There IS NO MONEY!

Don't you damned teachers understand? There isn't any money, and there will continue to be no money. Stop your whining!

Well, sure there is money for remodeling the ESD in Yakima, but that's different.

And yeah, school administrators in Spokane saw their salaries go up while the teachers lost two days of pay, but if we don't pay our administrators more they'll......well, they earned it, so there.

And sure, ya bawl baby, we might have spent millions on a failed Race to the Top grant, and now we're getting ready to change the assessments yet again, but that's money that we had to spend. For the children.

I guess what I meant to say, teachers, is not that there's no money--there's just no money for you.

Read more here, if any.

The Education Budget #5: Should Navigation 101 Get Lost?

From the Senate budget (p. 92 line 37):

$3,220,000 of the general fund--state appropriation for fiscal year 2010 and $3,219,000 of the general fund--state appropriation for fiscal year 2011 are provided solely for the dissemination of the Navigation 101 curriculum to all districts, including disseminating electronic student planning tools and software for analyzing the impact of the implementation of Navigation 101 on student performance, and grants to at least one hundred school districts each year for the implementation of the Navigation 101 program.

Nav101 is a curriculum/intervention program designed to provide individualized lessons for kids grades 6-12 and help them plan for their future. It's labor intensive--to do the "advisory" periods requires changing the schedule twice a month, meaning that the other classes get shortchanged on those days. Reaction from teachers is mixed depending on who you ask--in my district some teachers love it, others hate it.

All that said, if you didn't fund Navigation 101 with state money you could save 40 teaching positions.

If relationships are the heart of student success, then let's give them teachers to have relationships with instead of spending money on curriculum.

Read more here, if any.

Gregoire's Education Budget: How to Save Levy Equalization

(For more posts about Governor Gregoire's proposed education budget, try here and here.)

In her budget proposal Governor Gregoire suggests cutting the amount of money from the state for local levy equalization by 33%, which would have a profound impact on many of the smaller, property-poor districts here in Washington (and, for some reason, Spokane, but that's a topic for another day).

There's an awful lot of information available from the Office of Financial Management website, and if you poke around in the agency summaries section you can get enough numbers to keep you in Excel for the next decade. One of the interesting documents to me is on the compensation plan, wherein we can read that the increases in health benefits for K-12 employees are projected to cost $127,904,000.

The cuts to levy equalization are estimated to save $125,400,000.

I think you can see where I'm going here.

If we suspended the increase in health insurance benefits for the next two years and instead fully funded levy equalization, the only hit to the district budgets would then be the reduction in I-728 money. This is fair, because then at least every district is getting hit in the same way. If you cut levy equalization, though, a lot of districts that are already struggling are going to get hit in a way that the Bellevues of the world will not, and that doesn't help anyone.

You can't mention levy equalization without also mentioning Neal Kirby, the godfather of LEA; he wrote a great editorial for the Aberdeen Daily World on what exactly levy equalization is and why it matters.

And sure, ideally, education wouldn't take any sort of cuts. I think we need to deal in reality, though, and look for those areas that would cause the least harm. Levy equalization is not that area.

Read more here, if any.

Workbooks That Don’t Work

We’re making a commitment to look at every aspect of our spending, and one area that is getting a close look is student workbooks, because there’s a ton of them and they’re all expensive. In my first grade room we have two different books for reading and one for math; they cost about $40 each per child. That’s about $10,000 a year, then just for workbooks for my one grade level.

Looking at that, we decided that next year we would eschew the reading workbooks in favor of a cheaper phonics workbook; we didn’t feel like we could do without math. Even in reading it will be difficult because of how the workbook paces the curriculum, and so we’re going to have to make a pretty strong commitment to bringing in other ways to teach specific reading strategies, high frequency words, and spelling.

If you’re doing a curriculum adoption make sure that you nail down what the year-to-year costs will be to keep it going. We got caught with our pants down.

Read more here, if any.

I ain't sayin', but I'm just sayin'....

Dino Rossi released his transportation plan this week. As can be expected he's getting gleefully savaged several times over by the commentators over at Horse's Ass, where transportation is king.

Transportation is what it is, and for many folks it's The Big Issue. As an education guy my piece is to worry about the effect on the schools if you take $10 billion out of the general fund (COLAs suspended again? Full-day kindergarten delayed? A retreat on standards?), and if Sen. Rossi is going to stick to the line on spending there are going to have to be cuts, or the math doesn't work.

But how can I reconcile that with this from Rossi's website?

Making education our paramount duty

• Today, too many politicians in Olympia do not treat education funding like it is their paramount duty.
  
• As governor, I will make funding education one of my top priorities.

Elsewhere in his education platform he calls for increased salary for math and science teachers (more $), merit pay (more $), new initiatives in the STEM subjects (more $), and alternate routes to certification (more $).

I realize that this is the game that politicians from either side play, but I'm really curious to know--how will Dino pay for it all? How can he criticize Gregoire for her spending habits, when here it really looks like just more of the same?

Read more here, if any.

A Sad Statement on the Value We Place on Education

The March 5th issue of Education Week scratched my research itch with a front-page article on how the coming election could potentially change the emphasis that NCLB places on "scientifically based" research; they cite a recent forum (note: the link has video! and audio!) hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, and the quotes they pulled from it are very thoughtful.

The piece that really grabbed me came from a section on funding for educational research, with many saying it wasn't enough. The DoED spent $327,000,000 on research during FY2007, which sounds like a fantastic number until you compare it to other areas. Quoting the article:

The research and development budget of the US Department of Education falls far short of the total R&D budgets, shown below in millions of dollars and including facilities, of many other federal agencies.

Department	FY 2007 Actual
Defense	$78,936
Health and Human Services	$29,566
NASA	$9,952
Energy	$8,522
National Science Foundation	$4,440
Agriculture	$2,275
Commerce	$1,080
Homeland Security	$1,003
Veteran's Affairs	$819
Transportation	$768
Interior	$607
EPA	$606
Education	$327

Put another way, the budget for education research is 4/10 of 1 percent of the budget for military research.

We teachers need better lobbyists.

Read more here, if any.