Burnsville Takes Budget Shortfalls out of the Hides of Kids

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

McCleary v State: Embedding Cost Correlation in the Budgetary Process

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the recent Washington Supreme Court decision,  McCleary v. State, enforcing the State's constitutional requirement to assure appropriate funding for public education.  You can jump to prior posts in the series using links below.  McCleary v. State deals with a number of important issues in education finance jurisprudence.  But I've been posting on one aspect of the decision, the part that holds that the State does not meet its constitutional obligation to public education, when it sets funding based on politics rather than a data based costing system.  Unless the state legislature bases funding on credible efforts to determine the cost of required programs, it is acting irrationally and irresponsibly.

This common sense articulation of  one component of the constitutional test for education funding says that a legislature does not perform its constitutional duty unless education funding formulas "correlate to the real cost of amply providing students with the constitutionally required education.  The McCleary court explained:

The evidence at trial showed that the State’s now-abandoned basic education funding formulas did not correlate to the real cost of amply providing students with the constitutionally required “education.” As a result, the State has consistently failed to provide adequate funding for the program of basic education,

In the last post, I explained that courts usually take an extremely permissive, hands-off, approach to reviewing  state legislation when a constitutional right is not impaired.  When applying this relaxed hands-off standard, the Court simply asks if there is any possible rationale that could support the decision that the legislature made.  Under this relaxed standard, the legislature need not actually go through the motions of acquiring data to support its decision.  The defenders of the State law can actually supply a rationale that the legislature didn't even consider.   Courts like Minnesota (Skeen) and Washington (McCleary), however, have held that this hands-off review of education funding does not apply when the right to an adequate education are implicated.

How then should the Courts fashion a principled approach to judicial review of whether the education funding formulas "correlate to the real cost of amply providing students with the constitutionally required education?"   The purpose of this post is to begin an exploration of a couple of approaches to the correlation process. .

De Novo Costing Out Approach:    One approach to evaluating whether funding is correlated to the real cost of education would be to conduct a "de novo" trial in which the trial court takes testimony from superintendents, state officials, and professional education costing experts.   There are a number of such experts.   University of Wisconsin professors Odden and Picus,  Augenblich  Palaich and Associates often testify for the plaintiffs, and Eric Hanushek of Stanford often testifies for the State defendant.  The result is a lengthy and costly battle of experts resulting in a trial court decision as to what it really does cost.

Under this de novo costing out approach, the Court determines the amount of shortfall in legislative funding and then orders the legislature to come up with a solution to the funding shortfall in a reasonable time.   The resulting court order typically leads to a complex litany of subsequent litigation in which the parties contest whether legislative changes in funding do, or do not, comply with the letter and spirit of the Court's order, and we could easily spend ten blog posts on the complexities posed by the de novo costing out approach and still not cover the topic adequately.

Legislative and Executive Cost-Out Approach   Another alternative would be to require both the governor and the legislature to follow their own business like costing out approach as they prepare the biennial education budget.   Under this alternative, the courts would require both governor and legislature to engage in certain minimum good faith data-based efforts to correlate the real cost of the education required by state law.    How would that work?   What would prevent the legislature from double crossing the court's mandate by making up phony numbers.  What would prevent the Governor to present a bogus budget that dramatically understates the cost of education under current law?      If a legislature can pretend that science doesn't support climate change, then what is to stop the legislature from adopting a completely bogus correlation between its funding formula and the real cost of amply providing students with the constitutionally required education?  

Let us begin to answer this question by acknowledging that our current legislature and governor make absolutely no pretense of conducting this correlation process, and neither did Governor Pawlenty and the DFL legislature which proceeded the current incumbents.  A system under which the governor submitted a cost-correlated budget and the legislature adopted a cost-correlated budget would be vastly superior to the current system in which everyone involved proceeds on the common understanding that they will not even attempt to cover the true cost.   A requirement that the legislature and governor actually go through the motions of covering the full cost of state required education would force the State Department of Education to engage in a costing out approach using actual data, something that simply is not done today in the budgetary process.  How can we possibly solve a problem as weighty as education funding when we begin our work agreeing not to determine the true correlated cost?

Once the executive and legislature actually began to attempt to build an education budget based on the correlated cost of state mandated education, a number of positive changes might well result.  First, the legislature and governor would have to begin to develop a modicum of expertise in the actual cost of education, and that expertise would give new meaning to the legislative process.   Many of the key legislators in both parties show remarkable, even appalling, ignorance of even fundamental costing issues.   This ignorance results, I believe, from a process in which the actual cost of educational programs is deemed irrelevant to the ultimate result. Why learn something that doesn't matter?   In today's process, the key knowledge for legislators is to understand the "runs" produced at funding time that explain how much their own district is going to receive as compared to other legislator's districts, so that the legislator can explain to the home folks that our district is in just as bad financial shape as other legislators' districts.
  


Second, when mandates are imposed, the legislature's new-found interest in the actual cost of those mandates might create a far more cautious approach to imposing mandates in the first place.  The current practice which disregards cost correlation tends to breed irresponsibility in the legislative process. 

Once we actually began to use costing information in the budget building process, there are a variety of safeguards that could be imposed in the budget building process to assure a modicum of integrity in the process.  I'm trying to keep these posts to a manageable length.  In subsequent posts, I'll suggest some further approaches to the correlation process that might preserve a proper relationship between the legislature, executive, and judiciary.



Links
McCleary v State, Washington's Groundbreaking School Finance Decision

 McCleary v. State, Part I  

McCleary v State Requires Legislature to Base Funding on Actual Cost
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
McCleary v State and Determining the Cost of Education
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
 McCleary v. State: what level of scrutiny is appropriate for legislative funding decisions
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
Correlating the cost of education: fund the child.
Jvonkorff on Education  McCleary V. State Part V
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

Making English the Official Language will not Assure Universal English Proficiency

The Tribune carries a story this morning regarding a bill proposed by Representative Drazkowski proposing to make English the "official language" of the State of Minnesota. (click here). Allegedly, part of this initiative would be to prohibit government from communicating to new to country non-English speakers in their native language. Perhaps I am being unfair, but one is inclined to ask, what are we supposed to do -- use sign language. Before I write further, I'd like to make a couple of things crystal clear:

• English is already the official language of the United States. You cannot function effectively in the United States without being fluent in English. Everybody knows that, especially immigrants. Failure to speak English at a high level is an employment impediment. It makes it difficult to navigate all aspects of our daily lives.
  

• English has become the unofficial language of the world in many respects. It is the language of trade and commerce. It is spoken as the number one second language of preference across the world. English as a primary language is not under threat. In fact, only one thing could possibly threaten the dominance of English as a primary world language, and that would be nativist attempts to flaunt that primacy in ways that cause other countries to respond in kind.

• Immigrants to the United States, whether their native language is Spanish, Somali, Chinese, or otherwise, are united in their desire to learn English, and especially to see that their children become fluent in English. The implicit suggestion that we have to force immigrants to learn English is an invention of people who seek to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment. The most common criticism that I hear from Somali parents is that they want our school district to do more to assure that Somali children learn English as fast as possible.

English-proficiency-now advocates are asking school districts to accomplish an objective never before demanded of public or private schools in American history. We have undertaken this task, but passing a law is not going to assist us in that effort. My German ancestors came to the United States to escape wars of religion, wars of nationalism, wars among the petty German states, and periodic waves of economic depression. We were Catholics, Protestants and Jews, mostly. When we arrived in the United States, most Germans strived to maintain their fluency in their native language and many maintained German as their first language for a generation or more. Wikipedia explains:

The Germans worked hard to maintain and cultivate their language, especially through newspapers and classes in elementary and high schools. There are German Americans in many cities, such as Milwaukee brought their strong support of education, establishing German-language schools and teacher training seminaries (Töchter-Institut) to prepare students and teachers in German language training. By the late 19th century, the Germania Publishing Company was established in Milwaukee, a publisher of books, magazines, and newspapers in German

This desire to take advantage of the freedom and prosperity of the new world while preserving the cultural richness of the old has characterized all immigrants to the United States. In some respects, preservation of the native language strengthened the ability of Germans to organize to make sure that their children received appropriate education.

By the late 19th century Germania published over 800 regular publications. The most prestigious daily newspapers such as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and the Illinois Staats-Zeitung in Chicago promoted middle-class values and encouraged German ethnic loyalty among their readership. The Germans were proud of their language, supported many German-language public and private schools, and conducted their church services in German. They published at least two-thirds of all foreign language newspapers in the U.S. The papers were owned and operated in the U.S., with no control from Germany. As Wittke emphasizes it was "essentially an American press published in a foreign tongue."

For generations, there was a degree of animosity between protestant Germans and Catholic Germans as well as animosity towards Germans from other immigrants. Nativists argued that the Catholic Germans and other Catholic immigrants would be loyal to the Pope instead of their new country. They alleged that the new immigrants didn't understand English values and that they would ultimately undermine the political and constitutional values that made this country great. It took "two or three generations, German Americans adopted mainstream American customs—some of which they heavily influenced—and switched their language to English. As one scholar concludes, 'The overwhelming evidence … indicates that the German-American school was a bilingual one much (perhaps a whole generation or more) earlier than 1917, and that the majority of the pupils may have been English-dominant bilinguals from the early 1880s on'."

Several school districts in Minnesota have experienced a rapid rise in enrollment of non-English speakers. In St. Cloud, we now have approximately 1100 students who come to us with severely limited English or no English at all. Housing policy of various neighboring communities have tended to concentrate non English speaking children and their families in our school district. By way of comparison, the most recent MDE reports so that Sartell has 22 limited English Proficiency students (LEP), or 0.77 percent as compared to our 12 percent. We have a few districts in Minnesota with more than 1/5 of their students with limited English Proficiency, and we have a host of school districts who have a tiny percentage -- under one or two percent -- of limited English proficiency. At times we are stunned, really, when we hear people from school districts with virtually no non-English speaking students claim that, well, it shouldn't cost any more to educate a child from a refugee camp in Somalia than the son or daughter of a lawyer, banker, or college teacher. You can't arrive at English proficiency for all by passing a law: it takes effective, aggressive, dedicated teaching. Nor will we achieve that objective by pretending that it can be done for free.

Its somewhat stunning to hear Americans who struggle to learn how to say "where is the bathroom" in a foreign language announce by legislative fiat that it should be a cost free project to teach English to non-English speakers in a few short years.

Those of us who have been handed the responsibility to assure that all Americans speak English effectively take that responsibility seriously. We know that it is absolutely critical to the future of American democracy and economic prosperity that immigrants learn English as rapidly as possible, and that they learn about American democratic ideals, so that they can become effective citizens. But just about the worst way to make that happen is to pass silly laws that prevent us from communicating to immigrants in their native language while stripping school districts of the resources needed to do the job. Putting us in that straightjacket makes it more difficult to make sure that kids are in school, that their parents understand disciplinary expectations, that our teachers can teach effectively and assure mastery of the English language.

Representative Drazkowski, if you are really interested in making sure that every American learns English effectively, why not sit down with leaders of school districts and learn what we are doing to make that happen. Why not ask what you can do to help. We would welcome a visit to St. Cloud to engage in a constructive dialog on how we could accomplish an objective we all share: assuring English proficiency of every American resident.

There are things the legislature can do to lend us a hand. The State has demanded that all non-English speaking students who come to our school district must become fluent in English at a college ready level. Representative Drazkowski, come visit St. Cloud and find out what we are doing to try to make that happen. The City of Mazeppa is 97.69 percent white. Of the 1071 students in the Zumbrota school district, 7 (or six tenths of a percent) are reported by that District as coming to the District with limited English proficiency. If you really want to lend us a hand in a mission that we should all care about, the best thing that you could do is to try to understand that it takes more resources to take a young person who speaks no English and educate them to proficiency in the time allowed by Minnesota law. If that is your objective, then you will fight to make sure that school districts like ours aren't stripped of funding we need to do that job effectively.

Passing a law to make English the official language won't do anything to make sure that we all speak English. There is one thing, and one thing only that will accomplish that objective, and that is to provide public schools who are charged with the task of teaching English have the resources to get the job done. How about lending us a hand!

Discussing Compensation Does Not Disparage Dedicated Educators

In recent weeks, I have explained my position that there needs to be a more transparent, more public discussion of the structure of compensation and benefits in public education. In a recent post, I said that the process of reviewing our costs and benefits should be "open and fully transparent." I said that the public would benefit from understanding our system of compensation, and I said, "Let the public review begin." This statement has enraged some people, claiming that it was akin to George Bush's famous words "bring it on" challenge to the terrorists. I did not mean to disparage anyone with that comment. I find that interpretation of a public officials statement that the public has a right to understand the compensation system and the bargaining system that determines the very survival of public education pretty strange. Evidently some folks believe that publicly to discuss the cost of compensation, the structure of compensation, and the bargaining process is a violation of some unwritten rule. I dissent from that point of view.

I believe that the public's business must be done in public view--all of it. The cost of a public education is a matter of high public importance. The public needs to understand more about the costs and what is driving them, not less. All over the state of Minnesota right now, school districts are locked in a struggle over survival. District after district is paralyzed because they are caught in a vice-grip between funding cuts on the one hand and expectations from employees that they receive increases in pay that the districts cannot afford. These districts are being asked to make significant increases in class size, cut major programs, and it is not appropriate to meet this challenge in the back room. This problem will not be solved with less transparency; it needs more.

Perhaps some people sensed a bit of a tone of anger in the syntax of my words in that previous blog. I regret that tone, because it wrongly suggested to some that I was disparaging individual dedicated public servants. I apologize for that. I was disappointed. Often it is the people who you respect the most who disappoint you the most. We have superb public servants working for the school district. They do a great job. They have dedicated their careers to what I regard as God's work: the nurturing of children. They often feel abandoned, as they do their work against the background of increasing child poverty and what seems to them an ever increasing sense that parents aren't as supportive of the work of educators as they used to be.

One of the ideas that we must drive out of public education is that by discussing the compensation of our employees publicly we are criticizing the work that they do. That is not the point. Education is the most valuable commodity in our society, or nearly so. More valuable than financial planning and the brokering of stock, more valuable than lawyering, accounting, and even doctoring. For it is educators who train financial planners, stock brokers, lawyers, accountants and doctors. We under value educators in our society and the consequence of that under-valuing is that policy makers in St. Paul and Congress can allow it to decline without public consequence.

Some people claim that it is wrong to discuss our compensation system in public because it is offensive to our employees. To them I say that I am proud to be one of those people who defends every last dollar that we pay to educators. I know that they work hard. I know that they are doing important work. I deplore people who think that educators are overpaid. I think that the State of Minnesota is not investing enough in education, and I believe that an open and transparent discussion is what is needed to establish that fact.

The problem in Minnesota that is destroying public education is not that teachers and administrators are overpaid. The problem is that we have a system that forces local school districts to pay them more than they can afford. Precious few superintendents are willing to face their citizens and explain that fact. Precious few school boards are willing to open up and explain what is going on. A system has developed in Minnesota where superintendents and boards go behind closed doors and make settlements with their employees, the consequences of which they know take us further down the road towards the destruction of our public education system. It is regarded as bad form to tell the truth. Who are we protecting? Many school boards and superintendents are now finding new ways to evade the true cost of these settlements. And when they do that, their lack of transparency and courage avoids making public the true nature of the problem in public education.. Unless the problem is publicly discussed, it cannot be solved.

When I say that the public education financial system is broken because superintendents and boards are persistently paying out more than they can, I am not attacking teachers or administrators. They earn what they get paid. The problem is that we are paying them what we cannot afford to pay them, and somebody has eventually got to talk about this problem, as painful as it is, before it is too late.