Let's Talk About Solutions...
Andrew Crapo
This and my previous post are a summary of my thinking after 16 months on the Scotia-Glenville Board of Education. I hope that you will share your views of where we need to go to have the very best schools at an acceptable cost!
Financial Summary
In my previous post I looked at data supporting the claim that over the past 20 years our district's ability to pay, as measured by the inflation-adjusted total adjusted gross income (AGI) of district residents reported on NY State tax returns, has declined. At the same time, the cost of public education has increased steadily and significantly. The Scotia-Glenville budget is now over 10% of the total district AGI. The upward trend in the cost of public education is not sustainable. With the economic downturn, reductions in state aid, and continued financial hardship for some in our community, the BOE has moved in the direction of incremental cuts in programs. As long as costs, some of which are entirely out of our control at the present time, continue to increase much faster than inflation and available resources fail to even keep up with inflation, deeper cuts to programs seems inevitable. What are the alternatives?
A Productivity View
In the private sector people talk about productivity. Wikipedia defines productivity as "a measure of the efficiency of production...a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it." It is generally accepted that productivity improvement is the way to a higher standard of living for a nation and is necessary for a company to remain competitive and to survive.
What does productivity mean for a public school? If we divide the district budget by the number of students, even after adjusting for inflation, our productivity has decreased substantially over the years. But enrollment is not our goal; it is not what the school produces. Consider the district mission statement. "The Scotia-Glenville Central School District is committed to providing an environment which allows students to realize their full potential and thus prepares them for life in an ever-changing world. In the tradition of excellence, Board of Education, administration, staff, parents, business and community members will continue to ensure that our educational system fulfills the needs of our students. " That says that we are producing an "environment"that "allows students to realize their full potential and thus prepares them for life." I suspect that we really want to be a little more proactive than that--we want to provide our students with knowledge and skills, not just an environment.
What and how to measure to determine the quantity and quality of our production is an on-going debate. The new New York State Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), adopted as part of New York's effort to win Race to the Top federal dollars, begins to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student achievement. It brings us face-to-face with the question of what and how to measure. Most people are aware that we are trying to produce more than higher scores on traditional standardized tests. We can probably agree that we want the "most education" we can get for some level of cost.
Improved Teaching and Learning
There is a trend both in successful businesses, in medicine, and in education to be more evidence-based. Fundamentally this means measuring the results and only doing those things that can be shown to be effective in improving desired results. In medicine, for example, it is estimated that a significant fraction of money spent is for procedures or medications that are ineffective. Evidence-based education (EBE) is defined as “the integration of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence in making decisions about how to deliver instruction.” EBE can help us move resources from activities that are less effective to those that are more effective.
Education researchers and practitioners are constantly seeking to find better ways to instruct and motivate students. For example, here are a few trends that seem to bring value to the school.
Differentiated instruction -- gearing instruction to the needs of each individual student; starting where they are and helping them move forward
Inquiry and project-based learning -- providing students with more opportunity to individually, and collaboratively in small groups, learn by a more natural process of pursuing questions of interest to them and by actually doing, not just talking
Co-teaching -- one form puts special education instructors and special education students in the regular classroom and the instructors work together. This has benefits for the students but also the teachers tend to learn from each other. For example, the special ed teacher will usually be better-trained in differentiated instruction and the co-teacher will see and adopt improved methodology.
Brain-based research -- understanding the physiological factors that affect learning and modifying instruction and/or environment to improve learning by aligning with how learning actually occurs
These and many other initiatives seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of instruction and change other processes/resources to achieve a better result. These initiatives do not generally cause any significant reduction in the cost of education. Many appear to get a better result at an increased cost.
Is Technology the (an) Answer?
Productivity can be seen as depending on two factors: 1) the available technology or know-how for converting resources into the desired outcome, and 2) how well those resources are organized. We look for the most highly skilled teachers and provide them professional development opportunities to address the first factor. We hire superb administrators to do the second.
Technology can have an effect on both teaching and administering. The way information flows in the district office to track teacher evaluations, tenure, reports to the state, etc. is in the second category. The fact that I get a set of paper Board documents almost every week, which are delivered by a pickup truck that drives to my house and which I cannot effectively index and search because they are paper, even though these documents are almost all created electronically, is an example of inefficient information management. There is of course some cost in changing administrative procedures although in many cases I suspect the payback period would be very short. Unfortunately, the impact on the overall budget would be minimal because administration is only about 10% of the budget.
Technology to improve instruction and learning is by far the greater potential impact. There are some impressive examples of the possibilities of on-line learning. Consider these:
In the Hole in The Wall experiments Internet access was provided to children in an urban slum in New Delhi. The result was amazing. See http://www.ted.com/speakers/sugata_mitra.html for a very brief introduction and http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html for a TED talk on the subject.
The use of the iPad in special education has been very effective for some children. See Apps for Autism: Communicating on the iPad from CBS's 60 Minutes for some examples.
For some students who are motivated and self-directed, access to the world's knowledge via the Internet may be sufficient to provide them with an education. They do not even need a classroom and a teacher. However, it is generally agreed that the effectiveness of technology in delivering content increases with the age of the student. First someone needs to teach students how to read and help them develop other essential learning skills. Just as one approach does not work for every student in classroom instruction, there is no evidence that delivering content with the latest technology will improve outcomes for every student, even in higher grade levels. One view is that technology can provide an effective and compelling means of delivering content and evaluating student mastery, freeing the teacher to motivate, tutor, monitor, and mentor students. Technology is potentially a disruptive technology in education, but how to effectively use it without significantly increasing costs in the short term and/or loosing students in the transition from where we are to a more technological future remains an open question. For an interesting article on this subject see the NY Times article In Higher Education, a Focus on Technology.
An Education Foundation?
A 501(c)(3) education foundation is a non-profit organization separate from the school district but which normally has a memorandum of understanding with the district to work in concert with the district to support education. Different foundations have different missions and provide different kinds of support. Some, for example, offer a competitive grant program to encourage and enable teachers to innovate in the classroom. Many districts in the Capital Region have education foundations; see Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake Education Foundation or Schenectady City School District Educational Foundation, Inc as examples.
During last year's budget meetings, a group of district residents voiced their willingness to pay more in taxes to make sure that programs were not cut to balance the budget. An education foundation offers residents (and interested non-residents) an opportunity to contribute more to education. Forming a foundation and keeping it healthy involves much more than simply making a donation. A board of directors and other volunteers must demonstrate commitment and ingenuity to achieve success. There are organizations that will help establish foundations. Is it time for Scotia-Glenville to have an education foundation?
Jerry
1. Hold a public hearing on employee contracts before adopting them.
2. Join with other school districts to pay for an attorney in the
County Attorney's office and stop hiring outside counsel.
3. Double the size of PE classes and have them supervised by 1 teacher
and 1 fitness trainer. Just because class sizes have been reduced for
academics is no reason to reduce them for fitness.
4. Close an elementary school.
5. Reverse engineer the positions added during the past 12 years by
deleting them. This is especially true for the middle school, which
has failed to improve student learning beyond what the junior high
school achieved.
6. Convert sports programs to intramurals or clubs.
7. Require discretionary courses to be offered only through online
instruction, provided this reduces spending.
8. Convert athletic fields and grounds to gardens to teach children
about hard work and teamwork, and to teach them practical skills that
will improve their lives while raising food for the cafeteria or for
food banks.
9. Require students and teachers to clean their own classrooms.
Require athletes to clean and maintain athletic fields and equipment
to the extent feasible.
10. Integrate courses with area businesses.
11. Create a corps of volunteers to reduce the need for paid employees
and to provide additional services which have been omitted due to
cost.
12. Create an “academic brand” that attracts tuition-paying students,
locally, nationally and internationally.
13. Provide non-credited foreign language instruction in the
elementary schools by using online instructors from other countries.
14. Keep administrator duties doubled up, as currently done with
the Director of Curriculum/Elementary Principal and
Athletic Director/Elementary Principal.
15. Convert from line-item budgeting to program/performance-based
budgeting.
See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2004/h2r2/ch_3.asp
16. Establish a standing committee, with subcommittees, to provide a
thorough and
ongoing review of the objectives of the school district and the costs
for achieving them.
Additionally, I note that a budget is not just a function of programs/
services and costs, but of many other factors, including:
planning time and effort
planning resources
the effort spent to grow and improve planning resources
scope and depth of research
the decision-making process
the problem-solving process
the roles of the decision-makers
the objectives and values of the decision-makers
the objectives and values of the organization
creativity and latitude of discovering alternatives
the number and severity of budget conflicts
the number and severity of distractions
the economy
competitiveness for public funding -- competing priorities
the rules of public funding
the type of budget used - line item vs performance/program
the knowledge, skill, interest and motivation of the players
special interest politics from classrooms to the White House
exogenous prices and inflation/deflation
endogenous costs
unanticipated/extraordinary funding/expenses
the price interaction among budget items (pension up books down)
the cultivation of income generating talent - all groups
the efficient use of assets
the entry cost of new ideas