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Short Term Savings, Long Term Losses

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Daily, articles describe the fiscal problem for schools.  Tuesday, February 23, 2010, a San Francisco Chronicle front page headline stated “Over 900 pink slips likely for S.F. schools,” the largest, distressed district in the bay area.

CA suburban middle school

CA suburban middle school

Today, Wednesday, February 24, 2010, the Wall Street Journal front page reported disaster for San Mateo County school districts, elementary to community college, affecting high and very low-performing schools with layoffs up and down a beautiful part of the San Francisco peninsula.

The superintendent of well-to-do Lafayette School District states “districts across the state are increasing class sizes, decreasing the length of the school year, eliminating professional development, and eviscerating art, music, athletic and summer school programs.”  See “Complacency has added to our crisis in education” by Fred Brill, San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2010.

The catastrophe for students is the procedure whereby huge cuts balance a short term budget, i.e. layoffs aka RIF-reduction in force.

“Increasing class size” means teacher layoffs.  “Eliminating professional development” means teachers providing the service disappear.  No “art, music, athletics and summer school” means RIF.  Furthermore, furloughs and decreases in the number of school year days forewarn that teachers decamp in hopes of a better salary elsewhere-maybe to booming Wyoming.

It may be that school districts are caught in the middle of the state’s fiscal debacle, especially in California.  However, Jeffrey Pfeffer in ‘Lay Off the Layoffs” Newsweek, February 15, 2010, quoted a head of human resources, “If people are your most important assets, why would you get rid of them?”

It’s a business quote, let’s be honest, not a school district’s.  First thing that will come to the reader’s mind is school districts are not businesses.  Agreed.  This blog often says that.  Nevertheless, think about why layoffs sabotage the goals for student achievement.

Immediately, the unemployment benefits that the county will pay cuts into money available for schools.  Money spent when people are rehired cuts into supposed savings.

Next, morale of the remaining staff goes down.  Teachers are redistributed, and there is a direct and indirect cost to resettle in a different school, much less learn the “school climate” at the new location or new grade level.  That’s why the strongest schools have few teachers moving in and out and students remaining at the school from grades K-5.

Another indirect cost is loss of institutional memory.  Especially in low-performing schools where young teachers are often the first to be sent packing, every year the few remaining teachers must spend at least a month of instructional time training new teachers who inevitably are brought in as student demographics shift.

Next, productivity is reduced.  Fatigue sets in.  With substantial layoffs, too few teachers must take on extra duties that had been distributed among more employees.  They get sick.  More teachers take days off and the district must pay for substitutes-another cost.

This blog has no “magic bullet” to avoid projected layoffs for 2010-2011, other than to hope more stimulus money is authorized by Congress.  However, state and local school boards should think “long term.”

How about working through the county to gain volume and thus reduce the substantial cost of supplies per school district?  Right now each school district makes deals, not nearly large enough in volume to save the money required.

The state department of education should advocate for the revised federal health care plan, thus cutting costs for teacher benefits and Medicare, after salaries a major cost to school districts.

County boards of education should strongly advocate for combining small districts into one larger district to save the cost of multiple superintendents and district personnel.  Maybe the goal should be 10-20,000 students per district.  Contentious, but cost-cutting.

Finally, this blog has advocated for the proposal developed two years ago “Getting Beyond the Facts: Reforming California School Finance” that suggests a plan to reorganize the funds available to the state so that money is allocated where it’s needed.

Why should teachers (and so students) be the first to pay the price for a poor economy and state inability to manage its finances?

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Posted in California budget crisis, community colleges, layoff notices, low-performing schools, public schools, school finance reform |
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What’s the Answer?

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
a California high school

a California high school

Amazing in itself, two bills (SBX5 1 and SBX5 4) passed January 7, 2010, in the California legislature and were signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, aiming to get $700 million from the federal Race To The Top (RTTT) funds.

What will that money be used for?  Most of the California education world only expects it to shore up the fiscal crisis, allowing legislators to say “See, we didn’t take any more money from schools.”

Such manipulation does nothing to address the real crisis in California, the governor and his party’s refusal to consider taxes, the Democratic majority’s inability to pass legislation anyway because of the supermajority (2/3) needed by the legislature and/or from the voters in an election for any tax or finance legislation.

Meantime, the onslaught against teachers continues, pay cuts, furlough days, increases in student/teacher ratio, all of which really are to the detriment of students for whom RTTT funds are supposed to benefit.

Round and round we go, where we stop…

Actually, anyone who studies school reform knows where to stop.  At schools in deep failure, low-performing on exams; poor, poor, poor facilities; unsupported teachers; distracted parents consumed by pay and food for their children.  Whether tax haters like it or not, systemic failure needs money to reverse itself.  This blog has reported suggestions to reorganize without cost, but in the end, it’s dollar bills, used effectively and efficiently.

The legislation is geared to help the lowest-performing schools turn around, but two big issues dominate the legislation.

First, a bill component allows the linkage of school data to teacher evaluation, an ongoing concern with many competing ideas to put such a system in place. Randi Weingarten, AFT president, on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, offered a model in which teachers and other school personnel are part of the team designing the plan.  In the California legislation, collective bargaining is part of the process.

Second, the bill establishes a commission to update the state’s student content standards, not revised since the mid-1990’s.  No plan for teacher evaluation or changes to state testing would occur until the standards are revised.

Another aspect of the legislation has received strong support and strong condemnation. The provision allows parents to petition and state officials to force a school district to overhaul bad schools.

It’s true already that California State officials take over school districts, from community college to urban K-12.  Sometimes parents develop a charter school, so that’s already happening.  What will likely cause the uproar is allowing students to choose any school in the state to attend.

“Open enrollment” offers that possibility.  RTTT suggests that open enrollment policies to allow students to transfer out of schools that fail to raise state test scores high enough, quickly enough, will help.  Bruce Fuller, education and public policy professor UC Berkeley, says it’s just shifting chairs around on the sinking Titanic. (SFChronicle, January6, 2010)

Sounds good for the student, but what about the transportation costs, the cost to the receiving and sending school districts.  Who puts up the money to make it happen?

While teacher’s unions have been wading in to advocate for a number of these provisions, after making sure their objections have been heard, the California Teachers Association (CTA) is adamantly opposed to the “open enrollment” part of the legislation.

It’s not hard to imagine the unintended consequences of the proposal.  It will bring chaos to many school districts, like schools with high transient rates and low test performance, without offering any model for improvement.

Is that the answer to fix failing schools?

(Image by SHM)

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Posted in American Federation of Teachers, California Teachers Association, Race to Top, community colleges, low-performing schools, program improvement, public schools, school reform |
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Same old, same old won’t do

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Same old, same old won’t do for public education anymore

School boards will be under tremendous pressure for the next three to four years to meet two seemingly contradictory goals:  cut budgets and improve school achievement.

Schools can produce revenue

I submit that schools should add one more goal:  increase revenue.  If districts can increase revenue when tax receipts are down, maybe they can also make forward strides on student proficiency.

School buildings, especially those with dwindling student enrollment, can be more efficiently used to bring broad-based education to whole communities, not just kids in the communities.  With the push for high school kids to take community college courses, and with more adults needing to train for new careers, public schools become an ideal place to institute post-12 education.

I’m suggesting public school-community college partnerships to reduce new construction and to create satellite delivery systems for face-to-face higher education.  Community colleges wouldn’t have to raise money for new construction, and public schools can gain revenue from leasing rooms and advanced technology.

Adult learning in public schools can help kids achieve

A cheap way to increase student achievement is to provide middle and high school courses to adults, particularly parents with kids in school.  Math is taught differently today from 1980.  If parents take a beginning algebra course today, about two weeks ahead of their children, for example, they can be much more instrumental in helping their kids learn.  And we can charge parents for the opportunity.

How can this happen?  As school districts develop online classes for kids, those classes can also be offered to parents, at a price.  Why not?  If a high school class that a teacher wants to offer doesn’t fill, maybe that class should be offered also to the adult community, which would create an interesting mix of adults and adolescents.  Maybe an adult wants to learn the physics he or she never took, or study a foreign language.  Or revisit the classics in literature.  Or relearn grammar.  Or take art.

Online courseware swapping can save everyone $$

School districts can save money and improve education outcomes by trading online courseware.  If one district has great science courseware and another district has great writing courseware, why not swap and trade?  This method saves money for everyone.

Put post-12 remedial education online through high schools

Currently, community and four year colleges do a lot of remedial skill building for students.  Why not bring some of that work back to high schools using online courses to deliver the services.  This may be a place where state or federal funding could intervene to support remedial programs and allow public schools to more expansively use their courseware.

New to a school board in a large Colorado district, my goal will be to think outside of the traditional boundaries, and I hope those ideas will bring more money and better learning to public schools.

Will let you know as changes move forward.

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Posted in adult education, community colleges, program improvement, public schools, school community, school resources |
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Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

With each article about prisons, I think of “at risk” school kids who could benefit from the millions of dollars spent on building and staffing one more prison facility because California, like many states, has a crazy quilt of laws about prison sentences.

“California Passes Bill Addressing Prisons,” by Solomon Moore, The New York Times, September 13, 2009, is another in the unending line of commentary on the cost of  felonies and misdemeanors, building another prison, overcrowded prison facilities, and court mandates to reduce prison populations.

Make no mistake.  Major criminals should be incarcerated, though FBI statistics in “Violent crime falls sharply…” by Devlin Barrett, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2009, show that killings, for example, decreased 3.9% in 2008.  Still, the laws that send men and women to jail for petty theft or small drug sales, as if they had robbed the federal gold depository or had lorded over a multi-state drug cartel, need reform.

Know why?

CA spends $6000 a year for each of these public school students

CA spends $6000 a year for each of these public school students

Students “at risk” need every dime of help they can get.  And they need every adult who can be rehabilitated to support their children.  In California $7000 a year (in 2009 down to $6000) is allocated per student attending public schools.  At the same time, an average of $49,000 per year is spent for each prison inmate (current prison population-167,000).  However, the bill just signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger will release 16,000 inmates without violent records or serious offenses through changes in parole regulations and early-release rules.

Sound better?  Let’s see…

Studies (see post 6/30) have shown that for an “at risk” student to succeed, attendance is important, adequate safe facilities are necessary, highly-qualified teachers must be hired, adequate books and other resources are required, assessment and time/money for analysis of student academic needs is mandated, tutoring and before or after school programs should be provided, and parent commitment to encourage the student’s achievement must be supported.  Not counting the funds for a district to oversee each school’s budget in order to get every bit of use from each thin dime.  All that for $7000, now $6000 after the recent budget cuts, a year per child in California.

Now for each person spending the year in prison, food must be provided; health care, a safe facility, rehabilitation services should be allocated; and prison guards and administrators must be paid to run the facility. Done at $49,000 a year per inmate.

Rarely is a word printed about any funded services to guide inmates ready to be released into programs that will help them return to their family responsibilities.  In fact, the local public school is held responsible for guiding parents: providing counseling, direction to family health services, and parent education so they can support their children’s academic success.  Again, unless the school receives a grant or qualifies for Title I monies, all those services are included in the $7000, now $6000, per child per year.

Rethink priorities.

Along with the entire financial mess that California has brought upon itself, how different groups in this state are supported financially must be carefully reviewed.

In the article “California’s costly budget decisions,” by Larry N. Gerston, San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2009, we are reminded that budget-cutting at the expense of students, who with education get jobs and enter professions, leaves them to drop out.  How many will think the only way to get money is to rob, sell drugs, or steal cars, eventually landing in prison at $49,000 a year?  Instead, how about spending “the fraction it might take to keep them in school?”

In addition, wouldn’t it be better to spend money on community colleges, half-way houses, drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities for no other reason than to provide paroled adults with skills to help their children succeed in school.

Sanity must return to California’s finances.  What teacher wants to grovel, asking, buddy, can you spare a dime?

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Posted in California budget crisis, community colleges, highly qualified teachers, public schools, school finance reform |
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Next Year

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

When I read the newspaper I wonder how schools will ever change.  Budget cuts threaten everyone and everything associated with teaching students.

Now, I’m the lucky teacher.  My district cut costs in the 2008-9 budget, somehow recognizing the dangers lurking in the economy.  Also, the residents in my school district, who strongly support education, passed a parcel tax at the last election.

The district has saved so much money that, at the end of the school year just completed, we were assured of weathering the disasters affecting other districts.  The major disruption will be a reduction of before and after school classes.  They will only be offered for students with learning difficulties.

On the other hand, funding for adult education classes, touted to retrain the unemployed all over the country, is being slashed (the New York Times, May 28, 2009, and the San Francisco Chronicle, July 1, 2009).  I question how people are going to get back to work without the programs offered in the community colleges?

In Oakland, California, a school district under state takeover after making a mess of its finances, is now back under the guidance of its school board, along with $60 million of debt.  How is that low-performing district going to devise a plan to raise its students reading and math achievement when it’s searching for money to clean the school restrooms?

A teacher friend in a large district in San Jose, California, told me the schools will revert to 30-1 students per teacher.  The 30-1 formula reduces the number of classrooms needed.  That’s when teachers will not be rehired and the “who-to-lay-off” question comes into play.  A young highly-qualified teacher or a tenured teacher?  In my school, the issue has been put off for a year because of the massive savings held by the district.

In the huge Los Angeles district, I’ve read that most summer school programs have been cancelled.  The cuts leave students whose parents work at loose ends; leaves teachers who depend on the summer income searching for work in a recession; and worst of all, leaves the achievement gap, that most worrisome of school issues, to expand because students don’t have access to learning opportunities.

Most students in my school have highly-educated parents with time and money to provide all sorts of opportunities during the summer.  In my small district I only worry about keeping students at the top of the achievement benchmarks in California.

It’s infuriating that the federal stimulus funds, supposedly available to support a turn around in low-performing schools, will likely be used for basic services.  Why?  Because the legislature in California and other states gives funds and takes them away from the budget depending on the temper of the governor and legislators from one day to the next.

As a teacher I surely want clean restrooms in my school, but I also want to teach my students with all the resources available, not simply ‘make do’.

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Posted in California budget crisis, Education, Elementary, Primary School, adult education, community colleges, highly qualified teachers, low-performing schools, public schools, stimulus funds |
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