What we spend to educate our children in Virginia

According to the Virginia government $ 4,714,536,188 was spent on public K-12 education for the 2010/2011 school year.  That is four billion with a "B". 

According to the the 2011 US Census there are 1,574,060 people aged 5 to 19 in Virginia which I am using as a rough approximation of the total number of school aged children in the state.

That means the state of Virginia spends $2995.14 per student.

I took it a step further and looked at spending per pupil for the Williamsburg James City County School Division (WJCC) and the York County School Division (YCS).  Those are two of the local divisions around where I live.  Each local school division gets money from its local government for education.  To calculate these numbers I took the total student enrollment for 2010 and the final budgeted amount for 2010.  I got the information from both of the school division websites from various documents.  WJCC spent $10382.92 per student and YCS spent $9826.28 per student.    

The numbers from the local divisions include the money from the state of Virginia. 
The spending by school divisions incorporates more than just instruction.  It also includes transportation, administration, athletics, nursing, special education, facilities, and other supportive tasks.

I am obviously making some large generalizations by not drilling down into more specifics about the numbers; however, I do feel that this gives a good overview of the investment made by the local communities and the state on behalf of children and their education. 

Sources:
http://dpb.virginia.gov/budget/buddoc11/agency.cfm?agency=197
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk
http://www.wjcc.k12.va.us/

http://yorkcountyschools.org/

We already have school choice

Last time I talked a little bit about what school choice might look like.  Today I wanted to mention another aspect of school choice, the fact that it already exists. 

Look no further than real estate prices for evidence.  Houses with good schools cost more because people are willing to pay more to get into those good schools.  One local example here in Virginia is a development called Kiln Creek.  It straddles two local government jurisdictions, York County and Newport News.  I compared similar sized houses that I believe are no more than a half a mile apart in the same neighborhood.  What do you think the price difference is between the one in the better school district versus the one in the not as good school district.  It is a $100,000 difference.  I recognize that other factors influence a consumers decision to purchase a house beyond just schools, but a quick glance at many real estate search websites will show that schools is an option that consumers can look at when reviewing houses. 

The problem with this kind of school choice is that it favors the wealthy and affluent significantly more than the poor because it is far easier for them to move into areas with excellent school systems.

This begs the question, are good schools good on their own or are they good because they attract the best students?

What do you think?  Is this a fair assessment of how things work today in our society?  Thank you for reading.  

A friend recently commented that he wanted the ability to choose where his kid goes to school.  He wanted to be a consumer.  He wanted a marketplace of school options that would allow him to pick where he could send his children to be educated. It sounds good on the surface right? It is what we do each and every day when it comes to consumer products.  We look for the option that best meet our need and then go purchase that option.

If we dive into the idea of offering a choice of schools a little bit more we start to run into some stark realities.  My first question would be who provides the schools?  Will it be the government or the private sector?  If it is the private sector only, what do you do for the children who come from families that could not afford to educate their children?  Do we want to be part of a society where education is not universally available to everyone?  That starts to sound very third world to me.   I believe very strongly that everyone should have access to a decent education up to a certain point.  That is the foundation upon which I build my arguments.

Let’s say that the government provides a minimum stipend to families that cannot afford schooling.  At what level would you cut off that stipend?  I think this idea of support creates a really touchy political issue, one that could be incredibly divisive.  Just look at Medicare, social security, and welfare benefits to get a sense of how touchy this might be.  Another issue I see with this idea is that you would have schooling segregated by socioeconomic class in this scenario.  I think there is great value in the mixing of everyone for a shared educational experience.        

If the government is still running schools, but families are free to decide where their children go you would see huge demand for the "best" schools.  What parents in their right mind would knowingly choose to send their child to a mediocre or bad school when they could just as easily send them to a good school.  I think you see this idea playing out when charter schools are forced to run lotteries to determine who gets into a school.  I don't see a lot of value in a system where everyone is always trying to go to the best school.  I think that creates a lot instability and turmoil in an area that should be as stable as possible.        

So looking at these options, how do you institute choice into the educational environment in a meaningful way while still offering universal access to education for everyone?  I am all ears if you have a good option.

What do you think?  Am I getting this right?  Do you agree with my arguments?  Post a comment and let me know.  Thank you for reading.    

Is your school a "failing school?"

It is SOL season here in the state of Virginia.  Students are taking a test which determines if their school will meet adequate yearly progress AYP or not.  That one measure determines if a school is deemed to be successful or a "failing school."   I just read the other day that the term "failing school" didn't really enter the public conversation until the onset of No Child Left Behind. 


I think it is pretty sad that we choose to measure the quality of our schools on one set of tests.  It doesn't take into account all of the other things that our schools do.  We don't test students on how they are learning to behave in society or how compassionate they are, or on how well they can sing or play an instrument.  With regards to AYP we don't care about their knowledge of social studies or science.  It is focused only on English and mathematics.  

The ridiculousness of this system is that one elementary school in the division that I work for is considered a "failing school" because one subset of the student population failed to meet the AYP in one subject.  The overall scores were good enough to pass.  I hear that the stress on those teachers this year has been really hard on a lot of them.   

I think we can do better.  We should keep testing schools so that we have data to work from, but we need to stop punishing schools for things that might not be in their control to fix.

What do you think?  Am I right or wrong?  Why?    

The Police and Crime Analogy

Diane Ravitch shared this analogy when she spoke at William and Mary last year and I like it.

What if we passed a law that required all police departments to reduce the crime rate in their jurisdiction to zero percent.  Since doing something like that takes time, the law would be set up so that the police have ten years to meet the target.  To help them reach the target, each year they would have to meet a crime rate target that was lower than the previous year until they got to a state of no crime in the tenth year.  This sounds like a reasonable thing for a police department to do, right?

Now what happens if we also include in that law a punishment for police departments that do not meet the yearly targets?  If you don't do your job, you would be punished right?  If a police department does not meet the yearly targets they will lose funding, be forced to go through reorganization including the firing of police officers deemed to be not doing enough to reduce the crime rate, and could possibly be closed down in favor of new privately run police departments.   

Does something like this make sense?



Replace police departments with schools, crime rate with test scores, flip zero to one hundred, and police officers to teachers and you have our current education system.

Tenure Kills Motivation

Think about it.  Would you work as hard if you knew that getting fired was very difficult for your boss to do because it cost a lot of money and involved him or her filling out a lot of paperwork?  I know my wife would still work hard because she is that kind of person, but I also know that there are plenty of people who would take advantage of those circumstances. 

Tenure in K-12 public education offers that kind of working environment.

The difficult thing about tenure is that it creates a situation where some people don't but forth their very best effort and it also makes it difficult to get rid of those very same people.  A teacher who is not giving 110 percent of what they have to give to their students is doing their students and their community a disservice.  Tenure allows some people to not be as motivated and thus not help students succeed as much as they could be.

I am glad that I work in a school division where I don't see a lot of this lack of motivation.  I do see some of it though and it breaks my heart. 

What do you think?  Does this argument make sense?  Have you experienced a teacher who was going through the motions? 

Tenure Protects Bad Teachers but not as many as you think.

The first and most obvious negative of tenure is that it protects the occasional teacher who really should not be teaching.  Because of tenure protections, it is much more difficult for school divisions to get rid of ineffective teachers.  Research has shown that ineffective teachers hurt students’ academic performance.  Thus tenure hurts some students’ performance.     

I do want to point out that the number of truly ineffective teachers is not nearly as large as most people think.  I can only speak from my personal experiences working at two elementary schools in one of the better school divisions in the state so I may be underestimating the number of teachers who really should not be teaching.  Out of a total of about 60 teachers that I work with I would say that only two or three really should not be teaching.  That is five percent of the workforce.   

That matches up with the same assertions that Rick Hess makes in his blog post ""Many" Teaching Who Shouldn't Be".  I did the math and his numbers equal about five percent of the teaching workforce as well. 

To me the issue is really one of flexibility.  Schools should be able to adapt their workforce as necessary to meet the demands of their students.  Tenure gets in the way of that flexibility.  

What do you think?  Thanks for reading.  

Tenure Protects Good Teachers from Bad People

Another positive of tenure in K-12 public education is that it helps to insulate teachers from being dismissed because of political pressures.  Since all the public school divisions here in Virginia are managed by a board of individuals who are either elected or appointed by people who are elected, there exists the possibility that teachers could be fired for teaching or acting in a way that those school board members do not approve of.  A possible example of this is if you had an overly conservative school board which made it a point of trying to fire teachers who were registered and active in a more liberal political party.  Tenure provides an additional layer of protection from the political process. 

Another way in which tenure offers protection to teachers is from administrators who hold some kind of grudge against an individual.  With tenure, good teachers would be more protected from abritrary firings if a bad principal came along or from an overly emotional principal.  One could argue that this helps to keep good teachers in a school division even in a principal is not so good.

The final bad person that tenure protects teachers from, are parents.  Because teachers are typically responsible for a wide range of students, the odds of coming across a parent who disagrees with the teacher or their methods are pretty good.  Tenure provides an additional protection to teachers from parents who might make a considerable protest in an attempt to remove a teacher that they don't agree with or like.

What do you think about these arguments?  Do they make sense?   

Coming up next, the negatives of tenure.  Thanks for reading. 

Tenure Saves Taxpayers Money Again

Here in Virginia it takes three years to earn our version of tenure.  Once earned, you maintain your tenured status for as long as you continue to work for that school division. Thus tenure creates an incentive for teachers to stick with a division over the long run.  Teachers stay with a division to earn tenure status and then continue with a division to maintain it.  It could be argued then that tenure helps to keep teacher turnover lower than it might otherwise be.  Lower turnover reduces the costs incurred by a division to recruit and train new teachers.  So again tenure saves taxpayers money by reducing costs, this time ones associated with recruitment, training, and retention.  

What do you think?  Does the argument make sense?       

Tenure Saves Tax Payers Money?

Tenure is a benefit in the K-12 education environment.  As such, it has value to those who earn it or are striving to earn it.  If tenure is taken away, I think you would see a demand from teachers for increased pay to compensate for the loss of the benefit of tenure over the long run.  Since tax payers ultimately bear the cost of public K-12 education, I argue that tenure is currently saving tax payers money by keeping wages lower than they otherwise would need to be to attract qualified people to the teaching profession.

While tenure is not the only factor that influences someone in making a decision to become a teacher, I do believe that they are willing to trade reduced salary in exchange for the additional job security and protection that comes with tenure.  

What do you think?  Is this a rational argument?