 

The panel was a little lop-sided, with Rebell the only speaker who opposes the Fund the Child "manifesto," as he so terms it, because he thinks it is designed to distract the debate from the more urgent need to address funding adequacy. Rebell was very compelling in his arguments and, with Merrow's assistance, really held Podesta's feet to the fire on why Podesta supported a proposal that could also make it easier to fund school vouchers.  That said, I think Rebell came across as a little too dismissive of the importance of equity in school funding.  Ackerman was essential to the panel, having implemented WSF in three school districts--it's always good to hear about how these things play out in practice and, surprise, Ackerman pointed out that adopting this model is not the "silver bullet." She also said that while WSF doesn't take politics out of the funding equation, it does increase transparency so that parents and others in the community know how budgeting decisions are made.

Merrow fell down on the job only in not allowing enough time for questions, of which there were many.  Leigh Dingerson from the Center for Community Change asked Ackerman a pointed question--if weighted student funding leads to more resource equity between schools, then why hasn't student achievement in the District of Columbia improved since the district adopted WSF over 10 years ago.  Ackerman answered that she left the district shortly after WSF was implemented and that not enough of the other necessary ingredients were in place to improve student achievement.  Makes sense, but I found myself agreeing with Rebell, who pointed out that Fund the Child is also called the 100 Percent Solution--not the 85 percent solution--so it is disingenuous of The Fordham Foundation to pitch it as "the" answer.

Using average teacher salaries (rather than actual salaries) in the school budgeting process was much-criticized by Fund the Child but largely missing from Friday's debate.  So I asked Ackerman a question about whether using actual salaries is essential to WSF.  As it turns out, in the three districts where Ackerman implemented WSF, the districts continued to use average teacher salaries and were still able to achieve more resource equity between schools.  Ackerman did not provide much of an explanation as to why this was, but, if districts were able to do it without using average teacher salaries, it makes you question whether some of the Fund the Child signers have motives other than resource equity.

Check out what others have to say on the debate: Masie McAdoo at Edwize here and Joe Williams has to say here.

Posted by Michele at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)