Mo money

As the economy in Utah recovers, tax revenue to state coffers is up, which is good news for education funding, but not really good news, according to news stories today.

Gov. Gary Herbert’s Office announced the revenue projections Monday: An estimated $280 million from taxes on a growing economy, plus a one-time surplus of $128 million. "When you consider what is happening nationally or in other states, the steady drum beat of positive economic news in Utah is certainly encouraging," Herbert, who will release his budget proposal next month, said in a statement.

Despite the good economic news, the swelling budget will just barely cover an estimated $280 million growth in state programs, according to Ron Bigelow, the governor’s budget director. "We’re going to try and fund a few little things here and there, but if you take health and human services and education, there’s not going to be a whole lot left over," Bigelow said.

About 12,500 new students are expected to enter Utah schools, costing the state about $50 million. Enrollment in health insurance for children and the poor is growing, with costs for that program and services for people with disabilities expected to grow by between $100 million and $140 million, as well. The state has also funded ongoing programs with about $52 million of money that will lapse at the end of the year. Filling that gap is a top priority with the new money.

Deseret News reports on new charters

This is a really lame post.  All I do is link to a story in the Deseret News, which they publish annually, listing basic statistics about new charter schools set to open in the fall.  They list the school's name, location, a tiny bit about the mission, and enrollment caps.  No real reporting goes here, since the News doesn't do that anymore.

I just point out the lameness of this post to illustrate that I'm linking to an equally lame article.  The News is as lame as I am on Thanksgiving morning.  But wait til the weekend when I finally get that post done I've been working on about local control!

Weilenmann sues county over road access and student safety

Weilenmann School of Discovery sits at Parley's Summit between Park City and Salt Lake City in Summit County.  The one access to the school is a winding driveway on the north side of the school.  If Summit County and a local developer get their way, that single-lane road would be an access point to a new mountainside development south of the school for construction crews and trucks first, and then for residents once complete.

Weilenmann has filed suit against the county to stop that zoning change.  "The school's lawsuit claims the county council's approval of [the development] was arbitrary, illegal or debatable, the approval violated due process, and that the council's decision directly affects Weilenmann property without the consent of the property owner."

Utah's charter magazine wins national award

UAPCS has published the first-ever magazine for Utah Charter Schools, called Charterology.  The magazine won a Gold Medal MarCom award for its design and content.  The content was written by volunteer contributors from Utah's charter school movement.

Schools will receive magazines, designed to be distributed widely to staff, parents, board members, and every other school stakeholder, this week if they haven't received them already.

Quail Run students excel at mathletics

From the Daily Herald:

[Kudos] to 20 students who helped make Quail Run Primary School in Pleasant Grove No. 10 in the nation in the 2011 American Math Challenge sponsored by Mathletics. "The students worked really hard and really long," math teacher Curtis Nielson said of the online competition. "It was a team effort that awarded the school this honor." Special kudos to two brothers at the charter school who were the only pupils from Utah to finish in the top 100 individuals: second-grader James Bott, 7, and sixth-grader Deren Bott, 11.

Charter school lemons

If we're interested in innovation in education, then we need an environment that allows for:

• Autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic rules
• Choice for parents, so they can choose to leave schools that fail them and go to schools that they think will do better
• A willingness to take risks
• A willingness to close or replace innovations and charters that fail

This Time magazine piece makes the point well.  "TIME got an exclusive first look at the most comprehensive evaluation of charter school networks ever, and although the study, which will be released on Nov. 4, underscores the challenge of creating quality schools, it also makes clear that it is indeed possible to build a lot of schools that are game-changers for a lot of students."

Here's what I think is the key passage:

How much risk and failure are we willing to tolerate to create much better schools for students who don’t have them today? Or, put another way, if I told you there was a way to create 10 outstanding networks of schools for students who lack decent educational options now but that the cost of doing this would be the creation of four lousy networks of schools, would you take the deal?  

Critics of charter schools say this choice is a false one and that we should instead focus on improving existing schools. But their argument ignores the immediacy of educational failure. We’re talking about communities where public schools are not failing just a little but where the catastrophe of broken lives unfolds every school year, places where less than half of high schoolers graduate and where fewer than one in ten students finish college by their mid-20s. And let’s not forget, despite all the noise about turning around persistently failing schools, that successful turnarounds are like snow leopards — more mythical than actually observed. 

Charter proponents also disagree with the lose-some-to-win-some premise. Their main argument against it is that bad charters can be shut down. It’s true that this does happen — government officials have refused to renew some charters — but it’s proving to be more difficult in practice than in theory. There is an old saw in education that closing a school is like moving a cemetery: you get very little help from the inside. Charter parents and teachers often resist school closures just like their counterparts in the traditional system, and today there are not enough effective — read strong — charter school authorizers around the country.

And I agree with that completely.  If we want to achieve great success, the only way to figure out what works better is to try new approaches, and some of those approaches will not succeed--may even be worse than already exists.  But the difference is the choice that parents have.  Leaving just the monopoly system without real variety and choice for parents shackles students to a school and a system that has been mediocre or worse for decades.  When charters fail, there are no shackles, and parents can freely leave to greener pastures.

However, Utah also faces the same conundrum from the study noted above, namely that parents and school officials often resist the closure of a charter just like the same groups do at traditional schools.  That makes it politically difficult to pull the closing trigger, and it's never actually happened in Utah.

I'm a free-market guy who generally believes that if parents are satisfied enough to stay a a school, even if the bureaucracy or the government doesn't like it, we should give deference to what parents are choosing as the best option for their kid, even if the system thinks they shouldn't.  Finding the balance between parental choice and public accountability is a tricky balance.

So, I suggest that Utah needs the following:

• Expansion of charter schools, particularly successful charter schools, so that parents' choices are not limited by mile-long waiting lists;
• School districts that embrace innovation, relying less on boundaries, and that really empower schools to innovate and achieve--along with the inherent risks that come with allowing parents to choose to leave;
• A realistic mechanism to close or replace failing schools, both traditional and charter, including making it easier to convert a traditional school to a charter (the state Charter Board has made progress in this area, but I believe they also need an enrollment trigger);
• Real freedom in schools to allow for the variety that gives families real choices, including freedom in whom they hire, what they teach (let a school decide that more time teaching reading is more important than teaching how to use laundry detergent), and how they spend money;
• No fear to try something and fail.

Very interesting data on teacher pay

Are teachers underpaid?  I've been a teacher and sure felt underpaid.  I made more (and worked more) as a principal and now as a business manager.  So, what's the real story for teachers?  Are they underpaid when compared to:

• Private school teachers?
• Other working professionals?
• Compared to what they could make if they left teaching for another line of work?

Turns out, the answer to all those questions is "no," according to a new study by the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.

The study finds, in fact, that the typical teacher who leaves teaching for another profession actually sees a decrease in salary.

When factors like retirement benefits and substantial time off during the year (teachers typically have 180 scheduled days off per year), teacher benefits are about double what the private sector typically provides.

The study also finds that:

• Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curricula. 
• Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private-sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits. 
• Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions. Using a model to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.
• We conclude that public-school teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels.

I'm a simple man that doesn't usually get into all that silly data (though there's plenty in the study).  Instead, I focus on the simple and conceptual explanations.

I know that teachers do a lot more work than most private-sector workers at a similar salary level, at least during the school year.  It takes a lot of time to prepare lessons and review student progress.  I also know that the public largely thinks teachers are underpaid.

So, independent of any data showing how public school teacher pay compares to other professions, why aren't teachers paid more, especially if what they do is seen as so valuable by the public?

It comes down to the same rules that set price for all goods and services in the world: supply and demand.  There is a large supply of people who are willing to teach for what the market is currently paying.  The study makes the point that it is likely that even reducing teacher pay would not likely result in a shortage of teachers.

What we are short on is excellent teachers.  If schools were freed from collective bargaining and could compensate teachers based on the factors that really matter (student achievement, parent satisfaction, quality instruction) instead of just longevity and the degrees a person has, pay for excellent teachers would increase.  We'd see more excellent people turn to teaching.  Pay for sub-standard educators would fall, and we'd therefore see fewer of those teachers remaining in the profession, once they find that they have to do a lot more work for not more pay.

Unfortunately, that's not the case today.  Poor teachers are, according to the study, compensated at 52 percent above the market rate for similarly skilled workers outside of education.  Excellent teachers are compensated exactly like poor ones.  The incentives are therefor exactly wrong.  Traditional public school pay scales encourage poor teachers to remain teaching and encourage excellent ones to look elsewhere.

Reform is needed.

No real improvement

Utah continues to be "average" in a below-average industrial nation when it comes to educational progress.  But the story is actually worse than that, as Utah's "average" score is only that high because our demographics push us up to average.  When disaggregated for race and other factors, Utah is in fact quite below average.  And we are making no progress.

Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said educators should always strive for improvement, but shouldn't get too discouraged when scores hold steady. "Improving student achievement is like climbing a mountain — the higher you climb, the harder the next step gets," Buckley said. "It can be pretty hard just to keep pace, let alone see improvement."

Oh, boy, talk about making excuses and missing the point.  We aren't climbing very high.  The U.S. is outranked by more than 20 other industrialized nations, including Finland and Poland on international tests, and Utah is in the middle of the pack among 50 states, and even lower based on demographics. (Meaning our white score are below average, and minority kids score below average.)

It's not okay, given where we are, to make no progress.  That's a recipe for falling further behind.