August 2001

Aug. 30, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 27, 2001)

Bonus babies

The reported shortage of schoolteachers in Kansas isn't following the old pattern of shortages and it looks like that could mean a major change for teachers, their unions, school boards and maybe, just maybe, the Kansas Legislature.

The shortage of teachers is not for commodity-style elementary and secondary teachers, generalists who can teach every subject at lower grade levels, but for specialists. The specialties? Try special education, science, mathematics, music, foreign languages and technology.

It's clear that the days when schoolteachers could dust off their certificates and jump into the labor pool to earn the equivalent of egg money are over. The teachers districts need are specialists, and that is likely to spur in the upcoming Legislature calls for the ability for school districts to make special salary offers to scarce specialties, running either over or around negotiations between school boards and teacher union representatives.

From a purely market-based orientation, the spot shortages of specialists means that some legislators can veer away from the usual appropriations mode of just throwing money at school districts--they're not going to do that next year, anyway--and instead make noises about specific teacher needs, and the relatively small number of dollars that would be necessary to draw those specialists back to the classroom.

If you remember the saw about a rising tide lifting all boats, consider the possibility that not all boats need to rise. The vast majority of teaching slots in Kansas are filled, and that apparently means that teachers are willing to work for whatever pay they have negotiated.

Creating a class of bonus babies--teachers with specific, needed skills--will provide some conservative lawmakers with a specific target for increases in funding, or designation of where existing funding is to be spent. All of a sudden, the universe of new money needed for schoolteacher salaries, the so-called "putting the money in the classrooms where it belongs," can be drawn down to a small amount...just enough to engage the teaching specialists that districts needs.

Do we hear merit pay? Yes, we do, and we've heard it for years at the Statehouse, but never at a time when a shortage of specialist teachers has been so repeatedly mentioned, by Republicans and Democrats. Democrats, of course, take the tack that all teachers need more pay, Republicans will line up on the side of finding specific teaching specialties that need more money to attract teachers, and finding a way to create that small amount of new money.

It all comes down, as it usually does in Topeka, to the numbers game. While it may take hundreds of millions of dollars to raise all teacher salaries to the point that college students will take the courses leading to a teaching degree, and into the highly sought-after specialties, it would presumably take only a few million dollars to lure the foreign language, math, science and special education teachers back into the classroom.

Oh, and that narrow-casting of money at teaching specialties is also a way for legislators who just happen to hate the Kansas National Education Association to try to make major changes in the authority of teacher unions at negotiations, or to drive off members who qualify for specialist pay boosts.

Yes, one could form a double line of Republican legislators stretching across the Statehouse rotunda who would like to try that tack.

And, that shortage of specifically trained teachers also hands K-NEA its most potent weapon in seeking higher salaries for teachers...the quarterbacks that school districts know they need to provide the full educational regimen, the specialists that are mandatory for districts to hire.

That's if K-NEA can keep all the teachers, especially the specialists, on their team.

Yes, this might get interesting.

Aug. 23, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 20, 2001)

New math?

There may be a method to the madness of the State Board of Education's call for a $1.16 billion increase in state spending on elementary and secondary education, but Railsters and legislative leaders are seeing the proposal as mostly madness...

The state board has done the mathematics, and the key portion of the plan is a $690 million expenditure over the next three years to raise teacher salaries in Kansas to the national average pay for schoolteachers.

Problem with the plan is that there is no source of money, and the Legislature is looking for, at best estimate, only about $40 million in "new" money for the coming fiscal year, which leaves the state about, what, some $650 million short.

What's happened is that the state board has literally removed itself from the negotiations game for school aid this upcoming year. It's literally not a player for the upcoming session, which means the needs of K-12 education are going to be almost totally unrepresented in the coming year.

The legislators who run the appropriations committees, and who hold top leadership spots in the Statehouse, are still stunned.

The numbers themselves are the problem. Stretching out $690 million over three years produces a financing gap that roughly equals a 1 percent sales tax increase each year for three years. What? No hands in the air to introduce that bill? Well, we didn't think so. Alternatively, the Legislature could just increase the property tax levy for school districts by about 20 mills a year for three years, which would also necessitate legislators moving from their current homes into bunkers dug deep into the earth to protect them from assaults by property owners.

One leader says "where do you start negotiating from" for an expenditure that big.

The State Board of Education plan comes on the heels of a summer during which lawmakers have generally been pounded for the Legislature's 2001 session which yielded districts about $50 per head of pupil for the current year, a figure that was maintained with considerable difficulty in the ever-more-conservative House of Representatives.

In coffees and rallies and newspaper editorials, most legislators have been bashed for not spending enough money on K-12 education. And while it's pretty much inside-the-ballpark stuff, the Kansas-National Education Association and the Kansas Association of School Boards, which represent labor and management, respectively, in the K-12 industry, have both blasted the Legislature for not providing more money for schools.

Some legislators thought they'd get at least a little slack from the state board, which, after all, is made up of members who stand for election and theoretically have their fingers on or near the pulse of their constituents.

Now lawmakers feel they've been abandoned and left to take the heat all alone.

And they have.

What's it mean for the next session of the Legislature? Well, first, that considering the revenues available to the Legislature, even the most heroic effort to pump more money into schools will show up as a disappointing fizzle. Even a masterful job of shunting state money to schools will likely be reported as "less than 10 percent of the amount that the State Board of Education recommended." And that's if lawmakers wring every dime out of every other expenditure and sends that money to schools. A lesser effort doesn't even bring the Legislature into double digits in percentage of State Board Plan accomplished.

Without a credible State Board of Education plan, the pressure to sharply increase spending is largely off the Legislature.
And, a session in which every plan for increased funding can be labeled as pie in the sky means that the Legislature can probably get away with virtually no new money for schools.

Who likes that? Well, fiscally conservative legislators, and the socially conservative among their numbers, get to sound pretty responsible when they reject the State Board's plan, and that mantle of responsibility will expand to conservative candidates for the Kansas House next (election) year, and there will probably be more flinty conservatives elected.

Has the State Board of Education done anything good for K-12 schools it oversees?

It doesn't look like it...yet.

Aug. 16, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 13, 2001)

KBI in the gunsights

A small but purposeful group of legislators has put the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in the gunsights of an experiment called zero-based budgeting. The legislators? The interim committee on Ways and Means/Appropriations, and the experiment is the most basic and radical budgeting effort tried in Kansas.

It will literally look first at the lawbooks to determine just what tasks are assigned to the state's top police agency, and then what resources are necessary for the KBI to carry out those duties.

This could prove to be fun, at least for Railsters who watch the Legislature year-around, and can already see the election-year possibilities of a budgeting exercise that is both political and financial.

Where did this come from? A couple of senators asked for a summer study of zero-based budgeting of some state agency to see whether the experiment will tighten state spending. In zero-based budgeting, one essentially creates an agency's budget from scratch, rather than just adding 2 or 4 or 6 percent to what it got in the previous year.

Ways and Means/Appropriations last week met to target an agency for the experiment. It is probably worth mentioning that the decision to field strip the budget of the KBI was made by consensus of the committee--no nagging votes for or against that can be attributed to any specific legislator.

And the real fun comes when the KBI, a roughly 200-person agency with a budget of about $18.4 million in total funds, about $12.7 million of which is state general fund money (the rest is federal grants and awards and such), starts defending its budget.
There is no doubt that there is always going to be a KBI. It's designed to assist local law enforcement agencies in particularly difficult, complex and fiscally intensive investigation of crime.

But the zero-based budgeting effort comes at a time when the KBI is far behind in doing the scientific investigation of methamphetamine crimes, and when it has been so slow in processing evidence that some judges have tossed out charges against suspected drug-makers because the agency can't complete its scientific analysis of evidence in time to give suspects the speedy trial that they are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Typically, in this era of frenzy over meth, a KBI director might just wave the bloody shirt and say that because of stingy appropriations by the Legislature, he can't hire the staff to complete the analyses of suspected meth-related evidence, and he needs millions more dollars to protect us and our children and grandchildren against the temptations of drugs.

There is a powerful wave of methamphetamine scare being generated by law enforcement officers and the press. The KBI director, Larry Welch (oh, he's a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, as he tells everyone he meets), has a powerful public relations tool there in meth. There are some legislators, aware of the possibility of being labeled "soft on crime" or more specifically "soft on meth" during the upcoming election year, who are ready to toss money at Welch and hope he uses it well.

But there are at least a couple who are looking behind the meth scare and wondering whether, for example, the KBI ought to be processing the freshest evidence first, and not cranking out reports on just what was in beakers that are found by the side of the road, or in laboratories that have been long-abandoned and were seized with nobody around.

This is one of those budgeting experiments that can be closely analyzed to determine whether the KBI is helping to manufacture its own fiscal crisis and whether just because everyone doesn't like methamphetamines, legislators ought to hand Welch a blank check.

You think this zero-based budgeting stuff is dull? Not in a political year, not when it's aimed at an agency dealing with a high-publicity drug, and not when the agency under the microscope has a history of wrapping itself in the cloak of crime-fighting.

Aug. 9, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 6, 2001)

What's in a label?

What if, say, you represent a group that lobbies the Legislature, but that group believes that it is not just another special interest group, but the truth and the light and the way that the Legislature ought to follow?

Well, it doesn't happen often that some lobbyist believes that in all things he is right and therefore shouldn't be forced to wear the tag "special interest group" because that label is so, well, off-putting.

The Pork Producers Council doesn't mind the label "special interest group" and neither does Southwestern Bell Telephone, or the Quarter Horse Racing Association or the highway contractors, the schoolteacher lobby or even the Kansas Catholic Conference.

But the Kansas Public Policy Institute does.

Well, if you are in Kansas, and believe that your information and viewpoint is so universally respected, and, by the way, right, and you don't want to be looked on as having a special interest like more than 300 lobbyists do, you apply to the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission for the first-ever "not a special interest group" designation.

Now, there isn't a designation like that for anyone else, but the KPPI, you see, contracts with professors and other smart folks to prepare learned studies on topics of interest to the Legislature, and, we Railsters guess, all of Kansas.

KPPI is one of those conservative think tanks that believes that the market fixes everything, and that by presenting to legislators what they believe will happen if pure market forces are allowed to rampage, we'll all be better off.

It puts us in mind of those jokes we've all heard that start with "A guy walks into a bar with a duck under his arm..." If you accept the premise, you generally laugh at the joke.

Now, that's one thing for jokes, but probably a lot different thing for attempting to influence the Kansas Legislature do something that not everyone instinctively agrees with.

Conservative economics is a special interest, and Kansas is becoming a pretty conservative state, but the Ethics Commission decided that representing conservative market-oriented economics is still a special interest, apparently as long as there is anyone in the Legislature who doesn't believe, say, in setting a specific level for contributions to pension programs and letting participants' retirement plans float up or down with the market economy.

Know what? The Ethics Commission decided that no matter how economically theoretically correct the KPPI may be on any subject, it is still a special interest group. And if the KPPI spends $100 a month on legislators, either buying them meals or producing learned studies for them to peruse, it's still lobbying.

That's probably some relief to other lobbyists, who hang out at the Statehouse and try to prove to legislators that casino gambling at racetracks is good, or that telecommunications companies ought to be able to bury their cable in cities at reasonable prices or that coin-operated car washes really ought not have to collect sales tax on those quarters.

A fairly important point was made by the Ethics Commission--unanimously, by the way--that if you try to talk the Legislature into something or other, whether it's right or not, you ought to play by the same rules as those who lobby the Legislature for stuff that probably is one or two steps less "right" than gravity.

Aug. 2, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 30, 2001)

Handing out rocks to rioters

Come about April of 2002, during the heat of winding down the legislative session dealing with, of course, no new money to spend and reapportionment of the Kansas Legislature's House and Senate, there is likely to be a new, big, politically charged issue to deal with, Railsters figure.

That big issue is likely to be school finance, the same as it is every year, except that there is a decent chance during the wind-down of the session that legislators are going to be armed with brand new statistical evidence that the Legislature either is spending too much on public education or too little. And the statistical evidence is going to come at precisely the right time to be put to no good use.

Lawmakers this summer are struggling with just how to word a $225,000 contract for some consulting outfit to look at the state's kindergarten-12th grade public school expenditures and report back by late March on whether the state is spending too much, not enough or just the right amount of money on K-12 education. Don't bet on the "just right" scenario.

After two and a half months of legislating, cutting budgets, haggling over every dollar spent, a report on public school finance financing will probably arrive on legislators' desks around April Fool's Day--too too late for thoughtful consideration, but just in time for late-session shenanigans.

It's going to be the legislative equivalent of handing out rocks to rioters, and asking those rioters (yes, those are your legislators) to be careful and responsible for them.

What's the problem here?

One of the problems is that the Legislature remains split between those who believe that public education is getting enough money from the Legislature now, and those who believe that the Legislature isn't spending enough on K-12 education.

A thoughtful, third-party report on what a suitable education ought to cost in school districts across the state probably is a pretty good idea. It might turn out, for example, that some districts are getting more than they need for a suitable education and some aren't getting enough. That seems like a fair assessment. But which districts those are and just what goes into a suitable education are issues that lawmakers have fought over for years, and are concerns that a professional study just might be able to shed some light on.

Legislature-watchers understand, though, that if the study is presented in the last weeks of the session, chances are that everyone is going to pick out his or her own favorite statistic from the study and try to put it into law.

Say, for example, this study shows that districts spend $1 per head of pupil for school nurses. Now, that's something that legislators can fight over.

Shouldn't parents keep their kids at home if they are sick? And shouldn't a truly sick pupil be able to be spotted by a grown-up schoolteacher, and his or her parents called to come get the pupil? Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but if school nurses cost $1 per pupil, that's nearly $500,000 a year statewide, and that is enough money to fight over.

Similarly, consider costs of security officers at some schools. Should the state pay for school security, when every county has a sheriff who is charged with maintaining law and order? If school districts want their own security guards, should the state as a whole participate in financing those guards?

That's the type of stuff that is likely to pop up with a late-in-the-session study of school funding. Important stuff, but way too easy to take out of context for purposes of a school finance debate late in the session.

Best idea from those who have watched the Legislature for years? Either have the study completed before the Legislature starts so everyone gets a chance to study it and see if there are pieces of it that are worthy of consideration, or keep it locked up until after the Legislature is safely adjourned for the 2002 session.

Chances of the early-completion are nil. It's too late now to get a study done before the Legislature starts. Chance of getting the study completed too late to be used for legislative mischief? Slim, also.

Watch for the school finance wars, again, next session.