Bill Curry has a perceptive column in the Courant today pointing out the apparent lack of progress on key issues like health care, property tax reform, education and energy from the 2007 session. A key point:
The core problem in education funding is the property tax. It deprives thousands of children of a basic right even as it burdens businesses and families, chokes cities and drives sprawl. We could improve education and ease the racial, cultural and economic segregation of cities by cutting a tax people hate. You’d think Democrats would jump at the chance. (Curry)
Obviously getting rid of the property tax–at least for education–would mean that the income tax would jump up to take its place. But Curry is right–decoupling the property tax from education funding is the right way to go. Once that’s done, we can carry it a little farther and do away with the expensive redundancy of most towns having their own locally-controlled school district.
Local control of public education is already largely a sham. Most of the rules and regulations governing education are made at the state or federal level–all that towns do is fund it, largely with state aid. Local control at the town level means that each district has its own superintendent and administration, with all of the attendant costs. Regional school districts, which exist for smaller towns, are usually carved up somehow, with individual towns often having control of an elementary school, for example.
Worse, the small-scale geography of Connecticut school districts has led to a stark divide between the haves and have-nots. How far is Simsbury from Hartford? Ten miles? It might as well be an ocean, given how wide the gap is. De facto racial and economic segregation persists, because of the movement of people across an arbitrary border. Students are locked into failing schools, simply because of where they live.
So here’s an idea to chew on for the future: let’s get rid of town-level school districts. Let’s scrap local control of education at that level, and pool our resources in a big way. I propose that we create eight super-sized school districts, each coextensive with the boundaries of a county. Instead of dozens of administrations in each town, a county-sized school district would have one. A single elected board of education would control funding and those areas of policy not already covered by state and federal regulations. This would not only save money, but allow students and parents to choose from a broad menu of schools. Hartford students, for example, could apply to Newington, Simsbury and Glastonbury schools, and vice-versa.
This wouldn’t happen any time soon, of course, but I believe that by giving parents and students choices, and by combining the resources of dozens of towns, we could start to address problems of segregation, quality and cost all at once.
Source
Curry, Bill. “Finding The Courage To Change.” Hartford Courant 13 May, 2007.
30 responses so far ↓
“The core problem in education funding is the property tax.”
Absolutely ludicrous.
The core problem in education funding is the rigged formula to dump almost all of the money into just a few cities where corruption dominates.
It is too bad your idea is not generating more comments, postive or negative. Like many other services, economies of scale are obtained with larger districts. In CT, we have a fetish about local control. For education, this local control is most expressed in the ‘neighborhood’ elementary school that is really not a neighborhood school except in the large cities. In the suburbs and rural areas, school busing is the watchword and only a small percentage of students are a walk or bike ride from the school. I would modify your idea to keep the elementary schools locally controlled by the cities and towns and regionalize the middle schools and high schools. To keep class sizes at a reasonable level and student bodies at a controllable level, it may mean closing some high schools and middle schools and opening others, depending on the population distribution. Have the elementary schools funded locally and the middle schools and high schools funded by the state with regional boards of education to have some local (if at an expanded level) input. Closing high schools will be a very emotional thing, especially to the sports folks. For example, if Waterford and New London merged to one high school, who would inherit the sports history? That may be one of the largest stumbling blocks to your idea but it is very worth discussing. I hope more folks will join in.
The cost of education is largely labor – teachers. Regioanlization, etc in this case is a red herring. It won’t lower costs all that much.
So, Hartford gets something like $10,000 per student. A class might have 40 students. That $400,000 per class is largely labor – teachers?
I need to change jobs. I want to be a teacher. $400,000 per year! That’s the job to have!
Is everyone nuts? Does anyone see the root cause issues with education? Throwing money at societal issues does not work! Take a moment and look back into the 60’s and early 70’s. Teaching back then was an earned privilege and those who were teachers took it seriously. The issues today are societal. Parents don’t have any time to participate in their children’s upbringing let alone their education. Parents are too busy trying to earn enough income to survive in today’s economy. Most kids are schuffled off to after school babysitters or to an empty home with no supervision. And the amount of children that come from single parent homes is increasing. I am not saying that single parents aren’t good providing a good structure, foundation and moral base for the children. The main problem is that children having children and transient populations are taxing our school systems. I reside in a town where there is 55% home ownership and 45% transient residence. I can bet you that the majority of the 55% do not have children thus not presenting a burden on the school system, however, they support the schools by means of taxation. Fair? not really, why not impose a tax structure based on the number of active children attending the school system? Because it will not work, not enough funds will be generated to support the ADMINISTRATIVE salaries and I mean the superindent etc… It is not the salaries of the Teachers that should be questioned – they are charged with a tremendous amount of responsibility – child rearing, educating and nurturing our leaders of tomorrow (scary, hunh?). I agree, in theory, that the educational systems will not survive on the local level – not with the State and Feds mandating results and evaluating effectiveness alone on this basis. So, what is to be done? Dump the fluff and get on with teaching. Involve the parents. Reach out! Go back to some grassroots here.
ps. I am a childless homeowner who pays attention to the town budget and listens to residents. I am not a candidate for local office and have no personal agenda.
“Apparent lack of progress”?
I’m pretty sure that’s what Darth Vader said when they weren’t finishing the Death Star on time. And I think that’s strangely fitting…
Ladyx, I have to tell you… you said it ALL. I couldn’t agree with you more, or add anything to what you stated perfectly…
curry’s paln is unsensical if teachers unions are in still control of the money train.
State employee unions already have the taxpayer under the gun. This would in effect make teacher state employees. NEED BINDING ARB REFORM!
do you think city legislator would would like it if evryone with means abandon their schools for the burbs. I think not!
Funny thing: Financing education started to become a “problem” only when the people who pay the bills began to reject overpriced town budgets in referendums. The way to fix overpriced town budgets is to lower costs. Politicians, naturally, are reluctant to do this, mostly because that portion of the voting public that is adverse to cutting budgets isorganized, while those who pay the bills are not. So now, the proposed solution to this problem is to have state government, not subject to referendums, assume a larger share of the costs. The solution is to move money subject to a referendum to a spending platform in which taxpayers cannot exercise a no vote on budgets. Very neat.
Thats what I was thinking Don: The voters have begun to wise up so Curry says change the rules. We lose our only chance to stop the runaway train.
So where do we lower costs, Don?
Seriously, where? Have you looked at school district budgets? Not a lot of fat there lately.
Only by combining services and pooling our resources can we really hope to start saving money.
Also, many larger towns (Enfield, Newington, Hartford) don’t have referenda for budgets. Even in those towns where budgets do go before the voters, who participates? What’s the turnout? 12%? 25%? Maybe 40% if it’s a really exciting year?
GC, where to lower the costs?
Lower the costs in the few cities which receive almost all of the state money and force them to figure out how to minimize the corruption.
GC, you must know that the state allocates almost all of the education funds to only a small group of cities — and those cities do not crack down on the corruption. Do you think that there is any sense in some cities spending $10,000 per student per year?
Genghis, your idea show’s intelligent out-of-the-box thinking (something that they obviously hate up at the Capitol!), but I don’t believe in taking away local control. Many people have moved to specific towns just for the school system. I believe the problem, other than the education unions (leadership, not rank and file teachers), is socio-economic in nature. Shifting to larger regional districts could helps with costs, but would only geographically shift the achievement gap, in my view.
GC –
Maybe school districts can lower costs by cutting lab sciences, making aftershool activities pay-to-play, cutting 10% of teachers and significantly raising class sizes, cutting music and art classes, closing one of the schools, doing away with al lday kindergaarten, or paying for less insurance coverage and having the individual members of the school board carry the additional risk themselves (all actual suggestions I overheard at a school board meeting on how to reconcile a $2,000,000 between what was requested and what was allocated – to their credit, the schoolboard chose to carry less insurance and leave themselves personally at risk. Unfortunately, the same decision had to be made the following year, and the year after that, and after that….)
• Establish a performance (fiscal and academic) based mechanism for the allocation of funds to the education machine. Meaning, demand accountability first, to only later award funds accordingly. As opposed to the current culture, by which the allocation of funds occurs first – consequently begging later on for accountability – when leverage has been attenuated, ineffective, therefore yielding insufficient outcomes.
• Detach education line item from the remainder of the state budget
• Refer both to a state wide referendum
• Stress the importance of ethics and constructive values.
Respectfully,
Bo ItsHaky
Curry’s plan is (as always) ludicrous. Why wouldn’t you link education to the property tax? In our state of 169 fiefdoms, the quality of public schools is a huge factor when families select a place to call home — why shouldn’t the cost of that education be carried with that choice?
As with everything else in Connecticut, the cost of education here is intriinsically linked to union dominance. If we already spend more money on education than any other state in the nation, how are we supposed to believe that MORE money will make things better — and why should we allow the state to control that money? (Stated differently, what makes you think that state/”county” control would be more efficient?)
Of course, this is all a precursor to Curry’s annual call to unfairly increase the income tax, but only on the “wealthy.”
nutty, your math “word problem” at #4 is just plain nutty. glad I didn’t stay around yesterday.
Responding to the question where to cut costs?
It seems to me that if $10,000/ student is a real cost there obviously must be plenty of places. I do find it very hard to believe there are many class rooms, where there actually are 40 students per class as one post here suggests… It seems to me 22-24 is a much more typical number. So obviously 1 more student per classroom means you need 4%- 5% less teachers. It’s a start. May not make the unions happy, but it might make the taxpayers happy.
But more significantly the biggest parts of the school budgets must be comprised of not just the teacher and administration salaries and benefits, but also the construction, operation and maintenance of the school buildings themselves. Each new school these days costs tens of millions of dollars. Yet the school year is only 181 days long… This huge capital investment in our education systems is not used 1/2 of the year!!! Can you imagine a hospital only being used 50% of the time? If you had one in your town that was only used full time for 1/2 year, would any of us agree to spend our tax money on a second one before we got the first one better utilized?
Ok I know there are some summer and evening programs, and the buildings are not totally closed. There is also time needed for maintaining these assets etc but the point is perhaps the school year can one way or another be extended to cover all 12 months. There must be ways to allow the full use of these assets in a way to lessen the need for as many schools and therefore the huge costs build and to run them. Would it not make more sense to pay fewer teachers more money for 12 months of work, than what we are doing now? Just the savings alone on the lower costs for benefits and pensions would be huge.
I cringe every time I hear that a new school is needed but not to worry,the state pays for a large potion of the cost. As if the money the state uses does not come from us to begin with… Then as I drive by these assets see them unused for the primary reason for them to exist in the first place for so many hours and days each year.
Just thinking out of the box a bit here…
Al, I agree the assets could be better utilized as you suggest but the kids need the summers off to work the family farms – or that’s how it used to go anyway and that’s why the schools weren’t air conditioned way back when a Hershey Bar was a nickel.
There is also a major issue with special ed across the board as well as security personnel costs in the cities.
and jack at # 17: there a number of us that would like to be able to keep a portion of the sales tax collected by the businesses in our munis but the state GOP doesn’t like it. As you said and why should we allow the state to control that money?
Hi Toucan,
As you point out and certainly I am suggesting, the historic reasons why the school year did not include the summer months are…well at this point historic.
I can certainly understand why a large number of students,their teachers, as well as their parents want no part of school during the summer months… What used to be farm work time for most of them is now vacation time for all of them. But something has to give.
The teachers and their unions want more money. I would tend to be far more sympathetic if the teachers worked full time to begin with. All the schools now need to be “state of the art’ to properly instruct. School books are almost obsolete the day they are purchased. And on and on. Yet it seems no matter how much we spend on education, just like the rich paying their “fair share”, it’s never enough. No matter how much we spend, or how state of the art we are, the results don’t improve. We cannot afford to simply keep looking at this black hole with a business as usual mentality. The taxpayers really need to get far more results for the vast sums of money they are required to spend to support this critical investment in our future.
I do find another issue quite amusing. The next town over from me is considering full time kindergarten. I mean all day long, from 8 to 5…Most parents with kids that age are totally for it of course.. The most often sited reason they say they are is that both parents happen to work, and that time spent in school even at this age is so important to the learning process……..Yet for some reason, I never hear anyone complain about the high schools letting the kids out at 2:30 in the afternoon, so the kids can hang around the mall as being detrimental to the learning process…….You don’t think taxpayer supported day care not education, could be the real interest here do you?
If time in school were so important to the learning process as the parents of these kindergarten kids suggest, then wouldn’t you think we should have full time high school as well??? Or, have we become so efficient at teaching our kids what they need to know to become competitive in a world wide arena we can do it all in a few hours a day, for 1/2 a year?
AL, Rell and legislators form both sides are talking about adding pre-K (used to be called nursery school) to the public education mix. Some cities like Stamford already offer it. Parents have too much on their plate these days, don’t ya know?
Glad to see some of the varied opinions in this thread. It shows the complexity of the problem and the difficulty reaching a consensus on the issues. It does bother me when I read that teachers only work 180 days in the year. The teachers I know work more than that as they keep their curriculum up to date, review text books, assist with the summer schools, do necessary course work to stay abreast with either teaching methods or their core subject, etc. I agree that our teachers are paid appropriately. The education act passed in the 1980s under Gov O’Neill has worked to make sure that has happened. Unfortunately, the state funding promised in that legislation has fallen by the wayside. Education is the largest part of city and town budgets. Most school districts run relatively tight ships on the expenses that they can control. Unfortunately, text books are expensive and should generally be replaced every five years or so to stay current. Some school facilities have not been updated for over thirty years and the local school districts are having to pay the piper today with school renovations, rebuilds or new schools. The voters get sticker shock, such as in Lyme-Old Lyme last week, and turn down projects that Boards of Education and School Building Committees have been working on for years and the voters say they just discovered. I agree with GC that regionalization will provide economies of scale. It is a solution worth working on building a consensus. It just might take the rest of our lives.
Wtfdnucsailor is right that building consensus on this issue may take a very, very long time. One won’t find many parents in West Hartford eager to share a school district with Hartford. But I also believe it’s worth it, especially as a piece of larger education reform. This isn’t just about saving money, but about choice and accountability.
Should teachers and students stay in school longer? Maybe. Frankly, I think one of the major reasons a lot of school buildings stand largely empty during the summer is that districts don’t want to stick air conditioning in them! But it is absolutely worth exploring the pros and cons of a longer school year, or a longer school day.
Genghis and wtfdnucsailor,
First Genghis, I am sure you would agree that the cost of adding air conditioning to any old school across the state so it can be used in the summer is far less than the cost of a new school. These are huge assets empty and unused for the purpose they were constructed far too many hours per year. As I said would you build a new hospital in your town if the one you already had was only used 1/2 a year? We have real money left on the table here like it or not. We cannot continue to allow this waste to go on.
wtfdnucsailor
I agree with your observation that many teachers use some of the huge amount of time off they have each year to keep themselves current. Just as any other professional person like engineers, doctor or lawyers are required to do. As I said I would have far more sympathy to the calls to increase teachers pay if they worked full time. Especially if that meant a school year could span 12 months, allow for full utilization of the assets, and use less teachers to teach more kids, more hours, a day.
I am not suggesting the kids are in school 12 months I am suggesting the teachers are, and a school schedule that keeps the school open 12 months. This would allow more kids to be taught in less schools by using the summer months for some to learn not play.
I have no problem at all using the money saved from the fewer teachers needed to be directly spent on those left who are doing more work. We would still save huge sums because we would need fewer capital assets.
All I am trying to do is think out of the box….. But this is one box the teacher unions as well as most teachers I am sure don’t want looked into.
So, Toucan, I guess that you now understand that your comment about the cost of education being “largely labor – teachers” was completely wrong?
Nutmeg,
You asked your question of Toucan not me so I hope you don’t mind me giving you my thinking on your question.
I just think the time has come for us to get past the paradigm of our historic thinking.. All of us all our lives have accepted that school and teachers are out for the summer. We also accepted a week or more vacation each year for Christmas, New Years. We never questioned why we need both a winter, and spring vacation, on top of another dozen or so other holidays a year. We just accepted that there was never any school on Saturday or Sunday.
In other words we just accepted that by throwing more money ( from teacher’s pay, to tens of millions for a new school, or the newest technology, or books ) at the same old problem we would somehow make what cannot work, work. We have not changed the basic way we do business. We have not faced the fact that our current investments in education because of all the built in and blindly accepted waste, are getting us less of a return on those an investments than a 3 month CD at the bank would.
Obviously, in my opinion the huge cost of education not just in this state, but also this entire country, is a direct function of the amount of waste we have allowed to be built into the education process, and then just blindly accepted forever.
I have to smile when I consider that there is far more discussion in each city and town across this state in questioning if a new swimming pool that maybe used for only part of the year is a waste of taxpayer money. Yet we let hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent on our schools and teachers each year in those same cities and towns go unused for 1/2 a year totally unquestioned.
The “variable” costs are largely labor, nutty, under the current education model. Al is talking about changing the model, which is certainly a good discussion.
LadyX;
Re reply #5. You said it PERFECTLY!! I believe to solve the EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM is twofold, and both are SOCIALITAL. They are
1) Lower taxes on the citizens of Connecticut. Maybe moms coulds stay home and raise their kids. Yes, I know some would want someone else to raise them, because they want a new BMW, but most working moms need to work to pay taxes.
and
2) Promote families to the lower class. The next generation of SOCIETY’s leaders don’t have the skills to lead. I think Connecticut should start a grassroot effort to get mentors for lower class kids. The mentor should help them study. Yes, single parents need to work but we need to help the next generation.
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