Frivolous lawsuit in Florida

Florida's system of K-12 education produced strong achievement growth over the last decade. Today the average Hispanic student in Florida outscores the statewide average of all students in 15 different states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth-grade reading exam.

Florida's students also demonstrate high achievement on other assessments. Recent results show that Hispanic students in Florida almost always out-perform their peers in big-spending states, though results are more mixed for black students. Yet, despite Florida's below-average per-pupil spending, achievement for black and Hispanic students almost always exceeds the national average.

A new NRPI article discusses some lawsuits against Florida which claim the state needs to increase funding to improve results. NPRI demonstrates, again, that despite Florida's low per-pupil spending, it still dominates many of the biggest spenders in America.

Read the full article, Frivolous in Florida, here.

The commanding heights of public education

The Clark County School District also rations school supplies from the central office. Approval for a needed resource to be allocated requires the authorization of up to six different central-office administrators.

In one instance, a district principal sought permission to acquire new computers that had large 22-inch monitors. District regulations, however, prohibited monitors larger than 19 inches. Yet the systems with 22-inch monitors were on sale for less than systems with the 19-inch monitors. Because of the inflexible regulations, the purchase request was initially denied.

In another case, CCSD paid $1.4 million above the lowest bid to remodel a school and an extra $170,000 for landscaping at another school. The central office also rejected a printing job that FedEx Kinkos would have done for $1,800, requiring the school instead to purchase the same service from the central office for $4,000. Although the school district is not required by law to accept the lowest bid, these practices add up and leave fewer dollars for the classroom.

When a central office directs the use of scarce resources, no one knows the real value of the resources being provided. What would benefit a school most — an assistant principal, a new English teacher or new computers for every classroom? Only the local school, intimately aware of the needs of its students, is in the best position to answer that question.

Read the full article, Financing entrepreneurial education: Part II, here.

Charter schools, the key to big savings

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute writes,

Michigan is awash in concern over education funding. Recent budget cuts ranging from $165 to $465 per pupil — with another $127 per-pupil cut on hold — have been described as a "tsunami that threatens to push scores of districts into deficit this year." But if Michigan converted all its conventional public schools into charters (also known as public school academies), that tsunami would explode into a refreshing mist — complete with fiscal surplus rainbow.

Based on the latest (2006-07) figures, the average charter school in Michigan spends $2,000 less in state and local tax dollars per pupil than the average district school. So the savings from a district-to-charter student exodus would add up to $3.5 billion annually. To put that in perspective, it would erase Michigan's recent $2.8 billion state budget shortfall and still allow for a $700 million across-the-board tax cut.

Charter Schools in Nevada also spend less per pupil than the traditional public schools. If Nevada had a robust charter school program like Arizona, we could save up to $320 million a year. So why don't we have more charter schools?

Read Coulson's article here.

Financing entrepreneurial education

Unfortunately, education has become a highly politicized issue, making it difficult to simply outline the problem and propose workable solutions. Today, education is a battleground fought between taxpayers, politicians, educators, bureaucrats, unions and corporations — with children trapped in the middle. Although opponents in the battle to reform education disagree on many issues, there is one solution that is gaining ground on both sides of the political divide: school decentralization.

For several decades, school districts, state legislators and the federal government have made numerous efforts to improve the quality of education. Through no shortage of good intentions, their efforts have woven thousands of complex rules into an oppressive net that forces teachers and administrators to focus more on complying with regulations than on the education of students. Today we worry more about what level of money is spent than how much students learn.

"Today's school finance systems fund programs, employ staff, sustain institutions and provide resources so that district and school administrators can faithfully execute the thousands of laws and regulations that have grown up around public education," noted the flagship report of the nationwide School Finance Redesign Project. But this complex patchwork of occasionally conflicting laws incentivizes a system that is "focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children."

Read the rest of "Financing entrepreneurial education: Part I" here.

School Board Budget Busters

(Guest post by Karen Gray)

Ironically, one of tonight's agenda items is to hire a retired
administrator to come back for $770 a day for 52 days ($40,000) as a
consultant, doing many of her previous duties — duties that other
employees are qualified to do, admitted CCSD staffers.

As one might expect, this isn't sitting well with many of the teachers
and support staff trying to ink-out a meager raise from the district.

It was obvious from the get-go that the board wasn't getting four
votes to approve this contract—the number needed to pass. Only three trustees supported the contract. So, as so often happens, trustees belabored the discussions, delaying a vote until someone caved.

Read more of her comments at the Parent's Sounding Board.

Teacher Union Zombies?

Dr. Matthew Ladner, the vice president of the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow of the Nevada Policy Research Institute had a humorous post at jaypgreene.com where he compared the teachers unions to zombies.

Apparently the president of the Arizona Educators Association demanded an apology, so Dr. Ladner hit them again - this time with a letter from the "Arizona Zombie Association" demanding an apology for comparing zombies with the teachers union.

“Given your obvious ignorance, I will inform you of the many redeeming features of zombies” writes the fictitious President Eatbrain of the Arizona Zombie Association. “True, while being infected with the zombie virus does produce an overwhelming desire to consume human flesh, you may have forgotten that it also gives you killer dance moves”

The zombies have a point, the teachers union haven't given us any cool dance moves.

Money well spent?

According to a recent Las Vegas Review-Journal article the Clark County School district spent $14 million on consultants between June and October of this year. Was that money well spent? I wonder if the teachers and principals had control over the budget, would they spend their money on these consultants?

Read "Money down the drain" to learn where CCSD's $3.7 billion a year budget goes.

LA Times wrong, charter schools work

The Los Angeles Times writes an editorial attacking charter schools, and Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute takes the paper to task:

“With print media players disappearing faster than mosasaurs in the late Cretaceous, one would expect the last papers standing to be extra careful with their fact checking for fear of being blogged into extinction. One’s expectations would be mistaken.

Yesterday’s LA Times editorial on charter schools combined errors of fact and omission with a misrepresentation of the economic research on public school spending. First, the Times claims that KIPP charter public schools spend “significantly more per student than the public school system.” Not so, says the KIPP website. But why rely on KIPP’s testimony, when we can look at the raw data? LA’s KIPP Academy of Opportunity, for instance, spent just over $3 million in 2007-08, for 345 students, for a total per pupil expenditure of $8,917. The most recent Dept. of Ed. data for LAUSD(2006-07) put that district’s comparable figure at $13,481 (which, as Cato’s Adam Schaeffer will show in a forthcoming paper, is far below what it currently spends). Nationwide, the median school district spends 24 percent more than the median charter school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”

Read the rest of his blog post at the Cato Institute.