(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Jan. 5, 2015)
Another court panel has said, again, that the state isn’t spending enough money to provide K-12 students in every school district in the state with the education they need to meet the state’s new Rose Standards, which presumably set them up for successful lives.
The decision, which will presumably someday be affirmed or modified by the Kansas Supreme Court, has already set off some predictable, and some unanticipated, response from the Legislature.
The simplest reading of the decision is that Kansas needs to send more money from Topeka to those districts. But, as with nearly every issue with a pricetag—an estimated $548 million boost in funding this year—the details almost overwhelm the problem, if a majority of legislators concur that there is a problem.
There are dozens of legislators who believe that the state is spending enough money now on K-12, and that local school districts are misspending that money—either on administrators who don’t actually teach children how to read or do long division, or by not running their districts in a tight, businesslike, economical manner.
And, there are dozens, too, who believe that if the state would spend more money on schools, then local property taxpayers would see savings, children would have more teachers and we’d have a state rife with children who are going to succeed in their lives, whether it’s learning a vocation or going on to higher education and becoming prosperous members of society.
Oh, and there are probably also dozens of legislators who believe the courts don’t have any business meddling in education and the finance thereof, and that nobody really knows whether our kids in schools are getting a sound education or not.
It doesn’t get a lot more confusing, does it?
The whole issue that everyone supports—getting Kansas kids the best education possible—gets dissected so many ways, looked at from so many vantage points, that the focus can be lost. Remember, this funding issue is a legislative issue, which means that 63 votes in the House and 21 in the Senate decide the response.
There are some obvious included issues to be fought out. If the state spends more money on school finance, what else in government doesn’t get funded, and does the state need to raise more money—that’s taxes—to fund schools and everything else?
Property tax-financed local option budgets—originally designed to allow districts to provide the special services that are important to the constituents of school board members—have now been hijacked to pay for basic costs that the judges last week said the state isn’t adequately financing anymore. The “local option” portion of school finance isn’t really optional anymore.
So, does the Legislature just rename and claim credit for that local option budget, which at least on paper appears to make the state more supportive of the basic cost of keeping the schools open? There are takers for that option, and the judicial panel did in its findings say that the state making pension payments for teachers is part of support for public education.
And…there are those Rose Standards which are the new measurement of quality education in Kansas. Those standards haven’t been reduced to a test so that from the vantage point of Topeka, lawmakers can tell whether whatever money is spent on K-12 is getting the results that the state wants…or not…and why.
So, besides this little budget problem ahead—cutting about 10 percent of state spending or some lesser amount balanced by tax increases—there’s the school issue to deal with.
We’ll have to see where this goes…or if lawmakers decide to just study school finance for another couple years while the kids get older…