RoguePundit

Data from the Statewide Report Card

Yesterday, the Oregon Department of Education published its 2008-2009 Statewide Report Card.  Here's some data from that report.

 

 

All those educators are taking a bigger chunk of taxpayer revenue, but it's those who get most of the attention who have benefited least.  Missing from those numbers are the costs of health care and PERS, both of which have risen faster than inflation.

 

 

The report never mentions home schooling.

School Districts Making Us Pay to Sue Ourselves

It's a sign of failure whenever one government agency sues another.  There are all sorts of causes, including badly-written laws, agencies which can't or won't compromise, defending or trying to expand one's turf, an unwillingness to live within one's means, on and on.  It's all unnecessary...or at least should be.

My local Three Rivers School District was one of several that combined to sue the state over the amount of school funding provided by Salem (previous blog here).  To recap...

On March 21, 2006, six school districts and three parents, on behalf of their school-age children, filed a school funding case against the State of Oregon and legislative leaders. Based on the state constitution’s requirements to provide “a uniform and general system of common schools” and to appropriate funding “sufficient to ensure that the state’s system of K-12 public education meets quality goals established by law,” plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the current finance system unconstitutional and order the state to create and fund a constitutional system.

In the Pendleton School District v. State complaint, plaintiffs point, inter alia, to the Quality Education Model (QEM) created by the state’s Quality Education Commission. The legislature established the Commission to determine – using the QEM – the specific qualitative changes and funding required for Oregon’s schools to be able to attain the education goals set by the legislature in 1991. Plaintiffs allege that the state has fallen far short of reaching the funding levels required by the model.

The school districts claimed that they wouldn't spend any school resources in pursuing the case, as a new non-profit, the Oregon School Funding Defense Foundation, would reimburse any costs.  That was never completely true, but at least it wasn't tone deaf.  And never mind the fact that Oregon taxpayers would end up bearing the cost of both defending and adjudicating the lawsuit.  More on that in a moment. 

The lawsuit was a fishing expedition.  Early this year, the Oregon Supreme Court confirmed that the QEM is an accountability check, not a funding requirement (previous blog here).  Yes, the state failed in its Constitutional requirement to provide what's defined as adequate school funding, but that doesn't automatically mean that the schooling itself was inadequate. 

Flashing forward to today...

In a final note on its ruling the Legislature failed to adequately fund public schools from 2005 to 2007, the Oregon Supreme Court has denied attorney fees to the school districts that sued the state.

In a sharply divided opinion, the court awarded the schools $1,056.55 to pay the costs of filing the paperwork in the massive lawsuit but denied them more than $100,000 in attorney fees.

Ahhh...the school districts were going to pay for this, at least if they could backdoor the Oregon taxpayers for the legal fees.  Wonder who's going to pay now?  If the Oregon School Funding Defense Foundation is out of cash, will this money end up coming out of school supplies, maintenance, etc. in our school districts? 

The taxpayers should have never had to spend a dime on this idiotic intergovernmental warfare.

Less Rigorous, Lesser Results

While adult Americans tend to work more hours than their counterparts in other industrialized nations, the same isn't true for our children. 

American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

That all might be okay if our schools produced better--or at least similar--results.  But for the most part, they don't.  There are myriad reasons for that, one of the least important being the need to spend more money.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. 

Our lengthy summer vacations have long been explained as being a hold-over from our agrarian days.  However, summer isn't when the majority of crops are planted or harvested.  Indeed, there's more to the story.

First from a study published in 2005... 

The September-to-June school year is not an agricultural holdover. It is a coordinating device to facilitate geographic mobility. The adoption of age-graded schools, which work best if all students start together, and the growth of worker mobility, which requires extra time and amenable weather to relocate households, produced the standard calendar. A "natural experiment" supporting this explanation is the equator. Summer vacation is a norm both north and south of it. However, American and European families on temporary assignment in the Southern Hemisphere use schools that maintain a Northern Hemisphere school year in order to facilitate relocation to their home countries.

And from a more recent Education Sector report... 

In large cities, long school calendars were not uncommon during the 19th century. In 1840, the school systems in Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia were open between 251 and 260 days of the year. New York City schools were open nearly year round during that period, with only a three-week break in August. This break was gradually extended, mostly as a result of an emerging elite class of families who sought to escape the oppressive summer heat of the city and who advocated that children needed to “rest their minds.” By 1889, many cities had moved to observe the two-month summer holiday of July and August.

Rural communities generally had the shortest calendars, designed to allow children to assist with family farm work, but they began to extend their school hours and calendars as the urban schools shortened theirs. By 1900, the nation’s schools were open an average of 144 days, but, with many youth in the workforce and few compulsory attendance laws for school, students attended an average of only 99 of those days.

School schedules underwent more adjustment during 20th century to accommodate a changing population and the needs of war. Summer sessions were provided in some communities to teach English to immigrant students or to provide accelerated programs to allow students to graduate early, but most programs were used to manage a growing youth population and prepare a workforce. The first extended-day schools came into being during World War II to provide care for the school-aged children of women pressed into work.

If nothing else, extended school days and a longer school year can act as even more childcare.      

More Skullduggery by the OEA

The Oregon legislature is currently considering a couple of laws that would limit schooling options.   

Senate Bill 767 requires that 50 percent of students enrolled in the virtual charter schools live in the host district.

Its sister legislation, SB 881, would limit the state funds online charter schools receive for enrolled students who live outside the district.

If both bills pass, they would effectively close online charter schools in Oregon, virtual school supporters say.

Lawmakers said they don't oppose online education but they're concerned the virtual schools are sending state education dollars outside Oregon to pay the companies that operate the Web sites.

The Medford Mail Tribune should be ashamed for printing a lengthy article on this subject that completely avoids the elephant in the room.  Here's why the Oregon Educations Association (OEA) was recently the Willamette Week's Rogue of the Week.  

On March 10, Obama laid out his vision for education. He promoted teacher merit pay and greater charter school access, saying, “I call on states to reform their charter rules.”

However in Salem, the OEA, a powerful union representing 47,000 teachers, is doing its best to kill Oregon’s largest online charter school, Scio-based Oregon Connections Academy. Founded in September 2005, OCA now serves about 2,650 K-12 students.

Since 2005, OCA has battled the Oregon Department of Education over a law that says at least 50 percent of students in a virtual charter school must live in its sponsoring district. Only a small percentage of OCA’s kids live in the Linn County district, but school officials believe OCA was grandfathered in before the law took effect in 2005.

On March 5 at OEA’s request, several leading Democrats introduced Senate Bill 767, which would prohibit kids below seventh grade from attending virtual charters, ban a waiver of the 50 percent residence requirement and require permission from a student’s home district to “attend” an out-of-district virtual charter. OEA has never liked charters, which can employ non-union teachers. Online charters also require fewer teachers than conventional schools and cost districts money when students leave neighborhood schools.

Switching links again, to one which refers to the Oregon Connections Academy as ORCA...

In a Feb. 16 letter to the State Board of Education, 20 lawmakers came to ORCA's defense, not only urging the state to grant ORCA the waiver but expressing anger that ORCA even has to ask.

The letter, generated by Keizer Republican Rep. Kim Thatcher's office, says, "During the 2005 legislative session when SB1071 (which established the 50 percent provision) was being debated, the Oregon Department of Education official in charge of virtual schooling assured the Legislature that SB1071 would not affect ORCA. We voted for the bill only because of this assurance, with the good faith understanding that ORCA would never be required to comply with this provision."

It added, "ORCA has grown to be one of the largest public schools in the state, and it is meeting the state's academic standards. But now the [education department's] position has changed. It now says that ORCA must comply with the 50 percent provision starting in 2010. This would mean the death of this innovative public school. ... To deny this waiver request is tantamount to the [education department] announcing that its word cannot be trusted."

It's absurd that ORCA and any schools like it should need a waiver.  If Oregon's leaders are concerned about education dollars leaving the state, they need to push our schools to do a better job of competing for those dollars.  The OEA would rather restrict choice--a conservative urge that Salem should avoid. 

As long as the Democratic leadership in this state is dependent upon the OEA for political and monetary support, our educational system will continue to be a shadow of what it could and should be. 

One Student, One School

Agness is a remote community located near where the Illinois River joins the Rogue.  That puts it in Curry County, about 30 miles east of Gold Beach.  It's one of two remaining communities in the U.S. that's served by a mail boat. 

The two-room elementary school there is still open, though the classroom isn't very crowded.  

Measure 5 in the early 90s caused Pistol River, Agness and Ophir schools to be absorbed by the Central Curry School System; since then, the Agness School has been funded by CCSD using state grant money awarded in the amount of $133,000 annually for those living that far out of the community within the Agness area.

The money coming in to support Agness is also helping to support a paid teacher's assistant position. The requirements of keeping the school running includes having one person, on average, attending the school. At the moment there is just one child attending as well as a teacher and a teacher assistant.

$133,000 for one student?  Well, that's one of the reasons why the district is rather motivated to keep the school open.  But note that the schools in both Pistol River and Ophir have been closed and sold.

There is a possibility that there may not be any attendees for the coming school year as the one child is purportedly not happy being there. Her siblings are going to school in Gold Beach with the other Agness kids. She may be home schooled. If this is the case, the school system may fall short in funds this much more in the 2009-2010 school year.

The district is currently looking for a way to accommodate the situation and keep its school in Agness.

Principal Tom Denning of Riley Creek stated that they encourage anyone they can to move up there.

And do what?  That's the problem. 

Oregon's Average Teacher Salaries, 2007-08

The Oregon School Board Association recently published a map showing the average teacher salaries in each of Oregon's 36 counties for the 2007-08 school year.  Once again, rural and financially-challenged Josephine County easily topped the state at nearly $60,000 a year, over $8,000 above the state average.  The JoCo average rose by $1,948 over the previous school year, while the state average rose by just $980.  Here's the map, which the OSBA needs to fix by shifting the Coos County totals. 

Yesterday here in JoCo...

Tears streamed down Marcy Quist's face on Thursday night as she sobbed over the news that Wolf Creek Elementary School will close in June.

...

The Three Rivers School Board voted 4 to 1 on Thursday to close the rural elementary school at the end of this school year and merge its students with Manzanita Elementary School.

Wolf Creek is the smallest school in the district.  With the cost structure here, how much longer will it be until we lose an elementary school in the Applegate Valley?   

Strahan apologized to those in the crowd from Wolf Creek. He also asked to have the issue of interdistrict transfers placed on the March meeting agenda. Several parents have said they want to send their children to Glendale Elementary in Douglas County if Wolf Creek closes. To do that, parents would need approval from the Three Rivers board.

That's another tough issue.  Wolf Creek is closer to Glendale, and not having to traverse Sexton Summit makes for a safer drive and might save a snow day or two.  However, the Three Rivers School District would lose the funding for any students it allowed to change districts.  

At least it looks like the district won't be cutting school days this year.  Legislative leaders have said that they plan to spend $166 million of the federal stimulus money to cushion the impact of the school budget cuts across the state.  If the teachers had taken Governor Kulongoski's suggestion and worked a few days for free, that stimulus money could have been invested in ways that benefit Oregonians who don't have good jobs with great benefits.  However, that type of shared sacrifice was out of the question.  

The Sanctity of the Teachers Lounge

I can understand some teachers being frustrated about the following.  But, it sure sounds like whining.

Two years ago, the Oregon Legislature decided to ban the sale of most junk food in public schools to combat childhood obesity.

But now some teachers complain that the law treats them like children and want the option to purchase sugary sodas and high-fat snacks in teachers lounges and other "employee areas" during the day.

"We are adults and able to make choices, good or bad, just like any other grown up," said Doreen Powers, a 4th grade teacher at Butternut Creek Elementary School in Hillsboro.

Gosh, if they were allowed to choose to smoke on school grounds, the nicotine could act as an appetite suppressant and possibly help them with their soda and junk food urges.  Instead, we're forcing them to plan ahead and bring such items.  Unfortunately, that doesn't stimulate the economy as much as paying more for the convenience of vending machines.   

Members of the House Education Committee agreed on Friday, advancing a bill that would exempt school employee areas from the 2007 law that banned the sale of candy bars, sugary colas, high-fat chips, oversized slices of pepperoni pizza and other high-calorie snacks.

... 

The effort to rewrite the law is being co-sponsored by Rep. Mitch Greenlick. The Portland Democrat said lawmakers had children—not adult school employees—in mind when they imposed healthy standards for food and beverages sold in schools. 

By passing the 2007 law, legislators unintentionally violated the "sanctity" of the teachers lounge by taking away teachers' option to purchase sodas or snacks that have been deemed off limits to students, Greenlick said.

"It seems to me that having the ability to buy a Coke in the teachers lounge is probably not going to change their ability to be role models for children," Greenlick said.

For those of you who don't know Greenlick's background...

Greenlick is a graduate of Wayne State University and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in health system organization. Greenlick moved with his family to Portland, Oregon, in 1964 to start and later direct the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. He also was named Vice President of Kaiser Foundation Hospital in 1981. Starting in 1990, Greenlick served as Professor and Chair of Public Health and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University.

And he's currently the Chair of the House Health Care Committee.  But judging from his waistline, Greenlick doesn't believe in setting a healthy example. 

Not Failing a Constitutional Duty

My local Three Rivers School District--which covers all of Josephine County outside of Grants Pass plus a touch of Jackson County--was one of eighteen that sued the state over school funding.  What a waste of time and effort that was.

The Oregon Supreme Court on Friday refused to order the Legislature to boost funding for local schools to meet ambitious education goals.

...

State analysts have said that meeting the Quality Education Model's goals would cost $7.7 billion in the current two-year budget, about $1.5 billion more than schools actually got. The extra money would pay for smaller class sizes, more courses and extra help for struggling students.

School advocates who filed the lawsuit said the court could have ordered future Legislatures to provide the higher funding amounts to meet the education goals.

They pointed to the 2000 constitutional amendment that requires lawmakers to set aside enough money to fund the model fully. The amendment also contains a provision saying that if lawmakers do not comply, they are required to issue a public report explaining their failure to do so.

In May 2008, the Oregon Court of Appeals agreed with the state's contention that voters in 2000 did not intend to force the state to fund schools at a predetermined level and that they instead believed they were imposing an "accountability check" on lawmakers, not a funding requirement.

The reports explain that the reason for not providing the money recommended in the QEM is insufficient revenue.  Case closed, legal fees wasted...the Supreme Court's ruling was unanimous.

While the schools certainly have some valid funding concerns, there's also been a lot of misleading whining going on.  For instance, the Oregon School Funding Defense Foundation website shows the following for my school district.

Josephine County Unit/Three Rivers School District--Covering 1200 square miles, Three Rivers provides critical education services to a widespread population. The large rural district has to contend with many cost drivers outside of its ability to control:

• Three Rivers has cut nearly 140 teaching positions since 1994-95.
• Three Rivers buses traverse 8750 miles each day to transport approximately 5600 students. Compared to last year, the District has spent between 49 cents and $1.01 more per gallon of fuel this year than last year. On an annual basis, that means a net cost of perhaps $150,000 or more spent on fuel than was budgeted.
• Their general fund budget has increased just 9 percent in 10 years, an amount that is eclipsed by inflation and other cost drivers. The total general fund expense in 1995 was $33.6 million; in 2005 it was just under $36,000,000.
• At the high school level, many programs that keep students engaged have been reduced or eliminated due to cuts. Vocational classes have been reduced at all three high schools and electives classes reduced at the middle schools.

And what's glaringly missing from the above?  Since 1994-5,

- The student population here has dropped significantly,

- The PERS contribution percentage has risen significantly,

- And the average teacher salary in Josephine County (which has but two school districts) has been well above average.  The most recent data available (the 2006-07 school year) showed JoCo easily paying the highest average salary in the state (previous blog here).  Why is an impoverished rural county paying its teachers over $7,000 above the state average? 

A goodly percentage of the school funding problems here are related to compensation.  Unfortunately when funding is increased, not much of it goes towards helping the children.  Measure 1 didn't change that either.

Begging for School Supplies

From an article earlier this week...

A Detroit elementary school is asking for donations of toilet paper and light bulbs to continue functioning.

The principal of the Academy of Americas sent a letter to staff, parents and partners asking for donations of items "that are of the utmost importance for proper school functioning and most importantly for student health and safety."

In the letter, Principal Naomi Khalil cited budget constraints within the district as the reason that the school could no longer stock the items.

The district is grappling with a more than $400 million budget deficit and is on the verge of being assigned an emergency financial manager by the state.

The letter asks for toilet paper, paper towel rolls, trash bags and 60-, 100- or 150-watt light bulbs.

Public schools in Detroit have been reduced to that?  Remember the former Detroit school teacher who later made a fortune in the construction business and wanted to donate $200 million of it to the school system there?  Switching to an editorial in the Detroit News.

With the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) near disintegration, it ought to be noted that it's been five years since Plymouth philanthropist Bob Thompson was told to take his $200 million and get back to the suburbs.

Thompson, a retired road builder obsessed with spending his fortune to get urban children a high-quality education, ran into a political buzz saw when he offered to open 15 charter high schools in the city that would guarantee to graduate 90 percent of their students and send 90 percent of those graduates on to college.

Community activists denounced Thompson as a white meddler out to steal their children. They were joined in their absurdity by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who threw their lot in with the teacher union.

The unions are more important than the children.  FYI, Mayor Kilpatrick, who is now in jail, sent his kids to a charter school.

...instead of a network of alternative schools that would have rescued roughly 5,000 students from the sinking DPS, look what Detroit has today:

A school district that fails to graduate 70 percent of its students; a school board that's fired two superintendents and an interim superintendent in four years; 18 of its 19 high schools on the failure list; and a fiscal meltdown.

Five years after Thompson was given the boot, Detroit is officially the worst big city school district in the nation and still sends more children to welfare and prison than it does to college.

Think about how different things might have been. Had the Thompson schools been built, they would be preparing to graduate their first class in the spring. Two thousand Detroit seniors would be making college plans. And Detroit's fast-fleeing middle class would have a reason to stay.

The student population in DPS has plunged...from 157,000 six years ago to 94,000 today.  Meanwhile, the city's charter school system is up to 54,000 students.  The DPS budget this year is $1.3 billion, which is over $13,800 per student.  Last year with 105,000 students and a budget of $1.2 billion, the figure was about $11,400 per student.  But of course, nowhere near that amount makes it through the bureaucracy and corruption to finally help the students...or ensure they have enough toilet paper and light bulbs.

DPS wants a half billion to get itself back on firm financial footing.  Right...with the all the corruption and incompetence there?  Here's a tiny example from last June.

(Superintendent) Calloway, who started on the job last year, said that even though the proposed budget called for 1,400 layoffs, she was surprised to find that DPS does not have a reliable seniority list needed to legally cut 1,100 of those workers from the 16,000-employee pool.

It was who Calloway brought in outside auditors that uncovered most of the deficit.  Presuming those layoffs have occurred, DPS still has 14,600 employees who support 94,000 students...a ratio of 6.4 to 1.  Yet, it's got class sizes in some places topping 30 students.  

Suppose anybody will be held accountable for failing the children, much less the taxpayers?  With the power the unions have there, a ceremonial sacrifice or two will be about it.

Majoring in Eligibility

Up at the University of Nike, athletics reigns supreme.  A professor in U of O's Department of Biology put some numbers to that in an R-G editorial today.  

...the university has benefited from $678.5 million in capital building projects in the past 10 years. A closer look, however, reveals that $409.5 million, or 60.4 percent, of this money has been spent on athletic infrastructure, including the Autzen Stadium renovation ($89 million), the new baseball stadium ($21 million), Hayward Field renovations ($9.89 million), state-of-the-art weight rooms and medical facilities for athletes only (estimated $8 million), an academic learning center also only for athletes (estimated $20 million), an indoor football practice field ($16.6 million) and the new basketball arena ($200 million plus $27 million for the land and $18 million for parking).

What’s the justification for a public university directing 60 percent of its capital expenditures over an entire decade toward a nonacademic auxiliary unit whose annual budget is only 8 percent of that of the entire university?

What about the long-standing administrative promise to renovate our severely outdated undergraduate dorms, a promise now on hold because of the $200 million borrowed for the arena? Top administrators also promised to find substitute graduate student housing to replace the Westmoreland complex, which was sold because, in the words of a nonacademic vice-president, it was an “under-producing asset.” It may be lost on our administrators, but the University of Oregon’s biggest asset is people, not buildings.

The same story is retold when it comes to our recently completed fundraising campaign. The university raised $845 million from incredibly generous donors. Of that amount, $323.9 million, or 38 percent, went towards athletics.

Some of the money was raised or donated with strings attached, but his point is valid.  Meanwhile, few disciplines at the U of O have a strong reputation when it comes to the quality of education they provide or the research they conduct.  In Kiplinger's recent ranking of 100 of the nation's major universities on academic quality, cost, and financial aid, the U of O was a lowly 88th.  But, that was an improvement...it was dead last when I blogged about it roughly two years ago.  

What about the university president hiring an athletic director who paid $1.8 million to buy out the contract of his predecessor? Or the university president allowing a senior vice president to be employed three-quarters time at the university at an annual salary of $141,000, while also working three-quarter time and earning an additional $84,000 per year at an outside job? Direct or perceived conflicts of interest should not be tolerated at a public institution.

Then there is the campuswide salary disparity issue. We have staff members on food stamps, graduate students with stipends so low that they need second jobs to support their families, and faculty salaries far below every other AAU institution.

Yet we have a university president who received a $158,321 raise, or 28.45 percent, this year to $714,774, retired university administrators rehired at significant salaries for minimal jobs while drawing full Public Employee Retirement System pension benefits, and athletic coaches making millions — including one not yet appointed who has been promised $7 million over five years. Seven million dollars for one person at a state institution!

In comparison, my own biology department’s annual budget of $3.99 million supports 82 faculty, staff and graduate students.

Some of those coaching salaries are the cost of doing business nowadays.  But, the faculty salaries in the Oregon University System continue to rank amongst the lowest in the nation.  Within the system, the U of O's are highest.  As I've noted before, many of the K-12 teachers in Jackson County earn more than the faculty at Southern Oregon University.  

Union influence matters.