Schools Face Test on Budget Math

WSJ:

 For seventh-grader Kyle Scarpa, budget strains affecting schools across the country are hitting where it hurts.

In addition to freezing wages and jettisoning its librarian, the school he attends here in southern New Jersey will cancel his after-school remedial math and literacy classes. His teacher believes the tutoring helped him build confidence and get his average grade up to a C from a D.

"He could fall through the cracks," says teacher Rose Garrison, noting that Kyle is among four kids in her class having trouble keeping up. "When you're teaching exponents and you have kids who don't know the multiplication tables, how are you going to teach them?"

The struggles at Downe Township School illustrate the challenges public schools face across America as a convergence of factors—ravaged state and local finances, tapped-out taxpayers and a reform push by the Obama administration—force wrenching change. As the school year winds down, educators are grasping for new ways to do more with less, and to remedy an embarrassing reality: Despite spending more per student than the average developed country, U.S. schools perform below average in core subjects such as math and reading.

"Where we are as a country in education is not acceptable," says Jon Schnur, a former education adviser to the Clinton and Obama administrations and now head of a training program for school administrators called New Leaders for New Schools. The goal, he believes, should be to bring performance up to the level of spending, rather than to cut the latter.

But in the wake of the worst recession in more than half a century, many communities find themselves with no choice but to cut.

Public education, unlike Social Security and national defense, depends on state and local financing. The federal government accounts for less than 10% of public-school funding, with state and local budgets roughly splitting the rest.

And lately, states have seen tax revenues shrink at the fastest pace in more than two decades. Local property-tax revenues are set to fall as taxpayers in many communities vote down rate hikes and tax assessments gradually catch up with the bust in house prices. Federal stimulus money that helped ease the blow is set to run out after the coming school year.

Schools facing budget squeezes are running out of easy ways to reduce costs without hurting students.

More than three in five U.S. school districts are planning to increase class sizes in the 2010-11 school year, up from less than one in ten in 2008-09, according to a survey by the American Association of School Administrators. Eleven states are considering cuts in preschool programs, which researchers associate with greater achievement throughout life. In the year ending in May, some 77,000 local-government education employees—mostly public-school teachers—lost their jobs, according to the Labor Department. The administrators' association projects that schools could cut 275,000 education jobs in the coming school year.

Faced with a mounting crisis, state politicians are showing a newfound willingness to rethink how schools work, and to dismantle the seniority-based pay and employment guarantees that teachers' unions have long fought to secure. Spurred by the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, which offers some $4 billion in federal money to support reform initiatives, 46 states have laid out plans or passed legislation to do such things as better evaluate school performance, weed out highly paid but ineffective teachers, boost pay for those who perform well, and increase competition among schools.

The obstacles to such dramatic change are numerous, ranging from resistance by teachers' unions to debate over the most effective way to teach kids.

Even when reforms are implemented, there's no guarantee they'll work. Some studies have found positive results from efforts to increase school competition, such as establishing charter schools or providing parents with vouchers they can use to pay for private schools. But a preliminary study in Chicago, where Education Secretary Arne Duncan, then head of the Chicago Public Schools, launched a pay-for-performance plan in 2007, showed no effect on student achievement from that program.

"We know so little about what works and what doesn't that right now, we need to see some experimentation," says David Figlio, professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. While some experiments will fail, he says, "keeping the status quo isn't the solution, either. Particularly in urban and rural schools, we have a lot of kids who are experiencing mediocre at best and horrible at worst education."

Posted via email from Jim Nichols