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June 9, 2005
First Class NonsenseHere's another doozy. There's an effort in eight states by the founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, to get state legislatures to decree that every school district shall spend 65 percent of funds "in the classroom." Called First Class Education, the goal is to "by the end of 2008, pass a law in all 50 states and the District of Columbia requiring every school district to spend at least 65 percent of its education operational budgets in classrooms for the benefit of teachers and kids." The effort's Web site includes education spending info on each state, such as: "California: Current classroom spending: 61.7 percent. National ranking: 21st. 1st Class Education proposed increase: 3.3 percent. Increase to the classroom: $1.526 billion a year. Without a tax increase!"
The Minneapolis Star Tribune begins to unpack the "65 percent solution" here: "As critics point out, the shift of funds could cut teacher training, transportation, nursing and technical learning budgets. When more children than ever need help with individualized learning styles and social and computer skills, shifting resources away from those areas is not sensible." The Star Tribune and others understand that the one-size-fits-all approach fails to take local circumstances into account. There's a reason we have school boards.
The plan's biggest supporter in the Minnesota House makes her case here. Here is the take by the plan's supporter. This guy is dutifully on message, too. And here are links to debates over the 65 percent game in Colorado, Illinois, and Arizona.
Of course, the larger problem here is the continued fiction about how the downtown school district office is overcrowded with overpaid educrats, and that school districts have lost all sense of priority about what really matters. This is education's equivalent of the wildly inaccurate but persistent impression that about 10% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. It's yet another convenient tactic for changing the subject from inadequate school funding.
The argument is seductive. Teachers' unions have used it, around different terms, in efforts to gain sympathy for pay raises. Public school bashers use it, to reinforce claims that schools are not making the grade and therefore local control should end, replaced by the whims of mayors, or governors, or business people who have never spent a day running a school district. And, as the higher ed world knows all too well from the U.S. News and World Report phenomenon, this kind of thing is subject to clumsy arbitrariness about what gets counted and how, and it has a perverse tendency to force everybody to try to game the numbers, sometimes in ways that are terrible for students.
For the record, BoardBuzz certainly agrees that school boards might want to take a hard look at how their districts' expenditures break down between the instructional and the non-instructional, and they should be aware of the policy concern. But state requirements mandating particular allocations of personnel or arbitrary percentages of spending are yet another set of handcuffs for local school districts. Maybe our kids would be better off if school boards, professional administrators, and teachers just stayed home and let the politicians run our schools for a while, since that increasingly seems to be where they're headed. Or maybe Mr. Byrne could do us all a favor and go back to running Overstock.com.
By the way, if you've ever wondered how it is that lame education ideas like this one and vouchers are even taken seriously by some seemingly intelligent people, NPR's Marketplace just ran an eye-opening (or ear-opening, as the case may be) series of reports on one explanation: the booming "think tank" industry. The exposé calls to mind Ambrose Bierce's definition of politics: "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." Many observers say think tanks, despite their respectable trappings of "studies" and "discussion" and "analysis," increasingly are little more than money laundering operations for crass lobbying.
So if you've ever heard about the latest federal or state proposal and thought to yourself, "No one in education ever could have come up with that one," you're not imagining things. With enough money to throw around, public policy can be bought. Check out the four-part series, called "Under the Influence," here. As this document reveals, starting on page 9, public education is afflicted with more than its fair share of this phenomenon.
Posted June 9, 2005 12:00 AM
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