Professor Helen Ladd of Duke University, internationally renowned economist of education, and her husband Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, recently wrote about a sneaky move by the North Carolina legislature to undermine the funding of children in public schools. Not content to fund charters and vouchers, the legislature is directly attacking the basic funding formula for the state public system. The overwhelming majority of children in the state attend public schools. Why do their parents elect these people who short-change public education?
Ladd and Fiske write:
“In a last-minute change that was taken with no hearings and no prior publicity, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has undermined the fundamental building block of school finance in North Carolina.
“Ever since the state took over responsibility from the local districts for funding public schools during the Great Depression, state funding in North Carolina has been based on the number of students served. When a local district’s school rolls increased or decreased, the state would adjust the funding up or down accordingly, using a variety of formulas, all of them driven by the number of students.
“Under legislation enacted last month, the legislature has scrapped this system. From now on, every spring the state will make an initial commitment of state funds to districts for the following year based on the number of students currently enrolled rather than, as in the past, on their projected enrollments. In other words, districts with growing enrollments will no longer be guaranteed an increase in per pupil funds to cover the costs of educating the additional students.
“Any additional funds will have to be negotiated as part of the legislature’s more general budgetary process later in the year.
“Local and state school finance officers describe this change, seemingly quite technical in nature, as the most fundamental, even “drastic,” change in school finance in North Carolina in nearly a century. It constitutes a direct attack on the state’s ability to carry out its constitutional obligation to provide a sound basic education to all children in the state.
“Here’s how the system has worked since 1933. Every February or March the Department of Public Instruction notifies local districts what their per pupil allotments will be for the coming school year. The calculation is based on the prior year’s statewide per pupil funding levels or a range of expenditures, from teachers to textbooks, multiplied by the number of students projected for the district for the following year. Districts then use this figure as they construct their budgets and make plans for hiring teachers and other spending decisions.
“Now that the legislature has struck down this system, districts with growing enrollments will no longer be guaranteed a proportionate increase in funding to cover their additional students.
“The legislature will still have the option, through its budgetary process, to provide additional funding, but it will have no obligation to do so. Funding to cover growing enrollments will have to be negotiated and compete with other state priorities.
“The practical implications of policy change are huge for two reasons. First, it undercuts the basic pupil-based structure for distributing state funds to local districts that has served the state well for many decades. Second, it undermines the ability of district officials to do responsible financial planning. Whereas districts normally hire teachers for the coming year in the spring, they will now have to wait until the legislature gets around to adopting a new budget, which this year was August, before they can make firm commitments.
“Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of the new policy is that it undermines the state’s constitutionally mandated commitment to provide sound basic education to all young people in North Carolina. While politicians in the past have debated about what constitutes adequate per pupil funding, now, for the first time, they will also be debating whether to appropriate any additional funding simply to cover the costs of additional students. Such funding will now be a matter of political give and take.
“The new policy will clearly have the most obvious effect on districts with growing student populations. Although a majority of North Carolina school districts, especially those in rural areas, are currently experiencing population declines, the overall number of students in the state continues to increase, and six of the eight largest districts are dealing with a growing number of students. Wake County schools are projected to see an increase of more than 8,000 students over the next three years, while Charlotte-Mecklenburg is facing growth of more than 9,000 during the same period. Even districts with declining school populations will be hurt because available state funds will have to be spread among a larger total student population….
“So why would Republican leaders adopt a policy that weakens the state’s ability to provide quality education for all students and makes it more difficult for district officials to engage in responsible planning? Perhaps one answer is that, since the large tax cuts Republicans implemented last year have reduced the revenue available for major state expenditure items such as education, they are now scrambling to find new ways of reducing support for education without seeming to be doing so. A related answer lies in the overall thrust of their education policies.
“Since taking power in 2012 Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican leaders have enacted a series of efforts aimed at weakening the state’s commitment to public education. They have, among other things, reduced the number of classroom teachers, teacher assistants, assistant principals, guidance counselors and nurses in North Carolina schools They have cut funding for textbooks and other learning materials and eviscerated teacher professional development – all the while giving favored treatment to charters and adopting a voucher program that diverts funds from public schools and puts them in the hands of religious and other private schools immune from public accountability…..
“The sleight of hand continues.”
Helen F. Ladd is professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Edward B. Fiske, formerly Education Editor of The New York Times, edits the Fiske Guide to Colleges.
Read more here:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Elected thieves in North Carolina—bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires—are quietly at work to destroy public education in that state—giving favored treatment to charters and adopting a voucher program that diverts funds from public schools and puts them in the hands of religious and other private schools immune from public accountability…
I will say that forces are uniting to fight back.
Aim Higher Now held a rally this past week and former Gov. Jim Hunt spoke (via satellite) and plans to go before the Legislature in 2015 (which will hopefully have a very different composition by then) to ask that we get a more reasonable agenda for public education again. http://www.wlos.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/nc-teachers-rally-votes-17834.shtml
Teachers are being vocal about the bogus raise (most veteran teachers saw their salaries go down).
It’s hit after hit after hit and thanks to this blog (albeit unable to prevent it), I’ve seen it coming for two years.
Aim Higher Now, NC. . .we must.
Lots of progressive groups are on this and education is certainly the point of proving the real agenda of the ALEC guys in office.
Woe be to us if Thom Tillis makes it into the US Senate. He’s done a heck of a job making things hard for North Carolinians.
Isn’t the other side of the legislation that rural districts which are generally experiencing a declining enrollment from one year to the next will be better funded? It would not surprise me to learn that this legislation had strong support from rural representatives.
TE, you may be right because many of our ALEC members in the General Assembly are from rural areas. However, I think that is just a convenient coincidence. I think they are rationalizing some pretty poor decision making in terms of investment in our state and it is because there is a revenue shortage that is not discussed by them (due to the tax code that gives breaks to the top).
Believe me, I have plenty of conservative and business-minded friends, but the situation here is about an agenda against public school. It’s not about scaling back in rural counties. Projected numbers in a district that is declining in numbers would not have a serious lag time resulting in waste for the state in terms of expense—that might sound like a good reason for this, but I don’t buy that. And in fact, the rural counties are already operating on smaller budgets because they don’t have town and city subsidies, which most NC districts do.
We have slipped and are slipping. I do see teachers and staff dealing well with the situation, but we have lost 14,000 teachers and plenty more are planning to leave.
What was it someone posted the other day? Let’s not call this conservatism because that makes conservatives look bad. This is forced austerity because of a completely different ideology based on trickle down theories and right wing ideas. I ain’t hatin’. . .I’m just calling like I am seeing it. The absence of a union with collective bargaining rights hurts teachers more and most are not members of NCAE (our professional organization who is fighting hard as they can to salvage what we once had).
I heard a retired teacher today say, “well the system is broken.” And my reply to her was, “well, it wasn’t broken until some people set out to break it.”
I spend some time at ALEC’s website today.
In 2010, ALEC said that public education was about half of a state’s total budget.
With that undocumented point, ALEC recommends a new system of “student-centered” budgeting that radically cuts the authority and oversight of state departments of education. It gives more authority to the legislature and offers the “appearance” of giving more power to districts and schools.
Alec’s model legislation, begins with this assertion: “The primary purpose of each public school in the state is to facilitate the academic achievement and growth of enrolled students.”
ALEC proposes “student-centered funding” that “links education funding (inputs) to student achievement (outputs),”
State departments of education and district boards become shell operations that serve as a pass-through for funding and bookeeping services. Budgeting for a school is based on required “inputs” for enrolled students and maintaining satisfactory “outputs.” Budget cuts can be made if student achievement and student growth measures don’t meet the standards set by the legislature.
In the ALEC model, funds would flow to schools based on annual and weighted formulas set by a district-level board. That traditional school board becomes a shell, operating with limited budget authority and a radically reduced share of state funds for “central services.”
The district-level school board would: (a) appoint a School Funding Task Force to set up: (a) weighted formulas for funding the cost of operating local schools and (b) weighted formulas for the cost of educating students who attend a specific school. Each student is thus classified as more or less expensive to educate depending on the school they attend.
For schools, the weighting is anticipated and sketched—more for high schools, less for middle schools, even less for elementary schools; more for large schools, less for small schools: other weightings for school location.
For students, the School Funding Task Force would determine funding weights based on factors such as “student grade level, poverty, language, disability status, and academic achievement level.”
The money follows the student, and the school principal is in charge of spending it subject to “advisory” oversight by a governance board for their school, comprised of representives for the licensed employees and parents.
The legislation has a lot of detail. The annual weighted formulas would apply to all funding categories, local, state, and federal, with all line-item revenues and expenditures reported for each school based on the number of eligible students, verifiable student need, and in some cases“ proofs of improved student achievement.”
As I read it, the intent is to kill budgeting based on teaching positions, class size ratios, and other staffing norms (e.g., nurses, counselors), along with other program-based budgets such as those for security, custodians, cafeteria/food services, athletics.
The principal in consultation with the school advisory board decide allocations for curriculum and materials for areas such as science, social studies, and the arts. The high stakes accountability required by the state legislature whould influence here the money goes.
Other requirements are thrown in to put the screws on teachers and principals. “Each teacher, in consultation with students’ parents or legal guardians and students where age-appropriate, shall establish academic growth goals for the student at the outset of each academic year and shall regularly measure students’ academic growth throughout the school year,” using “a variety of assessment tools selected by the principal and faculty of the public school.” (Imagining writing doing the parental consultation if you have no caps on class sizes).
The model legislation also requires a a teacher “to communicate in person with a student’s parent or legal guardian if the student is not meeting his or her academic achievement goals.” (Note the “in person” qualifier).
There are separate and not equal requirements for charter schools, but the whole thrust of the legislation is to forward school choice with a monetary value placed on the cost of educating each student. That monitized bounty for each student has huge implications for marketing schools, segregating students based on that value, and of course, making the work of teachers fit more legislative mandates, and more “accountability-driven decisions” determined by the principal. The model law requires principals to learn the intricacies of budgeting through district “academies” or pay from their school budgets the cost for professional services on finances.
ALEC”s cover story for all of this is summarized here:
“This bill designates local School Funding Task Forces instead of a statewide government agency because those members will know local student and school needs best. Moreover, because local schools are now accountable for performance, school principals, teachers, and staff working together with parents must have the autonomy over school funding for operations, staffing, and programs.”
If you love legal language you can learn more at http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/the-student-centered-funding-act/
ALEC wants the family to receive money to educate each child. The family then decides how and where to spend their education dollars. The goal is to do away with “public” education and create a totally private system of “choice”.
That sounds like communism to me. Slap a dollar value on kids and dole it out evenly.
Communism.
So perhaps my occasional verbal jab at the rheephormistas with the phrase “Potemkin Village Business Plan for $tudent $ucce$$” is closer to the mark than I thought.
Wow! Comrade Gates, meet Comrades Duncan and Rhee and Deasy and Christie and the other appartchiks…
I hope the above remains strictly fictitious and facetious.
Although perhaps this, too, shall come to pass…
Rheeally… in a Johnsonally sort of way…
Why am I not laughing?
😳
NC has become so bad that South Carolina, which had been the butt of educational jokes for eons, is now desirable.
But that doesn’t mean that we have to accept that.
Elections are coming up!