- By Dan Veaner
- Around Town
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| In Part 1 and Part 2 we explored what a mandate costs the Lansing School District and mandate outcomes. This week we look at the value of mandates vs. local programs. | ||
"Theoretically the Board of Education has local control over the curriculum," she says. "That's supposed to be the idea of why the local community has to pay for so much of it. But really, there may be some funding for any curriculum that's mandated by the State, but it's not matched dollar for dollar."
Mandate Relief?
State officials say schools and teachers are not performing, while educators say state interference is political and does not benefit children. Lansing School Superintendent Stephen Grimm says the net effect of mandate relief is similar. Even as legislators dump outdated mandates they are piling on new ones.
"There's never going to be enough mandate relief to equal the amount of time it takes to deal with the new unfunded mandates," he says. "There's no doubt about it. I don't think they've ever had any meaningful mandate relief ever. They're pulling things off the books now that have been there for 40 years, so one year of mandate relief is not going to do it."
"How can you have a two percent tax cap when the retirement system benefits that are mandated from Albany are 15%, 20%... health insurance is always seven or eight percent... So how can you have a 2% tax cap unless you're going to continually reduce your educational program?" Grimm asks. "Or get more state aid? Or free up ways for us to spur revenue."
He notes that increasing taxes is the only way schools are permitted to grow revenue, but says he would like opportunities to be innovative about raising money to preserve and grow programs in Lansing.
"Let us put the Borg Warner name on something," he says. "Let Pepsi be the main distributor for diet soda at our games. There are so many restrictions on how we can acquire revenue and they're limiting us on the one that we do have, which is taxation."
Dealing With Mandates
Lansing administrators are hard-pressed to come up with a comprehensive list of mandates. Because they are so interwoven with the curriculum and operation of the district it is also hard to put an exact cost on them. Is this something we would be doing anyway? Would we be doing something else, but spending the same money to do it?
King says all of special education is mandated because it is required by the state or the federal government.
"Some of it is funded. We receive aid on certain aspects of it," she concedes. "But any curriculum is mandated by the state."
She adds that all of the Regents exams and state exams now required for elementary and middle school students all incur huge costs. The district pays for the giving of the tests, their proctoring, and now for scoring many of them.
"A lot of the middle school and elementary tests are given during the course of the school year," King says. "When the Regents exams are given at the end of the year those teachers are not teaching classes. When they are at BOCES scoring those exams, we're bringing in five, ten, fifteen substitutes that we're paying for those days."
King says that emissions mandates for a school bus purchased this year will cost an additional $30,000, driving the full cost of a new bus to $120,000 this year. Transportation aid pays for about 60%.
She says mandates are well intentioned because they come from a perceived need that will theoretically improve something state-wide. But she argues that local control suffers, that high performing schools are brought down to meet a median, and that the tax burden falls on local property owners who have diminishing say in how their money is to be spent.
"Lansing is a community that is so supportive of quality education that we might be spending the same amount of money, but we might be spending it differently," she says.
At a recent school board meeting Board Of Education member David Dittman complained that the district is mandated to pay charter school admission for a growing number of Lansing students. This year 15 Lansing students are enrolled at New Roots Charter High School, and King has estimated that next year charter school tuition may be as high as $175,000. Grimm says that families have been asked why they are choosing New Roots over Lansing, so the district can evaluate whether it can meet those needs and keep students in Lansing.
King has been supportive of the idea of the charter school, acknowledging that a small rural district can't meet every need for all students. She says the charter school is a way those kids can receive education in a way that fits the way they learn. But she also says mandates creates those gaps by restricting the ways district schools can deliver education.
"That's where the charter schools can fulfill a niche for some students because they can take a different approach to the educational system," she says. "It's because of the mandates that we can't do that as an entire campus, that we can't have entirely unique programs with a lot more freedom to come and go and develop your own program. It's because of the reality of confinement we suffer with the mandates."
Some mandated expenses are imposed simply in order to accept school aid. King increased the budget line for audit fees around $20,000 because of the additional audit that has to be attached to receiving federal ARRA (American Recovery Reinvestment Act) monies.
King says the school district is required to pay three different auditing entities every year. That is a similar mandate to the Wicks Law that requires building projects to use separate plumbing, heating/ventilation/air conditioning and electrical contracts, which then requires school districts to either be its own general contractor or hire a 'clerk of the works' to manage the project. Studies estimate the Wicks Law adds adds between 8% and 30% to project expenses. In upstate New York Wicks Law is applied to all projects that exceed $500,000.
Local Control and Mandate Relief
Michael Nozzolio, who represents Lansing in the New York State Senate, has been a proponent of taking the burden off of property taxpayers while unburdening local taxing authorities of mandate expenses.
"We must also enact real mandate relief, including pension reform, to protect property taxpayers and ensure that local governments and school districts stay under the tax cap," he said in a statement last January.
NY State Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton says she passes along concerns and specific suggestions to the Education Committee. Lifton says she voted against Race To The Top because she didn't think this made sense as a way to evaluate teachers. But she was not clear on whether real mandate relief is going to happen.
"I encourage that discussion and I've sent many of those specifics along to my school districts. I am sure staff and chairs are looking at those issues. Whether there is going to be any movement on that I don't know."
King says that some mandates are philosophically good, and may even be things a district would do if given the choice. But she adds that they take away local control.
"I think that's discouraging for school board members," she says. "New people get on the board to fix and change all these things, and then they find out it's all regulated."
The issue that should be on everybody's minds is what is best for students. If state mandates bring down higher performing schools to a 'lowest common denominator' are they really helping children?
The new state APPR regulations on teacher evaluations provide a microcosm for the arguments for and against mandates in general. Student performance more than ever defines good teachers, and that performance is adjudged on test results. But do state-wide standardized test results really demonstrate good teaching or good learning?
"That's a matter of opinion, because is the test going to bring up the performance of the schools?" King says. "The spotlight on their test performance may force them to get better test results, but does that make a better educated citizen?"
Again, it comes down to this: without state tests and standards there is no universal way to quantify results in a black and white, bottom line way. State-wide standards and tests provide some way for evaluating schools and educators. That approach may not be entirely objective, but it goes in the direction of objective evaluation. Because there is no objective measure of simply teaching the material and cognitive thinking, you can't compare the approaches. It's apples and oranges. Do you trust the numbers or the professionals we entrust with our children?
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