A plan to provide taxpayer-funded accounts for parents looking to enroll their kids in private schools was hailed Thursday as a viable option to spur educational choice. But critics said it could siphon money from already cash-starved public schools struggling to meet students’ needs.
He said the commission has also heard from school leaders with innovative ideas on subjects such as how to keep the best teachers at the most challenging schools and how to use full-day pre-K to get students at an academic baseline early in life. “Those two things without question cannot be funded or sustained with the current funding levels we have,” Bernal said. “Even the districts that piloted it said they were about to run out of money.”
The change is expected to save the district about $1 million a year, but Brighton Superintendent Chris Fiedler previously told Chalkbeat that the biggest benefit will be “to attract and retain teachers” in a district whose salaries are among the lowest in the metro area. “I realize this will be a significant change for our students, their families, and the communities we are so fortunate to serve, but our district can no longer be expected to do more with less financial resources,” Fiedler said in a press release.
“Kansas Lawmakers face an April 30 deadline to respond to the Kansas Supreme Court’s ruling that the Legislature’s latest efforts to fund schools had fallen short. That gives them precious little time for such a complicated task as writing a new formula and then funding it. Taylor’s study…concluding that a link does indeed exist between spending and a student’s educational attainment. She said lawmakers must spend another $1.7 billion over five years to reach performance targets or an additional $2 billion to deliver enhanced educational outcomes…The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded.
Challenging the conventional wisdom about collective bargaining, a new study finds that requiring school districts to bargain with teachers’ unions did not actually improve teacher pay. Thirty-three states passed mandatory collective bargaining laws since the 1960s. Those states do typically have higher teacher salaries and higher per-pupil education spending, but they already did so “well before the emergence of collective bargaining rights or modern teacher unions,” the study found.
An early-childhood education advocacy group has released a new report on how states are using the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, to leverage federal support for early learning. The report is the latest component of what the First Five Years Fund calls an ESSA resource toolkit. Entitled, “Early Learning In State ESSA Plans – Implementation Snapshot: How States Are Using the Law,” it breaks down how each state plans to either launch new early-childhood initiatives or increase their current offerings.
According to Larry Miller’s presentation, school districts spend roughly $15,000 per child on education, but early childhood centers spend between $2,000 and $4,000 per child. That disparity means early education centers have longer waiting lists to attend, teachers who quit because they earn more at McDonalds and children receive fewer hours in care.
As teachers in West Virginia noisily celebrated a 5 percent raise that ended their nine-day walkout, momentum was building elsewhere for similar protests over pay and benefits for the nation’s public school teachers.
School districts spend on average about 22 percent of their budgets on special education, Donahue said — up from 13 percent in 2006-07, according to an association survey of business administrators. While districts can’t increase their budgets by more than 2 percent without voter approval, “special-education costs have no cap,” Donahue said. The costs have added to school district budget pressures in a state with some of the highest property taxes in the country — and that has for years failed to follow its formula for distributing money to schools.
Medicaid spends only $4 billion of its $400 billion annual budget in schools — a “very small portion of the pie,” said Jessica Schubel, a senior policy analyst at the bipartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But for the school districts providing an array of services that have quietly become vital to students and families, losing this funding source would be immense, she said, “a big deal.”