| Facing A Difficult 'Choice' Program boosts some school district budgets, hurts others |
| Doneen Durling News Correspondent REGION As the Ashburnham-Westminster Regional School District debates whether to accept more School Choice students to help cope with a $1 million-plus budget deficit, Winchendon and schools that lose students to School Choice are again trying to determine how they can stop the bleeding of students to other districts as their own budget problems worsen. The School Choice program allows students to apply for enrollment in schools outside of their own city or town, with the tuition paid by the sending district. In fiscal 2016, the number of receiving, or “Choice-in” districts in the state was 186, and the number of sending districts, or “Choice-out” was 310. Receiving districts statewide took in 15,341 students with a tuition dollar amount of $92 million. During a recent Board of Selectmen meeting in Westminster, Ashburnham-Westminster Superintendent Gary Mazzola and Business Manager Sherry Kersey said the district’s current deficit in its fiscal 2017 budget was due to increased costs for insurance, transportation and other operating expenses. “We have been trying to do more with less,” Mazzola told the selectmen. The superintendent said that he did not wish to balance the budget on School Choice students, but said that funds received for the 200 students currently coming into the district helped to fill a $1 million deficit. “We have waiting lists for kids in every single school in Ashburnham and Westminster,” he told selectmen. School Choice requires that a parent or guardian provide transportation to the out-of-district school. Mazzola said people are happy to drive the miles it takes to bring a student to school in Ashburnham or Westminster. Mazzola explained that the per-pupil expenditure for each student in the district is $12,611. He noted there is a gap between per-pupil cost and the $5,000 received for each School Choice student. “But we take it to help us,” he said. Keith Harding, a former member of the Advisory Board, the cost of labor in the school district historically absorbed about 75 percent of the budget. He said that School Choice students who bring in $5,000 are actually a drain on the district if the per-pupil expenditure is $12,611. “Not even factoring in any infrastructure, people in our district are paying $9,000 and getting reimbursed $5,000,” he said. Harding said he was sure many taxpayers were not happy with the fact that they were subsidizing School Choice students’ education. “God bless the Winchendon students, but I don’t think people are too happy.” Selectman Chairman John Fairbanks said School Choice is allowed because there is an excess of capacity. “In theory, you don’t have to hire another teacher, they simply go to another classroom that has excess space,” he said. Harding wanted to know if there could be 12 less teachers that the district did not need if there was no School Choice. He argued that the school district’s purview was not to provide jobs but to educate its students in the most cost-efficient way possible. “I hate to be thinking that to preserve jobs, we are Choicing-in students and the taxpayers are taking a loss,” he said. Kersey said the district was not so much preserving jobs as saving programs. Mazzola explained that they look at the funding coming in. He said if there are three seats empty in a class and they need a high school marching band program that will cost $15,000, they consider those seats as something that will help to maintain programs. Mazzola said there are laws against what School Choice money can be allocated toward. “It is programs and salaries only,” he told the board. Kersey said there was a question of opening up 40 seats in the middle school, with 20 of them being in the sixth grade because there was a dip in enrollment at that level. She said there was no way to reduce staff size, because even with the 20 kids, the way the team concept is configured, they would not have been able to reduce staff. She said that in essence it would cost the same to run the building with the teachers and the overhead whether the 20 seats were filled or not. “Those 20 seats gave us $100,000,” said Kersey. “It’s a balancing act,” said Fairbanks, “and basically the towns depend on the professionals to take their best shot at it.” Mazzola said that an accepted School Choice student is assured a seat in the district until graduation, so if one particular class increased due to enrollment, School Choice students could not be told to leave. Enrollment of Ashburnham and Westminster students is down by more than 10 percent since 2008, officials say, but growth is projected in Westminster. Mazzola said he has warned the School Committee that the budget cannot keep being balanced using School Choice students. Harding suggested that the district might save money by Choicing-out students to other districts. Mazzola and Kersey said that Choicing-out a student would cost the district not just the $5,000 they would owe another district, but also the balance of net school spending funds they would have received for the per-pupil expenditure. Mazzola said he has received calls from other superintendents requesting that he stop accepting students from other districts. Winchendon Superintendent Steven Haddad hopes to keep more students interested in the offerings of their own district, to consider staying rather than leaving for what they may consider greener pastures and greater opportunities. Haddad said School Choice parents pick what they believe is best for their children but don’t understand how their departure hurts the district. “To me, it is a marketing problem because we are losing students and we are losing the faith of the constituents in this town. We have to change that,” he said. Haddad has been in the Winchendon district for 16 years. “It’s a district with a lot of pride and a lot of tradition,” he said. “There are a lot of good people. We have good teachers, good administrators, and we have great kids. Parents aren’t as confident. My goal is to turn things around a little bit. We really need to change the culture in our schools and make it a more positive environment.” Haddad outlined a few things that have been started to help improve school spirit, beginning with students at the elementary level to get them to really like Winchendon Public Schools so they will want to stay longer. “The problem,” he said, “is that we get to eighth grade and parents feel a need to pull their kids out of school, so we’ve got to beef up the high school.” Pride begins at the kindergarten level, as students celebrate blue Fridays by wearing the school colors with the year they will graduate, 2028, printed on the back. The school spirit song has been recorded by high school students, and children in the younger grades get to hear it sung by the older students they look up to. Haddad is hoping parents will help to instill school pride within the family. The superintendent said students leaving hampers the district’s ability to bring in good teachers because money is lost to School Choice. The district’s administrative team is performing a root-cause analysis, and it is looking at more specific areas in education that could be enhanced, including Advanced Placement classes. Haddad said high school Principal Joshua Romano is leading that effort. “I think we are currently offering 14 advanced placement courses so the kids can be prepared for Harvard, Yale and colleges like that, because we have really intelligent students in the district if we can just keep them here.” Students from Winchendon use School Choice to attend Oakmont, Narragansett and Gardner. Haddad said he’s confused why parents encourage their children to leave, and even prod other parents to do the same. “I don’t know what they are thinking,” Haddad said. “I don’t think they understand the effect it has on our town. Wouldn’t you rather have a town everyone is proud of than send your kid someplace else? I don’t get the mentality. I understand that the greater the competition, the better you have to be, but when you can’t bring in revenue because you are not a business, you can’t throw more money to bolster up an educational system.” Haddad said he understands Mazzola’s need to fill his district’s budget deficit. “All the surrounding districts are working toward making their students successful,” Haddad said. “I just want people to understand we are doing everything we can to provide opportunity to our students in Winchendon. I don’t want it to be negative, but I feel that we have our swords drawn.” |
Paul working for you.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
The Economics of Education - Facing A Difficult 'Choice'
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School Choice is a game that is rigged...No One wins!
ReplyDelete"Keith Harding, a former member of the Advisory Board, the cost of labor in the school district historically absorbed about 75 percent of the budget. He said that School Choice students who bring in $5,000 are actually a drain on the district if the per-pupil expenditure is $12,611.
“Not even factoring in any infrastructure, people in our district are paying $9,000 and getting reimbursed $5,000,” he said."
Back in the day, while attending UMass to finish my undergrad degree, a group of us needed to take a course for graduation. The course was called the Economics of Education and it was only being taught that semester at Amherst College.
So we trudge over there for a few weeks to listen to these very sincere "trust fund babies" describe how they will go on to be elementary school teachers for the love of the job...(earning $29,000/year as a beginning teacher to pay off $150,000 in student loans??) Needless to say, we got the hell out of there.
My point is the funding for public education is so screwed up that taking in school choice kids at $5,000 per head when it costs a district at least $9,000 a head is a good deal.???
That is NOT a good deal. Eventually, it all falls apart.
Not that long ago Quabbin was raking in the dough with School Choice to the use of a net gain of a million dollars. It's not working out that way anymore.
Templeton voters voted to build a new elementary school. Why? To fill it with school kids kids?
The economics of education needs an override every 5 years to fund the operational expenses and increases of the school district. Every 5 years!
Or the nuclear option! Whereby the regional school district turns 4 NO votes into a Yes vote.
603 CMR 41.05 look it up!
Schooling not education was set up by the wealthy to keep you stupid and obedient. Competition was out of the question and making you part of the machine was the objective according to Gatto in his great book The Underground History of American Education that can be read in its entirety at Templeton Times. Here's a taste.
ReplyDeleteThe Cult of Scientific Management
On the night of June 9, 1834, a group of prominent men "chiefly engaged in commerce"
gathered privately in a Boston drawing room to discuss a scheme of universal schooling.
Secretary of this meeting was William Ellery Channing, Horace Mann 's own minister as
well as an international figure and the leading Unitarian of his day. The location of the
meeting house is not entered in the minutes nor are the names of the assembly 's
participants apart from Channing. Even though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98
percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent, the assembled businessmen
agreed the present system of schooling allowed too much to depend upon chance. It
encouraged more entrepreneurial exuberance than the social system could bear.
— The minutes of this meeting are Appleton Papers collection, Massachusetts Historical
Society
Frederick W. Taylor
The first man on record to perceive how much additional production could be extracted
from close regulation of labor was Frederick Winslow Taylor, son of a wealthy
Philadelphia lawyer. "What I demand of the worker," Taylor said, "is not to produce any
longer by his own initiative, but to execute punctiliously the orders given down to their
minutest details."
The Taylors, a prominent Quaker family from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had taken
Freddy to Europe for three years from 1869 to 1872, where he was attending an
aristocratic German academy when von Moltke's Prussian blitzkrieg culminated in the
French disaster at Sedan and a German Empire was finally proclaimed, ending a thousand
years of disunion. Prussian schooling was the widely credited forge which made those
miracles possible. The jubilation which spread through Germany underlined a
presumably fatal difference between political systems which disciplined with ruthless
efficiency, like Prussia's socialist paradise, and those devoted to whimsy and luxury, like
France's. The lesson wasn't lost on little Fred.
ReplyDeleteNear the conclusion of his Principles of Scientific Management '(1911), published thirty-
nine years later, Taylor summarized the new managerial discipline as follows:
1 . A regimen of science, not rule of thumb.
2. An emphasis on harmony, not the discord of competition.
3. An insistence on cooperation, not individualism.
4. A fixation on maximum output.
5. The development of each man to his greatest productivity.
Taylor's biographers, Wrege and Greenwood, wrote:
He left us a great legacy. Frederick Taylor advanced a total system of management, one
which he built from pieces taken from numerous others whom he rarely would credit....
His genius lies in being a missionary.
After Taylor's death in 1915, the Frederick W. Taylor Cooperators were formed to
project his Scientific Management movement into the future. Frank Copley called Taylor
"a man whose heart was aflame with missionary zeal." Much about this Quaker-turned-
Unitarian, who married into an Arbella-descended Puritan family before finally becoming
an Episcopalian, bears decisively on the shape schooling took in this country. Wrege and
Greenwood describe him as: "often arrogant, somewhat caustic, and inflexible in how his
system should be implemented.... Taylor was cerebral; like a machine he was polished and
he was also intellectual. ...Taylor's brilliant reasoning was marred when he attempted to
articulate it, for his delivery was often demeaning, even derogatory at times."
Frank Gilbreth's 2 Motion Study says:
It is the never ceasing marvel concerning this man that age cannot wither nor custom
stale his work. After many a weary day's study the investigator awakes from a dream of
greatness to find he has only worked out a new proof for a problem Taylor has already
solved. Time study, the instruction card, functional foremanship, the differential rate
piece method of compensation, and numerous other scientifically derived methods of
decreasing costs and increasing output and wages — these are by no means his only
contributions to standardizing the trades.
To fully grasp the effect of Taylor's industrial evangelism on American national
schooling, you need to listen to him play teacher in his own words to Schmidt at
Bethlehem Steel in the 1890s:
Now Schmidt, you are a first-class pig-iron handler and know your business well. You
have been handling at a rate of twelve and a half tons per day. I have given considerable
study to handling pig-iron, and feel you could handle forty-seven tons of pig-iron per day
if you really tried instead of twelve and a half tons.
Skeptical but willing, Schmidt started to work, and all day long, and at regular intervals,
was told by the men who stood over him with a watch, "now pick up a pig and walk.
Now sit down and rest. Now walk — rest," etc. He worked when he was told to work, and
rested when he was told to rest, and at half past five in the afternoon had his forty-seven
tons loaded on the car.
ReplyDeleteThe incident described above is, incidentally, a fabrication. There was no Schmidt except
in Taylor's mind, just as there was no close observation of Prussian schools by Mann.
Below, he testifies before Congress in 1912:
There is a right way of forcing the shovel into materials and many wrong ways. Now, the
way to shovel refractory stuff is to press the forearm hard against the upper part of the
right leg just below the thigh, like this, take the end of the shovel in your right hand and
when you push the shovel into the pile, instead of using the muscular effort of the arms,
which is tiresome, throw the weight of your body on the shovel like this; that pushes your
shovel in the pile with hardly any exertion and without tiring the arms in the least.
Harlow Person called Taylor's approach to the simplest tasks of working life "a
meaningful and fundamental break with the past." Scientific management, or Taylorism,
had four characteristics designed to make the worker "an interchangeable part of an
interchangeable machine making interchangeable parts."
Since each quickly found its analogue in scientific schooling, let me show them to you: 3
1) A mechanically controlled work pace; 2) The repetition of simple motions; 3) Tools
and technique selected for the worker; 4) Only superficial attention is asked from the
worker, just enough to keep up with the moving line. The connection of all to school
procedure is apparent.
"In the past," Taylor wrote, "Man has been first. In the future the system must be first." It
was not sufficient to have physical movements standardized; the standardized worker
"must be happy in his work," too, therefore his thought processes also must be
standardized. 4 Scientific management was applied wholesale in American industry in the
decade after 1910. It spread quickly to schools.
In the preface to the classic study on the effects of scientific management on schooling in
America, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 5 Raymond Callahan explains that when he
set out to write, his intent was to explore the origin and development of business values
in educational administration, an occurrence he tracks to about 1900. Callahan wanted to
know why school administrators had adopted business practices and management
parameters of assessment when "Education is not a business. The school is not a factory."
Could the inappropriate procedure be explained simply by a familiar process in which
ideas and values flow from high-status groups to those of lesser distinction? As Callahan
put it, "It does not take profound knowledge of American education to know that
educators are, and have been, a relatively low-status, low-power group." But the degree
of intellectual domination shocked him:
ReplyDeleteWhat was unexpected was the extent, not only of the power of business-industrial groups,
but of the strength of the business ideology... and the extreme weakness and vulnerability
of school administrators. I had expected more professional autonomy and I was
completely unprepared for the extent and degree of capitulation by administrators to
whatever demands were made upon them. I was surprised and then dismayed to learn
how many decisions they made or were forced to make, not on educational grounds, but
as a means of appeasing their critics in order to maintain their positions in the school,
[emphasis added]
The actual term "scientific management" was created by famous lawyer Louis Brandeis in 1910 for the Interstate Commerce Commission rate
hearings. Brandeis understood thoroughly how a clever phrase could control public imagination.
"Gilbreth, the man who made the term "industrial engineering" familiar to the public, was a devotee ofTaylorism. His daughter wrote a best
seller about the Gilbreth home, Cheaper By The Dozen, in which her father's penchant for refining work processes is recalled. Behind his back,
Taylor ran Gilbreth down as a "fakir."
List adapted from Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow.
Taylor was no garden-variety fanatic. He won the national doubles tennis title in 1881 with a racket of his own design, and pioneered slip-on
shoes (to save time, of course). Being happy in your work was the demand of Bellamy and other leading socialist thinkers, otherwise you
would have to be "adjusted" (hence the expression "well- adjusted"). Taylor concurred.
5 Callahan , s analysis why schoolmen are always vulnerable is somewhat innocent and ivory tower, and his recommendation for reform — to
effectively protect their revenue stream from criticism on the part of the public — is simply tragic; but his gathering of data is matchless and his
judgment throughout in small matters and large is consistently illuminating.
The Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools