Can technology fix what ails American education? Terry Moe and John Chubb think so, and they’ve outlined their ideas in a new book, Liberated Learning.

Here are some excerpts from a recent Wall Street Journal book review.

What can online learning do?

“They think that technology — particularly online education — holds two potentially dramatic benefits. One is simply a general improvement in education as students from “anywhere — poor inner cities, remote rural areas, even at home” gain access to high-caliber instruction. More important, the authors say, is technology’s ability to destroy the political barriers that prevent education reform.”

The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is an example of online learning in action:

“As for results, even though the school’s demographics are average or even below average, Cyber was rated as having made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in No Child Left Behind, hitting all 21 educational targets. By contrast, barely half of Pennsylvania’s bricks-and-mortar schools received the AYP rating. On SAT tests, Cyber students scored 97 points higher than the state average.”

What do teacher unions think of the idea?

“Teachers unions, of course, are appalled. They know that “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” Messrs. Moe and Chubb write.”

Still, the authors hae high hopes for online schools:

“The authors also believe that, by allowing the door to be cracked open with online schools, the unions won’t be able to shut it. With the encouragement of students’ parents, millions of children will rush in, overcoming current union-imposed enrollment caps. Since labor costs keep rising, school districts, hard-pressed for funds, will naturally turn to technology as a way to get more for less.”

More for less? Bring it on.

Are Kansas Schools Overrated?

The results of state versus national assessments would make you wonder.  See also a publication from the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, “Does Kansas Grade Itself on the Curve?“

How Many Teachers Does Your School Employ?

How many employees of your local school districts are actually teachers? Perhaps not as many as you think.

Here’s some information from USD 259:

“Over a period of 12 school years, the number of students per employee has declined from 13.7 to 10.9. In percentage terms, that’s 20.4%. This increasing number of employees, both absolute and in terms of the number of employees per student, is expensive.”

Unless teachers do everything in a school–balance the books, take out the trash, and so forth–it will have non-teacher employees. But how many of such employees does it need?

I suspect that charter schools, as a group, get by with fewer non-teachers. One reason is that they have to actively appeal to parents, who may prefer maximizing the use of teachers over other staff. Another is that they tend to be smaller than traditional public schools.

Labor Union or Professional Organization?

Is the Kansas National Educational Association a professional organization that fosters higher standards and best practices for its members? Or is it a labor union simply out for more money?

There’s nothing wrong with a union seeking higher wages. But if an organization is a union, we should recognize that its first allegegiance its to the well-being of its members–or depending on the union, its leadership–rather than anyone else.

Take a look at what the KNEA wants.

Who’s Being Crossed-Examined?

Being able to ask public officials questions in open meetings is an essential part of good government. Bob Weeks, writing at Wichita Liberty, says that the board of USD 259 could use some improvement in how it conducts its meetings. In particular, be sure to click through to the video he links to. The defensiveness on display is remarkable.

Tutoring for Profit–and Learning

The March 2, 2009 edition of Forbes contains a short, informative article about tutoring, and specifically Kumon.

The company, which started in Japan, entered the U.S. market in 1983, and has had shortage of finding customers here, the magazine reports.

Why? Schools have, for various reasons, not satisfied the needs and wants of the people who should be their primary customers–parents of young children. So the parents become customers of Kumon also. Of course that means they pay twice–once in taxes to the school, and once in cash to Kumon.

Some more facts about the company:

- Its enrollment has doubled since 2001. (Can you say the same thing about schools?)

-  It serves 194,000 students.

- It did $81.4 million in business in the U.S. last year, selling two-month long classes for $85 to $115.

- While some schools change their philosophy every year or so, Kumon’s approach hasn’t changed since the company was founded 50 years ago, in 1958. It stresses fundamental math skills, avoids calculators, and uses rote drills.

- The company is privately owned, which may contribute to its unchanging approach.

- Clearly the public schools don’t satisfy some taxpayers. The article focuses on a Ridgewood,  New Jersey, where property taxes average $12,500 a year.

Source: “Remedial Math,” Forbes.

Interesting Facts on American Education

The National Center for Education Statistics, a unit of the U.S. Department of Education, recently released The Condition of Education 2009, which is  filled with interesting information. I haven’t read the whole document, but if you’re interested in education, it’s worth looking at.

Here are some items that stand out from the full report. Page numbers refer to the page in the file, which is not the same as the page number in the document.

EARLY EDUCATION

A majority of 3 and 4-year old children (55 percent) are now in preschool. This contrasts with 20 percent in 1970. (page 5)

COLLEGE

Two in three 18 and 19-year olds are in college. This contrasts with fewer than half in 1970.  (page 5)

HOME SCHOOLING

The number of children in home schooling has increased dramatically, from 850,000 in 1999 to 1.5 million in 2007. That’s an increase of 76 percent. They now comprise 2.9 percent of all school-aged children  (page 5 and 14 and following).

PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Roughly 11% of students are in private schools (page 46)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

There are many other measurements in the report, including those dealing with student performance and school finance.

This page lists many different ways of getting to the report, or portions of it.

You can browse through the information here.

You can view or download the entire document (some 300+ pages and 4MB) in a PDF file if you click here.

You can read a shorter (41-page) version of the PDF file here.

Sitting on Cash they Can’t Use

Paul Soutar, an investigative journalist recently hired by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, has uncovered some interesting numbers that might be part of the solution to the concerns of school administrators and taxpayers alike.

Soutar looked at numbers on the KSDE web site. Each school district has to allocate its money into a variety of funds. The following numbers, taken from this link on the Flint Hills site, give the historical perspective on some of the largest unencumbered balances in the largest funds. (I believe the original data is here, though be ware that some links at KSDE do go bad after a while.)

Fiscal Year	Capital Outlay	Special Education	Food Services	Contingency Reserve	Total	Annual Change
2000-2001	236,838,411	86,131,293	31,018,006	40,112,012	394,099,722
2001-2002	231,072,221	88,718,083	31,704,918	60,256,269	411,751,491	4.5%
2002-3003	242,160,862	109,042,721	34,557,624	74,345,417	460,106,624	11.7%
2003-2004	306,060,049	130,346,929	33,259,172	80,118,210	549,784,360	19.5%
2004-2005	320,989,321	131,914,785	34,399,477	80,773,479	568,077,062	3.3%
2005-2006	363,830,181	127,419,601	33,854,143	96,626,234	621,730,159	9.4%
2006-2007	382,076,795	145,919,148	37,939,317	106,147,726	672,082,986	8.1%
2007-2008	449,291,653	163,666,930	36,928,843	119,016,020	768,903,446	14.4%
7-Year Change	89.7%	90.0%	19.1%	196.7%	95.1%

In other words, schools have a lot of funds that they could be tapping, and the amount of money has increased from year to year.  KSDE gives the following guidance, which I’ve formatted for easier reading:

* There are no definitive guidelines as to how much money is to be kept in the Capital Outlay Fund-it should be dependent on the size of the district, the age of the buildings, renovations needed, the status of equipment, and numerous other factors.

* There are no requirements for the Special Education Fund cash balance either.

* The Food Service Fund cash balance, however, must not exceed three months’ average expenditures and

* the balance in the Contingency Reserve Fund must not be greater than four percent of the General Fund for years to the 2005-06 school year. For the 2005-06 school year and thereafter, the limit was raised to six percent.

Consistent with these guidelines, the balances in the food service funds have increased the least of these commonly observed funds. The most growth has occurred in the category with the broadest latitude, the contingency reserve funds.

You can also download a spreadsheet file that gives the cash balances, for each fund, for each school district in the state, though only for the 2007-08 school year. The file contains not only the funds mentioned above, but many others, including professional development, summer school, and “extraordinary school.” It also lets you see how much each district has, on a per-FTE basis, when you add up all the funds. The amounts range from $321 per student in USD 438 Skyline to $19,469 in USD 442 Nehama. Actually, USD 422 Greensburg beats them all at $8…. but that’s largely due to the need to rebuild after the tornado. The average district (mean value) has $2,785 per student in reserves.

In a report that accompanies the files, Soutar sums up the total unencumbered balances at $1.36 billion (as of the latest numbers on July 1, 2008). He says that if the Legislature loosened some of the restrictions currently in place, districts could switch money from one fund to another, and thus address some of their financial needs.

He also points out that state law has a spend-it-or-lose-it provision that applies to general funds. This provision could lead to some unwise spending.

Two days after his initial report, Soutar reported that districts can in fact spend some of their unencumbered funds–though only in the contingency reserve funds. Here’s an e-mail on the subject:

—————–

School Districts Permitted to Tap $119 Million in Contingency Funds

As the Kansas legislature continues to discuss options for balancing the 2010 budget, some members are taking a hard look at unencumbered cash balances held by school districts and asking whether districts are able to dip into those funds.

Total unencumbered cash balances totaled $1.36 billion scattered across 27 separate funds as of June 30, 2008. Most of the money in those funds can’t be tapped unless the Legislature revises the rules, but one of those funds is immediately accessible and portions of other funds may be as well.

Dale Dennis, Deputy Commissioner of the Kansas Department of Education, confirmed that district contingency reserve funds are available. According to Kansas statute 72-6426, district boards can use or transfer contingency reserve funds to meet financial contingencies as determined by the board. School districts statewide had $119 million in their contingency reserve funds as of July 1, 2008. Contingency reserve cash statewide has grown 197% since 2001.

School districts also have a special reserve fund which collectively held about $70 million as of June 30, 2008 but districts are limited in its use according to Dennis. Special reserve cash is a sort of self insurance fund set aside to pay claims, judgments, expenses related to health care, disability income benefits, group life insurance, uninsured losses, workers compensation insurance and workers compensation claims according to Kansas statute 72-8249.

The capital outlay fund statewide held $449 million but, according to Dennis, much of that also can’t be touched. According to state law once a tax is levied for a specific purpose the revenues can’t be diverted to a different purpose.

“When we make a levy for a fund like capital outlay we can’t use it for something else,” Dennis said. “We told the taxpayers what we were collecting it for and we’d be lying to them if we used it for something different.”

Some capital outlay funds, however, are not collected through a mil levy but transferred from the General Fund and can be transferred back before June 30, but such transfers are rare according to Dennis. Money left in a district’s general fund at the end of the fiscal year is subtracted from what the district receives from the state the next year. Districts are reluctant to leave money in the general fund and prefer to transfer it to other funds rather than lose the money. It’s unknown how much of the $1.36 billion came from such transfers and therefore likely eligible to be returned to the General Fund, but Legislators have a strong incentive to find the answer.

The legislature has in years past authorized specific transfers beyond what the law allows and some unencumbered cash funds may hold opportunities to meet budget shortfalls if the legislature is willing to write exceptions to current rules.

“The legislature can propose any legislation they want to,” said Mark Dick, executive vice president of Allen, Gibbs & Houlik, an accounting firm that audits state reports. “But there are probably going to be legal hurdles to overcome.”

Many funds were created so legislators can monitor spending for specific programs. These funds are like a fish trap. What swims in can’t swim out.   “Each session they seem to make it more complicated,” said Dennis. “We end up amending it slightly – a little here, a little there and eventually it’s extremely difficult to follow.”

State aid to schools has increased $959 million over the last five years while enrollment is essentially flat. Many legislators are sympathetic to taxpayers who will not accept tax increases on top of private sector layoffs and a worsening economy. With K-12 education accounting for 51% of state spending, legislators are hard pressed to balance the budget as required by the state’s constitution without cuts to education. Some legislators say it comes down to asking school districts to share in the solution to balance the budget or to raise taxes on an already stressed population.

More Federal Money

From the Lawrence Journal-World comes word that Kansas schools will get some federal funding:

The U.S. Department of Education announced that $301 million is now available for Kansas under the federal economic stimulus program.

“The $301 million Kansas will receive today is part of the single largest boost in education funding in recent history,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

The article also contains some interesting but not complete information:

Lawmakers cut per-pupil spending for public schools from $4,433 to $4,280. The federal funding was needed to get per pupil funding to that $4,280 level, said Deputy Education Commissioner Dale Dennis

That’s $47 per student, or a 1.1 percent decrease. When state taxpayers are losing their jobs, that’s not a very large haircut. And it’s even less when you consider that the $4,280 is not all of the state money that school districts get. That’s just the base amount. They also get money for being too small, being too big, having students who are from poor families, and so forth.

Open Public Records

Sherry Chisenhall, an editor at the Wichita Eagle, comments the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy for its determination to bring to light public county records. The Center has meet resistance from some counties in its efforts to secure some records.  (For background, see this PDF file from the Center’s web site.)

Chisenhall says, in part:

A reader left a voice mail for me late last week, asking me to share some thoughts on a project by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy that sought property tax records from 105 Kansas counties. The gist of the message was that the organization didn’t really have a right to the records — or was doing something wrong by “raising a stink” at being denied records — because it is not a news organization, but is a think tank that supports a specific point of view.

My reaction: Good for FHC. Doesn’t matter who you are or why you want public records. They’re public. Period.

You can read the rest of her remarks, here. While the records aren’t directly related to education, the principle of disclosure should be followed by schools as well.

Should You Get Paid Just for Showing Up?

The following op-ed comes from the John Locke Foundation, an organization in North Carolina. While it references the situation in that state, the logic applies just aoubt anywhere, including Kansas.

Merit Pay For Teachers Makes Sense

Andy Taylor

School will soon be out for summer, but the issue of education reform will not.

Over the next few months, President Obama will roll out a number of proposals designed to improve public schools. Some of these will look like the usual reflexive effort, generated by left-leaning education “experts,” to throw money at the problem. But others, interestingly enough, are worth supporting. Obama has some encouraging ideas about expanding charter schools, for instance.

I want to focus on another idea kicked around in the White House: merit pay for teachers. This does not sound like a particularly radical idea — after all, the most activist Democratic president since LBJ is intrigued by it.

The North Carolina Association of Educators, however, has drawn a line in the sand on the issue. The union is vehemently against salary that is differentiated based upon performance. To this point, they have prevailed upon their allies in state government to protect against the policy.

Currently, with the exception of cost-of-living adjustments added by counties, teacher pay in North Carolina varies along just two dimensions. The first makes sense. Teachers are given pay increases based upon the training and education they receive — essentially getting a graduate degree or becoming certified by a national board.

Some, like economist Jacob Vigdor of Duke, are skeptical about the amount of value these experiences add, but since they are costly and voluntary the teachers who go through them are presumably more motivated and capable than their colleagues. At the very least, these experiences signal merit.

The second dimension does not make sense, however. Borrowing from Woody Allen’s maxim that “80 percent of success is showing up,” the state believes teachers should be paid for sticking around. This principle wouldn’t be so bad if longevity were earned and teachers weren’t tenured. But, largely protected from dismissal, our public school teachers generate raises by punching a clock rather than doing their job well.

Performance, therefore, isn’t incentivized much. Poor teachers slide by. They don’t serve the interests of their students or the taxpayer, and they take advantage of the good will and professional integrity of their more talented and hardworking colleagues.

They are protected by public policy and NCAE — an organization that purports to promote the interests of all teachers but that really works only for the worst.

This is particularly troubling when you consider that aside from fundamental biological, social, and economic characteristics — Is the child disabled? Is the child from a broken home? Are the childs parents unemployed? — teacher ability explains most of the variation in student accomplishment.

The research shows matters like moderate reductions in class size, the presence of an assistant, and the availability of technology have minimal effects. You have a good teacher, the students progress. Put a bad teacher into a high-tech classroom with an assistant and relatively few students, and there’s little to nothing in the way of development.

The Obama administration is going to call for small merit raises and financial incentives to get teachers to work in rural and poorer schools. Gov. Beverly Perdue has iterated this. Guilford County has its “Mission Possible” program, although, again, this is really just a one-time bonus for teachers who go to work in low-performing schools. But we can do more than this. We can reward achievement systematically.

Salary structures need to be overhauled with annual raises to base salaries given exclusively for merit. So as to have confidence we are rewarding excellence, we should gather as much data on teacher performance from as many sources as possible.

Direct classroom observation and general assessment by principals or assistant principals are critical. Parents care the most about a child’s academic progress, and their views about the teacher’s performance should be taken into consideration as well.

We now put students through a variety of tests — the “end-of-grade” for grades 3-8, prekindergarten screening, etc. The previous year’s results can be used as a benchmark against which to compare this year’s and, in turn, provide a measure of a student’s advancement and the value added by her teacher.

We already have much of this information. It can all be done with little additional effort and administrative cost.

With these reforms, performance will be rewarded. Talented individuals — or those who generally look at salary ceilings rather than floors — will no longer be discouraged from entering the profession because they can be certain of earning more in other fields. Students and parents will benefit, as will taxpayers who will receive greater return on investment. The losers? NCAE and inferior teachers, whose pay will lag that of their colleagues.

Sounds like a good deal to me.