Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005240527
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DUDLEY J. EMICK JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Superintendents urge governor's commission to consider only an increase in education funding." "Snow Creek treasures its little school." "Governor's commission scheduled to report after the 1991 General Assembly adjourns."
But without changes in the structure of the education system, "leveling up" - that is, equalizing per-student spending in various districts by raising taxes to generate more money - is self-defeating.
Reforms are needed, but it is important to keep the discussion from getting bogged down on only the issue of closing small, inefficient schools.
And while the General Assembly may be an abysmal place to seek educational reform in an election year, that is precisely what the Constitution of Virginia requires.
If the governor's commission isn't going to report until after the next General Assembly session, then a federal judge will be invited to make the decisions that we state legislators took an oath to make.
I propose several changes:
Reduce and revamp the administrative staff of the state Department of Education, and use a regional staff to do much of the work now duplicated by staffs in each school division.
This alone would free up millions of dollars which could be used for better classrooms, teachers, and lower pupil-teacher ratios.
There are an estimated 440 employees in staff positions at the state Department of Education. Among local divisions, Roanoke City has 63, Salem 11, Roanoke County 57, Bedford County 25, Botetourt County has 12, Franklin County 15, and Montgomery County 46. Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach have 600. Alexandria, Arlington and Fairfax have 680.
These numbers include no teachers, principals, assistant principals, custodians, aides, school secretaries or librarians. They are strictly staff positions, whose work is duplicated, triplicated and compounded in Virginia in all its 140 separate school divisions.
Do away with the state's current school-funding formula.
Instead, have the state fund local schools on a per-student basis of approximately $3,000 per year. Locally, divide the assessed real estate between school purposes and other purposes. Local elected officials would apply a rate to their share of the real estate for general government, and elected school boards would apply a rate for school purposes.
It is a rare legislator, councilman, supervisor or newspaper editor who will even try to understand Virginia's school-funding formula. In each school division, however, there is at least one person who knows this formula backward and forward - and is usually the person who mixes and spends the federal, state and local tax dollars appropriated for public education.
There are at least seven attractively named programs, such as "drop-out prevention," under which schools can apply for specifically designated monies. But in fact the monies go to the school system, and are used by the money mixer to fund the cost of general education.
Also, study after study in Virginia has shown that - despite the state mandate of 100 percent fair-market-value assessment and uniform tax rates within a locality - poor and moderate-income property-owners pay closer to their fair share of property tax than do wealthier property-owners. This so-called local effort, however, is one of the factors in the formula for distributing state school money to localities.
Have locally elected school boards with taxing authority and the power to appoint the division superintendent. All other staffing (except for personnel, payroll, etc.) should be done on a regional basis by a state superintendent of public instruction appointed by the governor and confirmed by the General Assembly.
Virginia is the only state in the Union with so many overseers of education: the General Assembly, local elected officials, local school boards, the state Board of Education, the state superintendent and local division superintendents.
None of them directly supervises another. Coordination among these offices relies primarily on the personalities of the individuals holding them.
Blame-shifting is the norm and turf protection is the game.
A member of the General Assembly will threaten to bring a suit because he lacks the will to push for legislative changes, or the courage to raise taxes. A school-board member will call for closing small schools to obtain some modest efficiency, which causes a city councilman to wail that his constituents want their children to go to school across the street instead of around the corner.
Each of these independent groups will speak eloquently about fully funding the standards of quality in education - with an understanding that every listener will interpret these words differently.
Fund schools to educate students in math, English, history, science and the normal curriculum associated with becoming a literate citizen. Other worthwhile goals should be pursued in an environment away from the public schools.
Schools have become laboratories for a wide variety of social experiments. Baby-sitting for children under 5, sex education, consumer education, and programs for substance abuse such as MADD, CADRE and other acronyms are part of this experimentation.
In one school division, a very good elementary principal was installed as director of multicultural affairs - to head a program established as part of a political compromise, and of seemingly marginal use except for public relations.
Common in many schools are areas that look like hospital wards, with severely retarded students lying on mats and receiving little or no instruction.
As citizens, take up the cause of public education.
Discussion of the problem of hospital wards in public schools, which were created by federal law, will be construed as a futile attack on an unchangeable mandate or, worse, an attack on the handicapped.
With better service to the handicapped, outside the public schools, mandates can be changed.
Discussion of the problem of allowing urban schools to deteriorate to little more than reform schools could raise the nasty word "racism."
It is not racist to demand excellence in education. It is an abdication of citizenship to be satisfied with anything less.
Discussion by teachers of waste in staffing, though they will talk in private, is thwarted by a feeling they will be punished by the administration for their candor.
Teachers and the Virginia Education Association should be yelling out about wasteful practices, since the waste reduces the money available to them.
Discussions of keeping open schools designed for 400 students but attended now by 100 are clouded by ringing speeches about the glory of learning in the old one-room school, and by the pathetic nostalgia that sees the school as the glue holding the community together.
It is disingenuous to think that political speeches by cowards hoping to stay in office will make the federal courts, or anyone else, approve of spending of tax money raised elsewhere to keep open inefficient schools.
by CNB