Yesterday's Minneapolis Tribune carries an Editorial
challenging the Burnsville school district for considering a plan to
reduce its $140 million dollar budget by about $5 million by reducing
the number of school days of instruction. Here's how the plan
apparently would work. There would be no school every other Monday,
cutting the number of school days significantly. So far, this is a
variant of the proposal adopted by a number of rural school districts
facing financial crisis, in which they cut back to a four day school
week, and add compensating time to the remaining four school days each
week. Burnsville would skip only every other Monday, reducing the
number of days when families would have to find day care for younger
children, and figure out how to manage their older, hopefully more
responsible, children.
The district would then increase the
amount of time for each remaining school day by 35 minutes. Assuming
that all of these additional minutes result in additional instructional
time, the added 35 minutes would compensate for most of the lost days,
but not all of them. If my arithmetic is correct, adding 35 Minutes
to 9 days every two weeks results in 315 minutes gained, but losing a
Monday every two weeks, results in a loss of 480 minutes every two
weeks, assuming an 8 hour school day. Now the net loss in
instructional time can't be calculated without knowing how much of the
day is spent in actual instruction. But the potential for this swap
in schedule is that there would be a net loss of 160 minutes, plus or
minus, every two weeks. Again, if my arithmetic is correct, the added
time, compensated for by the lost days, results in a net reduction of
about 5 traditional school days. If anybody finds a problem with my
arithmetic here, let me know.
What does the District get in
return? The District has a number of Mondays now available to
conduct professional staff development, without hiring substitutes.
The cost of hiring substitutes is shifted on to the parents, to some
extent, who must now pay for day care, or take some time off from work
to stay home with their kids. The district would save about $800,000.
The plan represents a continuing pattern in Minnesota public
education, in which school districts cover their increased payroll
costs on the backs of children. I'm not criticizing Burnsville,
really. They are doing what most everyone else is doing across the
country.
What is the cause of Burnsville's fiscal crisis?
That depends upon your point of view. Between the 2005-2006 school
year and the 2010-2011 school year, the average teacher salary in
Burnsville has risen from about $52,000 to about $60,000, exclusive of
benefit costs. That's an increase of about 13 percent, or about 2 and
one half percent per year. (Individual teachers pay increases are
going up more or less than that amount, because average teacher pay
costs represent a netting of salary increases, offset by the impact of
replacement of retiring teachers by teachers coming at starting steps
and lanes.) The Minnesota funding formula rose about 11 percent
during that time period, but some of that increase would have been
offset by significant special education losses inflicted by state
policy. So the effective net increase in Burnsville's funding is less
than 11 percent. The District is increasing educator's compensation at
a rate faster than state revenues, and as long as it does that, it
must find creative ways to make up the difference.
Now some of
you are going to chime in and use this as an excuse to attack teachers,
administrators and their unions. If the unions didn't demand pay
increases greater than available funding, you will say, then Burnsville
wouldn't be looking at these cuts. And some of you are going to chime
in and say that's wrong, that the State's fiscal problems shouldn't be
solved "on the backs of educators." And others are going to argue
that school boards are at fault, because they should just hold the line
somehow. But in my view, the underlying cause of our dysfunctional
school finance system is a complete abdication of responsibility for
creating a system that works by the legislator and the Governor of the
State of Minnesota. Democrats and Republicans have conspired to create
this dysfunctional system, which annually provides funding less than
the increase in labor and other costs.
The Democrats
steadfastly protect the absolute right of labor to push up labor costs
faster than school districts can afford. They have cleverly shifted
the blame for this upon school boards and republicans, but the system
that has been created at the state level, and that is where the
responsibility lies. The Republicans steadfastly insist that
taxpayers be held largely protected from this problem, and assure that
any excess costs are not covered by revenues, but rather come out of
the hide of children and parents. The two together have created a
system which is so broken that the participants don't even remember
what it might be like to participate in a stable properly functioning
education finance system.
In my recent posts on a
constitutional school finance system, I've argued that the legislature
and governor have an obligation to correlate the cost of the current
system of public education to reality, and to provide adequate funding
to keep it afloat. My argument isn't that teachers should be paid
more, and it isn't that they are paid too much. My argument is that
it is high time that the legislators and the governor take
responsibility for figuring out what educators should be paid, taking
responsibility for that decision, and implementing it in a way that
doesn't pay for it out of the hides of children. If the state wants
to legislate based on the idea that teachers don't deserve more, then
it needs to implement a system that makes it possible to stop providing
unaffordable increases. If the state wants to legislate based on the
idea that teachers do deserve more, then it is high time, really, that
the state takes responsibility for that position, and ponies up the
money to pay the necessary increases.
In the meantime, if we
keep up with the current approach....pay increases on the backs of kids
and parents...this Burnsville gimmick is just going to be the first in a long series of
destructive, wrong-headed, irresponsible tricks that taken together
represent the destruction of our system of public education in
Minnesota.
Links
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part
I
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part
III
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part
IV
Summary
of Decision Network for Excellence
Washington
Supreme Court Blog
JvonKorff on Education, The
Rose Decision
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional,
Part I
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional,
Part II
Minnesota's School Finance System is
Unconstitutional, Part III
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional,
Part IV
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