Cutting School Costs
From A to Z
Q.
I get tired of hearing people gripe about their taxes, a large part of which
goes for public schools. But nobody ever seems to make any concrete suggestions
for how we could cut school spending in order to hold the line on taxes, or
maybe even (gasp!) reduce them. All I hear about is spending more money, not
less. Now, I don't want to see teachers take a cut in pay. But we have to start
somewhere with cost-cutting. Where?
Educators are not responsible for securing the resources
they need to do their jobs, the way people in a private business or running a
home usually are. When you're spending other people's money, the mindset is
just different.
How many times have you heard about someone appearing before
your school board and suggesting tangible ways they could cut school spending?
Maybe never? That's the problem. The apathy and ignorance of school spending is
why costs per pupil, even after adjusted for inflation, have more than doubled
in this generation of students.
Let's face it: we, the people, have been pretty lousy bosses
in the spending accountability area.
So it's up to we, the people, to act like the parent, and "make
schools do as they're told." "And that means cut costs before we bankrupt
ourselves. Nobody likes the idea of cutting teacher jobs, so let's concentrate
on non-classroom expenditures.
Educators may wriggle. They may whine. But it's time for the
rest of us to step in like a determined mama and give school spending a
business bath.
It's as easy as ABC:
Administration
It may be
time to elect school superintendents instead of having them appointed, since
elected officials are usually more cognizant of the impact on the citizens of
each decision to increase spending and, thus, taxes. Also, it's time to let
noneducators compete for top school management jobs in school districts and
state government. Good management is what is needed, much more than
subject-matter expertise in education.
Bureaucracy
Let's go
back to "zero-based budgeting" which reduces opportunities for featherbedding
and other budgetary excesses, and across-the-board minor nonteaching staff
reductions just to get a handle on the increase in expenditures. Reduction in
Force (RIF) of 5% of the educrats - employees of government agencies that focus
on education -- in our state education department and the Educational Service
Units, or ESUs.
Contracting
No-bid
contracts . . . cousin-cousin deals . . . nepotism . . . we're spending
hundreds of millions on education with very little outside oversight. Whenever
you have human beings working together with money at stake, you will have
waste, fraud and corruption. Look at all the civil litigation between private
companies regarding contracts. It's astounding that we aren't demanding better
oversight of the billions of dollars in school spending. Let's get
investigative audits going, enact "sunshine laws" to expose business
relationships, and demand more information from our schools about their vendors.
Debt service
Those
"spending per pupil" figures of $7,000 or $8,000 are typically just
general-fund, annual operating expenditures. If you add off-budget items such as debt service on
new buildings on top of that, in many districts, the true spending per pupil
tops $10,000 a year. Interest can add significantly to the real cost of a new
school building or remodeling, but educrats rarely mention it. Let's make 'em,
and make sure every proposal for a new building includes open, honest financial
information about the long-term costs of going into debt to build that
building. Then maybe smaller-scale remodeling will look more palateable than a
whole new building.
Expense accounts
Districts
should have to publish a detailed list of employee expenses, including
entertainment, travel costs, destinations, hotels, per diems, purposes and
itemized "other" costs. They should put them on their websites. Why
not? We bought them those websites, and the computers they use to keep track of
those expenses. Let's see where the dollars go.
Facilities
Quick: do
you have any idea how much your school district's property is worth? Very few
people do. In most cases, school buildings are worth a ton, and in some
neighborhoods, they stand idle. Districts don't like selling school buildings
because they're afraid (gasp!) competition might start up in them, meaning
private schools. Well, so what? Competition is GOOD. Isn't it? If it's not,
then OK, let's cancel all school football, basketball and baseball seasons.
Gotcha! But honestly: what about selling off excess and idle property? In
addition, schools should publish the fair-market value of their buildings, land
and equipment, and details of their maintenance, utilities and landscaping
spending, in a way that taxpayers can understand.
Grants
Grants are
morphing schools away from educational pursuits and toward providing politicized
social services. Let's see grant applications posted on school websites. You
may be shocked at the lack of educational intent and measurable goals . . .
big-dollar drug ed grants with no specified, distinct, measurable goal for
reducing drug and alcohol use among kids, or that the program they want to fund
even works, for example. Just that they'll try, and they hope it does. Sigh.
Health care costs
Fringe
benefits represent another one-fourth to one-third of salaries that we must pay
for. "Bennies" are like a thick frosting on the salary cake. But we all know
about skyrocketing health-care costs. Everybody's doing cost containment and
shifting more of the load on employees; why shouldn't schools do it, too? Let's
see what deductibles and premiums are, so we can compare them to private-sector
insurance plans. Again, this information should be posted on district websites.
Since it's not, it looks like they're trying to have their cake and eat it,
too.
Inventory
Most school
districts are wide open to waste, theft and fraud because of poor inventory
control methods. Are paper, books, games, furniture, ed tech parts, and other
stuff going into the dumpster instead of being used or at least sold at
garage-sale prices? The end of every school year is "dumpster diving"
season . . . the retrieval by scavengers of items school districts have thrown
away rather than get caught featherbedding. Sighhhhhh. Districts also literally
throw away good items through their "service centers," and if there's a report
listing even garage-sale equivalents, the public never sees it.
Juking
University
of Nebraska running backs should have such deceptive moves. The educrats ooze
that property tax rates are not going up . . . but increases in real-estate
valuations produce more money for schools, anyway. That's because it's an
equation: the tax rate, or mill levy, times the amount of money your home is
worth. So even if the tax rate (mill levy) set by school boards remain the
same, the near-universal increase in property valuations produces more money
for schools, and often substantially so. Similarly, educrats ooze that teacher
salaries are abysmally low . . . never mentioning their 185-day work
"year" versus 235 days for the rest of us, so that actually, their
salaries are better than comparable private-sector jobs. No more ooze. Tell us
straight.
Key
Put parents
back in control of the money. Every additional state and federal tax dollar
sent into local schools drives the stake deeper into the heart of local
control. The farther away from the source of the funding you are, the less
power you have. So the funding power needs to be yanked back from Washington,
D.C., and state capitals, to the local yokels. The reason private schools do a
better job is that parents have directly invested in the operation. Public
schools will never do the job they should without this accountability key.
Long-distance phone bills
Just
publish 'em. Are there calls to Las Vegas and phone sex lines? Were they placed
from the teachers' lounge . . . or the superintendent's office? If not, good.
If so . . . uh, oh.
Mismanagement
What
percentage of school staff have been dismissed in the last year? Zero? Isn't
that a red flag, if your district employs lots of people? Find out the
comparable turnover in a similarly-sized private business. Are educators so
perfect? What percentage of the computer equipment your district owns or leases
is in working order? How much are discrimination and sexual harassment
settlements costing your district? How much does your district have in cash
reserves and why? What percentage of your school board's votes are unanimous?
If it's close to 100%, are they serving as watchdogs of the public trust and
public dollar . . . or a fat, lazy rubber stamp likely to tolerate poor
management out of sheer apathy or powerlessness?
Nonmedical special ed
The
so-called "learning disability" category has exploded. That's why
special education spending has exploded, and yet there's a SPED teacher
shortage. But in the vast majority of cases, there's no medical diagnosis
behind the "LD" label; it's just that the student doesn't read very well. A
growing army of critics believe the way that schools teach reading in the early
grades, which is not based purely on phonics, is why so many children are
getting labeled "LD" and causing so many special-ed staffers to be hired, in
order to try to teach them to read - when it was the wrong method that caused
the problem, not anything "wrong" with the student. Each district should
publish its numbers for each SPED category. You may find that 80% of your SPED
kids don't have a medical diagnosis for a physical or mental disability, and
shouldn't be SPED at all. Sigh. Let's get them out of there, and save beaucoup
bucks, by teaching reading with phonics-only methods in the early grades.
Open up the books
A simple
and effective way to provide accountability would be to publish the district's
checkbook on the district's website. This should be a searchable data base so
we can see what vendors are being paid for what items. Each warrant should be
itemized. It's OK to list paychecks by job title rather than name so that
nobody gets embarrassed. But the principle is "transparency" with the budget. It's
our money, and we deserve to see where it's going.
Professional development
I've sat in
on some staff development workshops and inservices at local districts and the
ESUs. All I can say is: oh, my . . . and we're PAYING for this? What a big
waste of time most of this stuff is. To whittle it down, staff development
costs should be itemized for taxpayers, including costs of providing substitute
teachers. Agendas, outlines and speaker biographies should be published, too. Most
of the rest of us have far less "free" professional development, and if we need
or want more, we read books on our own dime, on our own time, to get better at
what we do. Why shouldn't teachers?
Quality measurements
Let's not
stroke out over standardized test scores, although they're a good
accountability tool. Quality goes far beyond test scores, though. Let's have
some stats that educators don't like to trumpet: dropouts; how many seniors
don't graduate on time; what percentage of high-school and middle-school
students read below grade level; what percentage of high-school students don't
take calculus, chemistry and physics; what percentage of enrolled students are
exempted from, or don't take, standardized tests; what percentage of your
district's high school graduates have to take one or more remedial classes when
they get to college and at what cost to their parents and taxpayers, who
subsidize colleges or at least the public ones and therefore are paying twice
for the same education. . . .
Retirement costs
It's
probably time to roll back the largesse of the 1990s, in which many states set
up early retirement plans for teachers. A typical plan: if you work as a
teacher for 30 years and reach age 55, you can retire with your full pension,
and still have 10 years of energy to work at a job and "double-dip." With
people living longer these days, a teacher's pension may be "worth" $1 million.
Yet the reason for cushy pensions was supposed to be to lure good teachers to
stay in teaching 'til retirement. Now we have all the experienced veterans
taking early retirement, and the beginners don't have leaders to look up to.
Not smart. Too costly. Let's roll it back.
Salaries
Each
district, the state education department and the ESUs should all have to
publish their salary schedules by job title. Again, that's what the websites
are for. This is eye-popping info that taxpayers need to know.
Time management
Minute for
minute, less than 50% of the typical school day is spent on core academics in
the classroom, the good stuff parents want. The rest of the time goes for
passing periods, the huge shift into nonacademic activities like guidance class
and "life lab," fund-raisers, social services, lunch, recess, death
ed, drug ed, gang ed, Mr. Ed, assemblies, holiday celebrations, "closing
activities," and so on. Couldn't some or most of that optional stuff, that
is not required by state law, be moved to after-school time? And shouldn't optional,
nonacademic activities be paid for by user fees from those parents who want
them for their children?
Union contracts
Silver
bullet: arrange for a smart, tough, experienced labor lawyer to go over the
labor union contract and bird-dog giveaways and frou-frou. Better yet, hire
them to negotiate instead of school-district pantywaists who cave in, year
after year. Remember, school administrators are "bargaining" with their buddies
on the other side of the table. How can we realistically expect them to
represent us with their full strength? This is a huge problem and a huge
conflict of interest. And the union contract should be posted on the district
website, if nothing else, to quell rumors that a certain teacher's breast
augmentation surgery was paid for with tax dollars because it was included
under fringe benefits in the union contract, and stuff like that.
Vehicles
Districts
and education agencies should list what vehicles they own and lease, how much
they are worth, who is driving them, and what happens in the off-season. That
goes for buses, vans, and district-supplied autos for administrators. Do they really
need a Navigator? Why not a Civic?
Websites
Find out
what your district's website address is, if they have one. Look at the PR
schmooze on there. Are they serving the students, parents and taxpayers . . .
or themselves? This should be a great accountability tool. Make 'em use it. The
webmaster should report to the elected school board, not the administration.
Xerox
There's a
thing called "one-color photocopying" but school districts don't know
about it. Instead, their printing bills are sky-high. Why must they have color
brochures on heavy paper stock, and newsletters and notes from poohbahs on
color letterheads day after day? Why must they have expensive calendars given
free to the public? Why must they have a public relations budget that exceeds City
Hall's? Why paid newspaper ads, and paid ads in the symphony program? Why can't
they get with the '00s and publish this stuff for cheaps on their websites?
Year-round education
If the
drumbeat hasn't come to your town yet, it will. Hold on to your hips: this is
the biggest money-grab yet. It's been tried and booted from coast to coast, and
it's terrible for kids. The evidence is clear, both here and abroad: there is
absolutely no connection between more time in school, and higher student
achievement. This is all about money - more for schools, less for you, and a
pretty good chance that kids will go even more "school sour" than they already
are. Fend it off, or you'll be sorry.
Zillions
That's how
many other ways we could cut costs in schools if we would just come out of our
stupor and try. What can you add to the suggestion box?
Homework: Which one of the above will you
select to be your personal cause in your neck o' the woods?