When looking at spin from the left over this next few months – which will involve an epic battle between responsible, austere, adult GOP legislators and a profligate, irresponsible, spending-addicted, passive-aggressive, grossly-dysfunctional DFL governor and legislative minority – look for the following checklist items:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/strong>:\u00a0 You’re a bad, bad <\/em>person.<\/ol>\n Dave Mindeman of mnpACT runs through the checklist<\/a>; the subject du jour<\/em> is education, but the same template will be repeated for every other subject – LGA, MNCare, high-speed rail, nursing homes, whatever.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dave’s not had the best fall, of course:<\/p>\n I haven’t posted much lately as I evaluate looking into the new year. It has been a pretty depressing evaluation in regards to policy issues, which, again, are going to be difficult to make progress in.<\/p>\n My top priorities have been education and transportation….and frankly, both look to be losers in the coming legislative session.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0Oddly enough, education and transportation are among my top priorities – and they look to be winners\u00a0in the coming session.\u00a0\u00a0 But there’s some cognitive dissonance involved, I suspect.<\/p>\n I am especially disheartened by this news story regarding my local school district, ISD – 196 (Rosemount-Apple Valley – Burnsville). It is a situation that is apparently becoming all too common.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As Republicans continue to preach the idea that we are overspending and budget bloated, wouldn’t you think that a high priority like education would at least be meeting its budget needs?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Check off #1, up above.\u00a0<\/p>\n What are <\/em>the “budget needs?”\u00a0 And how do we know if those “needs” are being met?\u00a0<\/p>\n District 196’s enrollment was 27,954 in 2008 – which was off -1.9% since 2003; the average American school district grew by 1.6%, and the average district in Minnesota shrank an average of 3%, a number that hides huge disparities in growth; the Minneapolis Public Schools shrank 22.6%, while exurban districts like Elk River, Prior Lake, Saint Michael and New Prague grew in the 20-30% range.\u00a0<\/p>\n District 196 employed 1,720 teachers in 2008, which was down -1.4% from 2003.\u00a0 That’s at odds with growth in teacher numbers nationwide (up 4%, 2.5 times as fast as student numbers grew)) and Minnesota (up .3%, even as the number of students dropped).\u00a0\u00a0 The district spends $9,611 per student; of that, 90% – $8,646 – goes to teacher compensation, which is in line with national and state averages ($8,366 and $8,381, respectively, which are 81% and 82% of the respective per-pupil costs), figures which rose by 32-34% over the five year period, versus national and state average increase in the 22-28% range (the stats are all here; \u00a0.\u00a0<\/p>\n The district spends at the state average, and their budget grew considerably faster than state averages, even as the teaching staff shrank by a lower margin than the general enrollment, and the amounts spent per student rose by considerably faster than the national averages.<\/p>\n And yet, says the Pioneer Press<\/em>, “parents” are “footing the bill for teachers<\/a>“.\u00a0<\/p>\n What concerns me the most about this article is that ISD 196 is not a poor district by any means. And by all accounts, it is one of the best managed Districts in the state. Yet, they are resorting to outside funding by parents. Isn’t there something amiss here?<\/p>\n What is even more disheartening about this is that if an affluent district like 196 is doing this, where are the poorer districts going to turn?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To we, the taxpayers, of course.\u00a0 Minneapolis and Saint Paul spend a solid 30% more per student than the Rosemount district, to the tune of $12,000-$13,000 per student; their changes in per-student spending on overall budgets and teacher compensation is commensurate with Rosemount’s, well into the 20-30% range.<\/p>\n If we think we are having difficulty with the achievement gap now, how much worse will it be in the future if this funding problem continues?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Check off #2.\u00a0 The only link\u00a0between per-student spending and the “achivement gap”\u00a0– and I’ll admit it may be a specious one, but numbers are numbers – is an inverse one; the higher Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts spending goes, the worse the achievement gap gets, while the solutions that do <\/em>work seem to have little to do with spending <\/a>– or the public school system<\/a>, for that matter.<\/p>\n Are tax cuts that important? Are we willing to risk the educational future of the next generation because we think we need to pocket more money? Do you really think that last November’s election said that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The election said “it’s time to look at these questions empirically, rather than through the ideological “throw more money at the problem” lens that the DFL uses”.\u00a0 So yes and no.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oh, yeah – check off #3:<\/p>\n Somewhere, somehow, we have to come to terms with the idea that we have to pay for things. We have been dumping responsibility for our problems on future debt. And then the same people who do the dumping complain about the debt.<\/p>\n It is frustrating and an endless circular argument.<\/p>\n The “Greatest Generation” has given rise to the “Dead Beat Generation”. We pay for nothing…we aspire for nothing.<\/p>\n We have become shiftless leaches that will leave our children with a legacy of mediocrity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Give us what we want or your are an awful person who wants our children to starve”.<\/p>\n Look, Tom Dooher wants your money, and he’s saying something not far removed from the caricature in the previous line.\u00a0<\/p>\n Against that, the facts are that spending doesn’t correlate with achievement – anywhere<\/em> – and that spending on education, like all government spending, is disproportionally focused on labor and pension costs.\u00a0 Labor costs, thanks to the Teachers Union stranglehold on district compensation policies, has little to do with achievement; pensions have even less.<\/p>\n But the unthinking, unreasoning approach is “we have to pay for things”, the unspoken message being that we, the taxpayers, must not examine what it is we are paying for.\u00a0<\/p>\n So is it a surprise that the “spend at any cost” school of thought works through the checklist, arriving inevitably at the conclusion that questioning The Machine is a sign of some sort of depravity?<\/p>\n Take a\u00a0 number.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When looking at spin from the left over this next few months – which will involve an epic battle between responsible, austere, adult GOP legislators and a profligate, irresponsible, spending-addicted, passive-aggressive, grossly-dysfunctional DFL governor and legislative minority – look for the following checklist items: Opposing [a spending proposal] will harm the children (or the elderly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16808"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16811,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16808\/revisions\/16811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}