Virtually nobody following the world of education finances is looking at the current situation and saying, “Yeah, the pandemic shut-down isn’t going to affect school funding at all.” A huge school budget crunch is coming.
Students are hungry for human contact and interactions, not hours in front of a computer.
Schools were last hit like this in the 2008 Great Recession. In much of the country, they have not yet fully recovered. And all districts have suffered at least some long-term effects, with schools serving low-income families being hit the hardest.
The majority of a school’s budget is spent on personnel, so budget crunches inevitably result in staff cuts. When officials like New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo talk about “reimagining” schools and replacing traditional classrooms with a more “personalized” approach, what they really want is to park students in front of computer screens and replace teachers with software.
There are several reasons not to be excited about this idea. Students are hungry for human contact and interactions, not hours in front of a computer. Nor is there any evidence that an algorithm-managed software approach to education actually works.
In the current context, it’s worth noting that what may seem like its most appealing quality—cost reduction—is illusory.
Remote learning is expensive. The hardware itself is relatively cheap, but the software programs are not like textbooks that a district can buy once then use till the covers fall off; they require paying for licenses for every student, every year.
If you gather students in a school, you have all the regular brick and mortar expenses, plus the cost of “coaches” or “mentors” to supervise the students and trouble-shoot the computers. If you require your students to do their work from home, then you have to address the need for reliable high-speed internet connections for all of those students, plus adaptations for students who are legally entitled to them.
Anyone who imagines that the district can just buy some curriculum software, lay off 80 percent of the teaching staff, and that will fix everything, is dreaming.
But, if going online isn’t the answer to saving schools money, then what is?
Here are some ideas:
Testing
The end-of-year Big Standardized Test was rightly scrapped for this year. It would have been pointless, generating data that would tell us nothing and be comparable to nothing. That is likely to be the situation next year as well. So why not just scrap the test forever?
It is hard to know exactly how much money goes into the testing regimen. One 2012 study pegged the number somewhere around $1.7 billion a year. That’s a tiny piece of education spending (about a quarter of one percent), but as the saying goes, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
And while the cost of testing may not have shifted hugely since 2012, the last decade has seen districts pump tons of money into a burgeoning test prep industry.
The beauty of ending the high-stakes test is that districts would not only recover money, but they will also recover weeks and weeks of instructional time. By getting rid of the Big Standardized Test, you effectively lengthen the school year.
Redraw district lines
A recent op-ed in The New York Times pointed to Camden County, New Jersey, as an example of a problematic phenomenon. The county includes thirty-five districts, twenty-three of which are within a five-mile radius of the city of Camden. Some of these districts enroll fewer than 1,000 students.
The op-ed’s author, EdBuild CEO Rebecca Sibilia, noted that there are four times as many school districts as there are counties in the United States; more than 250 counties contain more than ten districts each.
Some of these district lines are the result of educational gerrymandering and a movement of district secession, in which a small slice of the community sets up its own separate district. These lines are invariably related to race and class. This leads to too many districts being based on socio-economic distinctions, rather than geographic realities. Redrawing district lines could help mitigate the problem of leaving low-income families on their own.
Other district lines are the result of history and tradition. Pennsylvania pushed the consolidation of township-based school districts in the 1960s, and my home county of Venango now contains four full districts.
But many of these layouts defy sense. Students in my old district would reach the high school by traveling from their homes in our district, straight through another district, and back into our district.
Consolidation
One of the simplest cost-cutting tools in any district is to consolidate operations. Over the last two decades, my home district has gone from six elementary schools to three. Many districts are now like mine, with nothing left that can be further consolidated.
But many educational ecospheres have much to consolidate. Thanks to the school choice movement, many communities now support at least two parallel school systems with the money that was originally used to support one. With budgets shrinking, the ecosystem needs to shrink with it.
Redundancy is expensive, particularly when it comes to leadership positions. Charter schools generally spend more on administration. They also spend heavily on marketing. Most of this is paid for with public tax dollars. Folding charter schools back into the public system will allow the education system to spend more effectively by eliminating redundant big-ticket items and spend instead on programs that directly benefit students.
In too many states, the charter sector is unaccountable for how it spends public tax dollars.
Additionally, in too many states, the charter sector is unaccountable for how it spends public tax dollars. A report from the Network for Public Education found more than a billion dollars in fraud and waste just in the spending of federal grant dollars.
Virtual charters have had years to prove themselves. They have failed, and done so pretty consistently. It’s time to end that experiment and bring those students back into the public system. Students whose needs require virtual schooling can be better served by district operated programs.
The more schools that are funded by the same shrinking spot, the more poorly funded each of those schools will be.
Vouchers
The public system needs to retrieve all the tax dollars being diverted to private schools by various voucher programs. When public tax dollars can barely be stretched far enough for the students who attend public schools, it makes no sense to spend some of those dollars on an entitlement program to send a few students to private, frequently religious schools that continue to discriminate at will. That is not the purpose for which taxpayer dollars are intended.
Other options
Further solutions will be needed. It is past time to re-examine the use of real estate taxes as the primary funding source for education, and the federal government will be needed to help. But as was the case in 2008, hard choices will still have to be made at the local level, and sacrifices will have to be made.