Voice For Liberty

Tag: Education

  • Corkins testifies on school finance history, recommendations

    Topeka, Kansas — In testimony Monday before an interim session of the Kansas House Appropriations Committee, former Kansas Education Commissioner Bob Corkins supplied insight into Kansas school funding court decisions, and made some recommendations for the future.

    In its ruling in the Montoy case (the 2005 case that ordered the Kansas Legislature to increase school spending), the Kansas Supreme Court said very little about efficient spending, according to Corkins. The original trial judge addressed this issue in a preliminary order, saying that if schools funds are “squandered,” resulting in Kansas schoolchildren not receiving the suitable education the Kansas Constitution guarantees, the legislature needs to correct the situation.

    The courts relied on the Augenblick & Myers study in determining what a suitable education in Kansas should cost. This study relied on two methods, according to Corkins: the “professional judgment” approach and the “successful schools” approach. Another method, school district spending efficiency, was not used, with the report stating “Since the majority of successful districts [in Kansas] would be considered inefficient spenders, we did not use this examination of efficiency.” (emphasis added)

    In 2006 the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit produced a cost analysis, aided by outside consultants who wrote that “directly measuring efficiency is very difficult.” It did use research that found that factors positively related to efficiency in spending are district wealth as measured by property valuations, and the share of district residents who are over the age of 64. This logic, Corkins said, is difficult to accept.

    Corkins had several recommendations for the legislature, including these:

    Site-based budgeting: In this model, budgets are developed for each school building, and the principal has “greater autonomy and accountability for deciding how public dollars are spent on each student in that principal’s facility.” Kansas does not do this at the present.

    Site-based reporting: “What is the total spending per pupil at each schoolhouse in Kansas? Nobody is accurately disclosing that information presently.” Corkins said this information is needed to guide school spending policy and to defend its constitutionality. Also, this information can identify inefficient spending.

    The Kansas school funding formula includes weighting factors such as a student coming from a low-income family or needing bilingual education. These factors give the appearance of “direct personalized funding,” Corkins said, but there’s no guarantee that the students who generated the weightings that resulted in extra funding for their school district will actually receive and benefit from those increased funds.

    As Corkins said: “Put simply, there is no assurance that dollars will follow the student.” Lacking that, the weighting factors have no rational basis, and it may be that our school funding formula is unconstitutional. Local school districts may also be at risk for lawsuits.

    The Kansas Department of Education does have initiatives in place to help with this type of reporting, particularly Kansas Individual Data on Students (KIDS) and an enterprise data warehouse, although Corkins wasn’t able to verify the status of the latter.

    Corkins said that school district officials have been opposed to legislative efforts towards site-based budgeting. For now, he recommended that the legislature concentrate on site-based accounting and reporting.

    Analysis

    The recommendation to move to site-based reporting could produce some important results. According to Corkins and also a Kansas school board member I talked to, there are significant differences in per-pupil spending in the Wichita school district, with failing schools receiving much less funding that others. The type of reporting that Corkins recommended will let us spot these differences.

  • Extra money in Kansas school funds could help with budget

    Continuing a debate on Kansas school funding on the KPTS television public affairs program Kansas Week, Kansas Policy Institute (formerly the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy) President Dave Trabert appeared tonight to present KPI’s findings about school funding. While school spending advocates have criticized these findings, there’s really good news for Kansas in the numbers.

    Trabert said that despite the large amount of discussion about school funding in recent years, there is still much misunderstanding about the topic.

    He said that KPI put out a report that showed that Kansas schools finished the last fiscal year with $1.5 billion in unencumbered cash. A portion of it is not available for general use, he said, but $699.2 million is. This is not only according to KPI’s analysis, Trabert said. Dale Dennis, Kansas Deputy Commissioner of Education, last week told Kansas State Education board members how schools could access these funds. Money flows in to the general or supplemental general fund, and is then disbursed to other special funds. Money in the special funds can be used only for the fund’s stated purpose, but by reducing contributions to these funds, schools can effectively access the money in these funds.

    An an example, Trabert used a food service fund with a balance of $10 million. Then suppose a district believes it will need to spend $15 million on food service. Instead of stocking the fund with $15 million of new funding, add just $5 million (plus a little more). This gives the food service fund the ability to do its job, but it frees up perhaps $10 million to be used for other purposes.

    Trabert said that Dennis agrees that this action is possible.

    The $699.2 million balance in the operating category is a 53% increase over the past four years. “The only way that those balances grow is when more money goes in to them than is taken out,” Trabert said. This means that schools didn’t need all the revenue they received.

    Host Tim Brown noted that there is a fierce debate over this, with schools saying this money isn’t available for spending in this way. Specifically, ending balances in funds are needed for expenses during a “carry over” period from July 1 to October 25. Trabert said yes, schools need something for this period, but no one knows how much. The fact that the balances are growing rapidly is strong evidence that the balances are higher than needed.

    A second area of misunderstanding concerns how much the state is spending on schools. Using Kansas State Department of Education figures, Trabert showed that spending has been growing rapidly over the past years. Further, state spending is just part of local school districts’ total spending. For example, for the 2008-2009 school year, spending by the state of Kansas was $3,287.2 million, while Kansas school districts spent $5,666.7 million.

    Often only the Kansas base state aid per pupil is focused on, but that number is just the starting point for school spending. While this number has been cut, total spending by schools fell by only 0.64% last year, Trabert said.

    Brown said that these numbers are different from numbers seen in some other sources. Trabert replied that the numbers he is using are from the Kansas State Department of Education. Often school spending advocates use numbers that represent just a portion of the total school spending picture.

    In conclusion, Trabert said that there is really some good news in these figures: “We don’t have to have higher taxes or cut services. We can have both if we figure out how to make better use of all the money we already have.”

  • Reaction to Star Parker shows intolerance of left

    Before author and columnist Star Parker spoke at Wichita State University earlier this week, attacks were already launched, providing illustration of the rampant political correctness and intolerance in effect on the modern college campus.

    An editorial in the WSU Sunflower, the student newspaper, took issue with Parker’s visit to WSU. Not only was Ms. Parker herself attacked, but also Johnny Stevens, the Wichita businessman who had the idea to bring her to WSU and who paid the not inconsiderable expenses of the event.

    Here’s an example of the overblown rhetoric at Wichita State University, as used in this editorial:

    WSU College Democrats co-chair Katherine Paige contended, “It is ethically problematic to ask a group that believes in the value of public schools, helping the homeless and those in poverty and the separation of church and state to condone the wholesaling of our campus to conservative radicals such as Star Parker.”

    A few points: First, the university rented some of its facilities to a private person for one evening. Contrast this with the taxpayer-funded use of the university every day to promote leftist political agendas.

    Then, does this writer really believe the premise of her statement, that the public schools are doing a good job? That government really helps those in poverty? That it is “ethically problematic” to allow views other than those she agrees with to be expressed at a university?

    If so, this is more evidence of the decline in critical thinking and civility at our universities.

    The editorial also mentions “anti-government conservative propaganda,” presumably to be presented at Parker’s lecture. The implication of the writer is that the facilities of the university are to be used only for the glorification of government. Is no dissent allowed, even if the speaker pays for the privilege?

    That is what’s really troubling about this editorial, if it is representative of WSU students today. Not willing to allow alternative views to be heard, they turn the idea of “liberalism” on its head. Instead of being tolerant, the writer of this editorial and the WSU College Democrats co-chair show themselves to be as close-minded, intolerant, and bigoted as they believe are the conservatives they hate.

    Besides this, the editorial is wrong on two factual accounts. One relatively minor error is the report that Stevens “contacted the WSU Alumni Association with the hopes to bring Parker to the University.” Stevens said that this never happened.

    A more important error is the claim that WSU student fees will be used to pay for some part of this event. Stevens assured me that he is paying for all expenses the university might incur. He donated money up front, and his instructions were that he would supply additional funds if necessary after all the bills were known so that no university funds would be spent.

    Will the Sunflower publish a correction?

  • Star Parker delivers message in Wichita

    In an energetic message delivered to an audience at Wichita State University this Monday, author and columnist Star Parker spoke about breaking the cycle of poverty and other issues facing our country.

    Early in her talk, Parker noted the irony of the welfare office in Washington (the Department of Health and Human Services) being located on Independence Avenue. The approaches that have been tried over the last 45 years to conquer poverty haven’t worked and have led to two generations of government dependence with disastrous consequences, she said.

    Speaking of her own experience being on welfare, the rules of welfare are “don’t work, don’t save, don’t get married.” These rules are designed to keep poor people on welfare, not allow them to break out of poverty. There’s something wrong with our society, she said, if we allow this to continue.

    She believed the lie that “I was poor because rich people are rich.”

    There used to be a healthy black community, but the war on poverty has been very harmful to family life. Fathers used to be in the black home. But the government moved in and began to bankrupt family life.

    At the time, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked at the plans for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and recognized that it will hurt black families more than help them, Parker said. Then, black out-of-wedlock births was one in four; today it is three in four. Even though there was poverty and racism, black family life was largely intact.

    The ideas of the conservative right work for all Americans, including poor people, she said. Traditional values, including the duty to be self-sufficient and responsible in the choice they make, are an important factor in getting out of poverty.

    Who is in poverty, Parker asked? 53% of the poor live in families with only one parent. We need to “mention marriage every now and then,” she said.

    Developing a work ethic is also important, she said. “Work is how you get out of poverty.” But there is a hostile environment in Washington and elsewhere that says the wealthy need to be penalized. That means they can’t produce as many jobs as they could.

    The welfare state and moral relativism has caused harm to all of America, she said. The black family was most vulnerable, so it was hurt first. Now the rate of births out marriage for Hispanics and whites is higher than it was for blacks was when the war on poverty started.

    Regarding education and school choice, Parker made the point that the rich — even the middle class — already have school choice. It’s poor people that benefit most from school choice programs across the country. She told of the Washington, DC scholarship voucher program, where 1,700 poor children each year were able to attend better schools. Parents desperate to get their children out of DC schools applied, 40,000 of them, so there had to be a lottery to decide who would get the scholarship.

    But President Barack Obama canceled this program.

    Social security is another government program that is harmful to the poor, Parker said. The little that they might be able to save gets sent to Washington for something they don’t own, they can’t transfer, and on which they get a horrible rate of return.

    In response to a question about the redistribution of wealth through the tax system to provide basic needs such as food and shelter, Parker said that the best approach is to create an environment where people can provide these things for themselves.

    Answering another question, Parker said it’s important for youth to hear all sides. Most curriculum, she said, is slanted towards the left.

    A question about race and racism brought out Parker’s observation that whenever the left is losing on an issue, such as health care, they bring up the issue of race. This is the case even when the people on both sides are black. There’s an industry that benefits from racism, but “most of the barriers of segregation have been removed,” she said. The number one crisis facing African-Americans today is not racism, but sexual immorality, she said.

    Regarding the murder of Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, she said that people should not take justice into their own hands. The debate is intense, and we need to “take it down a notch.” The death of Tiller was a horrible thing, and it is also horrible to glorify the man and the things he did, she said.

    Additional coverage of Parker’s visit is at Kansas Watchdog.

  • Star Parker to deliver message of freedom in Wichita

    Tonight in Wichita, author and columnist Star Parker will deliver a lecture titled “Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: From Entitlement to Empowerment.”

    I spoke by telephone with Parker and asked her to give Wichitans a preview of the topics she’ll address tonight. One topic she will address is the notion that people do not have the ability to control their own lives. There are some that believe that other forces keep people from being able to live free, she said.

    Also, Parker will look at political freedom and its role in enabling people to live free. Then, she’ll examine the steps out of poverty, including self-government, work ethic, education, saving and investing, and charities, and whose role it is to provide these.

    A recent article in the Sunflower, the WSU student newspaper, criticized her visit to the campus. Parker said “In a free society, we have free speech. For too long, we’ve only allowed on our universities one side of the case to be made. It is healthy for students to hear both sides.”

    She said that her personal experience, having lived on welfare and experienced the social engineering that takes place, gives her a unique perspective on the war on poverty. That war has been fought for 40 years, she said.

    She also disputed the comments about the Iraq war attributed to her by the Sunflower article.

    Parker’s lecture is Monday, October 5th at 7:00 pm In the CAC Theater at WSU.

  • Author and columnist Star Parker to speak in Wichita

    An evening with Star Parker
    Sponsored by Johnny and Marjorie Stevens

    Lecture: “Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: From Entitlement to Empowerment”

    Monday, October 5th at 7:00 p.m., with a book signing following lecture.

    The location is the CAC Theatre at Wichita State University
    (click for a Google map of the location)

    This event is free and open to the public. It is presented by The African American Student Association, The Young Democratic Socialists, WSU College Republicans, and The Center for Student Leadership. This event is part of WSU’s Civic Engagement Lecture Series.

    Star Parker
    From Welfare to Warrior

    The story of Star Parker is a chronicle of how she left the seductive life of drugs, crime, abortions and welfare fraud to become a leading advocate for the family.

    Star Parker is the founder and president of CURE, the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education, a 501c3 non-profit think tank that provides a national voice of reason on issues of race and poverty — in the media, inner city neighborhoods, and public policy.

    Star is a syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, offering weekly op-eds to more than 400 newspapers worldwide.

    As a social policy consultant, Star gives regular testimony before the United States Congress, and has appeared on major television and radio shows across the country. She is a regular commentator on C-Span, FOX News, and MSNBC. Star has debated Jesse Jackson on BET, fought for school choice on Larry King Live and defended welfare reform on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

    Star Parker’s personal transformation from welfare fraud to conservative crusader has been chronicled by ABC’s 20/20; Rush Limbaugh; Readers Digest; Dr. James Dobson; the Washington Times; Christianity Today; Charisma, and World Magazine. Articles and quotes by Star have appeared in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Recently she co-hosted an episode of The View with Barbara Walters.

    Her books include “Uncle Sam’s Plantation” (2003) and “White Ghetto” (2006). She works in Washington, DC, and resides in California.

    (Click here for a printable flyer announcing this Star Parker lecture.)

  • Americans fail basic test on history and institutions

    If you took a test covering basic questions about American heritage and civics, how do you think you would do? Do you think college freshmen should be able to pass such a test?

    You can take the test to see how well you score. But for college freshmen and seniors, the average result is barely more than half the questions answered correctly.

    This test, created and administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is not difficult. Some questions are so basic that everyone should be able to answer them correctly. Some are more subtle, including the one I missed. But for college freshmen — people who have, for the most part, just graduated from America’s public schools — the inability to answer nearly all these questions correctly is an embarrassing indictment.

    The results of the test show that there’s little difference between liberals and conservatives in their understanding of American civics, with liberals answering 49% of the questions correctly; conservatives 48%.

    By testing students at the end of their college careers, ISI found that college adds very little to students’ knowledge of these matters.

    Perhaps the most amazing finding relates to elected officeholders: “Officeholders typically have less civic knowledge than the general public. On average, they score 44%, five percentage points lower than non-officeholders.”

    You can learn more about this test and its conclusions — and take the test yourself — at American Civic Literacy Program. The test is 33 questions, and you’ll get your score, along with the questions you missed, right away.

  • Jean Schodorf’s education credentials

    Kansas state senator Jean Schodorf, a Republican from northwest Wichita, is testing the waters in the race for the Republican nomination for Kansas’ fourth congressional district.

    It appears that she’ll use her public education experience and advocacy as a selling point. As reported in today’s Wichita Eagle:

    She has served in the Senate since 2001 and is chairwoman of the Education Committee, where she has developed a reputation for fighting in favor of schools and school funding.

    At her Monday news conference, Schodorf was introduced by former state Board of Education member Carol Rupe, who served with her on the Wichita school board and was one of several current and former USD 259 officials in attendance.

    When judging Schodorf’s record on education, we should keep in mind that when considering educational freedom, Kansas is one of the very worst states in the nation. Kansas has no charter schools to speak of. Any hope of a voucher or tax credit program is a faint and distant goal. This is all well and good, according to Schodorf, and she has a fair degree of influence over education in Kansas stemming from her role as the chair of the senate education committee.

    Instead, the Kansas public school spending lobby seems to pretty much control the legislature and the governor’s chair. Yes, Kansas had to scale back on school spending this year. But schools fared much better than did other state agencies and spending lobbies. It’s a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans that allow this to happen. Schodof is one of these moderate Republicans, with several Democrats in the Senate possessing a more taxpayer-friendly voting record.

    If Schodorf starts to talk about the many years of rising Kansas test scores, I hope she calls for an independent audit of those scores. This is needed so that Kansans can see for themselves whether these scores are a valid and reliable measure of student achievement. This is important because the results on the federal NAEP scores don’t support the rapid rise shown on the Kansas tests. See Are Kansas school test scores believable? for background.

    Also, the public school monopoly and its supporters in Kansas — Schodorf being in this group — continue to dismiss a way to save Kansas a lot of money and improve educational freedom and results at the same time. As shown in my post School choice would save, not cost, Kansas, we can save money by implementing school choice programs.

    Let’s ask presumptive candidate Schodorf some of these questions, and then judge the validity of her purported care and concern for the education of Kansas schoolchildren.

  • Articles of interest

    Chemical security, national health care, global warming cost, school order.

    Extending security standards better decision

    A letter in the Montgomery Advertiser makes the case for extending the present Chemical facility anti-terrorism standards. Legislation is under consideration that would give government the ability to regulate processes and technologies.

    “Although we believe CFATS should be reauthorized and made permanent, we do not support current draft legislation that replaces CFATS and extends the power of the DHS to dictate how a product is made. Decisions pertaining to feedstocks, processes and products should be left to the engineers and safety experts at local facilities.”

    The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda

    George F. Will’s column explains that while President Obama and Congress are presently considering a “public option” health care plan, this is just the first step on the road to a single-payer plan. “The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America ‘starting from scratch’ he would favor a ‘single-payer’ — government-run — system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system.”

    The Big Chill
    Congress shouldn’t fight global warming by freezing the economy.

    In a Wall Street Journal column, Pete Du Pont explains the enormous cost of the Waxman-Markey global warming bill and how little warming it would stop. “Manzi estimates the additional economic costs of the bill would be 0.8% of gross domestic product, while the economic benefits would be just 0.08% — so the costs would be 10 times the benefits. The cost of reducing emissions turns out to be greater than the cost they impose on societies. According to a 1999 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimate, the emissions cuts the Kyoto Protocol would have required in 2010 were likely to reduce America’s GDP by $275 billion to $468 billion, or $921 to $1,565 per person, and of course Kyoto does not apply to fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.”

    Taking back control of the classrooms

    “The dirty little secret of America’s schools is that teachers have lost control of the classroom. Disrespect is commonplace. Disorder is an epidemic — 43 percent of high school teachers say they spend more than half their time maintaining order instead of teaching, according to a Public Agenda survey. Learning is impossible in these conditions. One misbehaving student steals the floor, spoiling the learning opportunity for the other 29 students. ‘You know, it really doesn’t take very many kids to ruin a classroom,’ observed David Adams, superintendent of Shelbyville Central Schools.”

    Phillip K. Howard explains that the problem is too much law: “There is a broad perception — by teachers and students alike — that teachers lack the legal authority to enforce respect and order.”