The 21st Century Principal

If I wanted to design an education budget that gives the “appearance” of supporting teachers and educators, what would that budget look like? What if my long term goals are to get the state out of the education business and turn that entire enterprise over to the private sector? How can I continue to “starve” public education to achieve this goal? Here’s what I might do.

First of all, since I would have to give some raises in pay during election years, I would, but do so strategically. I don’t really want young college students choosing education as a career, because then I would have to keep paying them and ultimately give them some kind of sound benefits and retirement. I want young teachers and young teachers only, so I make sure that teachers in the first 10 years or so get paid well. I would not want to pay them too much after that. In fact, I would take away experienced teachers' longevity pay and any other incentive they might have to teach beyond 10 years or so. I don’t value experience nor getting higher education degrees, so I would disincentivize those things as well. The goal in my planned destruction of public education is to attract teachers who use the job as a stepping stone to other careers, so keep the pay for experienced teachers flat.

Secondly, I would look for strategic areas in the education budget that would have the greatest negative impact on public education in this state if they were cut. I would cut a bit here and there, change funding structures that in the end result in cuts. I could cut special programs like at-risk funding to make it even more difficult for schools to meet the needs of students, so I can say public schools are failures. I would keep textbooks and instructional supply budgets flat, so teaching becomes even harder. That has the duel effect of making sure no one chooses teaching in a public school as a long term career. It also makes sure that teachers can’t claim to be successful too much. After all, if my ultimate goal is to put public education out of business, can’t have teachers being successful.

Thirdly, I would tighten the accountability screws even tighter. I could use tests as bludgeoning instruments to further beat up the education system. Give schools ratings using these test scores (grade them on an A-F grading scale), and make it difficult for them to obtain the highest ratings. That way, we can use numbers, which I know everyone believes don't lie, to declare more and more public schools a failure. I would also use tests and a testing process that does not give teachers too much feedback on teaching. Can’t have them getting quality, timely testing data that can then be turned around and used to improve teaching and learning. After all, we don’t want public schools to succeed. We want them to fail, so we can then create a whole industry to take over the education enterprise.

Fourthly, I make sure teaching is no longer a profession. Tenure has to go so I try to pass laws with incentives for teachers to give it up or I pass laws so that it quietly goes away. After all, if the destruction of public schools is my ultimate goal, I don’t want due process rights to get in the way of getting rid of teachers when it becomes necessary to get rid of them. For example, at some point, I might want to toss teachers out to balance budgets or to keep from having to pay retirements. I also don’t want teachers in the system who might ask too many questions. If there’s no tenure, and they get too close to the truth, I can toss them out.

Finally, I add more money to voucher programs to continue the process of getting students out of public schools, and I promote legislation that supports the idea that “any-old-charter-school-will-do." It really doesn’t matter if charter schools or private schools are more effective. In fact, they can be less effective. All I want to do get students out of public schools and the funding that goes with them. That way I can continue to starve public education even further, as their ADM drops. I also cut the automatic funding stream too, that way I use it to further the public education starvation process.

With just these five steps, I can move the state closer to dismantling public education and turning education over to private enterprise, and give the "appearance" that I support education. I could simply use a four-pronged approach:

1) Make public school teaching less of a profession and a less attractive career,
2) Strategically cut money from the budget that has the greatest negative impact on public school success,
3) Institute measures to begin getting students out of public schools, after all this will in turn start pulling money from public education, thereby continuing the starving process,
4) Ramp up regulation, accountability and testing, and use both to bludgeon public schools and educators so they aren’t seen as successful.

This entire plan would perhaps so negatively impact public schools that the public would be screaming that they be closed.

Hmmmm…does all this sound familiar to anyone in North Carolina? I’ll let you be judge.

NC Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest’s proposal to fund teacher pay raises by collecting donations and selling special license plates is now a bill proposed by the North Carolina Senate Education Committee. The proposed bill would collect money from individuals and businesses and place these funds in an endowment. Lieutenant Governor Forest stated in May that his idea was “a creative response to tough economic times.” Now, Republican Senator Jerry Tillman has bought into the idea by starting that they are “looking for ways to build up and enhance education dollars…"

Instead of looking for “creative" ways to fund teacher pay and education in general, I suspect Forest and Tillman are looking for “creative ways to avoid adequately funding public education.

They don’t won’t to fund education the way it should be funded because they do not want it to exist.

It’s clear that our North Carolina Legislature still continues its anti-public education campaign with Lt. Governor Forest and NC Senator Jerry Tillman in the lead. For more info, check out “NC Bill Asks for Donations, License Plates to Pay Teachers More."

Yesterday, North Carolina Governor McCrory announced his plans to raise teacher pay in the short term with an average 2% raise, he also introduced a plan to raise teacher pay in the long-term. These long term plans were to raise pay based on a combination of experience, education, merit and market-need. The big question is always how do you pay for this when the North Carolina Legislature severely cut revenue last year, and it has been reported recently that there is already a $445 million shortfall? It would appear that our North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest has an idea for paying for these teacher pay raises: Let’s pay for them by donation.

According to WRAL this morning, Lieutenant Governor Forest is proposing to gather donations from specialized license plates, taxpayer donations, and corporate donations to pay for the new teacher pay raises proposed by McCrory, (See “Forest Proposes Endowment Fund to Raise Teacher Salaries.” ) Instead of finding tax revenue, Forest’s plan is to rely totally on donations for fund teacher pay raises. Forest states that it is a “creative response to tough economic times.” I would grant that it is perhaps a “creative” response and probably one someone who is tax-averse would suggest. Perhaps our entire government’s salaries should be paid by donation? If our Lieutenant Governor or Governor were paid “by donation” too, we could simply stop donating if they aren't doing the job we thought they should be doing.

The real problem with Forest’s suggestion is that it might really illustrate that our current state government is still not entirely committing to paying teachers what they deserve. Instead of biting the bullet and finding existing money or new revenue, they are going to resort to essentially what State Senator Josh Stein calls “voluntary taxation.” Methinks Lientenant Forest’s proposal has to be one of the most bizarre ideas yet to come out of this current state government. I give Forest a A for ‘”off-this-planet” thinking, and an F for really being committed to finding ways to pay teachers what they deserve.

Chris Fitzsimon at the NC Policywatch posted his Monday numbers on the NC Policywatch Blog. These numbers show the damage our state legislature and political establishment has wrought on public education since 2008. You can check out the complete numbers for yourself, but here's some that I think are indicative of the true value our state government places on public education.

• There have been 16,678 public school jobs eliminated in North Carolina in the last four years. (Our government has done its part to contribute to the unemployment rate.)
• North Carolina ranked 49th in 2007-2008 among 50 states in administrative spending in public education. (All that administrative waste politicians like to banter about isn't there and wasn't there.)
• Speaker of North Carolina House Thom Tillis said there were 0 teacher and teacher assistant positions cut in the 2011-2012 North Carolina General Assembly Budget. (See the reality in the next bullet.)
• As of August 31, 2011, 534 teachers have been laid off due to budget cuts made by the North Carolina General Assembly's 2011-2012 Budget. (For more reality, see next bullet.)
• There were 1,260 teacher assistants who lost their jobs due the North Carolina General Assembly's 2011-2012 budget. (Reality is not something our current political establishment deals with very well.)
• There have been a total of 2,418 layoffs in public education due to the North Carolina General Assembly's 2011-2012 budget. (While Thom Tillis can boast that his budget didn't lay off these individuals, his budget created the reality that made it necessary.)
• There have been a total of 6,307 public school jobs eliminated due to the North Carolina General Assembly's 2011-2012 Budget. (Tillis, as did many in General Assembly, demonizes these people as moochers.)
• 4,000 more public school jobs will go after the federal stimulus money goes away next year.

The article in the Charlotte Observer entitlted, "Budget Rewrite Saves Teacher Assistant Jobs", is a clear attempt by our political leaders in the North Carolina General Assembly to mask the truth of what their budget cuts are going to do to local school districts. What's even worse, the Charlotte Observer uses a headline that seems to support the idea that the North Carolina Legislature has somehow magically found funds to save 15,000 or so teacher assistant jobs. They haven't. What they have done is shifted the responsibility for making the job cuts back to the local school districts, which now have to find $429 million dollars to send back to the state out of their budgets. Our state legislature is playing the "discretionary cuts" game again, which translates into someone else having to do their dirty work. The public rarely knows or understands the discretionary cuts game.

Ann McColl, North Carolina State Board of Education lobbyist, calls it like it is when she says, "Some of the really tough decisions about positions and job losses are just being passed down to the local level." 

With the magnitude of cuts our legislature is asking of our schools, local districts will have no choice but cut positions, either teachers or teacher assistants. It seems some politicians still operate under the delusion that there's millions of dollars still being wasted in schools, but after three years of cutting, there's just not much there.


The sad part of all this, our legislators are doing this simply so they can respond in the next cycle, "I didn't cut any jobs."


Update: My partial apologies to the Charlotte Observer; they are only partially wrong. They got the misleading article and story from the Raleigh newspaper, News and Observer. Their headline on this budget reads "School Jobs Saved in State Budget."

This week, the North Carolina Senate released its version of the state biannual budget, and Senate Leader Phil Berger seemed to take it as a "bragging point" that they had actually decided spend more on education than the NC House. He especially pointed out their effort to reduce class sizes for grades 1-3, but apparently, that measure seems to be a ruse to deflect attention to what the real damage to education his budget will do.

Real Damage of NC Senate Budget

• Overall budget cuts will shave $500 dollars off per student spending state wide, bringing North Carolina closer to the bottom of per student expenditures in the nation
• Budget calls for adding 1,100 teacher jobs in grades 1-3, but it 
• eliminates 1 in 5 assistant principal jobs,
• all teacher assistant jobs grades 1-3
• cuts non-teaching jobs (secretaries, custodians, etc.) by 15%, 
• cuts support staff (guidance counselors, media specialists) by 5%  
• combined with discretionary cuts (those cuts where the state sends the money to school systems and then asks for it back)15,000 to 18,000 school employees across the state will lose their jobs.
• Learn and Earn and Virtual School cut by $6 million
• NC Science Olympiad funding eliminated
• North Carolina Science and Technology Center funding eliminated
• 30 technology related positions at the state department of instruction eliminated
• Funding for North Carolina Center for Advancement of Teaching eliminated
• Funding for High School Teaching Cadet program eliminated (a program to get high school students interested in teaching as a career)
• $12.5 million cut from teaching training, from an already non-existent budget
• Funding for NC Teacher Academy (entity that provides teachers with high quality professional development)
• $13 million of drop out prevention grants eliminated
• Funding for teacher Professional Standards Commission eliminated
• Merit pay plan but not funded next year, but when funded will give teachers a 2-3% pay raise based on performance (that performance has yet to be defined and plan created)
• Funding eliminated for any new North Carolina Teaching Fellows scholarships (a successful scholarship program to recruit and get high school graduates to become teachers)

According to North Carolina Senate Leader, Phil Berger, "We've got big changes coming the public schools in North Carolina this year." Some of the earlier changes mentioned were: zero money for textbooks, instructional supply money cut by half again, and no professional development money. Our politicians want to hold us accountable for teaching kids but don't want to fund the tools we need to do the job. There's definitely something amiss in that logic, but I'm not sure logic and politics even belong together any more any way.

What were some of these other "Big Changes" spoken about by Senator Berger?

• Cut teacher assistants in all but kindergarten classrooms.
• Shrinking class sizes in grades 1-3 toward a "goal" (please notice the quotes here) of 1 to 15.
• Paying teachers based on performance instead of seniority.
• Extending students' school year by five days by turning 5 workdays into student days.

I hate to bear bad tidings but there is nothing "big" in either one of those proposals and nothing to suggest a great deal of change. First of all, there are some North Carolina politicians who have been trying to sabotage public education since I was a "teacherling" in the late 80's. Let's just stop pretending any more. There are individuals of a certain political bent in our state and in this country who want public education privatized, and they're going to do it. In all my thinking, I can't imagine an intelligent person who thinks getting rid of teacher assistants in those crucial first grades is an effective move. The only reason I can come up with is they figure getting rid of teacher assistants will sabotage achievement in these grades and then they can say "Look, I told you public schools are a waste of time."

Now the idea of shrinking class size in this proposal looks really attractive, after all, most of us who are experienced educators believe that smaller class sizes do matter, but maybe not in ways that can be measured by bubble sheets. But on this proposal look at that one word, "goal." Goals in soccer and football are good things. Goals in politics are bad things. Why? Because politicians use them as excuses. In this case, three of four years down the road when we point to them that they said they were going to reduce class size, they can say, "Oh but that was only a GOAL."  Political goals can be moved about when it is politically expedient. So, the word "goal" in this case is useless rhetoric.

I knew our politicians were going to get around to pushing performance pay. This fad has been blazing across the country since it was first suggested by Secretary Arne Duncan. The problem with this provision is that a)it's been tried, and b) it wont' work. I admit, we need to revise the pay system, but just switching to performance pay because you don't have another alternative is not wise. Besides, researchers Daniel Pink and Dan Ariely have had a lot to say about the idea of performance pay, and they say it doesn't work. What's really funny, it doesn't work well in business either according to Pink and Ariely.

Finally, the idea of extending the school year by five days isn't earth shattering either. Does anyone really think adding five more days to the school year is going to make any difference in what students learn? Besides, with our state's mad devotion to testing, schools will probably just end up using those extra days for more testing. The problem with learning isn't that we need more of what we're doing in the classroom by adding more time to do it. The problem is we need to fundamentally change what we're doing in the classroom not continue doing more of the same.

Honestly, I agree public schools need to reform. We need to do what we're doing better, but politicians using education as political football only creates useless policy. There are no big changes suggested in any of the political propaganda suggested by our North Carolina legislators. Except maybe that our K-12 budget is going to be severely cut. You can safely say, this legislature has taken one more step in its efforts to make the job of educating students in North Carolina more difficult.

What does everyone else think? Do we really think cutting out teacher assistants is going to make a difference in the classroom? Is simply having legislation that says we have a "goal" of reducing class size enough to make it happen? Is adding 5 days to the school year, at the expense of doing away with worth days going to have any effect on learning? Is paying teachers for performance going to work in a state who can't even pay teachers for test bonuses and by seniority? What do you think?