THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605040019
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Schools and money, money and schools. As I've traveled around South Hampton Roads listening to candidates for mayor, for city council and school board, that's been the incessant refrain.
It's too bad education is so inextricably bound up with cash. It distracts attention from academics. Socrates taught outdoors. No school building or utilities, no chalkboards or chalk, no computers or textbooks required. His equipment consisted of one toga and a lot of hard questions for soft-headed pupils.
It would be nice if everything could be so simple again. And some parsimonious candidates try to pretend that what was good enough for Socrates ought to be good enough for us. Who needs all the frills, they ask?
They point to $40,000 flagpoles the way critics of the Pentagon point to $600 toilet seats. There's certainly something to be said for keeping a wary eye on school expenses. Waste can creep into any budget. Abuse is not unheard of, though outright fraud is mercifully rare.
But pictures of spendthrift schools are wildly exaggerated. Though schools can succumb to the edifice complex, we seem to be going to the other extreme. In the Gilded Age and the 1920s, America built schools as if they were banks or temples intended to last forever. Now we seem to lack confidence in our own permanence. We educate our children in mobile homes.
The fixation on schools and money arises because everyone hates paying taxes and schools eat up a huge percentage of state and local funds. We may talk a good game about the importance of education but we wince when we have to pay for it. Just as we extol the virtues of reading and then permit our children to park themselves in front of the tube.
To be fair, however, I was struck by the number of candidates willing to admit we are, if anything, underfunding education. That takes real courage in an anti-tax environment. It approaches heroism at the Beach where the public perception of the Sid Faucette regime is of uncontrolled profligacy.
In fact, some very dubious spending decisions were made, but it also looks a lot like much of the debacle stemmed from an attempt to provide more education than the budget permitted by keeping too many balls in the air. This Ponzi-esque method of coping with an inadequate budget was wrong, but that doesn't mean the budget was adequate.
It is interesting, for instance, that one of the first acts of the new superintendent, Tim Jenney, has been to insist that more millions are needed to do the job right. After the Faucette mess a far safer course would have been to take what council offered and pipe down.
Critics may say this only proves all educators are never satisfied, but it's hard to find the lunatic over-indulgence in most schools. Even candidates for School Board at the Beach, who have a vested interest in soft-pedaling the money question, have been so bold as to tell voters what they don't want to hear.
Asked if the budget for education is adequate, 41 of the candidates responded. Six waffled. Fifteen said there was enough money to do the job. Eighteen said Beach schools are underfunded.
It's hard to disagree with that conclusion. The teacher/student ratio is far higher than ideal and that is the factor that correlates most closely with academic success. Since salaries and benefits consume the lion's share of the budget already, doing anything to bring down the ratio will mean more expense. Almost everyone also believes that more technology is going to be needed in schools. That, too, will cost a lot more money.
Schools throughout Hampton Roads and Virginia are underfunded compared with the national average. For years the Southern states have compared themselves with the average of the Southern states on many education measures - test scores, teacher pay and so on. That way most can look great alongside Mississippi and Louisiana while ignoring the stiffer competition elsewhere in the nation and the world. That would be fine if graduates of Virginia schools were going to live in a world where they would only compete against Mississippians, but unfortunately it isn't so.
It's not at all clear where money will come from to meet technology and manpower needs. The federal government provides only a small fraction of local school monies, but even that could be in peril as the drive to balance the budget continues. State and local government will have to come up with funds to improve education if improvements are to be made.
Will voters be willing to approve more funds for education? Tuesday's election won't begin to settle the question. But the money issue won't go away. Sooner rather than later, voters are going to have to confront some very hard choices, an economics test with pocketbook implications. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB