September 8, 2012
Legislators and friends,
Let’s all take a deep breath, maybe a Tums, Rolaids or whatever you take when your stomach gets upset. This might be a little extreme right now but the medicine is going to have to be taken. This issue isn’t that hard, it simply is the act of taking the numbers and the facts and realizing that NEA, KNEA has controlled this topic entirely too long and we have to get the truth out to our constituents without making this a mind-boggling process. I’m going to take a shot at that here and now and give you more ideas on how to reshape the education system in Kansas to get back to a point where it educates children and is cost effective.
Let’s understand where the argument stands first. “Taxpayer”, you have to pay us more every year and you have to fund all of our “wants” or the administration is going to cut teachers from your student or students and this is going to result in a poor education or educational experience for your child. We are going to use your tax dollars to fund lobbyist on our behalf, and we are going to pay lawyers to sue the taxpayers for even more money. This point may be a little too simple but I had to inject a little sarcasm to go along with it.
This group, this entity, is not going to hold your kids for ransom, or use extortion techniques against the people “ANY MORE”! We are way past being sympathetic here, so reason and facts are going to have to rule the day. An example of how KNEA functions as a special interest group is its public titled “Behind Every Great Student is a Great Public School Teacher.” But what about the great Kansas students who go to private or church schools, or who are homeschooled? The answer is that KNEA cares nothing about these students, as they are taught by teachers who aren’t union members.
So luckily for me – math is a strong suit (back when they taught it). So as we dive into this issue with the numbers and I have tried to simplify them, we need to understand where this money is going (from what we can ascertain) and where it continues to go (from what we can ascertain).
The School System
Public education is maligning everything we stand for as citizens and our fundamental rights as citizens. It has no accountability, no independent oversight and continues to ask for money and request for more expenditure while student graduation and testing scores continue to drop. If I said we have a “LIBERAL” system that is the understatement of the century. We continue to throw money at a system that simply has NO structure or accountability to the taxpayers or to the State. It is important to the citizens of Kansas that this branch can be taken back to a time when its primary job was that of "teaching and educating students" because the reality is they aren’t managing doing that very well.
More than 1.2 million students drop out of school every year in the U.S. American children rank 31st in math among 65 industrialized countries. Sixty-eight percent of eighth graders can't read at grade level, and most may never catch up.
Economic success begins in the classroom—which does not bode well for the future of the U.S. economy. American high school students rank 25th in math and 21st in science, compared with high school equivalent students in 30 industrialized countries. The Broad Foundation estimates $192 billion in lost income and taxes due to high school dropouts each year.
Many American critics believe that the major problem with public education today is a lack of focus on results. Students aren’t expected to meet high standards, the argument goes on and on, and the process of education takes precedence over analyzing education results in policy-making circles.
This is a valid argument (as far as it goes). Indeed, it can be taken one important step further. We not only fail to hold individual students accountable for poor performance, we have also failed to hold the entire government-controlled school system accountable for its performance since at least World War II. Public education is itself a failure. Why shouldn’t individual students follow its example?
The history of reform efforts in American public education is replete with half-hearted measures, with almost comical misdiagnoses of education problems, with blame-shifting, and with humbug. Everyone is an expert (most have, of course, suffered through the very system they want to reform). At any one time during the course of school reform, an illusion of debate often obscures a surprising consensus on the new “magic bullet” of the decade—be it school centralization or progressive education or preschool education or computerizing the classroom—that will solve America’s education problems. These magic bullets are always missing the target. But instead of changing their weapon, policy-makers simply put another round in the chamber, foolishly believing that the newest fad will succeed despite the failures of its predecessors.
Some critics believe that public education reforms fail because they are compromised or sabotaged by the education lobbies—teacher associations, administrators, and their legislators. There is certainly some truth to that explanation, as we shall see. Most reform ideas are either irrelevant or destructive of education. They would fail whether organized political interests opposed them or not.
Many conservatives believe that American public education is in poor shape today because of cultural and social trends, most beginning in the 1960s, which destroyed classroom discipline, the moral basis for education, and a national consensus on what students should learn. Again, there is some truth in this proposition, but ultimately it fails to explain why American students do not possess the communication and computational skills they need today to succeed in college or in the working world.
Many free-market thinkers believe that applying market competition to the public schools will solve many of America’s educational problems. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but I believe it would inhibit school success. When government policy continues to impose rigid personnel rules, bureaucracy, regulations, and a mandate to use education to engineer social or political outcomes, a school cannot successfully impart the needed skills, knowledge, and perspective to its students—whether these students choose to be there or not.
The rhetoric of school reform needs to ignore the role of individual decisions (by teachers, by students, by parents, by business owners) in determining educational outcomes. You can lead a horse to water, the old adage goes, but you can’t make him drink. It’s a folksy way of imparting an important individualist truth. Providing students opportunities at school does not guarantee success if students watch television rather than do their homework—and parents let them. By assuming that any set of reform ideas can magically create a well-educated citizenry, we oversell the role of policy-making. Education requires initiative, a trait notoriously difficult to create or impose.
Cost
Here are the facts according to official government data for the period 2001 to 2011:
—Inflation was 24.2% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Midwest Urban Cities)
—FTE enrollment increased 1.8% (KSDE)
—Taxpayer support of public education increased 55.8%; state aid +37.6%, federal +155.4% and local +67%. (KSDE)
—2012 is expected to be a record-setting year for taxpayer support of public education, at $5.672 billion (KSDE)
Clearly these statistics reflect a substantial increase in spending for education from 2001 to 2011.
Here are a few more facts that, like those listed above, are not generally known to the public and are routinely denied by education officials.
—$402 million more in state and local aid was not spent between 2005 and 2011 but was used to increase operating cash reserves (KSDE)
—Instruction spending per-pupil increased 84% between 1999 and 2011 (KSDE) while inflation was up only 32% (BLS)
—Taxpayer support of public education in Kansas increased from $3.1 billion in 1998 to $5.6 billion in 2011 (KSDE) yet student proficiency levels is well below 50% (US Dept. of Ed.)
This year's estimated total per-student cost is $12,225, which is about 26 percent above what schools had to spend in 2005, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. Now Linda Jones, chief financial officer at the Wichita school district 259 is going to take issue with these numbers because “it includes money restricted to building maintenance and construction, which isn't available to schools to educate students”, well the last time I checked as a business owner and after managing million dollar companies – all cost associated with the company were calculated even if it wasn’t “related to the task” but it’s still part of the company cost! Her problem with this analogy is that she wants to independently choose the cost she wants to show. Maybe the utilities should be dismissed? The links below are the data to back this up.
http://www.kansas.com/2010/04/25/1285662/how-much-does-it-cost-to-educate.html
http://www.kansasopengov.org/SchoolDistricts/SpendingPerPupil/tabid/1271/Default.aspx
A simple formula to put this in perspective for all voters: 20 students = $244,500 for 1 classroom. Now before I even go any farther please review the information above, the school systems have this student/pupil rate down around 13-15 students per teacher in Kansas, which is ridiculous. Back to the numbers, if $244,500 is spent per room - less the teachers wage, we have around $200K to ask – where $#%* is that going since it’s not in the classroom?? Now we have struck a nerve!
Taxpayers do not know how their tax money is being spent (sports, utilities, etc.). This is especially true in education, which represents a huge investment by the taxpayers of Kansas. How much is being spent at the school district level is a matter of public record. However, what is not known is how much is being spent precisely at each school, and individual schools have substantial budgets. How much ends up in the classroom? How much goes to fund lobbying for more money by the school administration, to fund activities and to programs that are more properly described as something other than education? Like suing the taxpayer for more money when they can’t be responsible for what they already have.
There has to be a full accounting of the money!!
The Kansas teachers union and its stable of education candidates have also been successful in shielding teachers from meaningful evaluation and accountability for on-the-job performance. We need criteria for implementing an evaluation system that includes student achievement as a significant factor in the evaluation. The legislature needs to take this role to identify the most effective means of tying student achievement to teacher and leader evaluations and building that into the existing Kansas Educator Evaluation Protocol (KEEP).
Nationally there are now 32 school voucher programs in 16 states and Washington, DC, serving at least 210,000 students. Despite their limited reach vouchers are quite controversial. Parents with vouchers use them to enter private education, and so the detractors argue that they drain finances from public schools and “privatize” education. Another concern is that vouchers can be used at religious schools and therefore could erode the balance between church and state. However, as vouchers often pay less than the cost of educating a single pupil in public schools, they offer a way for a state to make savings in education spending, while increasing choice for parents.
Number of High Schools in Kansas:
http://high-schools.com/kansas.html
Schools and the # of kids:
http://kansas.educationbug.org/public-schools/
Schools and Districts:
http://teaching.about.com/od/ProfilesInEducation/a/Kansas-Education.htm
Top retiree’s in Kansas payouts:
http://www.kansasopengov.org/Retiree/RetiredDatabase/tabid/1569Default.aspx
Administrative Realignment
Telling parents the inconvenient truth is not attacking schools, teachers or anyone else. It is giving them the facts they need to make fully informed decisions about what needs to be done to improve public education. Let’s put as many ideas forward and implement them in a resourceful and meaningful manner to produce the education system we all want for our kids.
No one wants to consolidate school systems, but why have 316 school districts with 316 Superintendents, 316 Administrative offices, etc. Clearly many Counties could allow for (1) Superintendent with Representation from each school district to sit on the board. Wichita is the largest school District in the State with 49,600 students with (1) Superintendent (Administrative Realignment). This can and should be expanded on with other areas, as the school system has made it their job to make full time positions out of every position (Athletic Directors, Food Directors, Transportation Directors, etc.). We have 105 counties and the smaller counties outside of Johnson and Sedgwick could easily make this happen, as well as Johnson and Sedgwick could also consolidate suburban school administrations. We don’t need to pay $100k plus for a school district Superintendent with 2,500 students or even for those up to the aforementioned 50,000 students!
Suggestions:
Move toward removing the State BOE. I realize this too is a constitutional matter to change but this entity is simply inept. The school districts have the representation of legislators the same as the public.
The school districts have not been redrawn or moved in over 50 years, this single item has led to school districts running into different city limits and making wasteful use of tax payer dollars to bus students that would no longer even be bused to closer schools.
Hire an Independent company to evaluate each school district in the State and review its efficiency and cost per student. By learning the “true” cost associated with education and its expenditures we will never “really” know how to fix the problem. Schools are administration heavy, with an emphasis on classroom size rather than quality of education. These reports should be used by the legislature and Governor to ascertain better solutions to a growing problem of “out of control spending” and better review how certain school districts are not cost effective.
Serious consideration needs to be applied to a “voucher system” for the citizens of this state. Kansan’s deserve more choices and their kids deserve an education worthy of competition.
Any type of formula that allows other formulas to add to the states cost. School Districts continue to have bonds and expect the state to cover the bonds without a single legislator vote or the cost or impact to our budget. Lobbyist groups continually insist on tax increases and demand more funding without any accountability for public education – PERIOD!
Focus needs to be on “Special programs”, Special schools, and the needs for busing. Schools are not being responsible for this cost and providing them as a “want” not a need. Any advanced courses or college classes in high school should clearly have more students due to the very nature of the course in preparing them accordingly. Wichita’s USD 259 has “open borders” to their magnet Middle Schools (this transportation cost is over the top), rather than have a Magnet Middle school in each sector of Wichita (using Kellogg and I135) to divide the city, the district could easily place a single Magnet Middle School – centered in each of the 4 quadrants and anyone wanting to attend another Magnet school outside of their quadrant would pay for transportation or drive them to school – saving the district MILLIONS of dollars a year. This is but one thing that doesn’t cut teachers, or impact classrooms.
School years can be shortened to eliminate enormous amounts of cost in August and May due to the Heat. The use of “inservice days” and longer holidays is obscene.
Collective Bargaining for Public Employees needs to end.
Privatizing KPRS.
Bond and Interest formulas have to be reformed so that our legislators have to review before any of these are acted on let alone enacted.
End the Kansas Board of Regents ability to continue to increase tuition rates yearly and at ridiculous rates.
The US educational system is failing, because of over-regulation, unions, uninspired teachers, antiquated reward systems, etc. American students do not possess the communication and computational skills they need today to succeed in college or in the working world. I cannot explain the K-12 system failures in full here. There are those that believe that it’s because the schools need still more money. This is a view promulgated mainly by self-serving educators. Fact is, study after study has found that increasing school spending has done nothing to improve student achievement.
Next week I will put together the Strengthen Marriage issues! If for some reason you need to find out more on certain subjects please don’t hesitate to call or email me or visit our blog at http://kansasjudicialsystem-casemanagers.blogspot.com/
Chris Brown
316-644-8075
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