Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has a very good article on Gov. Daniels’ plans for education legislation in the 2006 session entitled Daniels will focus money on classroom. The two priorities appear to be:
School deregulation: A proposal that will eliminate some of the red tape that teachers and administrators face. It also could eliminate some of the schools’ reporting requirements.
Consolidation of purchases and services: A plan that would give districts broad authority to join forces to purchase insurance, supplies, buses and services.
The draft legislation has not yet been released, and the devil, as always, is in the details (not, as some would have you believe, in the evolution curriculum). Still, as general matters, those sound like good ideas. (Though, I had a chuckle at the idea of saving money through purchasing supplies — the school districts already have a plan for saving money on supplies: don’t provide them and rely on teachers to buy them out of their own pockets, saving the school district bundles of money.)
Gov. Daniels says he wants to spend more education dollars in the classroom and less on administration:
John Ellis, executive director of the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, presented information to a legislative conference last week that shows Indiana ranks 42nd in the nation in the percentage of staff who are principals and assistant principals. Also, his report said the state ranks 38th among states in the amount of central office staff at schools.
But Daniels has said repeatedly that Indiana is spending only about 61 cents of each dollar in the classroom instead of on administration. Raising that amount to 65 cents would shift $300 million annually more directly to student learning.
The Superintendents’ statement doesn’t really help because, even if the figures are accurate, it doesn’t tell us about the remainder of the administration infrastructure — how much do we spend on Superintendents and other administrators who are not directly involved with students?
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