Designing a Constitutionally Adequate Public Education? (Money and Education Part 3)

 JVonKorff has been writing in the last two posts to debunk the claim that more money is not needed to provide an adequate education for the students that our current public education system is leaving behind.   In a later post, we're going to tackle that issue by trying to envision an actual Minnesota public school that is equipped to provide students of color, lower income students, English language learners and  students with dyslexia with an education that meets state constitutional standards.   How should it be staffed; how should it be led; how many instructional days and instructional hours must it deliver.   How should it train its staff to deliver the required curriculum?  How much observation and supervision does it need?  Then we'll ask how much it would cost to buy such a program capable of delivering an adequate education to those students.   In doing so, we'll draw from scholarship and from successful examples in actual practice. 

But before we do that, it may be useful to ask what we already know about whether more money is required to produce an adequate education for the students Minnesota now leaves behind.     

(1) In a previous post in this series, I pointed out that the Century Foundation's recent report, estimated that Minneapolis needed about $21,000 per student to provide an education to achieve "national average outcomes" in math and reading for its students.  

(2) Also in a prior post, we pointed out that the Brooke East Boston charter school is delivering an outstanding education for traditionally undeserved students, but at a price above $20,000 per student.  Maybe you think they are wasting money, but then how about showing us a school that is doing this for less? 

(3)  In that regard, take a look at Minnesota public schools who serve students of color, lower income students, English language learners and students with dyslexia:  Which one do you hold up as an example is providing a constitutionally adequate education, one that meets state standards?  

(4) Or, take a look at the numerous initiatives launched in Minnesota.  Which one has been fully funded?    Which one has succeeded? 

Maybe its time that we ask experienced educators to devise a program that would deliver that adequate education to the students Minnesota currently leaves behind, and then determine what it would cost to provide that education and what legislative changes would be required to do it.  That, in fact is about the only thing that Minnesota has never tried:  How about designing a program that can actually work with no straight jackets: if we wanted to build a nuclear submarine, we wouldn't start out by pulling a budget number our of our ear and then order a factory to build it for the price we named, because it was convenient.    No, we'd hire some engineers and other experts; we'd make them  design the submarine and then we'd carefully calculate the cost of the build.  What makes us think that we can accomplish the delivery of an adequate education by ignoring design and the cost of that design. 

JvonKorff on Education is convinced that only a design-cost-and-build method will break Minnesota out of its straitjacket of educational failure.   If we want to accomplish something grand, we must "Begin with the End in Mind."  In Minnesota, the end is defined in law, including the Worlds Best Workforce statute, the LEAPS law,  the Dyslexia law,  the Special Education law, and the rigorous core subjects law, among others. Our Supreme Court has defined a constitutionally adequate education as an education that meets all state legal standards.  If we want to determine how much it will cost to comply with those laws, and to deliver what they require to the students we now leave behind, it is imperative that we first ask, what are the design components of a school that actually meets those standard for students of color, lower income students, and English language learners and the others we are leaving behind.

But in Minnesota, neither the legislature nor the Department of Education have actually tried to determine the cost of delivering the state requires adequate education. For example, for over a decade, the law has required each school district to develop a plan to comply with the Worlds Best Workforce statute, that is, a plan to reach the WBWF goals:  (1) All children are ready for school (2) All third-graders can read at grade level (3) All racial and economic achievement gaps between students are closed. (4) All students are ready for career and college. (5) All students graduate from high school. 

But a decade after passage of the World's Best Workforce law, Minnesota has utterly failed to make acceptable progress on these objectives, and surely part of the problem is that the paper plans  don't even require districts to report what it would take to actually meet these objectives.   The plans aren't real plans in Minnesota: they are check the box plans, accepted by MDE and posted on school websites as aspirational fictions:.    

As stated above, in subsequent posts Jvonkorff on Education is going to describe the components of a program that would actually deliver a constitutionally adequate education.   But this post argues that twenty years of Minnesota's consistent failure to deliver an adequate education to students of color, English language learners, lower income students, and students with dyslexia constitute a powerful argument that we need to do something different.   We need to design a school that will work: we need to cost out what it would take to operate that school, and then we need to  appropriate resources to districts serving those students if they are willing to use the extra money by implementing a proven design.   Here are some of our talking points!

•  Decades without Progress.  For decades Minnesota has been trying to close the opportunity/achievement gap without success.  In his 2003 State of the State Speech,  Governor Pawlenty Governor Tim Pawlenty  warned  “As good as our schools have been, we are leaving too many children behind. And the sad reality is, they tend to be poor, disabled or children of color.”  Despite that acknowledgment, no past or present Governor can truthfully argue that Minnesota has implemented the  systemic reforms needed to address the crisis identified in 2003 by Governor Pawlenty'.  That is a powerful argument that we should re-evaluate every aspect of what Minnesota is doing. 
  
  
• Task Force Recommendations.  In 2003, Governor Pawlenty commissioned a Blue Ribbon Task Force to identify what Minnesota must do to stop "leaving too many children behind."  The Task Force is the only state sponsored report that was allowed to report on the amount of revenue that would be required for those purposes. The Task force reported that the State must provide districts with  a "revenue amount sufficient to cover full dollar costs of ensuring Minnesota public school students have an opportunity to achieve state specified academic standards. These standards are connected to a comprehensive instructional program offered by schools."
  
  Governor Pawlenty cancelled the work of the task force before it completed its work to report the "full dollar cost" of delivering state specified academic standards."  Since the warning that Minnesota must provide the full dollar cost of meeting state specified academic standards, Minnesota has failed to deliver those specified standards.  That too is a powerful argument that the reason is that failure to implement the Task Force recommendations has prevented the delivery of those standards.
  
  
• The Pawlenty Task Force's work was subsequently finished  by nationally recognized education costing experts. Those experts  estimated that for the districts with the highest needs the full dollar per student cost "to achieve state specified academic standards" would exceed $23,000 (in 2005 dollars.)  Since Governor Pawlenty halted the Task Force's work, no governor and no legislature has ever conducted a comprehensive study of the revenue and reforms required to deliver an adequate education to the students Minnesota is currently leaving behind. 
     

Its now 17 years since the Pawlenty school financing task force warned that Minnesota must change its funding system "to pay the full dollar cost of meeting state academic standards." The report continued:

This formula should take into account the added costs included with relevant characteristics of each student (e.g., disabilities, poverty, school readiness, English language learners, and student mobility).

Its time to try something different:  bring some experts together who have actually worked in schools that provide an adequate education to the students Minnesota is now failing.  Ask them what a successful school requires?  Then reform the system so that we provide enough money for successful schools, but, by golly, require those schools to implement a system based on what has been proven to work. 

Does More Money Buy Better Education--Minneapolis edition (2)

 My facebook friend recently pointed out that Minneapolis spends substantially more per student than the average school district in Minnesota.   So why, he implied, can't Minneapolis do a better job educating its students of color, English language learners, students with dyslexia, and lower income students, the students it is disproportionately leaving behind?!   He posted a comparison chart showing that Minneapolis spent $16,967 of general fund dollars per student, whereas the average Minnesota public school district spent $13,912.    And, after all, Minneapolis academic outcomes as measured by proficiency rates and a number of measures are far behind the state average.   Can we then assert, based on this comparison, that Minneapolis doesn't have a money problem, it simply has a spending problem?  Is the extra $3,000 to take on the obviously greater task that the average district enough, or woefully inadequate.   Can we answer that by just announcing our favorite guess?

Now before you jump all over me, let me say from the outset, I am not writing to endorse Minneapolis approach to spending or curriculum.  No, I am writing to make the point that we can't draw conclusions with apples to oranges comparisons.   Minneapolis serves over 20 percent English Language learners.  The statewide average is 8.4%.  The state of Minnesota recognizes that it way underfunds English Language Learner mandated education.   For every dollar of money that Minneapolis spends on ELL education, it runs a state mandated significant defiit, and it carries that loss on twenty percent of its students, whereas the average district runs a loss on only 8.4%.  Greater spending on the books in that category corresponds to a far greater deficit that requires the district to subtract funds elsewhere  And where does Minneapolis get the money to cover its deficit.  Counting the extra ELL spending as a plus, for example, would be the same as if I took $100 out of your wallet and gave you $50 and congratulated you for having a fifty dollar bill to spend.

Minneapolis runs a huge state mandated on special education, a loss that runs about double the statewide average per student.   So it is an accounting mistake to count Minneapolis's above average spending on special education as a benefit.  Every special education dollar that a school district spends is a deficit creating dollar, and so the more it is required to spend the worse off the rest of its budget is.  More is less, here again.  Counting those extra dollars as suggesting Minneapolis is doing better is turning accounting upside down.  The extra dollars covering that spending is getting subtracted from English language learners, average students, students of color and lower income students. 

The difference in spending in Minneapolis as compared to the state average is $3,000 per student.   When we assert that Minneapolis is rolling in dough as it were, we are making the unsupported assertion that it is possible to take care of the educational needs of the demographic groups Minneapolis serves and do it for $3,000.  And too often, advocates for "they have enough money" just do that on faith.   It must be true, because we want it to be true.  And, we want it to be true, to justify evading our responsibility to provide an adequate education to the children of powerless parents.

So here is a counter argument from one of the leading students of equitable funding, Bruce Baker.  In a study for the New Century Foundation, Baker led a team of investigators to estimate the  investment needed to lift up students in the country that are currently falling behind. The study provided an estimate for each district in the country, and I'm not advocating that it was perfect, but I am saying that more work and diligence went into that study, by far, than the people who claim without evidence that Minneapolis is overfunded.   The New Century Foundation study estimates what it would cost for students in each district "to achieve national average outcomes on reading and math assessments in 2021."  

The estimated shortfall for Minneapolis is $4,389 per student, so say about a total of $21,000 per student plus or minus in total.   Now before you dismiss this figure out of hand, that difference is just about what the outstandingly successful charter school Brooke East Boston spends to achieve stellar results for a population of students largely lower income, students of color and English language learners.   

What gives us the right, after all, to take the amount of money that Minneapolis is spending on a failing program, as measured by results, and assert  that it must be the right amount of money to produce educational results that almost no school district in Minnesota is producing for a similar student population?  Maybe the popular, but totally unsupported claim, that Minneapolis has enough money, is just a rationalization for abdicating our responsibility to provide an adequate education for the students that Minnesota's power structure doesn't really care all that much about.    Maybe a lot of the dysfunctionality we see in our urban metro districts stems from decades of trying to do a job that is impossible to do on grossly inadequate funding.   More to come. 

 

Does More Money Buy Better Public Education (1)

 Does More Money Buy Better Public Education

For many years, jvonkorff on education has maintained a dialog with people who care about producing better public education for the student cohorts who are currently being left behind in Minnesota.  Some of these folks are experienced educators.  But many of them derive their beliefs from the newspapers, from pundits and commentators, from business interests and various other interest groups.   Many of them adhere to the belief that more money makes no difference, makes no impact, in providing a better education for students of color, lower income students, for students with dyslexia or English language learners.  Some people adhere to this view as a matter of faith, in the same way that anti-vaxers doubt the benefits of vaccines, or climate deniers adhere to the belief that climate change is not caused by human activity.  Others base their belief on the suspicion that Minnesota is very generous with public schools, and so surely the cause of Minnesota's flagging public school results for those students must be something entirely different.   

A fair number of these people adhere as well to an unproven, but strongly held belief that they actually know the "real reason" for Minnesota's achievement gap failures.  Some simply don't believe in the kids themselves.   The fact that a select group of schools, charters and some publics, demonstrate far better success, they attribute to some selectivity factor, in which the successful schools attract better students than the others.  Others believe that a public school system can't work by its very nature, because they are government schools, and government is incapable of delivering anything well, they believe.  This ideological belief hardly explains the achievement gap, because the gap itself measures the success of public schools for some, but not all, demograpic groups of students.

A Question of Framing:  "Can Money Improve" Educational Results versus "Does Money Improve" Educational Results? 

Social scientist and economists in this age of statistics and data tend to approach these big questions by "running the numbers."  When you run the numbers, you don't necessarily have to know anything about how things work.  For example, one could roughly determine whether the weight of an object makes a difference in  how fast it falls without knowing a thing about physics.  One could even derive the formula for its behavior that way.  And so, we have examples of numerous social scientists trying to compare student outcomes as correlated to the amount of revenue per student supplied to various school districts.  Or one could conduct longitudinal studies comparing the educational results in a given school district, or a particular state, revenue per student is added or subtracted, or as teacher salaries, or other specific inputs are changed.  And despite the fact that correlation is not causation, some of these social scientists are ready to use that data to prove that money does, nor does not, make a difference.

There are some very good econometric studies that run the numbers but attempt to be more analytical and more careful about drawing conclusions. To get ahead of our story,  A recent one is Bruce Baker's How Money Matters for Schools.  That study concludes that:

resource investments matter for student outcomes, especially when they are directed to under-resourced districts and students from low-income families. The research also shows that spending resources in ways that reduce class sizes for young children and those with greater academic needs and that improve teacher quality have strong payoffs for outcomes. Finally, some research suggests that increasing and equalizing school funding may be most effective when it is part of a comprehensive set of efforts to improve teaching and learning.

 But I want to focus this first post on the very important difference between asking whether increasing revenue for public schools will improve educational results, or whether under the right conditions it will improve educational results, and indeed whether it is necessary. 

Debunking the Claim that there is No Connection between Money and Results

It is relatively easy to debunk the "no nothing" surface allegation that there is no connection at all between revenues and educational results.    Let's use the challenge of dylexia as an example.   About 15% of all students, or more, have the learning disability called dyslexia.   Minnesota's public schools have a dreadful record, by and large, with these students, and the reason is well known.  These students need a different approach to reading, to the decoding of the written language, than Minnesota currently offers in most districts.

Numerous parents across the state --- and across the country -- who have figured that out, hire Orton Gillingham trained tutors, and at their own expense, these parents are reporting outstanding, school career saving results.   The money that they spend, the extra tutoring time, transforms their students.   The cost of providing these services in a public school setting is well known to be substantial, and probably no less than providing it in a private setting.   I wouldn't care to advise the parents who are paying hard earned money to buy dyslexia tutoring are wasting their money because more money can't improve educational results.  Of course it can!  

Let's do a thought experiment to examine the connection between revenue and educational quality. 

Suppose, then, that the state figured out how much it would cost to provide students who have the characteristics of dyslexia with the same desperately needed dyslexia service that parents are now paying for out of their own pocket.  Suppose that it were $2000 per eligible dyslexia student for an average of four years of additional services.  Suppose that the State decided that Minneapolis had, say, 1000 non special education students who needed dyslexia service in four elementary grades, and suppose that the State increased Minneapolis's total revenues by $2 million dollars in order to enable Minneapolis to provide those services. 

We can ask a few questions:  If the state added to $2,000,000 to Minneapolis in recognition of the dyslexia education needs, would it automatically follow that Minneapolis would begin to meet the needs of student with dyslexia?  How would the State actually go about figuring out what it really costs to deliver quality dyslexia education.  What would happen if Minneapolis went through a bad budget year, or was forced to inflict major cuts to settle labor contracts?   Suppose the legislature added the $2,000,000 to Minneapolis's formula and then in the following year the legislature slashed that allowance in half to balance the budget?   Would Minneapolis be able to allocate staff, or hire capable staff, able to deliver an effective program of dyslexia education to elementary students, and how would the district coordinate that program with administrators, the existing reading program, and with the districts supervision, staff development and teaching and learning program.

Suppose that the state allocated $2,000,000 to Minneapolis and the resulting reading program was no different from the current program?  Would that prove that money can't improve educational results; would it prove that money doesn't improve educational results, or would it prove that there is something terribly wrong with the way in which Minnesota's public education system is structured, and that if we want money to make a difference, Minnesota must do something more than add money to the system?