Archives for category: Budget Cuts
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AFT Documents Massive Underfunding of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2018 //
9

This Report was released by the American Federation of Teachers.

Education Underfunding Tops $19 Billion over Decade of Neglect
Report Unveils Link Between GOP Tax Cuts and Gutting of Public K-12 and Higher Education Post-Recession

PITTSBURGH—Governments in 25 states have shortchanged public K-12 education by $19 billion over the last decade, with low-tax Republican states guilty of the worst underfunding, a groundbreaking report by the American Federation of Teachers, released today, reveals.

“A Decade of Neglect: Public Education Funding in the Aftermath of the Great Recession” details for the first time the devastating impact on schools, classrooms and students when states choose to pursue an austerity agenda in the false belief that tax cuts will pay for themselves.

The comprehensive report offers a deep dive into the long-term austerity agendas and historic disinvestment that sparked the wave of nationwide walkouts this spring.

Among the findings: K-12 education is drastically underfunded in every single state in the United States. When you control for inflation, there are 25 states that spent less on K-12 education in 2016 than they did prior to the recession. But there are signs of the negative impact of austerity even in states with relatively stronger investment in schools.

Chronic underfunding explains why, in 38 states, the average teacher salary is lower in 2018 than it was in 2009, and why the pupil-teacher ratio was worse in 35 states in 2016 than in 2008.

While the recession may have forced budget cuts on our schools, the report exposes how Republican legislators and governors prolonged the damage by cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of public schools.

A majority of Americans instead support repealing tax cuts for the rich and using that money to invest in education, infrastructure and healthcare.

The report measures each state’s “tax effort”—that is, how much they tax, compared with how rich they are. Of the 25 states with the worst K-12 funding, 18 of them have taxed their residents less since the recession. Five of the 11 states with the lowest K-12 funding—Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas—are also among those with the lowest taxes on the rich.

The problem only gets worse in higher education, where 41 states spent less per student, creating a massive affordability and accessibility gap. This explains why tuition and fees for a two-year degree in 2017 rose at three times the rate of inflation when compared with 2008, and why the cost of a four-year degree rose even higher, putting college woefully out of reach for far too many Americans.

“These problems belong squarely at the feet of elected officials, many of them Republicans, who rather than investing in our future, insisted on ushering in counterproductive austerity,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “When legislators choose to prioritize millionaires over children, our country suffers. And when our education secretary says that money doesn’t matter in schools, we tell teachers, parents and children that they don’t matter either.”

The report was accompanied by a key resolution, considered by delegates today at the AFT’s biennial convention, to turn the data into action. “The Fight for Investment in Our Future and the Fight Against Austerity” states, in part, that the AFT “will … investigate legislative, policy and grass-roots solutions to increase investment in public services, including the identification of new revenue streams,” and “will work to channel the activism we are witnessing across the country in this moment into a movement for enduring change by electing pro-public education, pro-worker candidates in November.”

Read the full report here.

Click to access decade-of-neglect-2018.pdf

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding

Greg Windle: Did Philadelphia’s Superintendent William Hite Meet His Goals?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2018 //
5

Greg Windle wrote an exemplary report on the record of Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite, who took Office in 2012.

He makes clear that there are many metrics, not only test scores, and many actors, including the governor and the legislature.

Education writers, take note. This is a treasure trove of information that the people of the city need to know.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Budget Cuts, Funding, Philadelphia

Jan Resseger: Teachers Are Leading the Fight for Funding in Red States

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2018 //
19

Jan Resseger reports here on the role of teachers in Oklahoma and Arizona in leading the fight against tax-cutting Tea Party ideologues whose cruel zeal is hurting children and denying them a decent education.

She begins by citing an article in “The Nation” about Oklahoma, where taxes had not gone up since 1990 until the teacher protests this spring:

“Covert [the author of the article] introduces us to Scott Helton, a high school English teacher whose school opted to save money with online textbooks instead of buying the printed copies. But the school hasn’t enough computers and its Wi-Fi is inadequate. He has been forced to spend his own money to provide readings for his students. Ten years ago, his classes averaged 20 students; today they are packed with 35, and in once case 40 students, many of whom sit on the floor. We also learn about underpaid workers in other government agencies including Gail DeLashaw, a family-support worker in the Department of Human Services, whose salary is $30,000, 60 percent of the national average for someone like DeLashaw with an advanced degree. Her case load—once 500 or 600—has risen to 1,200 families.”

In Arizona, teachers and parents gathered 270,000 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to raise taxes for education. Gov. Doug Ducey and his allies, of course, will fight it. Ducey is up for re-election. Democrats will choose his opponent in a primary next month. The leading contender on the Democratic ballot is David Garcia, a strong fighter for funding education. Garcia is a professor of education at Arizona State University. Polls show him tied with Ducey, or even ahead of him.

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Oklahoma

Jennifer Berkshire: Hopeful Signs of a Movement to Save Public Schools in Wisconsin

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2018 //
4

Jennifer Berkshire writes here of the encouraging signs of a strong grassroots movement to save public schools in Wisconsin, despite the best efforts of Governor Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature to crush the teachers’ union and to offer school choice, both charters and vouchers.

She begins:

“It would be easy to write the story of Wisconsin’s current union landscape as a tragedy. In this version of events, the bomb that Governor Scott Walker and his allies dropped on the state’s public sector unions has worked just as intended: The ranks of the unions have thinned; their coffers are depleted; their influence over the state and its legislative priorities has been reduced to where, in 2017, the state teachers’ union no longer employed a lobbyist at the statehouse.

“All of this is true.

“But there is another, more hopeful story to be told about Wisconsin, seven years after Walker officially kicked off his war on labor. It involves parents and teachers and local grassroots activists coming together to fight for the public schools in their communities. While Walker and the Republicans who control Wisconsin’s legislature got their way in 2011, there is a robust ongoing debate, throughout the state, about the role of public education and who should pay for it.

“Just as in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado, states roiled by teacher and parent uprisings this spring, school funding has emerged as a flashpoint in Wisconsin. In the place where the modern era of scorched-earth-style state politics began, local activism around public education may just transform Wisconsin’s political culture.”

She identifies groups that are working in a nonpartisan way to increase school funding, to offset the dramatic tax cuts that ravaged their public schools.

State leadership has a simple ethos: “Privatize everything.”

By contrast, parents and teachers are mobilizing to keep their schools funded.

“Today, the Wisconsin Public Education Network is at the forefront of a statewide effort to support Wisconsin’s public schools and the 860,000 students who attend them. DuBois Bourenane and a small army of parents, teachers, school officials, and ordinary citizens are shining a relentless spotlight on the $2 billion in cuts made to the schools here by Walker and the GOP-led legislature, and demanding a fix to Wisconsin’s deeply inequitable school funding system.”

She identifies other groups that have formed to defend students and public schools.

One of the biggest drains on the state education budget is vouchers. Advocates have pushed the idea of breaking out the costs of vouchers so taxpayers can see clearly what vouchers cost them. In Milwaukee alone, where 32,000 students use vouchers, the cost was $269 Million in the last year alone. (Voucher students do not get better results than those in public schools).

Ironically, Gov. Walker is running again as “the education governor,” despite the fact that school funding is less now than a decade ago.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

How Red States Slashed Taxes, Cut Education Budgets, and Nearly Went Bankrupt

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2018 //
16

After the 2010 elections, when anti-tax Tea Party Republicans swept many states, they had a chance to perform a radical experiment. They bet that slashing corporate taxes and individual taxes would be a shot in the arm to their economy, creating new jobs and more revenue. They were wrong. The deep tax cuts reduced public revenues, harmed public services, especially education, and did not produce economic growth.

This article in The Nation explains it.

“Oklahoma isn’t typically a big-spending state, even under Democratic governors. But until eight years ago, Democrats held most statewide offices and maintained some power in the Legislature. Then, in 2010, a number of Tea Party candidates were elected to office. The GOP increased its majorities in the Legislature and, after winning the governor’s race, controlled the entire statehouse for the first time in Sooner history.

“Oklahoma wasn’t the only state that got a fresh coat of red paint. Republicans had full control of just 14 state legislatures in 2010, while Democrats held power in 27. After the November elections that year, Republicans held majority power in 25, including Oklahoma.

“The newly empowered Republicans didn’t sit on their hands; they got to work implementing an extreme anti-tax Tea Party agenda. But now the damage those decisions have wreaked is becoming abundantly clear—not just in underfunded schools and crumbling infrastructure, but in lagging economies and angry constituents. States are supposed to be the “laboratories of democracy,” in the famous phrase of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, putting new ideas to the test. But the Tea Party experiment of drastically cutting taxes in the hopes of sparking economic growth has blown up in lawmakers’ faces.

“Oklahoma legislators had already reduced income taxes back in the mid-2000s, and an amendment added to the state constitution in 1992 makes it all but impossible to raise taxes, requiring approval from a three-quarters supermajority of lawmakers. Lowering them requires only a simple majority.

“The Tea Party experiment of drastically cutting taxes in the hopes of sparking economic growth has blown up in lawmakers’ faces.

“But the politics after 2011 were different. “The Republicans swept,” said David Blatt, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “We never had a Republican governor with a Republican legislature.”

“State lawmakers came “out of the gate in 2011 with a pretty regressive, large-scale tax-cut plan,” said Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit, tax-focused research group. Led by Governor Fallin, the Oklahoma GOP wanted to scrap the income tax entirely—a plan that was the brainchild of conservative economist Arthur Laffer, the self-described “father of supply-side economics.”

If we lived in a rational world, everyone would agree that we learned an important lesson. Draconian tax cuts benefit the wealthy and do not produce economic growth. They require government to starve essential services. Unfortunately we do not live in a rational world.

Teachers and parents are angry. Will their anger suffice to throw the bums out?

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Kansas, Oklahoma

Justin Parmenter: North Carolina Cuts Staff Who Help Neediest Kids

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2018 //
3

Justin Parmenter is a teacher in North Carolina.

Here he writes about State Superintendent Mark Johnson’s budget cuts, which decimated Educator Support Services, a division that helps the state’s Neediest districts and students .

Johnson is an alum of Teach for America. He taught for a mighty two years.

What values are they teaching at TFA? Me first. Poor kids don’t matter. What would Betsy DeVos do?

Categories Budget Cuts, North Carolina, Teach for America

What We Learned from the NPE-Schott Foundation Report on Privatization of Public Funds

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2018 //
15

The Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a report grading the states on their support for public education and documenting the extent to which states are allowing the privatization of public funds.

The report can be found here.It will be regularly updated to reflect changing events.

The livestream of the press briefing, featuring John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, and me is on the Schott Foundation Facebook page.

Here is my perspective on what we learned.

Currently, 9% of American students attend private and religious schools; 6% attend charter schools; and 85% attend public schools.

The public does not realize that every dollar spent for a charter or a voucher is a dollar subtracted from public schools. No state has added extra dollars for charters or vouchers. They simply take money away from public schools, which most students attend

Charters and vouchers are a substitute for fully funding our public schools.

As we saw in the dramatic wave of teacher strikes this past spring, our public schools, which educate 85% of all students, are being systematically underfunded.

Privatization is diverting money from public schools.

Take Indiana, for example. There are more than 1 million students in Indiana. Of that number, 35,000 use vouchers. This is 3.5% of the students in the state. Vouchers cost the state $153 million this past year, which causes budget cuts in every district. The Fort Wayne Community Schools alone lost $20 million. Nearly 60% of the voucher students never attended a public school. The voucher program is an explicit way for the state to fund religious schools. In addition, Indiana has 4% of its students in charter schools, another loss to district budgets. Please note that despite the rhetoric of the politicians, the overwhelming majority of students are choosing public schools, not using vouchers or enrolling in charters. This is the case even though more than half the students in the state are eligible for a voucher.

Consider Florida. Its state constitution explicitly bans the spending of public dollars in religious schools. In 2012, Jeb Bush pressed for a constitutional amendment that would remove that explicit ban (he called his amendment, Proposition 8, the “Religious Liberty Amendment”). Despite the appealing name, the voters decided by a margin of 55-45% NOT to repeal the ban on funding religious schools with public dollars. Nonetheless, Florida now has four different voucher programs. Their total cost, according to calculations done by Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, is nearly $1 billion annually. Florida has 2.7 million school-age children. About 250,000 (10%) are in privately managed charter schools; another 140,000 (5%) use vouchers. Despite the widespread availability of charters and vouchers, despite the Legislature’s love affair with school choice, the overwhelming majority of students in Florida enroll in public schools.

While writing this privatization report, Burris calculated that about $2.4 billion is diverted from public schools to voucher schools, which are not accountable and are often evangelical schools that do not teach modern science or history and are not subject to civil rights protections.

Add to that the likely cost of charters. There are 3 million students currently enrolled in charters, out of a total student enrollment in the U.S. of 50 million. States vary in the amount they allot to charters. If the average state allotment is $5,000–and it could be higher–then that is another $15 billion subtracted from public schools to pay for privately managed charters.

That’s $17 Billion withdrawn from the public schools that enroll 85% of students.

In other words, the great majority of students are losing funding for their public school to support the choices of a very small minority.

Even in states where public officials are under the thumb of the choice lobbyists, there is no stampede for vouchers or charters. A small minority in every state are choosing to attend a charter or voucher, even in a state like Florida.

The vast majority are enrolled in public schools, and their public schools are cutting budgets, laying off teachers, increasing class sizes, and losing programs like the arts, so that a tiny minority can use public dollars to attend charter schools or voucher schools, where teachers are less qualified and less experienced.

This diversion of public dollars is hurting public schools whose doors are open to all.

The real cost of privatization is paid by the 47 million children who choose public schools.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Charters Suck Money Out of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2018 //
18

Jan Resseger writes that ECOT—the $1 Billion black hole of Ohio charters—has collapsed, but charters continue to defund public schools that most children attend.

“Because of the way Ohio funds charter schools, not only the state but also the local school district loses money when a student leaves for a charter school. In Ohio the money follows the child to the charter right out of the general fund of the school district in which the child resides. Many districts lose more money to charters than they receive in state aid. As the Columbus Dispatch‘s Jim Siegel reports: “Ohio does not directly fund charter schools, instead subtracting the money from individual districts based on where a charter student lives. Traditional public school officials and advocates have complained for years that the system also diverts local tax revenue to charter schools along with state funding. Siegel quotes Columbus, Ohio school board member Dominic Paretti, who says ECOT gobbled up enough funds to have used up several local school property tax levies: “If you add up all that local share of dollars that has flowed to ECOT from Columbus schools’ taxpayers, it would erase the need for us to possibly ever have to go to those levies.”

“The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow remains in the news because it will take years to wind up its affairs. Also Ohio waits for a final decision by the Ohio Supreme Court on the matter of ECOT’s final legal appeal to stay in business. In the meantime, Innovation Ohio has now calculated the total amount ECOT sucked out of local school districts’ funds between 2012 and 2018. During the six year period, for example, Columbus lost $62,897,188 to ECOT; Cleveland lost $39,405,981; and Dayton lost $20,200,830. Over the six year period, ECOT drained a total of $590,954,999 from Ohio’s school districts.

“Many people push back with the argument that the money should follow the child; after all, the school district no longer has to pay expenses for that student. In a new report published by In the Public Interest, however, political economist Gordon Lafer dissects the stranded costs the child’s public school district must continue to cover: “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community. When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district.” “If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Andrea Gabor: An Education Reform That Worked–and That Needs to Be Revived

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
65

Andrea Gabor writes in the Boston Globe about the remarkable success of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which involved a bipartisan agreement: more funding, equalization of funding, in exchange for standards and assessments. Gabor’s new book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is officially published today. It is a smart book that deeply understands the futility of the corporate reform movement, which substitutes competition for collaboration and guarantees repeated failures.

She writes:

Twenty-five years after Massachusetts passed a historic education reform law that helped make it the gold-standard for American schooling, the Bay State reforms are coming under scrutiny again — and for good reason.

What happened in Massachusetts is actually a tale of two reforms. The first, signed into law on June 18, 1993, was a bipartisan achievement hammered out by a Republican governor and Democratic state legislators, and informed by a vigorous local debate among educators, parents, and business people who agreed on a “grand bargain”: substantially more state spending for schools in exchange for higher standards and increased accountability.

The law worked initially as intended. It infused over $1 billion in extra education funding — mostly to poor communities. Massachusetts achieved top scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. By 2000, the gap between NAEP scores of black and white students had actually narrowed.

But tax cuts, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the mandates of Race to the Top eroded the state’s gains:

A new 2010 education law only made matters worse. While providing a one-time $250 million cash infusion from the Federal government, the law failed to make up for school-funding inequities, yet imposed dire consequences on schools, districts, and teachers who failed to make test-score gains. It also gutted the much-lauded curriculum standards.

It is time to revisit how the original 1993 legislation worked — and why it remains a model worth building on. The law was a response to a decade of property tax cuts that hit poor communities hardest. A successful class-action lawsuit, led by Brockton students, and decided just days before the Education Reform Act was passed, sought to remedy that inequality, arguing that Massachusetts was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “cherish” education for all students — language written into the state constitution by John Adams.

Support for the plan in 1993 was not only bipartisan but had the support of the business leaders.

They were willing to pay more for better schools, and they wanted strong foundation aid for the poorest schools. In a time of charter-mania, charters were capped at only 25 for the entire state.

Erosion of that support in recent years hit Brockton High School, where the rebellion began, extra hard. What was once a miracle story–the failing school that became one of the best in the state–was upended as funding became unequal again.

In recent years, Brockton has struggled to navigate new state and federal mandates, including new teacher evaluations and a common core-aligned MCAS. In 2016, Governor Charlie Baker and his top education officials imposed a charter school on the community against overwhelming local opposition. During the last school year, Brockton ran a $16 million deficit; the town is now exploring a new funding lawsuit.

It is time to restore equitable funding for schools — the aim of an education-funding bill that just passed the state Senate — and to fully realize the vision of the 1993 reforms. This encompassed not just a rich curriculum, but also a robust role for local school-based decision-making and a wide array of accountability measures, and, as the MBAE pointed out in 1993, “not simply results of standardized tests.” All these measures are needed to return schools like Brockton High to their former levels of fiscal and educational sustainability.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts

Oklahoma: What It is Like to Teach in an Underfunded School

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2018 //
11

Melissa Smith is a teacher at US Grant High School in Oklahoma City and a member of the AFT. She writes here about the effect of dramatic budget cuts on her school.

Unless you are in a school every day, you might not see the results of underfunding education. That is because we open our doors no matter what, and my colleagues and I will do everything we can to make sure our students get the education they deserve. But just because the consequences are invisible doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Isn’t that the definition of privilege? Thinking something isn’t a problem simply because it might not be a problem for you?

You have probably heard about the recent teacher walkout in Oklahoma. While some of that was about teacher salaries, it was more about the conditions in our schools – conditions that resulted from years of underfunding education.

The Oklahoma City public schools district is the largest in the state, serving about 46,000 students. Because of relentless decreases in funding from the Oklahoma legislature, our district has had to cut almost $40m in the past two years. This has resulted in our fine arts budgets being slashed by 50%, our library media budgets being completely eliminated and district officials being forced to end the school year days early.

Our school system also has 58 classrooms that are “split-level”. This means a teacher is required to teach two different curricula to two different grade levels at the same time in the same classroom. And our teachers do this without the help of a teaching assistant…

Our classes are extremely overcrowded, with 30 and 40 students per class. Some of us don’t even have enough desks for our students to sit in. Coach Aaron McVay, one of our PE teachers, has had classes of more than 80 students. How much learning happens in a class of 80?

Some teachers don’t even have classrooms. They keep their belongings, textbooks and supplies on carts and push them from classroom to classroom, hour to hour. I have been a traveling teacher. Like some of our fellow union members who are adjunct college professors and hold “office hours” in their cars and nurses who travel from school to school, fingers crossed, hoping no one at a school across town will suffer a health crisis, it is almost impossible to be an effective educator while carting your work around…

The cut that hurt most was losing our two maintenance workers, Gerald and Joe, whose positions were eliminated when our district was forced to cut the first $30m in 2017. Gerald and Joe kept our building running. Without them, nothing seems to work. Last August, we had days without air conditioning. It was common for my classroom to reach 90 degrees by 9am. In fact, Cristina Moershel taught her class outside because it was cooler there than in her classroom. Outside. In August. In Oklahoma. She used a dry erase marker on the window to teach calculus while her students sat on the ground.

Our current history textbook is so old that the Oklahoma City bombing only gets a couple of pages in the epilogue
Now, think about how much these problems would be exacerbated if some of this year’s proposed cuts to federal funding were to go through.

Cuts would make it impossible to retain qualified teachers instead of losing them at the rate of almost 400 per month. If there are cuts to federal programs for low-income students or students with disabilities, what else will my school have to sacrifice to provide the services they need? How will these cuts help students graduate and take on the world?

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Oklahoma
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