Governor Dayton: Don't Ax Funding for PLAN and EXPLORE

From time to time, I've written about our school district's scorecard system that tracks progress indicators towards the goal of preparing all students for post high school excellence. One benchmark that we use is the PLAN and EXPLORE scores on tests produced by the College Boards. PLAN and EXPLORE are preliminary ACT tests that are given to students in 8th and 10th grade. If you are a parent of a 10th or 11th grade student, you know that the ACT test is the most important gateway (along with the level of course-difficulty taken by the student) into college. ACT tests (in the Midwest) determine what level of college a student is likely to be admitted to. ACT results are used by colleges and universities as a check on grade point average, to determine whether the student is ready for coursework at the level of rigor at that college. Under the Pawlenty administration the MDE sponsored a small line item in the education budget that provided support for PLAN and EXPLORE testing, and Governor Dayton's budget makes a huge mistake in cutting that support. The decision to cut that support threatens to destroy one of the most important statewide systemic initiatives to assist parents and students to get ready for post high school career and college success.

PLAN and EXPLORE testing is designed give parents, students, teachers and schools early information on whether students are on track to succeed. It is a fabulous motivational system that causes kids to confront what they need to do to prepare for rigor, before it is too late. Too often, students discover the importance of the ACT in the last months before they have to take the test. Then, there is a mad rush to study practice exams, to purchase ACT preparatory booklets that seek to cram for vocabulary and math skills needed for the ACT.

It should be obvious that if student and parents recognize the importance of the ACT years before, that the student would have a far better chance of preparing. The EXPLORE test, usually given in 8th grade, provides the student with baseline information on the academic level of coursework for junior high students. It tells them whether they are on-track to reach their academic goals. Properly used by home room teachers and counselors, and of course parents, it is used as a course correction to plan high school coursework. A high score says to the student, you are on track to meet your goals. A low score says, look, if you continue at this level, you are going to have a rough time getting admitted into the college of your choice. Moreover, the EXPLORE test comes with a rich array of materials to assist schools and parents to make the necessary academic course corrections necessary to meet the students goals.

An important part of the EXPLORE test is that it engenders dialog at home and at school on what the student must do to get prepared, before it is too late. Our district has undertaken to deliver the EXPLORE and PLAN test, to use those scores to assist parents, teachers and students in planning for their future, and to track the level of student readiness for college on our district wide scorecard (Vision) cards. Our commitment to this testing system, our decision to integrate it into our scorecard system, our decision to train teachers parents and students in how best to use it did not happen by accident. It resulted from a decision at the state level to make the tests affordable to all students, and then to provide best practices training on how to get the most for the state's money.

The PLAN test is a mid-point progress test used by student, parent and school counselor to make mid-course corrections in 10th and 11th grade. Again, our district has begun to monitor test results on the PLAN test as a way of determining if our junior high schools and high schools are achieving district goals that demand improvement in the number of students who graduate ready for post high school success.

School districts all over the state have begun to integrate PLAN and EXPLORE into their infrastructure of academic counseling, evaluation, and school improvement. Partly that is because there is a high-quality program run by the Minnesota Department of Education designed to support systemic use of PLAN and EXPLORE. (click here) The MDE website states:

Minnesota strongly supports its students preparing for postsecondary education. Toward that end it subsidizes the cost for any public school eighth grader taking the EXPLORE and any public school tenth grader taking the PLAN, two tests that are part of ACT's College and Career Readiness System.

As a result of the State's commitment to systemic utilization of PLAN and EXPLORE, as well as professional staff development provided to districts, school districts have started to make major commitments to PLAN and EXPLORE.

The Dayton budget now cuts state funding support for PLAN and EXPLORE, just as districts like ours have begun to adopt them and integrate them. The State support is a small line item in the overall education budget. The decision to cut this important initiative is symptomatic of decades of lack of focus by the Department of Education in Minnesota. Time and time again, as the State moves forward with a project, just as it begins to pay dividends, a new commissioner, or new governor, seeking to place a personal stamp on education, cancels an initiative and moves funding into a brand new one. This year, the governor found $2 million to launch a new early childhood rating system. And, he found $11.9 million to create "excellence in education awards" which evidently will create a highly politicized competition to see who can get some extra money to run a program for a time, until the funds to support it are cancelled.

One of the great problems in education, that stifles its efficiency, and frankly drives local educators nuts, is the inability to take a state initiative and stick to it until it fosters systemic permanent change. The PLAN and EXPLORE testing system, is not just a testing system. It encourages students to take stock in their future plans. It provides them with comprehensive information on the skills that they will need to succeed in occupations that interest them. It provides early warning if they are not on track. Just as important is the fact that when educators across the state begin to utilize a quality program like this, the longer they work with it the better they do. Over and over again, we hear from educators, can't you guys stay on course!? Do you have to keep starting new programs, cancelling them, and then forcing us to start all over again.

When something works, the state should ride it to the end and keep riding it. If Governor Dayton wants to reform public education, he could start by being the governor that told the MDE to keep doing what works, instead of zigging and zagging. If the state cuts its support for PLAN and EXPLORE, all of the work already done towards this initiative is going to go down the drain. Unions will pressure their district to cancel the costs of tests on the grounds that "there is too much testing already." School districts faced with monumental budget challenges will toss the program in midstream on the grounds that it lacks sufficient public support. The infrastructure at the MDE that has developed training programs will disappear as fewer districts maintain the PLAN and EXPLORE system, and another initiative will bite the dust.

We don't need excellence grants in Minnesota, we need excellence. What we need is systemic, statewide excellence integrated across the state in all schools. The PLAN and EXPLORE initiative was perhaps the most cost-effective initiative undertaken in a long time to provide tools to parents and students, along with their schools, to get them ready for college, and the decision to cut state funding for that initiative was a huge mistake.

Does Dayton's Education Budget Attack the Growing Special Education Deficit

When the MDE issued its summary of the Dayton budget's impact, it contained no mention, even, of special education. There was new spending for all day kindergarten; new spending for some initiatives promoting improvements in education. But not a word about the special education funding crisis. Does this mean that the Dayton team ignored special education or, like Pawlenty before him, decided that the problem was so difficult to solve, that they should kick it down the road? The truth of the matter is that the budget is so complicated that its going to take a few days to figure out, but at first blush, it doesn't look like the Dayton budget is any more courageous that Pawlenty's budget in addressing the most significant financial difficulty facing public education today.

The chart below shows that from 2003 to 2013, the Minnesota Department of Education projects that total special education spending for all districts in Minnesota is expected to rise by $800 million per year from $1.2 billion per year to just over $2 billion per year, an increase of 69 percent, or nearly 7 percent per year. During that time period, unless Dayton and the legislature fix this problem with fundamental reform, the revenues provided by State and Federal Government combined will increase by only $400 million per year from $818 million to $1.28 billion per year. Thus, in the same period where state - mandate expenses will increase by $800 million, the revenues paid to districts to reimburse these expenses will rise by only one half that amount, nearly doubling the total "special education deficit" apportioned amongst school districts.

Will the Dayton budget reverse this trend, which is driving school districts to the bring of financial ruin --- will it use his proposed new revenues to make a dent in the growing special education deficit problem, or will Dayton, like Pawlenty before him, continue the practice of funding other priorities (tax relief or new programs) on the backs of the special education deficit and on the backs of those districts that have specially high costs? That is what we are waiting to find out as we wade through the detail of the Dayton budget.

But this hemorrhaging of the special education deficit is just the beginning of the problem. Special education responsibilities are not equally divided across the state. School districts are not primarily reimbursed based on the number of students or the severity of disabilities that they serve. Rather, they are funded based on a formula that counts the number of students attending public school in that district. If the District has a small percentage of students with disability attending the district, then the district loses money, but not nearly so much. Many of these districts are the ones who claim to be "frugal districts" with large fund balances. In fact, many are districts with vastly fewer high cost students--and thus lower special education deficits to make up. If, on the other hand, the District has a very large percentage of students with disability attending the district, then the district loses lots and lots of money and it absorbs a much larger of the statewide deficit -- the difference between the blue and red lines below.

Four major factors increase the special education responsibilities of particular districts such that the revenue shortfalls are vastly different from district to district. They are (a) the percentage of families whose children attend parochial schools (increases the percentage of students receiving district provided special education significantly) (b) in smaller districts, whether there are a few students with disabilities that are tremendously expensive to address, (c) the rate of poverty amongst children, and (d) whether the district is a regional medical care center like St. Cloud, Duluth, Rochester, and so on.

Now many years ago, the legislature recognized that the state funding formula for special education was fundamentally unfair. It was so unfair, that a few districts across the state had begun to hemorrhage special education deficits that threatened to sink their regular programs, because the regular programs would have to siphon money over to pay what the state would not take care of. And so, the State added an "excess cost aid" reimbursement provision which would provide funding for districts with very high special education expenditures in comparison to state and federal reimbursement.

There was a catch, however. The State decided to appropriate a fixed fund for that purpose. If more districts sought reimbursement out of the fund, then the fund would be "pro-rated," and the reimbursement would fall year after year, until finally someone woke up and said, hey, we have to fix this.

But politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, hit upon the idea that they could evade this problem by claiming that they were holding school districts harmless by appropriating the same excess cost fund, year after year, even though the fund was falling increasingly short as more and more districts took money out of the fund. As the blue line --- total costs in the State rose, more and more districts would become eligible for the excess cost aid, and then the districts receiving it would be reimbursed less and less, even though their need was rising. The Governor and legislature would publicly claim that they were holding the special education budget constant, thereby holding districts harmless, but actually, they were sinking the higher cost districts under a mountain of deficit spending. Governor Pawlenty was a master at doing this. His Education Department actively pushed up the blue line--constantly ruling that districts had to provide more and more costly services. At the same time, his budgets would continually push down the red line, creating larger and larger special education deficits. But since nobody looks at the special education shortfalls, the media would report that the Governor was preventing cuts in education.

Now we are waiting to find out, through analysis of the Dayton budget, whether Dayton has engaged in the same shell game. If he has chosen simply to keep the special education budget constant, and especially if he has failed to provide significant increases to special education excess cost aid, then our district and many others like it are due for another financial squeeze from a Governor who is claiming to provide us with an increase.

The operation of Minnesota's special education funding system is particularly venal. In our district, even though we have tried to freeze our expenditures at 2005 levels, still, our special education deficit has been rising. It is against the law for us to cut any further, but the state keeps reducing our excess cost aid, as it shares the limited pool, with more and more districts. As a result, our deficit keeps going up, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Now you understand, why we are waiting to find out if the change in governors will result in an end to the special education shell game. Will Dayton's budget, at long last, recognize the fundamental bankruptcy of the way Minnesota deals with special education costs and revenues, or will his budget continue the Pawlenty approach, and inflict further deficits on districts like ours? We're pouring through the Dayton budget. I'll write more on this topic, when we get the answer.