Olympia Business Watch

Isn't This Illegal?

Right on time for Labor Day weekend, The News Tribune headlines a likely teachers' strike in Bethel.

Clover Creek Elementary School teacher Danielle Edmonds expressed the sentiment of many of the teachers who gathered Wednesday in Graham to prepare picket signs.

“We’re really doing this for the parents, and the community and the children,” Edmonds said. In order to get high-quality teachers, we need that “TRI” (more pay for work outside the school day) package and we need class sizes manageable so we can instruct their children … in the best way we can.”

They might have a better chance of instructing them "in the best way they can" if they were in the classroom instead of on a picket line. So far, no reports that the picketing would be outsourced.

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation documents the monotonous frequency of teacher strikes in recent years.

While the TNT  doesn't mention the illegality of such strikes, this has been addressed before (hat tip to Jason Mercier at the Washingto Policy Center). And this 2006 opinion from Attorney General Rob McKenna looks pretty unambigous to me. The crux:

  In Washington, state and local public employees do not have a legally protected right to strike.  No such right existed at common law, and none has been granted by statute.  State ... statutes presently do not impose penalties on public employees for engaging in a strike. Under appropriate circumstances, a court may enjoin a public employee strike and may impose penalties for noncompliance. 

Here's a remedy unlikely to be pursued:

If it so chooses, the Legislature may establish penalties that would apply to employees who engage in unlawful strikes.  Provided they are consistent with significant limitations based in free speech guarantees, the Legislature also may establish penalties applicable to employees, unions, and union officials who incite unlawful strikes.

Something to consider next time lawmakers are inspired to pass legislation "for the kids."

Washington Ranks 32nd in New Report on High School Graduation

A report recently released by The Education Trust shows Washington ranking 32nd among the states in graduation rates. In a press release accompanying the report, the  Trust summarizes the problem.

“One in four students who start ninth grade will not earn a diploma four years later, and the picture is even worse for low-income students and students of color,”  said Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at The Education Trust, and the report’s author. “Because current graduation rates are so low, we need targets that provoke action on behalf of students, not ones that condone the status quo.”

As Hall's comment underscores, subgroup variation affects the overall graduation rate.It's worthwhile to examine the data table. For Washington, the average freshman graduation rate calculated by the US Department of Education - the number on which we rank 33rd - shows us at 75 percent. The report also looks at the state-reported rates, which vary considerably. The state-reported overall rate for Washington is 79.3 percent. The subgroup rates look like this: Asian/Pacific Islander, 85.2 percent; African American, 68.4 percent; American Indian, 60.6 percent; Latino; 67.4 percent; White, 82.1 percent; Low-Income; 72.1 percent; Students with disabilities, 73.1 percent; and Limited English Proficient, 75.2 percent.

The top five states according to the US Education department data are Nebraska (87.8 percent), Wisconsin (86.7 percent), Iowa (86.6 percent), Vermont (86.5 percent), and North Dakota (86.3 percent).

The Trust cites reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act as an opportunity to improve performance and makes several recommendations worth consideration.

· Crafting meaningful graduation-rate accountability provisions in the law and providing high schools with a greater share of the federal investment in education so they have more resources to meet ambitious improvement goals;

 

· Targeting federal investments to improve high school curriculum and assessments; and

 

· Better directing funds and interventions toward the lowest performing schools to ensure that high-poverty and high-minority schools get their fair share of the tools they need to be successful – strong teachers, high standards and high-quality curriculum and assessments.

What do you think?

 

This Just Makes Sense To Me

In Sunday's New York Times, Jonathan D. Glater reported on an emerging - and long over due - trend in higher education: differential pricing of various degree programs.

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

He writes that the changes are driven by costs - faculty in some professions can demand higher salaries, for example. Oddly - maybe not so oddly - some administrators balk.

“This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”

The objection seems misplaced. The higher cost programs tend also to lead to more highly compensated careers. But I can accept that there may be adverse consequences - few public policies come without downsides. For example, Glater reports administrators worrying about students getting trapped in low-cost majors.

But there's an easy fix, which he also describes.

Various universities have adopted different versions of differential pricing to try to fight the unintended consequences it may create. Colleges that charge higher tuition for a major like business, engineering or journalism generally allow students outside the field to take some courses in the subject without paying more.

... Most universities with differential tuition use some of the money — 20 to 25 percent — for additional financial aid to offset some of the impact.

As expected, the story sparked some good response.

On the Conglomerate Blog, Christine Hurt writes:

... why raise tuition across the board and have people who want to teach kindergarten have to subsidize the education of people who want to become engineers, who will get paid much more after graduation?  Why not just let engineering students pay more?  (The article did not mention lab fees, which I had long thought were already a mechanism to have students in certain majors pay more than others. Texts also cost vastly different amounts in various majors.)  Students already pay more for elite institutions than non-elite institutions; more for university education than community college; and more for degree-granting institutions than technical schools or cosmetology schools.  Surely this pay differential has something to do with the value of the degree.  And surely degrees within a particular institution are worth more than others.

It's a marketplace, right? This post from Inside Higher Ed last March makes a similar point.

The one-student, one-rate model is somewhat silently slipping away at many public universities nationwide, as institutions increasingly turn toward differential (read: higher) tuition rates for students pursuing specific majors, often those with higher costs of operation...

The College Board, the keeper of all tuition data, doesn’t track variable tuition rates by major, with the figures in its annual report representing the amount paid by a “typical” undergraduate. But several economists tracking tuition policy say, anecdotally speaking, at least, that while differential tuition has been around for quite some time, there has been a significant surge in the introduction of major-specific undergraduate differential tuition policies over the past five years.

Administrators may be uncomfortable with the evolving model, but I'm guessing it's here to stay.

Summertime Thoughts on School Finance

Rep. Skip Priest, R-Federal Way, had a good op-ed in Sunday's Seattle Times. Priest argues that the state education system is in crisis, particularly focusing on the way we fund the schools. A member of the Washington Learns commission, Priest says the group failed to do its job.

Its sole charge was developing a comprehensive approach to funding education. Unfortunately, after 18 months, and more than $1 million, the task force punted and, again, failed to provide the funding blueprint the Legislature requested.

And he believes the Legislature also failed to meet its responsibilities.

The Democrat-controlled Legislature did not do much better this session at meeting the state's paramount duty. While its decision to provide more than $1.7 billion in new funds to K-12 education earned some praise, the approach did little to address the crisis. The Legislature failed to provide a clear, long-term strategy for education finance and did not adequately fund the fundamentals such as dropout prevention, district salary inequities, special education, transportation needs and even something as basic as books.

As a legislator, Priest has been at the forefront of education issues and lays out some provocative ideas. At least, he's arguing for a legislative solution, which is where the responsibility for statewide education policy and finance rests.

Too many school activists want to wrest the responsibility from lawmakers and let the courts determine funding levels. In my column today, I argue against that approach. There's a lot of good information on this.

The Tax Foundation released a report last week examining the effects of so-called "adequacy lawsuit" on long term funding. The crux:

...lawsuits targeting "inequitable" or "inadequate" school funding have failed to produce long-term increases in school spending, but many have produced long-term tax increases.

Economist Eric Hanushek points out in Education Next that the big winners in these cases are often the consultants who put out the studies that drive the court's decision. He looks specifically at the work of Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden, who produced a report for Washington Learns, which Hanushek reviewed for the commission. His comments have general application.

What Picus and Odden provide in their reports is essentially a selective review of the published literature on program effects. Why do different states and organizations pay      ever-increasing amounts to see this research review when Google would bring up the most recent version immediately and without expense? ...  Clients want a bottom-line statement  about how much spending would provide an adequate education, and they want this cost estimate attached to their specific state. Few people care about the “studies” on which consultants base their reports, or even their validity, because nobody really expects schools to implement these specific programs if given extra funding. Clients simply want a requisite amount of scientific aura around the number that will become the rallying flag for political and legal actions.

John Burbank, head of the Economic Opportunity Institute, buys into the notion that solutions begin with more money. And he thinks wealthy parents ought to get their kids out of private schools.

We can rebuild our public education system. It will require the state to invest at least $1 billion more each year in K-12 education. But for private school parents, money spent on public education probably seems like charity. While they are paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, they are unlikely to embrace more investments in public schools that might increase their taxes.

Of course, one of the most successful products of a private Seattle academy has a pretty good record of putting money into public education.

We've problems in education, beginning with an unhappy willingness to retreat on accountability. The governor got it conceptually right last year:

"I think you're going to see a whole different way of investing in education," Gregoire said. "Not just more money."

As the lawsuit works its way through the courts and the 2008 political season gets underway, though, "more money" will rival "paramount duty" as the education mantra.

WASL Too Easy?

In today's Seattle Times, Linda Shaw reports that a consultant thinks Washington needs to beef up it math education, a conclusion that will surprise very few folks in business or education.

An outside review of Washington's standards for mathematics found them sorely lacking — with key concepts missing, a lack of focus and insufficient clarity, especially when it comes to the basics.

Consultant Linda Plattner, hired by the state Board of Education, says Washington expects too little of its students in math, even though roughly 40 percent of Washington 10th-graders fail math each year on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).

Because performance lagged, lawmakers delayed the WASL, over the objections of business leaders.

The News Tribune carries the AP story on Plattner's report.

1-Percent Income Tax for the Schools

Indulging every columnist's right to fanciful speech, John Burbank touts a 1-percent income tax for education in his column in the Everett Herald. He envisions the great things it would accomplish.

Why don't we pass a 1 percent flat rate income tax dedicated to education? Everybody would pay it. We could couple it with a penny reduction in the sales tax and still have over $500 million a year to dedicate to education.

...$500 million by itself would pay for universal full-day kindergarten and full payment for the cost of sixth period in high school, plus 25,000 more slots in our public four-year universities and community colleges for those kids when they do graduate with the WASL tests in hand. We have shied away from a state income tax over and over again. But if we want our kids to gain a world-class education, rhetoric and delay won't work. Investment in education will.

Knowing the cure, the diagnosis won't surprise you.

... that is the root problem with K-12 education - we don't invest enough, while we expect students to meet rigorous standards. ... it is hard to get the students there when we starve the system of support.

"Starve" seems a bit off. Here's what the governor said about this year's budget.

The $33.4 billion budget includes an increase of nearly $900 per student in kindergarten through 12th grade and a $2.5 billion overall increase in education funding.

 

Up $900 per student .... not bad. Besides, that $500 million, of course, is chump change compared to this.

States Struggling with Academic Standards

A couple of recent education reports continue to attract attention. Carrying the scintillating title, Mapping 2005 State Proficiency standard Onto the NAEP Scales, a report by the National Center of Education Statistics looks at how various state accountability tests (like our WASL) stack up against the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The crux: Not well.

Or, as they say in edu-speak:

There is a strong negative correlation between the proportions of students meeting the states’ proficiency standards and the NAEP score equivalents to those standards, suggesting that the observed heterogeneity in states’ reported percents proficient can be largely attributed to differences in the stringency of their standards. There is, at best, a weak relationship between the NAEP score equivalents for the state proficiency standard and the states’ average scores on NAEP. Finally, most of the NAEP score equivalents fall below the cut-point corresponding to the NAEP Proficient standard, and many fall below the cut-point corresponding to the NAEP Basic standard.

In other words, it looks like many states have set the standards for passing their own tests below the level the NAEP sets for academic proficiency.

At Governing Magazine's 13th Floor blog, Josh Goodman has this take, with several useful links.

One solution: Require every state to use NAEP or something similar. That's what, in response to the Department of Education report, the Washington Post opined in favor of this weekend, declaring, "America can no longer afford the quaint tradition of each state defining success differently." (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings disagreed in an op-ed.)

As Goodman says, we may be seeing increased pressure for a national test.

The national group of top state school officers offers this response.

For our state, the comparisons don't help much. No 8th grade scores are provided. The 4th grade results put us below proficiency in math and even below the "basic cut" for reading.

It's the struggle to get accountability right that matters right now. I'm no fan of federal standards, and would worry if inadequate state standards push us in that direction.

Perhaps more important - in Washington we cannot retreat on accountability, even as our insistence on it makes some folks uncomfortable.

And that's the focus of my column this morning in the Spokesman-Review.

MORE Education Week has a good story on the state tests and NAEP. And this from the Hoover Institution suggests some reason may be creeping into the courts' disposition of adequacy lawsuits.

WASL Up?

Friday, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction released preliminary Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) results. About 90 percent of next year's seniors have passed the reading and writing tests, required for graduation, and about 60 percent have passed the math test, which won't be required for five years. That doesn't sound too shabby to me.

There's a lot of coverage. The Seattle Times story notes that the good news doesn't mollify the head of the largest teachers' union.

Charles Hasse, president of the Washington Education Association, accused OSPI of artificially inflating student success on the test.

"It's an attempt to portray an unacceptable situation in the best possible light," he said.

Like that never happens in business or government. Even if he's right, the best possible light illuminates the situation pretty well. And these results show that there's no reason to back down on accountability now, a point strongly made in this editorial in The News Tribune.

The basic idea behind the WASL was that students should have to demonstrate they’ve acquired a meaningful body of knowledge before they graduate – that they’ve done something more than occupy seats in classrooms for 12 years.

The WASL and its many alternatives help ensure that a diploma from a Washington high school is a serious credential. If it’s hard to get, it should be hard to get.

And in this Everett Herald editorial.

This impressive success, however, isn't likely to quiet the WASL's loudest critics. They'll point to the 5,000-6,000 students who haven't passed as evidence that the test isn't fair, that a single test shouldn't bar a student from getting a diploma.

Such energy would be better directed at getting more students over the bar. ...

Math continues to be a concern. ... it's up to the state to figure out how to teach math more effectively.

In reading and writing, though, there's a ton of success for tens of thousands of families to celebrate. The focus now must be on getting as many struggling students as possible to join them, not on lowering expectations.

Right.

Getting "It" Right from the Start

Don's column in today's Columbian tackles an issue that has plagued employers, teachers, and a lot of other folks for sometime - the declining sense of personal responsibility.

Across our nation, employers need people who come to work on time, pitch in to get the job done, want to learn new skills, and approach customers with a smile on their face and "How can I help you?" on their lips. It doesn't matter whether those customers are people grabbing a quick burger at a fast-food restaurant or drivers going to a state agency for their license.

But that isn't the way it is today.

He backs it up with some examples that would be shocking if they weren't common. The problems start at home.

Taxpayers in our nation dump tons of money into our public schools and colleges each year. In Washington, the Legislature appropriated just under $1,000 extra per student in our K-12 system. While money is important, is it going to prepare our students to compete with workers from China, India, Ireland and South Korea?

It may help, but until parents instill responsibility and good manners in their children, we can dump billions more into our schools and the problem will remain unresolved.

We have some work to do.

Gain-sharing Lawsuit

The Washington Education Association recently sued to keep gain-sharing, the state's costly pension perk that was supposed to be a freebie to certain state employees. Then the Washington Public Employees Association sued, as well.

I wrote about it in a column published by the Spokesman-Review.