21st Century Public Education: Enact Funding Flexibility

Most people have no idea how complicated and painful education funding is. Virtually every dollar that comes into a district has strings attached in the form of mandates, restrictions and requirements. Some administrators have estimated that the staff time needed to keep up with all the mandated reporting and submission requirements amounts to nearly half of every full time employee in a school district. If you wonder why the ratio of administrators to teachers is so high, this is one big reason.
For instance, did you know:
1. School districts are required by law to keep separate accounts for capital, food service, debt service, future retirement benefit exposure, and operating funds, and those funds may not be transferred from one fund to another, even if they are not needed in their area;

2. Two percent of the budget every year is mandated to be set aside for staff development (continuing education, etc.), AND the locally elected school board has no control over how those funds are spent – those decisions are made by teachers and school building administrators according to state law;

3. If school boards don’t reach a contract settlement with their teachers’ bargaining unit (Education Minnesota) by January 15th of the contract year, the district is assessed a $25 per pupil penalty;

4. There are myriad “special pots” of money from state and federal sources that can only be used for specific things. Eligibility, submission and compliance requirements are often conflicting and negatively impact other sources of funding;

5. Various districts around the state have special local levying authority that other districts don’t have, and these authorities arise purely out of the clout their local representatives wield in the legislature (it's another form of earmarking). This creates a confusing and unequal playing field.

An economic downturn is the worst possible time for any government entity to ask for more funds. Minnesota’s school districts need funding flexibility. Here is what Minnesota’s public schools need right now:
1. Allow districts to transfer operating money from one fund to another. Locally elected school board members, accountable to the taxpayers, ought to be able to use capital, food service and staff development funds elsewhere depending on the needs of the individual district;

2. Minnesota’s state government should eliminate the 2% set aside for staff development, or at the very least, waive it for the next biennium so school boards can use that money where it is needed most in their districts. Additionally, the law should be amended to give school boards the final authority in how the money is spent to ensure that staff development programs are in alignment with the district’s goals for performance and student achievement;

3. The deadline for settling contracts, and the penalty for not meeting that deadline, needs to be eliminated, pure and simple. This requirement and penalty threat is one of many things that makes it very difficult for school boards to effectively negotiate labor contracts that are in the best interest of the school district;

4. Every “special pot” of money that is currently in existence, whether it’s a grant program, a local levy authority, or something else, needs to be carefully examined for relevance, effectiveness and ease of use, with most of them sunsetted. If the state of Minnesota adopted the same mantra that most moms use during spring cleaning, “for every one thing kept, two things must be tossed”, we would have a cleaner, easier to navigate, more transparent and equitable system of education funding in this state. Reserve special pots for top priority policy items: innovation, outstanding performance, substantial cost savings. Get rid of all the dust bunny programs hiding under the file cabinets because people never bothered to sweep them out.

5. The notion of creating "special" levy authorities for specific budget items like technology, health and safety equipment, etc. is silly.  Local school boards should be able to assess their budgetary needs in total and assess property taxes with the approval of the taxpayers with one number.  Trying to get around that accountability by creating all these special little categories is intellectually dishonest, takes too much staff time, and forces districts to make budget choices that may not best fit their needs.  This line of thinking falls into the dust bunny category above.  Instead, the legislature should craft language that grandfathers any existing special levy now in force into the local districts' current local operating levies (in the odd event one doesn't exist, the special levies would be pooled together to create a standard levy), and let districts work with the aggregate funding without worrying about whether they comply with each special levy's restrictions.

6.  Here's another, bolder thought: in an effort to stabilize education funding while we work out the budget and restructuring at the state level, the Minnesota legislature could authorize an automatic extension for two years of any local levy scheduled to expire within the next biennium.  Why would that be helpful?  First, it would remove the huge budgeting uncertainty that exists in every district where a levy is scheduled to expire during a biennium when the state budget will almost certainly have to cut (or at best, hold steady) education funding. Second, it would maintain stable tax rates for local communities.  Granted, tax rates would not decrease, but they would not be threatened with an increase either.  Third, it would relieve everyone involved from having to go through the process of a levy referendum - expensive and time-consuming for district staff who have to prepare all the data and deal with submission, approval and reporting requirements, divisive for communities during a time when communities are already exhausted from financial pressures.  A two year extension would, in effect, 'calm the system', and provide some breathing space for everyone from MDE to the legislature to school boards to communities while we restructure our public education system in Minnesota.

Simplfiying the budgeting and allocation process will allow school districts the ability to focus on their most important priorities, ease the contortions that legislators, staff members and the public have to go through to understand and administer the process, and might even save a little money to boot as districts spend less time searching for all the little scraps they can find to make up for general fund formula reductions. 

21st Century Public Education

Minnesotans believe in public education. Our state's founders believed in it so strongly that it was written into Article 13, Section 1 our state's constitution: "UNIFORM SYSTEM OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state."

In the last thirty years of the education wars, Minnesotans of various stripes have tried to reinvent, circumvent, shut down and compete with our statewide public school system. I have been one of them, because I believe that parents should be able to choose how their children are educated and that competition improves performance in any endeavor.

However, I'm also a Constitutionalist.

As a Constitutionalist, and as a Minnesotan, I have to understand that Minnesotans value public education. It is the most accessible, most affordable means of education that most families in Minnesota have. Abolishing or dismantling public education in Minnesota would be unconstitutional. And since the reality is that public education will remain the most accessible, most affordable form of education for most families, we should also heed our state constitution's requirements to make it thorough and efficient.

Note to Governor Dayton: that doesn't mean throwing more money at the system.

I've spent nearly 8 years serving on a local school board here in the Twin Cities. We have made some amazing progress in transforming our district's educational systems to better serve our students. Our high school has been listed in Newsweek's Top 1,500 High Schools for three years in a row. Our AP and other exceptional learner programs have some of the highest per capita ratios of disadvantaged students of any district our size. We serve a higher proportion of special needs students than most other districts in Minnesota because parents have confidence in our capabilities to educate their children. Our district's superintendent was the first superintendent in the state of Minnesota to base her entire potential salary increase on merit alone.

And we've done it with lower tax rates and lower per-pupil spending than almost any other district in the metropolitan area.

In this series of posts, I will outline the kinds of reform that public education really needs to allow it to perform in the 21st century. I believe in competition as much as I ever did, and I believe that public education can perform just as well as any other educational option if we have the flexibility and call to innovation that our districts need to get the job done. Public education is a core Minnesota value: let's get it right.

Muzzling the President

The heated controversy around an upcoming speech planned for the beginning of the school year by President Obama on the importance of education is dangerously close to at least equal mankind’s annual contribution to global warming. Parents are threatening to pull their children from school on September 8th, political organizations are calling for boycotts of schools that show his nationally televised speech, teachers’ unions are issuing marching orders for their members to show the speech no matter what parents and school administration officials say, and policy think tanks are renewing their arguments for private and charter schools to ensure that students have “freedom of thought” rather than suffer from government-imposed indoctrination of leftist values.

What???

This is the President of the United States. This is the leader of the free world. This is the highest office of the most free and prosperous nation in the history of mankind – one that considers the right of free speech as one of its most sacred foundational cornerstones. Yet people are calling for a ban on his welcome back to school speech. Consider what is being demanded: people are calling – no, they are howling – for public schools to suppress a speech from the President of the United States.

Have a large number of Americans suddenly lost their minds? Have they decided that free speech is no longer an essential right, and the best way to set the example is to gag the President?

I would suggest that this is not quite the case. Rather, the outrage is coming from a keen sense of deep distrust on this particular President’s motives. It is unprecedented for the President to deliver a back to school welcome speech, but that isn’t enough to raise this kind of ire. That his soft, feel-good message of working hard and staying in school comes precisely when his approval ratings are suffering a TKO and his bungled health care plan is barely hanging on life support smacks of pandering still doesn’t deserve such passionate opposition to a mere back to school speech. No. Anger this visceral comes from a deep-seated belief that Barack Obama isn’t addressing our nation’s students to encourage them to stay in school. Instead, concerned people believe that Barack Obama is trying to indoctrinate their children over to his side on policy, pitting child against parent in a war over values, priorities and a fundamental vision of what America should be as a nation. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

But does he deserve such a reputation? Well, let’s look at his very short history:

In the first month of his administration, Barack Obama shoved Republicans aside from discussions on economic stimulus, smugly telling them “he won”, so things were going to be done his way;
In the second month of his administration, Barack Obama put together a plan to take over the financial industry and the auto industry all while protecting those who decimated the housing industry;
In the third month of his administration, Barack Obama appointed multiple Cabinet and staff whose tax dodging and other legal entanglements compromised his pledges of honesty and integrity in government;
In the fourth and fifth months of his administration, Barack Obama’s right hand Rahm Emmanuel was caught trying to take control of the U.S. Census process to tilt the counting of American citizens to favor Democrats in election politics;
In the last three months of his administration, Barack Obama has tried to shove an unbelievably bloated, contorted, impossible to understand, implement and pay for healthcare system under the guise of reform without letting people read or debate it. We also discovered that he had reached back room deals with a number of insurance companies in the process – a practice he specifically said would not happen during his term.
Now, it has come to light that Barack Obama’s education speech isn’t just a speech, it’s the focus of a lesson plan developed by the White House to challenge children to find ways they can help him.

I’m sorry, but if the shoe fits…

Barack Obama has caused this outrage because of his heavy-handed tactics to push his policies through, his arrogance and smugness, his willingness to intentionally surround himself with people who do not measure up to public standards of moral and ethical conduct, and his brazen (and ill-conceived) intentions of taking control of just about every industry in America. That kind of conduct breeds intense distrust in Americans; we don’t like people who act like they’re better than we are, and we surely don’t like people who try to pull the wool over our eyes and then insult us for taking it off. Barack Obama has politicized the office of the Presidency so much so that 63% of Americans (according to a recent Facebook poll) would rather ban public addresses by the President in schools unless they have been reviewed by parents and teachers first than let those addresses happen without oversight. This is a serious problem. If Americans distrust their President so deeply they would rather censor him than listen to him, how can we hope to build any kind of common ground anywhere going forward?