After spending time with Appendix C of the Executive Summmary, it only makes sense to dip into Appendix D, doesn’t it? C was about state aid to the parts of municipal budgets that aren’t education. D is about the much bigger contribution the state makes to education. Once again, the really interesting things about the numbers in D are how they’ve changed over the years. (The information is reproduced in the Technical Appendix, page 211, and that table goes back more years.)
You can write an entire book or two about the funding of education in Rhode Island. But this is a tour of the entire budget, so we’re just going to skim some of the important points.
In 2013, the Governor’s budget would provide $674 million to all the cities and towns, to help run their schools, plus another $46 million for charter schools. This is up from $616 million last year, and the difference is revenue from the proposed increase in the tax on restaurants and hotels.
As of 2010, the latest year for which the collected municipal budget data is available, all the cities and towns together spent $1.79 billion on education. To that amount, the state contributed $592 million, plus another $30 million for charter schools.
A couple of points leap out here. The first is that, just since 2010, charter schools have seen a 53% increase in state funding, while everyone else got 15%. You might sniff at that and say 15% isn’t nothing, but in 2008, the traditional schools got $98 million more than they got in 2010, and $16 million more than they’ll get in the proposed budget — the rosiest scenario on the table — in 2013. That is, between 2008 and 2010, they were cut from $690 million to $592 million. The Governor’s proposed increase doesn’t even get back to the 2008 level. Not to belabor the point or anything, but during each of those years, rich taxpayers were granted an increase on the “flat tax” cut.
Oh, and the charter schools? They got no cut at all. Some years they might not have received what they were hoping for, but between 2007 and the present, each year they received more than the previous year. Sauce for the goose is apparently too good for the gander.
Splitting the cost
The other important point you learn from this page is that the state picks up around a third of the cost of education for the cities and towns, or a tiny bit more, depending on whether you’re inclined to count the charter schools or not. Back in the misty dawn of time, under the, um, storied administration of Ed DiPrete, the state’s official goal was eventually to fund 60% of local education costs. At the time, they were at approximately 50%, and there was a plan to get to the goal by sometime in the 1990s.
The plan was undone by the credit union crisis and the fiscal crisis it provoked, but its demise was due at least as much to the weakening influence of municipalities in the state house. Ed DiPrete, for all his faults, had been a Mayor, and seemed to understand the fiscal strains felt at City Hall. Bruce Sundlun, to put it mildly, did not. Nor did his successors, until Governor Chafee. Matty Smith, House speaker during the 1980s, was much more solicitous of the cities and towns than any of his successors have been. There was a lot wrong with the state house of 1988, and I wouldn’t want to go back to that era, but we didn’t have cities and towns threatening bankruptcy, either, did we?
What about cost inflation? Should the state guarantee a proportion of the costs for municipalities who have been unwilling or unable to control the costs of education? This is the point at which people commonly invoke the evil teacher unions. Certainly unions have played a big role in keeping teacher salaries up, but lately they’ve also played a big role in offering concessions to keep costs down. The 2009 edition of RIPEC’s school finance report (the latest one on their web site) tells me that teacher salary inflation in Rhode Island lagged the national average over the previous decade. We spend more per pupil than the national average, but we also live in an expensive part of the country.
The fashion in education reform these days is nattering about how to improve the quality of teachers, but the dominant trend seems to be to find ways to do that without money. I’m not sure what happened to, “you get what you pay for,” but it certainly isn’t the way policymakers think about teachers. So now we have “value-added” ratings and teacher testing mandates and all the rest. The research behind these trends is flawed by some strange assumptions about the teaching profession — it’s a perfect example of sophisticated statistics employed in pointless fashion — but leave that alone for a moment. I can think of only one valid way to judge whether teacher salaries are appropriate: do job ads result in a harvest of excellent resumes? If so, the salaries are appropriate. If not, well, not.
According to the same RIPEC report, Rhode Island has the eighth highest-paid teachers in the country. This is tragic, right? But according to a survey I did a few years ago we also have the seventh highest-paid accountants in the country and the fifth highest-paid veterinarians. Architects, pharmacists, counselors, and other professional jobs, are also paid quite well here. It wasn’t unions who drove those salaries up. The evidence seems that school departments are responding to the vicissitudes of the labor market, just as the employers of those accountants and veterinarians are. People who want me to believe it’s all the unions’ fault have to provide a much more detailed analysis to support their claims than I’ve recently seen.
What else?
There are other important factors beside salaries that push up costs, and some of them are in the personnel column. A recurring theme in budget browsing is the cost of health care, and until the state’s pension payments superseded them recently it was pretty much impossible to talk to a superintendent about costs without hearing about the skyrocketing cost of health benefits. You can’t spend any time with a budget without understanding that bringing down the cost of health care must be a national priority.
What else? How about that federal funding of special education mandates cover substantially less than a fifth of those costs? How about all the mandates of “No Child Left Behind”? The National Governor’s Association voted in 2003 to label both of these “unfunded mandates”, and they have only become more onerous since. How about that despite the calls for consolidation of services, school districts have only become more fragmented in the last decade, as more charter schools come online?
It’s a long list and education funding is a complicated subject — we haven’t covered the new funding formula, the suit from cities who say it’s not fair, the way we fund charter schools, the aid for school construction (“housing aid”), and lots more — but it’s a big budget to cover and it’s time for the tour to move on. Just one last word. Yesterday there was a hearing at the House Finance committee about the proposed hotel and meals tax that would make up a part of the local education funding lost since 2008. Lots of people protested it, but I’m not aware of any who proposed cutting this aid to schools. In fact, I’m not aware of any who were at all specific about what should be cut to avoid this increase. Readers who know otherwise are invited to send along copies of the testimony, and I’ll post them here.
Next: Budget Volume I
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In paragraph 4, should it be 1.79 Billion with a b?
Yup. Thanks.
“In fact, I’m not aware of any who were at all specific about what should be cut to avoid this increase.”
I am. Cut the schools. End the COLA’s. 25% co-pays for all retired or working. End all minimum manning and class size mandates. School bus monitors. No more welfare after 2 years period with NO waivers. Cut the JCLS cronies in half, if not more. No more pay, pensions or health care for councilmen or school committee people. No in state tuition for illegals. No more state paid babysitters.
Just the start. Is that specific enough Tommy Boy?
It’s time to stop being mean to the taxpayers at the expense of cronies, fattened government “workers”, welfare queens, illegal aliens and other parasites.
Do you have a problem with being civil?
How old are you? That’s about as “civil” as I can get with the quasi-Marxist kleptocratic elite that is crash burning this country and state.
You should check out Daily Kos or AR for some real “uncivil” postings.
I can see I am not long for this blog. So be it-I have been banned from better blogs!
“According to the same RIPEC report, Rhode Island has the eighth highest-paid teachers in the country. This is tragic, right? But according to a survey I did a few years ago we also have the seventh highest-paid accountants in the country and the fifth highest-paid veterinarians.”
This is a silly argument. Government compensation is not set in the same way as the private sector and is not constrained by the market forces of supply and demand like the private sector, so there is much more room for political manipulation and abuse, especially by powerful special interest groups like public unions. If we look at median household income, Rhode Island is around 20th according to U.S. Census data. That doesn’t, of course, mean that teacher compensation should be 20th as well, but there should be a convincing justification for such a disparity, especially when Rhode Island ranks so poorly in every measure of how effective its public education system is.
“In fact, I’m not aware of any who were at all specific about what should be cut to avoid this increase.”
Here’s my short list:
Freeze COLAs for current state and municipal employees (just like the Federal employees), 25% health care contributions (just like the Federal employees), 401k-type retirement plan for all new employees (just like the Federal employees), investigate and rescind all the fraudulent tax-free fire and police disability pensions, revoke the 5-6% compounding COLA’s for retired fire and police, fire Iannazzi and all other nepotistic/unnecessary hires at the state house, tax and cut judicial pensions, go to voluntary part-time legislature like New Hampshire with no health care, grant right of refusal to public EMTs on non-emergency ambulance calls, cut the duration and amount of unemployment payments while requiring stricter demonstration of active work search, reduce simple possession drug enforcement and replace incarceration with rehabilitation programs, install remotely controlled thermostats set at 62 degrees for all public housing/heating subsidy recipients.
That covers around 10% of my common sense cost-saving recommendations.
Sorry, Tom, but this is sloppy.
Look at the numbers per pupil or you’re not comparing apples to apples.
Several charter schools expanded in the time period you highlighted. Increasing their enrollment (and with state enrollment declining overall) and decreasing state enrollment will likely show that charters are receiving comparable or less dollars per pupil to the districts. In fact, the new funding formula decreases the state portion of aid to most of the charter schools (increasing local aid in many cases to better reflect the state:local ratio that exists for the district that student lives in).
As to your question, “Should the state guarantee a proportion of the costs for municipalities who have been unwilling or unable to control the costs of education?” the answer is actually pretty plain and was covered in Pawtucket v. Sundlun. In RI, the state constitution tasks the legislature only with supporting and promoting education, not establishing an education system, nor providing either an equitable or adequate education (common terms in other states that have been used in court cases to increase state funding). The decision clearly states that the responsibility for providing education falls on the municipality since they established schools long before schooling was mandatory. The Caruolo Act of lawsuit fame exists precisely to provide school committees with a process to remedy a lack of municipal support for education aid at levels required by state law and regulations (most importantly the Basic Education Program). So without a substantial change in the state constitution around education, the liability really cannot be passed on to the state legally, it falls squarely in the municipal’s court. There’s also a serious contradiction, in my mind, when you place liability on the state for explicitly local decisions. If community X wants to pay firefighters really well and teachers poorly, why should the state pick up the additional education dollars required for competitive salaries? That’s why we have a mechanism to describe minimum requirements and place the liability on the folks who are responsible for implementing.