Barack Obama managed a spectacular feat last year when he
convinced fellow congressional Democrats to set aside $5 billion
from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for what became his
Race to the Top school reform initiative. Obama won some
well-deserved praise for using those dollars, along with his bully
pulpit (and that of his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan), to
coax even states such as California to remove restrictions on the
expansion of charter schools and subject teachers to private
sector-style performance management. This has
weakened the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers, which have long counted on the Democratic
Party (and their influence in statehouses) to dominate education
policy.
Yet Obama hasn’t succeeded in forcing states and school
districts to abandon their worst practices. This is because the
very stimulus plan that helped fund Race to the Top also financed
those very habits without any strings attached to force states to
alter behavior or adapt more-systemic reforms. It may take a full
restructuring of school funding and state laws (along with a
reckoning with the long-term costs of unfunded defined-benefit
pensions) to finally achieve lasting reform.
In California, the Los Angeles Unified School District is
expanding school choice by handing off 196 of its schools to
private operators and parent-teacher groups, as well as authorizing
the establishment of 80 new charter schools over the next two
years. Yet in the past two years, and in spite of $395 million in
short-term federal funds aimed at helping it fill its budget, L.A.
Unified
laid off 2,700 young teachers — including 400 of its best
young elementary and middle-school teachers, while protecting
laggard veterans on the payroll.
Meanwhile in Texas, the Houston Independent School
District and its superintendent, Terry Grier, have been
praised by Duncan (and attacked by the AFT local there) for
such moves as requiring the use of student test score data in
teacher evaluations. But the district also has 200 more special
education aides on the payroll this year — even though the
district has 6,000 fewer students than there were five years ago.
Why? Because it had to spend the $18 million in short-term funds it
received from the Obama administration last year. (The teachers, by
the way, will be on the unemployment line by the end of this school
year.)
And in Connecticut, the state government used $542 million
in federal funds to fund grants at existing levels — while taking
the equivalent amount in state dollars and directing it toward
other uses. This action, called supplanting, wasn’t an isolated
occurrence; nearly all states made similar moves.
Causing all of this misbehavior is the very stimulus plan
that helped Obama launch Race to the Top and his other reform
initiatives. On top of the $62 billion spent annually by
the federal government on education, it added another $95 billion
to helping states states avoid budget-cutting and
stave off layoffs of the nation’s 6.2 million teachers and other
school employees. While the Obama administration attempted to
direct states and school districts to use the money in a more
reform-minded manner, it managed to make a mess of this by issuing
conflicting regulatory guidance (when it managed to get the
information out to bureaucracies in a timely manner).
Not that states and districts would have paid it any mind.
Declares school reform consultancy Bellwether Education Partners in
a
report it released last week: “the one-time nature of [stimulus
dollars] may have made districts less willing to use these dollars
to support ongoing reform.” Naturally. Meanwhile the rest of the
federal dollars went into existing programs whose formulas have
long ago been set by congressional edict. This includes $23 billion
for Title I — the federal program used to help provide extra
teachers and programs for poor students — and special education
grants. As a result, most states and school districts spent the
money with little consideration for thrift or reform.
School reformers have since attempted — with little
success — to force Obama and Congress to take different approaches
in doling out bailout funds. Earlier this year, they unsuccessfully
demanded that House and Senate Democrats require states to stop
last hired-first fired layoffs as a condition for receiving the $10
billion in federal funding that came courtesy of the so-called
Edujobs bill. They will likely attempt to get congressional
Republicans to place similar strings on Title I funding.
The bigger challenge is actually restructuring how
American public education spends the $593 billion in tax dollars it
receives every year. Given that school funding has increased
constantly over the past five decades (including by 16 percent
between 2000 and 2007), public schools don’t suffer from a lack of
money, but from
ineffective spending.
Thanks to decades of deals between teachers unions, state
governments, and school districts, pensions and retiree teacher
health benefits consume ever more school dollars. The average state
now spends 34 cents on benefits for every dollar of teacher salary
in 2007-2008, versus 28 cents in 2003-2004, according to the U.S.
Department of Education. States now pay $68 billion for pensions,
$18 billion more than they did five years ago. More money will end
up being diverted from classrooms thanks to at least $600 billion
in pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs
that are now coming due thanks to the retirements of baby boomers
from the teaching ranks.
Just as costly — and harder to see — are other aspects
of traditional teacher compensation such as degree- and
seniority-based pay scales. Some $8 billion alone is spent on pay
raises for teachers who obtained master’s degrees; this practice
continues despite evidence that there is no correlation between
graduate degree attainment and student achievement. Another $7
billion annually is devoted to university schools of education to
train collegians to become teachers. But that money is also wasted.
Just 13 percent of 77 education schools surveyed by the National
Council on Teacher Quality had high quality math instruction
programs.
The nation spent $53 billion in 2008 on school
construction and another $16 billion on capital outlays; that’s
11.6 percent of all public school spending. While some of that
money is going to replacing aging structures, the funds are also
used to build lavish athletic fields and sprawling campuses. One
such complex is the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in L.A.,
which was built on the grounds of the hotel where Sen. Kennedy was
slain. The cost so far: $600 million.
School districts remain as inefficient as ever. As Michael
Casserly of the Council for the Great City Schools points out, just
69 percent of school buses are kept in operation throughout the
school year. Most districts still keep antiquated academic,
financial, and management information systems in place — even as
the private sector and the federal government have begun embracing
21st century technology and techniques. The nation’s big-city
school districts are particularly inefficient, often serving as
jobs programs. The ratio of administrators and staff to teachers in
the average urban district is two-to-one, according to University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Martin Haberman; the
ratio in suburban and rural districts is two-to-eight.
Obama is learning that short-term bailouts and long-term
reform efforts do not go hand-in-hand. One can only hope it’s an
object lesson he takes seriously.
