There is quite a lot to discuss about the Governor’s proposed state budget (enough to keep several tax attorneys busy for many years [I hope]). Christian Schneider has started calculating the numbers at http://www.wpri.org/blog/?p=504
Governor Doyle has been busy. In an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, has previewed a plan to lift revenue caps for school districts. See http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/top/439591
Frankly, it is a very frustrating read (and we don’t know all of the details, so I’ll work off the articles).
First, as I think Doyle implicitly acknowledges, but won’t quite come out and say, it will result in higher property taxes. It is clear school districts have had lower amounts of yearly increases in the amount of school spending and in teacher benefits because of the revenue limits and the QEO.
And what will taxpayers receive for these higher taxes? Doyle says there needs to be a “pathway” for each district to get rid of the the revenue limits. From the article:
To avoid the revenue caps, Doyle’s plan would require districts to:
• Join together for the purposes of negotiating union contracts
• Make employees use the state health plan unless the school district already has a plan that is cheaper
• Require schools to agree to a list of practices that would improve student performance
• Provide compensation for teachers that better reflects the needs of individual schools such as those in rural districts that struggle to attract teachers for some subjects
I don’t know enough about union negotiation rules to fully comment on the first two. Perhaps if school boards bind themselves together for teacher contract purposes, they can avoid the teachers’ union from using arbitration to obtain higher pay and benefits. I’m not certain why that would be the case–I don’t think it follows that a group of school boards would strike a better bargain than single school boards. I fully accept the fact that some districts will want to pay their teachers’ more. Once a few contracts are signed at a higher level, a union in another school district can point to the contract in arbitration as “market.” WEAC, as they are fully allowed to do, will coordinate with the unions in various districts to make sure that “market” is as high as possible. Binding school districts together may moderate the increase in pay and benefits by decreasing the number of outliers, but I would want to see how the Governor proposes to group these school districts (the QEO may be imperfect, but I doubt any system of arbitration can match it for keeping overall salary and benefit costs in check).
On the second point, perhaps the school boards will need to pay teachers more so that their unions will accept changes to their healthcare (as the union president further along in the article brings up). If so, then the unions would be asked to trade healthcare they don’t want and more money. My understanding is that they were always allowed that tradeoff under the QEO. If they never took it, then it seems odd to pay teachers more money overall to accept a healthcare plan they don’t want under the guise of saving taxpayer money. If the savings from changing health insurance providers is that great, I would think that by giving the teachers’ union more leverage (eliminating the QEO), it would result in the teachers’ union and not the district capturing the savings (since the teachers probably already gave up extra pay to have the coverage that they wanted).
The third point is also odd. I would have thought that schools would have already been doing what was best for their students. Doyle’s plan makes it seem like there is some silver bullet out there that, if with just a few more hundred dollars a year (over the $8,500-$12,000 per student that we’re already spending), there will be some massive gains in educational achievement. More on this later.
The fourth point is probably worth debating. There are a number of poor, rural, low-spending districts across the state that do not spend up to the revenue limit (or they could always pass a referendum to spend more) but who choose not to do so, even though they are offered nearly the same grandiose bargain from the state that the Milwaukee Public Schools are offered–for every educational dollar spent, the state will pay for 75%-80% of the additional cost. To hinge a policy that will result in suburban school districts to massively increase their spending on the lack of spending by poor districts who will not take advantage of their increased ability to spend is nonsensical, especially when a good portion of the problem is the differential in pay between suburban and rural districts, not just the total amount of salary. To the extent the problem is differential in pay (suburban districts pay teachers more and thus claim the best teachers), then this plan will probably actually make the problem worse, because suburban districts have a higher appetite for spending. If this was really the underlying problem, there are far more targeted and cheaper ways to solve it.
The simple result of this plan is that teachers will be paid more than they are currently. Wages and benefits make up 75%-80% of each school district’s budget; if the revenue limit and the QEO are simultaneously eliminated, it is pretty easy to see where the majority of the spending increase will go–to teachers who are already teaching (less whatever savings can be obtained by changing health insurance to the state, as outlined above). Will paying people more make them better at their jobs? Doyle’s response seems to be, well, if the state can make them do their jobs better, then yes.
I have my doubts. Yes, we should expect more from our students, but Libby Burmaster and Tony Evers clearly don’t do so when it matters (beyond your basic campaign slock, that is: http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/40010682.html). I have great doubts about whether the proposals under this bill can really make the state educational bureaucracy into a machine for innovation and academic achievement.
The crux of this plan is in the middle of the article, so you might have missed it:
Doyle said his proposals on best practices for schools would draw on the work of UW-Madison professor Allan Odden, co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education.
Odden said Doyle’s plan would be a good compromise because it would allow school districts more money but also ensure that it was better spent. Odden said recommendations of his group included setting sharply higher expectations for student achievement, giving small-group tutoring to struggling students and more testing of students by teachers beforehand to develop their curriculum.
Good compromise for who, exactly? Certainly not the taxpayers who are footing the bill. Wisconsin school spending is more than healthy when compared to other states. So is Wisconsin’s tax burden. Taxpayers are rewarded under this plan presumably because the schools are going to produce better students (because we started expecting “higher standards” and paid the teachers more).
Odden’s work is mostly predicated on the notion that more money spent will equal more academic achievement. That would come as a big surprise to most of the economists and researcher who study the issue; they know that most studies do not find any general link between spending and achievement. When anyone, including the Governor, argues that by spending a few more dollars, academic achievement will increase, their plan deserves the strictest of scrutiny. Empirically, that is just not the case. It is not a “good compromise” for anyone except those who just want more money for schools.
I suppose the response will be that the programs that Odden is talking about will work (there may even be good evidence of some of these things working–such as regular testing of students). There may be some data that shows that particular programs will work. However, there is nothing stopping the implementation of those programs right now with the massive amounts of money that we already spend (an average of $9,600 per pupil), except maybe union rules. But giving teachers’ unions more leverage in negotiations by eliminating the QEO and going back to arbitration is not a good way to make sure that those rules are changed. There are other proven solutions that will produce increased academic achievement without spending anything close to the cost of this plan (which, conveniently, is clouded by so many contingencies, will never be clearly estimated). There are good solutions out there such as allowing administrators more flexibility in choosing and retaining teachers and pay-for-performance. Moreover, if the idea is to increase academic achievement with these particular programs, why wouldn’t the state just fund the programs that it finds can produce additional academic achievement (such as lowering class sizes), instead of allowing local districts to increase taxes for all sorts of programs/spending that may not be on Odden’s list of ways to spend money to increase academic achievement?
Without a doubt, Wisconsin should raise expectations for its students. The connections between the rationales offered for this plan and its operative provisions (as we know them) are loose, to say the least. The question of when Wisconsin’s students reach those expectations is not a fiscal question, it is a question of whether our leaders will make the tough, accountable reforms that we need to make to our schools.