Kansas has a State Supreme Court that pays attention to the State Constitution and cares about the future of the state, which rests on the educational opportunities of its children. Isn’t that novel these days!
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Gary Rubinstein thought that Ohio paid more money than any other state to Teach for America, at the rate of $20,000 per recruit.
Chicken feed!
One state paid TFA $90,000 for each recruit!
He writes:
A few days ago I wrote about how Texas pays TFA $5.5 million for 400 recruits, or about $15,000 per recruit. Yesterday I wroteabout how Ohio paid $2 million to TFA for 100 recruits, or about $20,000 per recruit. As TFA is in about 40 states, I wondered what state is paying the highest amount per recruit. I got a tip today for one that I think cannot be beat.
The state of Kansas paid TFA $270,000 for a total of 3 recruits. First they had a $520,000 contract for 12 recruits which would be about $40,000 per recruit. But when TFA only delivered 3 recruits, they had to give back $250,000. As a result, they ended up paying TFA a staggering $90,000 per recruit.
Under former Governor Brownback, Kansas cut taxes on the hope that low taxes would spur economic growth. It didn’t. It starved public services.
Kansans finally got fed up with the Republican strategy, and last November the voters elected Democratic state senator Laura Kelly, replacing the Trumpite Governor Kris Kobach.
Governor Kelly, cut this absurd expenditure for temp teachers and use the money to fund your public schools and your career teachers.
Kevin Bosworth, a teacher at Olathe East High School in Olathe, Kansas, wrote to tell me about a class discussion of grades and tests. A student shared her poem with the class, and Kevin shared it with me. The reformers and disrupters now say they are intrigued with social and emotional learning. Let them read this and see what they have learned.
Hello my name is worthless
Name number and date
State your class and hour
Let the rubric pick your fate
Your value as a human
Can be measured by percent
All that matters is the value
That the numbers represent
We promise that you matter
You’re more than just a grade
But you better score one hundred
Or else you won’t get paid
They require our attendance
We’re brain dead taking notes
So we can barf back up the knowledge
That they shove down our throats
Each human life is precious
And every childhood has worth
But if you fill in the wrong bubbles
Then you don’t belong on earth
They question our depression
They wonder why we’re stressed
When our futures are decided
Doing better on a test
They tell me that I’m gifted
That there’s no need to despair
But if you only read the numbers
I’m a living waste of air
I might think I have talents
But there’s no worth in art
Because it can’t be measured
By a number on a chart
The people say I’m flying
The numbers say I’ll crash
My letter grades ‘ll prove it
I’m worthless human trash
They use standardized procedures
To find the worth of kids
But I don’t fit in boxes
Without spilling out the lids
Some kids don’t fit the system
But differences can’t stay
They put us in the garbage
And throw it all away
The Kansas State Department of Education has money to burn (but not on tezchers’ Salaries), so it burned $270,000 to hire three inexperinced temporary teachers from TFA. The three will be gone in two years or so, meaning this was a very unwise expenditure.
Mercedes Schneider explains the folly here.
The real winner in this bad deal is TFA and its recruiter.
Note to state education departments: Don’t do stuff that makes you look foolish.
You read that right. Kansas is a state that has cut taxes and cut its education budget repeatedly and whose teachers are paid poorly. It is under court order to finance its schools adequately. You may recall that former Governor Sam Brownback imposed a far-right policy of cutting taxes to “grow the economy” while starving the schools and other public services. The experiment failed. Trump appointed him the
“Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.”
So now, because of low salaries, Kansas has teacher shortages. The remedy? A lavish contract with TFA to bring in temp teachers.
The Kansas Legislature agreed to pay education nonprofit Teach For America more than $500,000 this year for a pilot program to recruit 12 teachers to the state.
But the national organization only recruited three teachers for the state in 2018. All of them were placed in Kansas City, Kansas, where the local school district pays their salaries and benefits on top of another $3,000 per teacher per year to Teach For America.
Meanwhile, the state is still on the hook to pay the nonprofit $270,000 for training and recruiting teachers with no guarantee they will work in Kansas schools.
Mischel Miller, director of teacher licensure and accreditation at the Kansas State Department of Education, said the contract was intended to help fill a teacher shortage in the state.
“Our intention,” Miller said in an interview, “is that those dollars would be used for Kansas teachers.”
Yet the Kansas City, Kansas school district says it only hired three Teach For America instructors this year. Two other recruits started teaching in the district last year before Kansas hired the organization.
The state education department says Teach For America told the department it recruited all five of those teachers this year. The department is currently drafting a $270,000 contract to pay the organization.
A budget document from the Kansas Legislative Research Department dated Oct. 10 states, “Teachers will be paid a salary of $36,000.” But that money actually goes just to recruiting, training and placing each teacher.
That totals $180,000 from the state for recruiting five teachers, plus $80,000 to pay for the salary, benefits and travel expenses of a recruiter and $10,000 for one day of professional development. The rest of the money appropriated during the legislative session, totaling $250,000, will go back to the state’s general fund to be appropriated for the next fiscal year.
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?
Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas nearly bankrupted the State with his theory that cutting taxes would cause a huge economic boom. Taxes were cut but there was no boom. Meanwhile, the schools of Kansas were underfunded.
The state Supreme Court ordered the legislature to fix school funding. The legislature tinkered. Back and forth. Yesterday the Kansas Supreme Court ordered the legislature again to meet their constitutional obligation to fund the schools.
“The ruling also ordered a fairer distribution of state funding, to ensure that students in poor districts have the same educational opportunities as their peers in wealthier communities.
“The majority of justices supported giving the Legislature until June, but no more time than that, for a final fix on state funding of schools.
“That will give lawmakers, who will reconvene in January, a full regular session to try to come up with a school-finance law that meets court requirements, negating the need for a special session.
“The court is ordering that a new funding law be crafted before April 30 so there’s time for the justices to review it before the annual budget and the schools’ money runs out.
“Once legislation is enacted, the State will have to satisfactorily demonstrate to this court by June 30, 2018, that its proposed remedy brings the state’s education financing system into compliance with Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution regarding the violations identified, i.e., both adequacy and equity,” the court ruling said.
“After that date we will not allow ourselves to be placed in the position of being complicit actors in the continuing deprivation of a constitutionally adequate and equitable education owed to hundreds of thousands of Kansas school children.”
“Three of the seven justices – Lee Johnson, Eric Rosen and Dan Biles – wrote or joined in dissents saying they want the Legislature to have to move faster.
“I would direct the State to tell us no later than the end of this year precisely how the legislature intends to fix its years-long breach of the Kansas Constitution,” Johnson wrote.
“The case, called Gannon v. Kansas, has been going on since November of 2010.
“On Monday, the court specifically held that a school-finance law the Legislature passed earlier this year is unconstitutional.”
Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/local/education/article176605486.html#storylink=cpy
While driving yesterday, I listened to a panel discussion on taxes led by correspondent Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC.
With the usual left-right line-up of guests, they debated whether the Trump tax plan would benefit the rich or everyone.
The man from the right was part of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. He insisted that massive tax cuts would be very beneficial for middle-income and poor Americans. The man from the left (center, really) disagreed and insisted that the big winners were the rich.
Then the center-left man said that the governor of Kentucky tried massive tax cuts and it backfired. He quickly was corrected (or corrected himself) and said it was Kansas, not Kentucky.
That’s where Governor Sam Brownback cut taxes, predicting an economic boom–that never happened. Instead, the state is facing a budget hole of nearly $900 million, and even Republicans recognize they must raise taxes.
But Mr. Right winger jumps in and says “the Kansas tax cuts would have worked, but the courts forced the state to spend massive amounts on K-12 schools, which gobbled up all the savings from the tax cuts.”
I almost jumped out of my car. I knew that the Kansas high court ordered the state to fund the schools, but the state has not yet done it.
So Mr. Right winger was wrong on two counts, but no one corrected him:
1. The state did not spend the non-existent savings produced by tax cuts on the schools, because there were none;
2. The courts were trying to enforce the state constitution and demanding equitable funding, which Mr. RW clearly thought was unnecessary.
Having flat out lied, he got away with it because no one else knew the facts. There was no bonanza from the tax cuts, and the K-12 schools have not yet received a dollar of new money.
See here:
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article161585073.html
The great puzzle in Kansas is how the State got such a thoughtful Supreme Court, one that actually cares about education.
Kansas is in a deep budget hole because Governor Sam Brownback cut taxes repeatedly, in the belief that low taxes would produce economic growth. Only it didn’t, and the schools are in big trouble.
The court has repeatedly ordered the state legislature to produce a school funding plan that meets the requirements of the state constitution. After years of budget cuts, the state’s schools are in dire need of money. At one point, legislators grumbled ominous threats about how they might shake up the court to undermine its authority.
But now the lawyers for the state are in court, and the justices are insistent on a commitment to a fair funding plan.
Attorneys for the state and the Legislature faced a barrage of questions from skeptical Kansas Supreme Court justices Tuesday scrutinizing the Legislature’s school finance plan.
Solicitor general Stephen McAllister and Jeff King, a former Senate vice president, sought to fend off claims from school districts that Kansas is doing too little to make up for several years in which budget cuts and funding stagnation became the norm and school budgets fell behind inflation.
The justices repeatedly interrupted their arguments to seek deeper clarification of calculations the state cited to justify adding $293 million to school funding over the next two years. And they showed some interest in potentially retaining jurisdiction once they have issued their ruling, to ensure the state complies.
McAllister and King stood their ground, arguing the state’s solution meets the court’s previous demands.
“S.B. 19 makes substantial efforts to improve the funding,” McAllister said, using the plan’s legislative bill number.
Digging into the math
In the span of Gannon v. Kansas’ seven-year history, district court judges and the state Supreme Court have repeatedly struck down Kansas’ school funding schemes as unconstitutional.
Among the justices’ concerns in this latest round of the legal battle was a statistical analysis of student achievement that the Legislature generated this spring and used to extrapolate what statewide funding should be. The calculation was based on spending levels at 41 school districts found to be performing well on certain academic outcomes.
“I understand the math,” Justice Dan Biles told McAllister. “I need to know what makes that reliable and valid, and I’m not seeing it here.”
‘I understand the math. I need to know what makes that reliable and valid, and I’m not seeing it here.’ — Justice Dan Biles
The justices homed in on methodological particulars, such as the use of averages instead of medians and whether the omission of budget changes at six school districts could have skewed the results. And they questioned whether lawmakers had cherry-picked portions of past school finance studies to minimize the state’s financial obligations.
Justice Eric Rosen asked about the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund education through a system that allows school boards to elect to spend more. The concern is that poorer school districts are less likely to do so because of the burden on local taxpayers.
“What happens to those children?” he said, referring to students in those areas.
When Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas, he was all fired up with a simple yet radical idea: Cut taxes and businesses will expand and the economy will grow. State revenues dropped dramatically. School funding suffered deep cuts. Social services of all kinds lost money. And now the legislature is repudiating Brownback’s tax cuts. They voted to increase taxes. Brownback, having learned nothing, vetoed the budget. The legislature overrode his veto.
Farewell, Governor Brownback. And good riddance to failed ideas.
Diane Ravitch's blog 