Education is big money for Indiana’s budget.
Kevin Allen, writing for the South Bend Tribune, has a good article on education legislation. In it, he quotes Rep. Dvorak who points out that it’s probably not that tough to get testing that does what we want (or what we should want, in any case): “a one-day test that gives a general overview of student performance . . . What parents want to see is how their kid measures up to the other kids in their grade, whether they need to do some extra work, whether there is a problem at a school.”
The problem, as Dvorak also points out, is that ISTEP is tied to a lot of money.
“The test is hinged to so many other parts of the bureaucracy and money that the test is not really about students anymore. It’s about millions and millions of dollars in education funding,” Dvorak said. “It’s not an argument about coming up with the test. It’s an argument about what the test is used to measure and fund.”
. . .
[earlier in the article]
“Every session for the last couple years has dealt more and more with education legislation,” said Rep. Ryan Dvorak, D-South Bend. “In my opinion, we’ve done more to screw up education in the past couple years than we did in the past couple decades.”
Education is big money for the state. There are roughly a million students (a number which has held steady for a long time). So, every dollar-per-student a policy pushes this way or that means a million dollar swing in the state budget.
Rep. DeVon thinks we have problems because we’re spending too much on administrative expenses and not enough on the classroom. I see this idea thrown around from time to time, but I’m not sure the evidence supports the claim. It strikes me as one of those evergreen “fraud, waste, and abuse” pieces of rhetoric: it’s a political winner to pick on “fraud, waste, & abuse,” and on “bloated administration,” and there are probably examples of each that could be addressed. But it ignores deeper structural issues that are politically thornier.
The article also talks about the prospects for applying for a federal prekindergarten grant that Gov. Pence botched a couple of years ago as well as incentives for dealing with the teacher shortage.
The “more money to the classroom” rhetoric is misguided as there is a bunch of political football played with the categorization of expenses.
For example, utilities is not a classroom expense. Surely a some of that money that heats, cools and illuminates the classroom spaces should be considered.
Bus Transportation is not a classroom expense. However, when districts want to end bus service the state and legislature step in and say they can’t because it is a vital function of the school.
Building level administrators are not classroom expense, but they are expected to evaluate teachers in order to comply with the rules about teacher pay for performance.
Build a 3 category system that breaks things down in to direct classroom expense (teachers, supplies equipment, etc used in the classroom setting everyday), indirect classroom expense (counselors, proportion of principals, proportion of janitorial, proportion of utilities, transportation, library supplies and books, etc that support student learning) and overhead/admin expenses (central office, sports etc).
Of course that isn’t soundbite friendly…