Paying for Education

Kimberly Swygert has a long post about testing, teaching to the test, and related matters.

Let me make my own position clear.

I think that the community based public school is integral to American society.* It is local government operating to fill local needs. I readily acknowledge the problems that beset public education, and I am all for accountability; but I wonder at those who seem eager to eliminate the very idea. My own public schooling was mediocre at best, while my wife’s was good; our local district is very small, with three schools and about 1000 students. It does a pretty good job on a slender budget. The administration has never complained about standards and testing; they’ve just done the job. Perfect? No. The elementary reading program was poor when the Kid went through it, and I have lots of problems with math instruction. At the same time, this district deals with many, many immigrant children, many of whom do not speak English at home. By the time these kids finish 8th grade, almost all of them are performing at state standard level for reading. I may not be completely thrilled about every detail of The Kid’s education, but I do respect the work that these people do with slender resources.

I also believe in accountability by the school, and I support testing for that purpose. I haven't been able to work out my thoughts about individual assessments in the earlier grades; I’ve never been surprised by anything these assessments have told us about The Kid, and I don’t think any parent really involved in their children’s education is ever surprised by these tests. Your school district’s annual assessment tells you whether the people you’ve hired to educate your children are doing a good job. Obviously there are dangers, and obviously the tests can become political footballs. Accountability by schools and teachers is a good thing, and there must be some standard by which performance can be measured. Used wisely and intelligently, accountability leads to improved performance. If the generality of parents did not perceive that the schools have performance problems, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.

But there’s a rub, and a serious one; several rubs, in fact. They all come together in this, that assessment targets tend to creep upward, without any upward creep in funding. State and federal mandates also creep up, and neither the state nor federal governments put their money where their mandates are. In my district, reimbursement for mandates tops out at 53% for busing of handicapped students; next best is the state ESL mandate, funded at 35%.

Illinois has special problems in school funding (see below). Those problems are partly the voters fault; we don’t demand that the General Assembly and Governor solve the problem. We also allow diversions; the profits of the Illinois Lottery are supposed to feed the schools, but the pipeline is leaky. I dislike lotteries myself, but if we can’t get rid of it we ought to use the bucks for something worthwhile. Most school revenue comes from property tax, a system that obviously leads to disparities in income. My district has little commercial property; move a district or two over, and you’ll find a district of about the same size that gets the tax revenue from this gold mine. Because this is tax allergic Illinois, the increase in property taxes are limited to the growth in the CPI; but schoold district expenses are not similarly protected. For the last several years, my district has seen expenses rise at around 5% annually, while revenue increased at the rate of about 2%. This creates problems after a while. I should point out at this point that my district’s teacher compensation is low for the area, and the administrative budget is small. We’re lean here, readers dear.

What’s the link between funding and testing? As test result goals rise and budgets become less and less flexible, the school runs out of options. Staff gets cut, and as staff goes, the quality of instruction inevitably declines. A teacher with 30 students cannot teach reading as well as a teacher with 25. Older teachers will be offered early retirement to be replaced by younger teachers-and any parent can tell you that there’s a world of difference between a teacher of 25 years experience and a rookie.

Certainly, some of the complaints about testing come from educators who don’t want to be held accountable for their performance. I suspect that some conscientious educators (and there are a lot of those) worry because the conflict between rising standards and funding to achieve those standards seems unsolvable. Testing and rising performance standards are good things, but at the moment there’s a disconnection between the rising standards and paying for achieving those standards.

*And if you want to send your kids to private schools, or charter schools, or to homeschool them, fine. I'm not picking bones here.