No one knows how the Kansas Supreme Court will rule in the state’s school finance case, but the justices asked the right questions and made good observations during oral arguments Thursday.
For the state’s attorneys: Why didn’t lawmakers follow their own cost study? Does the state object to its own audit? What guarantee is there that future Legislatures would fund the phased-in spending increase?
And for the school districts’ attorney: Where do you draw the line on spending? Doesn’t the Legislature have to balance competing needs? Can schools even absorb such a large funding increase?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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If the Justices asked the right questions, why are Johnson County Parents Sueing in Federal Court for Fair Funding of Schools?http://www.saljournal.com/blogs/?p=927
With the legislature raising taxes, and the school districts spending money, there simply is no accountability or anyone taking responsibility.
Let the Schools Districts raise taxes and spend the money and be accountable to the voters instead of the “game” we’re playing now.
Regarding Tristan Duncan’s JOCO Federal Court suit:
“Local school districts” in Kansas exist only by authority of the State Constitution, as subdivisions of the state. Property taxation by a subdivision of state government is hardly an expression of an individual’s views or preferences that would be protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as argued by Tristan Duncan on behalf of students in Johnson County.In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Rodriguez decision concluded it was permissible under the U.S. Constitution, for Texas to let districts raise more money with local taxes. This by no means translates to the argument that Rodriquez protects the right to unlimited property taxation.Arguing that due process rights are violated unless Shawnee Mission can raise additional taxes to match funding in Dodge City is equally absurd. A handful of U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirm that states need merely provide a rational basis for funding disparities created or allowed across school districts. It is difficult to imagine a Federal Court requiring the Kansas Legislature to allocate less funding to districts with higher poverty rates or mandating that the state allow lower poverty districts to erase the “objectionable” difference when the legislature has not only a rational basis, but 3 cost studies and a state court mandate that they allocate more funding toward higher poverty schools. The “they got their’s so we deserve ours” argument is simply insufficient for a Federal Constitutional challenge to school funding.
These claims are patently absurd, frivolous and downright embarrassing for JOCO. Further, they are a waste of Federal Court time and have little or nothing to do with the state court proceedings!
Johnson County representatives, school officials and now Tristan Duncan on behalf of Johnson County students like to make the claim that Johnson County schools serve 18% of the kids but only get 8% of the state funding. Therefore, Johnson County schools and their students clearly get the short end of the stick. Let’s take another look:
Taking the state general fund budgets for schools, JOCO has about 18% of the kids, and under SB 549, JOCO districts would receive a total of 16.3% (not 8%) of total general fund budgets per pupil (excluding vocational and transportation). Indeed, much of this 16.3% is covered with the 20 mills that all districts are required to levy. The yield of the 20 mills in the context of school district general fund budgets is clearly state money.Taking the Duncombe and Yinger cost estimates for each district, JOCO districts in total are estimated to NEED about 16% of the total funding. That is, compared to cost and need estimates, JOCO districts get .3% more than their fair share.Finally, a simple note on tax policy: If it was the intent of tax policy to distribute back $1 for each dollar sent by an individual or community, then why would the state collect that dollar to begin with? (especially since there are processing costs for collecting and returning each dollar). Quite simply, taxes support the distribution and redistribution of public services.
It is more accurate to say taxes support the taking of one person’s property and giving it to another.
Aside from that, is there anyone who really believes that this extra spending will fix what’s wrong with the public schools?
The focus on increased spending and the legislature v. court kerfuffle sidesteps the important issue, that being that our public school graduates (considering only those those who bother to graduate) are ill-prepared to enter college and compete in a world economy.
BB’s arguments don’t quite make logical sense.
1. If JoCo has 18% of students, why should it only get 16%, or 16.3% of funding, i.e. LESS funding per capita student?
2. Let us not forget that JoCo, even were it to get 18%, or 20%, or 22% of state funding, IS A NET TAX DONOR to the rest of Kansas. Its taxpayers are subsidizing most districts in Kansas.
3. JoCo is different from the rest of Kansas, no question about it. It draws college-educated people from across the country, and around the world. Half of its 24+ year old adults have college degrees, and nearly 20% have beyond-bachelors graduate/professional degrees. A lot more parents there want their kids to go to college, and grad and professional school.
For those who say, “screw JoCo,” fine, strangle the golden goose. Aim your guns at JoCo and shoot yourselves in the foot. For instance, if they feel that they can’t get a strong college-prep education for their kids, JoCo citizens will opt for private education, and then vote for low public ed support, since it will be irrelevant to them.
You don’t need more money for education in Wichita to achieve better results. You need to recruit retired engineers, doctors, lawyers, WSU profs, and other well-educated people to provide free or low-cost academic-subject teaching. You need to recruit retired craftsmen and artisans to teach hands-on disciplines.
Learn to be creative. If you have a societal problem in education, mount a campaign to get educated people to help out, not just grandmothers as reading helpers, but really smart, successful people to TEACH CLASSES.
heartlander takes his mindless (and pointless) drivel to yet another thread.
Here is your problem, Apophis. I received a lot more public education than you did. I was in experimental classes for highly gifted kids that the hinterland didn’t have. I also experienced classes with people like you, due to public education ineptitude in an ag community. I went to the nation’s top-ranked public university, which at the time was also the nation’s top-ranked graduate-research university, which meant that it wasn’t only preeminent in America, it was preeminent in the world. As a 19 year old I worked with electron microscopy. As a 22 year old I was a biomolecular engineer–before this term had been coined. As a doctor, I have saved lives, repaired body parts, and counseled people in ways you can’t conceive. You weren’t allowed to undertake my training, because you didn’t have the requisite combination of intelligence, dilegence and sacrifice that was imposed upon doctors, and the challenges that were imposed on students who wanted to be doctors to find out, “Do you have the right stuff?” My home-educated kids had choices for universities that your kids didn’t, because I understood higher education, while you didn’t. You thought teachers college was “higher education” without looking at the historical evolution that started with 14 year old girls being trained to be public schoolteachers. When I was born, high school teachers had university degrees, because normal-school-cum-teachers colleges were universally recognized to be incompetent for training high school teachers. After WWII, the national agenda to extend 8th grade grammar school education to high school education was handed to teachers colleges. By 1980, most university-degree-holding teachers had been replaced by teachers college-degree holders. We now see the error of this scheme. Kids who pursue hands-on vocations don’t really benefit from four years of extra classroom schooling, while kids who want to go to university are denied the knowledge they need to succeed in university study. Look at KU. Once it graduated close to 90% of its entrants in four years. Today it graduates 48%, and even after six years, only 58%. KSU graduates ony 57% after six years. This is thanks to a terribly flawed proposition, that teachers colleges could train high school teachers. Because most Kansas high school graduates realize they need higher degrees, but their high schools have failed them.
Also, I started teaching long before you did. In elementary school, I was a voracious devourer of knowledge. So I asked questions, and when teachers made mistakes, I corrected and enlightened them, and my fellow students. In high school, students came to me asking for help. My children tutored other students at ages well earlier than you started teaching, like 16 and 17.
Why? Because my family knows how to TEACH children. You don’t. Education in 50 years will be something I could understand, but I’m not going to last that long. Education in 50 years would totally baffle and befuddle you, if you lasted that long. You were never trained to THINK creatively. You weren’t allowed into a realm that promoted this. You think you are an expert. You are, in obsolete industrial age educational thinking. That is worthless in the 21st century postindustrial economy.
I favor public-supported education in which kids best talents can be nurtured, and they can have valuable skills. You favor obsolete industrialist-designed public education that devalues kids, giving them a standardized one-size-fits-all regimen that severely limits talent development. I know you are not smart enough to see the difference, and you are going to be retired in the next decade, so you don’t care. But it matters to children who will have to compete in an economy very different from the one in which you have lived. It matters to older people who hope that society will provide them security when their productive years are done, which will be dependent upon a very productive working corps that can afford to support its parents and grandparents.
You have called me names, like Right Wing Whacko, and Asshole, in lieu of marshalling cogent rational arguments. I don’t feel sorry for you, because in your limited worldview, you’re getting what you want for yourself. I feel sorry for children who are exposed to your narrow-minded obtuseness. They deserve better. A lot better. But of course, it is up to their parents and other thinking adults to figure this out.
You again show your elitist view of the world heartlander. I stand for the best education possible for ALL children. All you do is CLAIM that you have done all of these magnificent things. As usual, you cannot prove a thing.
You come across as a person who HATES public education and will do anything to try to take the opportunities away from all children but a select few.
I have no need to apologize for anything I have ever posted in regard to you: YOU are an elitist, YOU DO hate public education, YOU ARE a wacko, YOU are an asshole and finally………YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.
I call myself Heartlander because my great grandparents were farmers and dairymen in Iowa and Illinois, and my grandparents did same, except in California. I grew up in an ag town. I worked in agriculture starting at age 14, when I could get a work permit. Before that I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges and dug weeds. I tried planting corn at age 10, and it failed. By age 24, I succeeded. Then did organic, including shoveling and transporting a ton of horse manure to a community garden. My zodiac says I am an earth person. You have shown you are spacey. That’s why we are totally different.
You call yourself Apophis. I originally thought maybe you studied Egyptian mythology, and took the name of the god of darkness. Now I realize you more likeley got this name from the movie Stargate, in which Apophis was this “god” who was a parasitic, malevolent individual who enslaved little people, abusing and killing them without remorse. That sounds pretty sick to me. If anyone here hasn’t seen the movie, he or she should rent it, and decide if I am right or wrong.
Now, “Apophis” can disappear from these blogs, but whoever comes up with a new moniker, spouting exactly what you say, will be identifiable quickly.
Oh you are so cool, naming yourself after an evil villain who turned out to be really stupid. Maybe in your new incarnation you can call yourself “Palpatine” (Star Wars emperor)
How can private schools turn out better students with less money?.Yes they don’t have to accept everyone but I think the big factor is that they have parents who care.
RA, true. Like parents who don’t have their first child until they are thirtysomething, some of whom spend tens of thousands of dollars for in vitro fertilization. When you have one or two kids, and you are in midlife when you have them, they are each just more important to you. And you are mature enough and knowledgeable enough to want something MORE than you received.
Apophis, I received most of my education in public institutions. 18 years. I received some of my education in private institutions. 7 years. Including church-based schools and non-religious Harvard. What is your score?
“I went totally to public schools including WSU. Nobody ever told me that WSU was originally founded by Congregationalists, and that its first principal was from Dartmouth, an offshoot of Harvard. I didn’t get to learn this. It’s not my fault.”
You aren’t a teacher because you aren’t a student. I’m older than you are, and I am a teacher. That’s because I am still a student.
How many times have you been to Europe? I’ve only been there once. But my sister, with a jc degree, and her husband, with an hs degree, have been there three times, and will go at least another three times before they are 55. Do I resent this? No, I think it is amazing. I’ve been to seven foreign countries. At less than half my age my middle child has been to twenty one. You don’t want to see amazing things happen to other people. I do.
Apophis’s drivel has run out.
My objective isn’t to engergize readers to say “Go Heartlander!” My objective is to energize you to THINK. Reinvent public education. You pay for it, Buy what you want for your children, and your nephews and nieces and greadchildren.
Warren Buffett has just announced he is going to give the vast bulk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The latter is already changing education. It is nothing short of amazing. Apophis can’t comprehend this change.
I support public education. But in this century it must be very different from the last century.
For example, USD 259 has refused offers of thousands of used computers, citing their incompatibility with the district’s security software. There are ways to solve this problem, such as keeping the donated computers isolated from the regular network. In this circumstance, and given their less-powerful processors, their functionality would be somewhat limited, but it would still be valuable for kids to have them. We have an older non-Internet-connected computer that I still use for Corel Draw graphics and word processing. We have a newer PC laptop that is not networked, but it is functional in stand-alone mode, such as for making PowerPoint reports, wordprocessing, spreadsheet calculations, and photo composing.
So, it was really obtuse for the district to turn away useful instruments for kids’ education. This kind of unidimensional thinking is one of industrial-age public education’s major problems. “These computers don’t comply with our system. We aren’t going to think creatively. It’s better that kids don’t have ANY computers, than letting them have computers that don’t match our system.”
For that matter, the district could have taken the computers, and then given them to poorer kids so that they could have computers at home. The donors wouldn’t have minded this at all, since there would be a community benefit, and the donors would have gotten charitable tax deductions.
Apophis says he wants education for ALL. Well, when a school district with a ca. 60% federal lunch subsidy-eligible student population, turns down free computers that would enable poor students to use modern technology–even old 486-processor machines, as USD 259 rejected, are extremely powerful tools, having 1960’s supercomputer capabilities– as affluent and middle class students do, that’s pigeonholing the poor. It’s holding them back.
When we developed the space program, which didn’t just send men to the moon, but created satellite technology that enables Americans to watch World Cup Soccer live, and “pilots” in Florida to control unmanned planes flying over Afghanistan, as well as scientists and technicians to monitor weather, crops production, and ocean temperatures from space, we didn’t go to GM, Ford, or US Steel to direct the space program. We had to create an entirely new framework, led by egghead scientists and engineers in California.
The PC is used for routine number crunching and document-writing. But it wasn’t developed by the adding-machine and typewriter industry. (NCR and Olivetti-Underwood actually tried to get into the young industry in the 80’s, but gave up.) The PC is a product of people who “think different”. Such thinking of giving 22 year olds low salaries, but stock options, to recruit creative talent and youthful energy. Old industries couldn’t conceive of this talent-recruitment scheme. They couldn’t conceive of 25 year olds making more money than 55 year old senior managers.
Education needs an entirely new infrastructure, starting with revolutionary concepts in teacher recruitment and training. For example, we don’t need any more “B” grade average high schoolers being recruited as teachers. They don’t have good study habits. They, being mediocre performers, are comfortable with mediocrity. Being substantially confused (this is what a “B” connotes today), they don’t understand the concept of subject mastery or task mastery. They cannot understand why it is important. Having spent their young lives switching subjects every hour, they can’t comprehend that this blocks subject-knowledge mastery and task- skills development.
Outside of public education, it is unheard of for mediocre performers to be selected to be teachers. The military’s flight trainers are its top pilots, not those who are merely satisfactory. Major League Baseball’s batting coaches were players with .300+ averages, not .230 hitters. Even at the high school level, coaches are recruited who were usually NOT blue-chip high school athletes, but they were youngsters who understood the game far better than their teammates, and often even better than most college players.
The industrial age education system is backwards relative to this century’s economy. It intentionally trains millions of kids to do busywork routines, and let superiors do the thinking. That matched industrialism’s needs. But this isn’t what employers want today. They can buy that kind of labor cheaply in China. They want people who can think well, who do more than is expected, who work well with people in other departments than their own, and who want their own knowledge and skills to continually evolve.
In the industrial age, it was okay for people to retire at age 65, or even younger in many blue-collar occupations. It was okay for them to learn a limited set of skills and use them for 35 years. But people are living longer. Most kids in school today will probably have to work until age 70, if not 75. People must be facile in continuously learning new things. They will often work for several companies, and even several occupations, before they retire.
How many parents reading this have seen their kids cram last minute for exams, or write their reports the night before they are due? Public schools incite procrastination. They do not inspire students to enjoy work.
How many teachers discourage their own kids from following their footsteps? Why aren’t 90% of teachers saying, “This is an incredible vocation. You can’t find a more enjoyable, rewarding field to work in. I’d do this even if they didn’t pay me. I hope I can teach until I need a walker to get to class.” Why shouldn’t 90% of teachers have this attitude? Because the system isn’t designed to make school a wonderful, inspirational place for all its inhabitants. Could we devise such a system? Absolutely. How long would it take? Probably 20 years to start implementing, and another 20 to replace industrial age education entirely. It is doable. It is necessary.
The industrial revolution was predicated on mass production of uniform-component goods. Its architects realized that with large factories, labor could be divided into realtively easy-to-perform tasks, which obviated the need for highly-skilled craftsmen. Whereas learning to make watches by hand took years of apprenticeship training, a factory in which each worker did only doing one of many assembly tasks could train workers in mere weeks to do these component tasks. And obviously, vastly more watches could be made, and were affordable to average citizens.
Industrialization, for which public education was invented, isn’t going to disappear, but it is being transfered. This is why the old education system is losing its historic mission.
I remember 30 years ago when the culmination of the Industrial Age was marked by the sentiment that old-fashioned craftsmanship/ artisanry was dead. But unpredictably, some people started doing small-scale manufacturing, against the tide, and paved a new road, not back to the past exactly, but towards a postindustrial future.
Mass production is great, but there are other ways to make things too.
Here is a very interesting article published by Casey Research, discussing new technologies that will enable people to design and build their own products in the future, in essence a 21st digital version of artisanry.
————————————-
Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, published a little book that got scant publicity but contains ideas of far-reaching consequence. It was called FAB. It addressed, as specified in the subtitle, The Coming Revolution on your Desktop–From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.
Gershenfeld begins by recalling his high school days, when “college-bound kids like me had to sit in rather sterile classrooms, while the kids taking up trades got to go to a vocational school that had all the cool stuff–machine tools, welders, electronic test equipment, and the like. At the time, this split seemed vaguely punitive [to] me. I couldn’t understand why an interest in making things was taken as a sign of lesser intelligence.”
In fact, Gershenfeld points out, that split far predates his adolescence. He traces it all the way back to the Renaissance, when the execution of an artist’s vision was first delegated to artisans, whose work was considered mechanical rather than creative. At the same time, the “liberal arts” gained a supremacy over working with one’s hands.
The division of labor intensified with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, as machines began to squeeze many artisans out of the equation. Anyone could learn to operate a machine that produced goods faster and more uniformly than craftspeople.
Carry the trend forward to today, and what we have is a system where you conceive of, say, a house. An architect designs it, a structural engineer may check it for flaws, a builder builds it, an electrician wires it, a plumber plumbs it, and so on, until finally a building inspector inspects it and tells you to tear half of it down because it doesn’t meet code.
More or less the same thing would happen if you were trying to invent a better toothbrush or had a sure-fire idea for a new engine that ran on water. In other words, insight, design and manufacturing exist in separate worlds with few points of overlap. For the most part, neither the person that originally envisions something, nor the end user, actually lays hands on the product to be produced until it’s done.
Furthermore, the introduction of new products is constrained by market limitations. If you have a pressing need for some complicated device that no one else wants, then you’re going to have a hard time finding a manufacturer for it.
All of this, Gershenfeld writes, is about to change–in a very big way. Soon, you will be able to imagine something and see it through to its final physical form, all by yourself.
The twin keys to this revolution are found in a couple of acronyms: CAD (Computer Assisted Design) and CAM (Computer Assisted Manufacturing). These have, along with everything else in the computer revolution, been developing at breakneck speed, with quantum leaps in both power and ease of use. And they have been joined by fabrication processes of increasing flexibility and portability.
Putting together a car from scratch in your garage may be a few years off, but in some ways the future has already arrived. Gershenfeld has been teaching a course at MIT called “How to Make (Almost) Anything,” in which he challenges students to dream something up, then produce it. Nor is his instruction limited to the country’s engineering elite, either. Gershenfeld and his prot?©g?©s have run workshops in underserved inner city communities, with stunning results.
One such workshop set up a small, traveling version of the fab lab back at MIT: “a laser cutter for making two-dimensional shapes and parts for three-dimensional structures, a sign cutter for plotting flexible circuits as well as graphics, a milling machine for making precision structures and circuit boards, and tools for assembling and programming circuits.” Add in a microcontroller to run the whole array, and you have a powerful design and manufacture operation at your fingertips. Best of all, the entire setup fits comfortably into a single small room.
Once the mini-lab was in place, Gershenfeld writes, the plan “was to first teach a few interested MIT students how to create the circuit boards [for custom controllers for computer games], and then have them show the kids at the community center.” But before he could do that, an 11-year-old girl named Dalia showed up. “Dalia thought the idea sounded pretty cool, so she shoved [my grad student] aside and announced that she was going to make the board instead of him.”
She did, too. With parts flying everywhere and no clear idea of how it all worked, Dalia nevertheless finished the board and “it worked the first time we powered it up.”
Dalia is not alone. In a wonderful example of how kids often pick things up far quicker than their more educated parents, Gershenfeld tells the story of Sugata Mitra, an Indian computer scientist. Mitra’s Delhi office abuts a slum and one day, on a whim, he punched a hole in his wall and faced an Internet-connected monitor outward. All it had connected to it was a joystick.
To Mitra’s amazement, within a day the local street kids–who were thought not even to speak English, and who received not a moment’s instruction–were surfing the Net and had left a message, “I Love India,” on the screen. When he asked them how they managed that without a keyboard, they showed him a “character map” program on the control panel that allows clicking on an on-screen keyboard. “Sugata has a Ph.D.,” Gershenfeld writes, “but he didn’t know how to do that.”
These small examples make the point. Technology that was once the sole province of specialists is rapidly becoming so user-friendly that it is now essentially available to all.
Among his more ambitious projects, Gershenfeld has worked with such technological neophytes as: inner-city Boston kids, to create an entrepreneurial jewelry manufacturing operation, using scrap material; villagers in India, to develop homegrown devices to monitor food safety and agricultural engine efficiency; and nomadic herders in northern Norway, to construct a wireless network for animal tracking.
Gershenfeld’s recollection of high school–putatively less-intelligent kids having access to fascinating machines and instruments, while bright kids were put in sterile classrooms–resonates with me. That’s what I noticed too, although in my town’s case shop rooms were in the regular high school, as only big cities had separate polytechnic high schools.
The truth is, a lot of really smart creative people gravitate to shop. This “does not compute” in the minds of industrial age educators. Furthermore, public education itself was created by soshy types, which is why math and science instruction is badly done in the vast majority of traditional public high schools. Not only does it cost more to hire good math and science teachers who have equivalent knowledge and skills in their fields to language arts and social studies teachers, science labs that are well provisioned are far more expensive to operate than “liberal arts” classrooms. These have been misguidedly envisioned to be “costs”, rather than investments.
Gershenfeld has travelled internationally to show people how to use advanced technology for small-scale manufacturing. He hasn’t been to Wichita. The past-mid-life public educators who are decision-makers here have no clue what Wichita’s economy will be like in 30 years, and no interest in thinking about it. That’s why the major overhauling will be led by people outside the field of K-12 education. They will set up new teacher-training programs, and devise the 21st century’s teacher-recruitment provisions. MIT is a private university. But as a world-leading technology center, it is playing a strong role in shaping the future of a technology-driven civilization, and it will perforce have a strong influence in reshaping education for this civilization. K-12 education isn’t a stand-alone entity, it is a component tool whose sole purpose is to prepare children to successfully integrate into the economy as adults.
The economy that our children will face will be extraordinarily different from that which we, their elders understand. Some energy analysts are projecting that with China’s rapid industrial expansion, we may run out of oil within 30 years. Perhaps biofuels or coal-derived methane for fuel-cells will enable us to still have two cars per family. Or maybe not. If the earth keeps on warming, and rainfall patterns drastically change, we may see human migrations of vast magnitude, dwarfing those of the New World’s colonization by Old World emigrants in the 17th-19th centuries. We will need not just small cliques of experts to deal with these matters, who tell everyone else what to do, we’ll need a massive collective-intelligence resource. This can only be obtained by transforming our education system to enable our children to meet these enormous challenges.