The Theme of the Day: Education Funding

I'm not sure what's in the water the past few days, but the right half of the Cheddarsphere is getting things wrong all over the place about education, the Milwaukee Public Schools, and vouchers. So, here we go:

Moving chronologically, we can start with James Wigderson's Saturday post on the impending compromise on the cap "crisis." He writes,

While the governor’s stance on school choice has been despicable and intellectually dishonest, many of those he is catering to at least are honest enough to admit they would like to end school choice. But are they intellectually honest enough to admit that they are more concerned with protecting institutions, public schools and teachers unions, than they are about educating children?

One correspondent here has laid out what I think are the basic arguments against school choice they’re willing to offer. He writes, “Money used for vouchers to send Milwaukee students to private schools is money that could have been put towards the public school system.”

The question is, why is this an issue? Shouldn’t the education dollar follow the student? And if there’s a more efficient means of educating the student (our presumed goal) then shouldn’t we put our investment there? And that’s the beauty of the concept of school choice. The education dollar follows the student, and the parent (whom we trust would know best) gets to choose what is the best method for educating that child.

Even better for the state, the choice school is often more efficient in educating the child, and therefore the state actually achieves a cost reduction while turning out a better product. [. . . L]et’s look at the bigger picture. If we have a successful program (school choice) and an unsuccessful program (MPS) then shouldn’t we be doing what we can to expand the successful program?

Aside from slandering Governor Doyle--who, for two solid years has been asking for Republicans to come to the table on a cap-raising compromise--Wigderson misses some points and makes dangerous and unsupported assumptions. For example, Wigderson assumes, like many on the anti-union right, that the teachers' union doesn't care about anything but lining their fat pocketbooks. But they do; that's why the primary thrust of MTEA's campaign so far has been on accountability for parents and taxpayers.

Which brings us to another problem: Wigderson assumes that parents have the information they need to make an informed choice. But remember that voucher schools are not required to collect or report any performance data; even though most of them do some testing of some students at some level or another, many do not even report those results to the parents--and none of the schools are asked to give the same tests, so any public data cannot necessarily compared on an apples to apples basis. For MPS, however, you can learn just about anything you want about any school. When parents sit down to make a decision, how can they make an informed choice between their neighborhood MPS school, about which they know everything, and their neighborhood voucher school, about which they know nothing?

All the talk of schools being effectively shut down by DPI exactly proves that the accountability system currently in place is failing miserably. DPI should not be shutting down these schools; parents should be.

Finally, Wigderson includes the typical conservative trope about money "following the student." Per-pupil spending is a convenient measure of a school system's cost, but it does not mean that every student is "worth" a certain amount. This is, I think, one of those "education-as-industry" notions, except students are not "widgets" that should all be the same; in a district like Milwaukee, with nearly 100,000 students, we make 100,000 unique, non-uniform widgets.

It is well documented that, for example, special education students are "worth" more because educating them can often cost two or three or ten times the per-pupil average. Advanced students may also have more "worth" by these measures, too, as will poor students who eat subsidized lunches or immigrant children who need language support. Should a special needs student get a bigger voucher? An English language learner? What about the thoroughly average student who needs no "extra" spending at all--does she deserve a smaller voucher? Part of the difficulty of running a voucher program like Milwaukee's, one where the size of the voucher is determined to be a flat rate by bureaucratic fiat rather than the actual cost of the school, is that you end up with a skewed sense not only of what education costs but of what a student is "worth." This leads, inevitably, to the equally skewed notion that voucher schools are educating students at half-price. That debunking, as I have promised repeatedly, will be its own post later.

MilwaukeeID10T (who comments here as Clint) picks up on Wigderson's post and comments to it, noting,

In so many arguments I keep hearing about economies of scale. From Chris B’s comment…

Correct me if I am wrong, but I am sure schools operate on economies of scale. Therefore, removing money for individual students hurts the students left behind.

While I understand this principle, I don’t believe that it is a valid argument. If economies of scale were an underlying primary contributor to the high budget numbers we see, then please explain to me why we have so many schools operating that don’t have enrollment numbers near their capacity. I believe that fiscally it would be extremely cost effective to shutter under-enrolled schools and have those students attend any number of other schools that have the capacity. [. . .]

Now I don’t want to seem like one of the eeeeeevvvvvilllll conservatives, but the harsh reality is that our politicians and school board members need to make difficult decisions when it comes to consuming our tax dollars. I know, please stop laughing. It is always easier to spend someone else’s money. We can, and do blame the unions for a lot of the woes associated with MPS and the public education system in general. But, how any member of the school board or local politician can say with a straight face that MPS is running at peak efficiency is ridiculous.

WEAC/Jim Doyle et al., even most conservatives, want to close choice schools that under perform. I agree that they should be closed. Now the question becomes to what standards of performance and, why are MPS schools that drastically under perform still open and sucking up tax dollars to ‘educate’ those children. [His emphasis]

Apparently, the ID10T hasn't been paying attention to the news that MPS is closing schools--one elementary school this year (with two others merging) and five schools total next year. These are based on enrollment and neighborhood demographic numbers. The ID10T also seems to have missed the point that failing MPS schools are being shut down or revamped (I don't want to say reconstituted, because what's happening isn't exactly described by the traditional definition of that word). Three big high schools are being phased out in favor of multiplexes of small schools; other high schools (including the one where I teach) are being revamped as "small learning communities"; elementary and middle schools are being reconfigured to offer K-8 or 6-12 and new curricula. Most of these decisions are being made on the basis of the performance of the schools--you don't see the superintendent tromping into Rufus King or Samuel Morse and demanding change, now, do you?

So, yes, ID10T, I am laughing, but because you have your facts wrong.

As for the operating at capacity idea--as I said, schools are being closed. Reliable sources tell me that next year will bring another round of closings beyond the ones named above. In other cases, schools are not at capacity for a variety of reasons: My own high school, for example, is being prevented (by the superintendent) from enrolling new ninth graders next year, leaving us below capacity. The new small high schools are in most cases being "phased in," so there are quite a few operating at one-quarter or one-half capacity now that will be full within a couple of years. There is also still leftover construction from Spence Korte's neighborhood schools initiative, which has been largely forgotten.

Plus, in parts I didn't excerpt, the ID10T asks why we should bother to pay to keep up century-old buildings. The answer is easy: Because replacing or renovating them would be voted down in referenda by anti-tax, anti-public school folk like the ID10T.

I included the ID10T's last paragraph because it's illustrative of several broader trends: One, there's the untruthful argument that MPS schools are not closing or changing due to pressure to perform. As a central office person put it to me last week, about my own underperforming school, it's change or die. MPS will shut the school down or hand it over to DPI, as required by law, without significant gains. Two, there's that same thing about closing bad voucher schools, and the same missing of the point that we saw in Wigderson's post: It is not, and should not be, the job of the state to close down failing private schools. Period. Parents need to have access to full and complete information about what's really going on at these schools--information that is readily available about MPS.

The ever-thoughtful Lance Burri gets into some of the same territory as the ID10T with yesterday's post, but with actual numbers:

Statewide, school spending is growing at about 5% per year. [. . .] In all, Wisconsin spends nearly $10 billion annually on K-12 schools. We cracked the $10,000 per student mark years ago.

Which brings me to a more basic question: why does it cost so much?

We’ve been over all this before. We’ll go over it all again. In five years (2000 to 2004), per-student spending went from $8,618 to $10,505. Over the same period, the student-teacher ratio fell from just over 13 students per teacher to just over 12.8. That’s not the same as class size--class sizes are actually larger. But just for kicks, let’s say it is the same. Rounding up to 13 students, at $10,505 per kid: that’s $136,565 per classroom. Enough to hire two full time teachers (at 2004 compensation levels), with $7,500 left over.

Let’s imagine an elementary school with kindergarten through 6th grade, three classrooms per grade. The leftover money (after we hire two full-time teachers per grade [I assume he means classroom]) adds up to $157,521. Enough for a principal and receptionist, maybe a janitor, too. And that’s if we double the number of teachers we actually have.

That’s part of why I’m frustrated: just perusing the numbers, I can’t imagine why we aren’t already spending enough. They shouldn’t need to ask us for more. [His emphasis]

I like Lance's thought experiment here, because he's at least starting to put some pieces together about how expensive it really is to educate a child. Let's keep going with his elementary school--we'll call it the Lance Burri Academy. LBA has 21 classrooms with 42 teachers and, it sounds like, about 450 students. Of course, 21 of those teachers teach the 21 classrooms. But let's identify the 21 others:

• One "teacher" is a librarian
• One "teacher" is a music teacher
• One "teacher" is an art teacher
• One "teacher" is a guidance counselor
• One "teacher" is a school psychologist
• One "teacher" is an assistant principal (450 require more than one administrator)
• One "teacher" is the school's share of the speech pathologist, school nurse, special education compliance officer, and tech coordinator
• Two "teachers" are physical education teachers
• Two "teachers" are two more secretaries and a safety aide (in MPS, anyway)
• Two "teachers" are another janitor (someone has to work the night shift) and two teachers' aides
• Six "teachers" are special education teachers

You see where this is headed, right? Because after those 19 "teachers" above, you still have to pay a share of additional district personnel who may never even set foot in Lance Burri Academy: The superintendent, the school board, the human resources people who hire the teachers and the "teachers," the people who make sure a district follows state and federal laws, the guy who delivers intra-district mail, and so on. That could easily eat up the remaining $140,000 for the two (of 21) not listed above. On top of that are costs for things that are not people: Heating the buildings, driving the buses, sports and clubs, sponges to clean the blackboards.

Where does LBA get money to pay for those things? Maybe they don't have a full-time librarian, or they've cut music. Some of you probably see other things on the list that you'd cut. I don't know. But as Diane Hardy pointed out last week, making those decisions can be tricky, and should not be undertaken lightly. Lance recognizes that his Academy would probably rush to find cost savings by throwing off some unfunded mandates, and that if the costs of health care or energy were lower, school costs would be lower, too. But that won't solve everything.

I think this exercise also starts to get at some of the drawbacks to what Wigderson was suggesting way back at the beginning (see? I go long with these essays, but they come together at the end), that there is a "per-pupil" value or worth for every student. As I said, it's a convenient metric for gauging the cost of schooling; it just gets clumsy when you start trying to do more than broadly pontificate about it. This also starts to fill in some of that long-promised post about the true costs of education.

I will be among the first to admit that throwing money at the public schools is not a comprehensive solution to performance problems in and of itself. However, to suggest that schools undergo extensive (positive) change at the same time as they are being provided fewer resources puts a lot of pressure on an already-squeezed system.