budget season

Sorry to be missing in action -- budget season is upon us, and I've been writing posts for the Irvington Parents Forum.

The Forum has also had an interesting discussion of kids learning Mandarin Chinese, including an email from a mother who is living in China so her daughter can learn the language. I'll get links posted as soon as I've read everything.

For New Yorkers and anyone else who is interested in school funding:

Per pupil spending $28,517

and

Why the tax cap passed in New York state
Pension contribution rises 37% for 2013-2014
New York State School Board Association opposes Triborough Amendment

and

English Language Arts scores 

The insanity in my state is that a school district can have nearly $30K per pupil funding and still be laying off teachers, cutting programs, laying off more teachers, threatening to cut French, Latin, and Greek, threatening to cut French, Latin, and Greek again, etc., etc., on and on.

Each and every year since the crash, we have a budget crisis: the same crisis, over and over again. It's like Groundhog Day, only not fun.

The reason we have a budget crisis each year without fail is that the budget is capped, but the contracts are not. The cap is 2%, but our contract calls for roughly 4% annual increase in compensation, and 4 is not 2. Plus pension payments will rise by 37% next year, and tax certs are through the roof (nearly $2 million this year, assuming I'm reading the Powerpoint correctly). Apparently tax certs always will be through the roof, forever. So we have a crisis.

Surreally, the solution is simple, but impossible.

All of our problems would be over if the union simply agreed to index raises to inflation. But that option is unthinkable.

The 4-is-not-2 dilemma is unthinkable even as a description of the problem. Instead of "labor costs are too high," the problem is understood to be Cost Escalation Beyond Board's Control.

Pension contributions! Health insurance! Special ed! Mandates!

True enough, all these things are expensive, but "mandates" obscures the fact that the only mandate that matters, and the source of our woe, is the Triborough Amendment. And that is here to stay.

So we are living in the land of zero-sum, where 4% raises for some mean lay-offs for others.

What if you're already a lean, mean educating machine?

I sit on a school board of a charter school that had its per pupil revenue cut again last year. We're under $6k per pupil, and we operate well on less money than the district schools have. Our school gives merit increases instead of the traditional step-salary schedule and this is now the second year that we have been unable to give any raises, excepting what is mandated by the state for the teacher retirement program.

Until the state raises PPR, however, the chances of teachers getting raises are minimal.  We ask a lot of our teachers and they deliver. How much longer will they be willing to do so? The surrounding district is still paying scheduled salary increases.

However...we do have a little bit of cash and so voted to allot some of it to provide a bonus for the teachers that have helped the school through the last few years when we were growing. Mind you, the amount of the bonus ranged between $700 -$1500. Hardly seems worth their hard work, yet as a Board, we want to acknowledge their dedication.

Last week, this arrived in my inbox:

Dear BOD Members,

I want to personally thank you for the bonus I will receive on October’s paycheck, as well as the hard work you put in to make XXX Schools what they are.  I recognize that money is hard to come by from the culmination of our economic situation and school growth.  Please know that I feel XXX is a fantastic place to be, and I look forward to helping us grow to be excellent in everything that we do.

Thanks again for thinking of me.

OK, so it's only one teacher, but I bet that's more personal thanks than the district board gets.

Peter Meyer explains New York's contingent budget law

at the Irvington Parents Forum:

[S]tate law says that school districts are allowed to increase their budgets by up to 120% of the rate of inflation. I forgot the exact formula, but we've been informed (again, I'm on the BOE of a small (2000 kids) upstate district) that the CPI is 1.6%.

This might not mean much to Irvington, but to a poor (median family income up here is right around $30k and over half our kids are free and reduced lunch) district where more than 50% of revenues come from State aid, it means something close to a fiscal disaster.

Cutting to the chase, if we, the BOE, wanted to (the law says a board may vote to go directly to contingency if it wants, no vote needed!), we could increase our budget (it's about $40 million) by the 1.6% and make the local taxpayers make up the loss of state aid (projected to be over a million bucks) and loss of federal Edujobs money (another million and change) by having us property owners (all ten of us!) shoulder a 14.9 percent property tax increase. In that scenario we only layoff about 15 staff (including 7 teachers). There are other scenarios, none of them too pretty (and I'm one who believes pretty firmly in the proposition that more money does not buy a better education).

here's a followup:

The interesting thing, of course, is that the contingency law never anticipated the current economic crisis. The board COULD raise taxes 15% if it wanted to -- it has the legal right to do it. Would it? Probably not. So, no there are lots negotiations -- and lots screaming and yelling in executive session and elsewhere -- about whose axe gets gored. I think 4% tax increase scenario resulted in something like 70 layoffs. And yes, a salary freeze saves about 20 jobs (depending, of course, whose job).... It ain't pretty and it ain't too much fun....

It could always be worse, I suppose.

At least New York doesn't have a minimum budget requirement.

up

 cross posted at the Irvington Parents Forum ^*

Proposed Tax Rate Increase: 4.31%

Average assessment in Irvington = $24,500
Approximate full value = $731,000
Estimated increase in school taxes for the average assessed home = $604.17

History of Irvington tax rate increases:

2005-06: 13.42%
2006-07: 9.41%
2007-08: 5.87%
2008-09: 8.86%
2009-10: 0.42%
2010-11: 0.28%
Proposed 2011-12: 4.31%

In the years 2005-2009, we saw increases far beyond the rate of inflation.

Inflation for 2010 was 1.6%, so again we are far above inflation. (Core inflation - excluding food and energy prices - was only 0.7% from October 2009 to November 2010.)

Here’s a chart of core inflation since 1971: ^**

If you superimpose Irvington’s percent change in tax rates on this graph, the problem becomes obvious. Annual tax rate increases well beyond inflation make school spending unsustainable.



BLS Consumer Price Index – January 2011 (pdf file) 

Forecasters Expect Solid Growth, Low Inflation in 2011 (pdf file)



^* If any of you would like to join the Irvington Parents Forum, please do. We have members from around the country.  
^** I don't know why the label on this chart is "Core inflation, previous 12 months." UPDATE from gasstationwithoutpumps: Inflation is usually measured as a ratio of two index values taken at different time points, divided by the time between the points. The label is saying what index is used and what pair of time points (the core index at time on the x-axis divided by the same index 12 months earlier).

the Times on public sector pay

terrific set of charts, graphs, and summaries

good news!

What exactly is "Readers' Workshop"? My son's school just sent me an email announcing the apparently great news that we have cleared some sort of hurdle, so we will now be able to begin Readers' Workshop as of January. Woohoo! Given that it is the same people who were equally excited about adopting Everyday Math, I'm almost afraid to ask. 

Cleared a hurdle!

I love it!

We've heard similar things around here.

I remember a few years back being told that our then-superintendent had been able to get us accepted by the elite Tri-State Consortium.

Come to find out, the Tri-State Consortium is not elite and charges an arm and a leg for everything it does.

money tree

Irvington School District's Financial Challenges

and: a new administrator at no extra cost to the district

autonomy, mastery, purpose

Dan Dempsey just left a link to this fantastic YouTube on the Irvington Parents Forum ---

$100 million to Newark public schools

I'm against it.

Seriously.

Public schools need the things money can't buy.

answering to the great Oz

from a parent:

There is no question in my mind that "wealthy" suburban municipalities have school systems that are the victims of "predatory" management and vendors.

The administrators, consultants, publishing companies (selling curriculum) and every layer of union, specialists etc. have contributed their portion of excessive profit taking to leave us with a torrent of spending resulting in bloat, and little to no accountability for results.

A generalization that fits here....

Our schools appear to be high quality because our children are simply high performing (in general) and come from households which are education oriented, set high expectations and are involved and assertive in their child's learning. For the most part, you could put this profile of child in almost any school, and they will do well.

I have some cynical views on how we the "powers that be" spend our money - mostly on visible items like themselves (sharp/well spoken/well dressed) infrastructure, equipment (fancy exercise rooms, fields and theaters and smart-boards), because these give the appearance of quality and visually represent "progress." Yet, our curriculum is gutted, there is little to no investment in the soft/invisible skills delivered by humanities, art and critical reasoning, exposure by travel to the great city we live, museums etc.

You get the picture.

Barring those important educational aspects, the school day is reduced to a form of day care where state tests are the focus. Again...you know the rest. That puts us on a vicious loop of paying extraordinary taxes for little beyond what any other school can offer educationally - without all the bloat. Correcting this is the the principal behind Charter Schools.

I have some ideas on how to pick-away at this, and it involves very concrete steps using novel approaches form technology...

First crowd-source community help to...

1) Translate all state mandates and laws governing schools into plain English. This way the community can defend itself every time the Administrators and come Board member invoke inertia in the name of "well it's the law" or "it's NY mandate." We as a community should know those rules better than they do.

2) Create a Benchmarking group or citizens from like and non-like communities with high performing schools and low performing schools to uncover what goes right and what goes wrong. We are way too much in a vacuum.

3) Create another team that looks for visionary, unorthodox ways to deliver great results with little spending. There are example all over the country of great leaps in education by making small changes no one thought of.

4) This is risky and counter-intuitive: Do challenge the budgets, hold back money and where appropriate, encourage communities to vote no, because if the money dries up, the vultures will leave.

5) Create regular surveys to act as plebiscites and referendums to steer the school's philosophical direction in line with the community. Today it is a disconnected space ship answering to the great Oz.

You cold have a volunteer group report everything up to the board in open community meetings every month, so as to distill the info gathered, and present it as workable ideas that can be voted on to implement.

Study how Giuliani and Bloomberg neutered the unions in NY, because they will always be a challenge here. I would also make a very public showing of removing the "Union Free" name in our schools. It's misleading, and the unions hide behind it. I would go as far as calling them Union based schools. They won't be able to hide. You will be amazed how many people don't know we have a very strong union to answer to over there, even though it's our money. They dictate to us. I am not anti-union, but I am very anti- lack of progress and results and a very high cost. They are part of the problem if they don't allow the teachers the flexibility that many of them want to further our kids along. With few exceptions, we have good educators and they deserve our support. The Administration, Union, NYS and even sometimes the Board is often in their way. They deserve our support. I'd love to see them all get raises (with less ongoing Health and Retirement Benefits - sorry, join the rest of us!), and way less to the Administrators.

C ya!

explanation, please

$1,675?

How exactly does a publisher arrive at this figure?

I would like to know.

cheap private schools - ?

I've been wondering about something.

Is there a way to create cheap private schools?

Relatively cheap, I mean?

Relatively cheap private schools middle-class parents would be willing to pay for -----

I'm asking today because I just came across this passage from an editorial by Paul Peterson while scouring the internet for more spending x scores graphs:

Universal public high school is relatively new in this country. As late as 1900, more than two-thirds of all US high-school graduates got their diploma from private schools; public schools were turning out only 62,000 graduates a year. In later decades, school districts expanded the "public option" in education; by 1960, 90 percent of high-school age students were enrolled. When something is free, people will use it.

Today, though, only about 10 percent of elementary and secondary students attend a private school. Private schools now attract only two kinds of families: 1) the well-to-do, who are willing to pay the high cost of private schooling; and 2) those seeking to preserve their religious traditions.

Anything available on the cheap will drive out the more expensive -- except for those with hefty wallets or strong convictions.

Health lessons from schools
Paul E. Peterson
New York Post

fyi: Yes, this passage comes from an editorial about the health care bill (back when the public option was still on the table), but that's not the point.

The point is: the cheap drives out the expensive. I'd never heard it put so succinctly.

Public schools are fantastically expensive ($30K per pupil in my district last school year). Yes, we have special education and a zillion mandates, but from my perspective one of the main reasons public schools are fantastically expensive is that constructivism costs an arm and a leg.

If you're running a constructivist school, you have to have tiny little classes so the kids can work in groups without the decibel level breaking the sound barrier; you have to have mixed-ability classrooms because.....well, just because, which means kids move through the curriculum at a snail's pace; you have to have spiraling curricula which also means kids move through the curriculum at a snail's pace; you have to have SMART Boards and laptops and Smart Phones and lord knows what else because it's the 21st century; you have to have literacy specialists and math specialists because the failure rate with balanced literacy and fuzzy math is high; you have to have lots of parent reteaching at night and/or parent hiring of tutors because the kids aren't great at discovering and constructing knowledge.... I could go on.

I've been thinking about "cheap private schools" ever since reading about the Knowledge Schools in Sweden. It's true that, technically, a cheap private school costs more than a public school, but when you contemplate the many costs of getting a slow, fuzzy education instead of a fast, coherent education, the money you'd spend on a 'cheap private school' might start to look like a bargain.

A year ago I was talking about the issue of school spending and quality with a friend, and I said, "A good education costs less; a bad education costs more."

She pointed out that this principle is true on two levels: the school budget but also the life of the child. A bad education costs the child.

Suppose you put together a bare bones K-5 or K-8 school with the fundamentals parents want....

Could you do it?

What would it look like?

the things money can't buy, part 2

From the Everyday Math response (pdf file) to the new CCSI standards:

It may be that some on the Mathematics Working Group, perhaps over-generalizing from their personal experience in school, underestimate the cost of bringing all children to mastery on, say, decimal long division with the traditional algorithm.

I have an idea.

How about the schools economize on curriculum materials by purchasing Primary Mathematics instead of Everyday Math, so we have enough money to teach everybody long division?

disconnect

I love these things...




Andrew J. Coulson at Cato

lgm on school spending in hard times

re: why school spending goes up in hard times:

My experience in this year's round of school budget discussions is that the staff could care less about the general taxpayers' vocal desire to pay market wages, have employees contribute toward their healthcare costs at a level equal to other state government employees, cut costs by seeking efficiency, and share services with local gov'ts. The tactic of sticking it to the students continues...'give us our raise and pass this budget' or 'we'll cut sports/extracuriculars' etc.

There was a bone tossed to seniors a few years ago in the form of a tax reduction. But for everyone else, it has been vocalized that a $1000 increase in property taxes really shouldn't be a problem. I get the feeling that the classism is on the rise.

I actually wouldn't mind paying more in taxes, except I know it just goes to teacher salary, not to students. I reallly can't see paying a gym teacher over $95K in a county where the average person takes home 50K. I can't see paying a math teacher over $100K when the results are this dismal, and even if every child was scoring a '4' on the state exam, I know that the large Fortune 100 company over in Dutchess Co. is not paying its engineers with higher educational levels and similar experience that much for a nonmanagement job. I'm for a salary cap on positions and reasonable compensation.

My town doubled school spending in 10 years' time with no measurable gains in student achievement. Real per pupil spending (based in audited financials) is now around $32K. And rising.

This year we've pushed the administration to adopt evidence-based decision making and link spending to student achievement.

No dice.

Cato on public vs private school spending

Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.

To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation's five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.

Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.

To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.

They spend what?
by Adam B. Schaeffer

I had no idea how much my own district was spending. I had been dividing the budgeted total by student enrollment, but it turns out we spend more than we budget because we borrow money to pay tax certs. (I think that's how things go - I'm still trying to master budget issues.)

I'd been thinking we were spending a couple hundred dollars over $28K per pupil.

Turns out the real figure is at least $30K and probably closer to $32.

And rising.

100 years of real dollar revenue growth

America’s Schools Have Experienced a Remarkable One‐Hundred Year‐long Period of Sustained Year‐Over‐Year Real Dollar Per Pupil Revenue Growth

America's Public Schools Face a Far Less Fortunate Future (pdf file PowerPoint)

Very worth taking a look at ---

Tri-State Consortium la la la

So I was saying that all of Westchester County, of a sudden, is gripped by the conviction that a high-quality school means a school with in-house, embedded professional development & plenty of it.

In-house, embedded professional development = instructional coaches. Teachers for the teachers. Tenured teachers for the teachers, no less.

Come to find out, Concerned Parent has seen the same over in CT:

...it's that stupid tri-state consortium mind-set. It's all the same buzzwords in my district: professional development, math coaches, no perfect curriculum, 21st century skills. My district actually believes we're falling behind because we have no math coaches-- it has nothing to do with Everyday Math and CMP2 and balanced literacy. Nothing.

Swell.

217

So... the state of Wisconsin mentioned "professional development" 217 times in its Race to the Top application and still didn't make the final 16.

Good.


update: uh-oh

from Fred Hess:

New York's 908-page application included some choice phrases. It promises, "An intense focus on curriculum and meaningful professional development based on student performance; data-drive instruction where teams develop individual student action plans based on data from formative and interim assessments; differentiated professional development and coaching based on data" (page 6).

It also declares that it will create "clear, content-rich, sequenced, spiraled, detailed curricular frameworks" (yes, five adjectives) for new assessments (page 10).

And, impressive for the sheer amount of jargon that could be wedged into a single sentence, New York's app promises "to support differentiated professional development closely linked to student growth data, identify coaches and mentors using effectiveness ratings closely tied to student growth data, and build data-driven feedback loops between professional development, coaching/mentoring activities, and teacher effectiveness" (page 144).

Spiraled frameworks, differentiated professional development, and coaching ----

Whoa.

I have to move.

Possibly to Wisconsin.

Or Guam.

Basically, any place not in danger of winning Race to the Top.

that was quick

Elsewhere in the edu-world, the town of Avon, CT hired a new superintendent last fall, only to discover, via a story in the newspaper, that as of March 4 the new superintendent of Avon has signed a contract to become the new superintendent of Berlin, CT.

The reader comments are priceless.

Berlin introduces David B. Erwin as superintendent