The Debates on School Budgets Continue

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the American Enterprise Institute on November 17, 2010:

“I am here to talk today about what has been called the New Normal. For the next several years, preschool, K-12, and postsecondary educators are likely to face the great challenge of doing more with less.

“My message is this challenge can, and should be, embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements. I believe enormous opportunities for improving the productivity of our education system lie ahead if we are smart, innovative, and courageous in rethinking the status quo.

“It’s time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It’s time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress.”

I have used this quote in numerous presentations, and Secretary Duncan was our keynote speaker for the Productivity and Efficiency Conference in November 2011 in Louisville. The reality of this quote has been hitting our school districts for a number of years, and the fiscal year 2013-14 state and local budgets appear to be the most difficult in recent history.

I recently read a report from the Fordham Institute entitled How Americans Would Slim Down Public Education. This report represents feedback from surveys and focus groups conducted by the Fordham Institute. The recommendations from the report are as follows:

1)      Shrink the administration.

2)      Freeze salaries to save jobs.

3)      If teachers must be laid off, base it on their effectiveness, not years of service.

4)      Opt for larger classes taught by excellent teachers rather than smaller classes with instructors of unknown ability.

5)      Move from traditional pensions to individual retirement plans.

The purpose of this blog is not to support this particular report but to highlight the national and state debates concerning school funding. Readers also should be familiar with the possible federal cuts to education from sequestration that I warned about, the work that the Kentucky Education Advocacy Team (KEAT) has done on the state education budget and the work of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

There are only three methods that I am aware of with regard to budgets. First, we must ensure all of our processes in education are efficient and productive. Second, we must redirect existing dollars from programs that are not efficient and productive to programs that are working. And third, we must look for additional revenue sources dedicated to effective programs. Working on only one method or cutting across the board are not strategies that will work in the long term.

These next two years are going to be extremely difficult budget years given the loss of federal stimulus dollars, possible federal sequestration, state budget cuts, the pending pension crisis, rising health care costs and increasing demands on schools. Leaders and policy makers need a balanced perspective when making decisions that impact teaching and learning.

Terry Holliday, Ph.D.

Rough Times Require Efficient Solutions

"No one makes tough choices in flush times."


"Don't let a crisis go to waste."

These are popular quotes nowadays. As I talk with educators across the nation, they are confronted with aggressive change agendas during a time of dwindling resources.

In a Kappan article this month, (“How to steer the tough budget road ahead - Accelerate your performance”), Rick Hess builds on his recent book Stretching the School Dollar with several key recommendations.

• Districts should take a close look at talent distribution through the lens of identifying priorities. This may mean reductions in programs and services that are not top priorities.
• Districts should look closely at performance management and benchmarking of key processes to identify waste and improvement opportunities.
• Districts should look at unit costs for services and programs to identify inefficiencies in delivery.
• Districts and states should look closely at salaries and benefits. 

While I am not in total agreement with Hess, we did recently host a productivity conference featuring Kentucky districts, the American Productivity Quality Council and 2010 Baldrige recipient Montgomery County, Md. The day culminated in a speech by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that celebrated Kentucky’s school success and challenges for improving student outcomes. You can see a recording of that speech here.

Moving forward, we announced two major initiatives that do reflect the recommendations from Hess. We will begin to highlight best practices of performance management through our Performance Efficiencies Recognition for Kentucky Schools (PERKS) awards, and we will convene district officials to start a study in unit costs (per-student costs) for operational services. It is not our intent to include these measures in accountability; however, we do want to provide districts with comparative information to identify potential savings in operations that could be redirected to classroom support.

While there are some signals of economic recovery, many experts are predicting Kentucky will not fully recover until 2015. School leaders are well advised to "not let a crisis go to waste." As we’re hearing frequently, "Now is the time to accelerate your performance."

Productivity and Efficiency in Education

The words in the title are very foreign to educators, and to some educators, they raise concerns that we are trying to be more like the business world. Let me say up front that education is an extremely complex social institution that is impacted by many factors other than the classroom. I do, however, believe that educators can certainly improve operational processes to make them more productive and efficient and, in turn, invest the savings in support for classrooms.

I also believe that classroom teachers can improve the learning results in their classrooms by improving key learning processes. The key processes such as instruction and student engagement must constantly be reviewed and improved in light of the student learning results.

Last week in my blog, I talked about the “new normal” that educators are facing. This new normal requires us to do much more to help more students achieve at higher levels and to achieve these results with fewer dollars than we have had in the past. I mentioned that I would be focusing this year on benchmarking, productivity and efficiency. This blog provides access to some recent articles and resources that may help readers gain a better understanding of the discussion that is taking place across education and government circles.

Of course, education is not alone in this issue of productivity. We are joined by health care, government, non-profit and all business sectors. Our challenge in education is not replicate business efforts, but to create sector specific language and improvement efforts.

This week, I reviewed a new report from the Center for American Progress: Return on Educational Investment: A District by District Evaluation of US Education Productivity. The link to the report is http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/01/pdf/dwwroi.pdf.

While there have been many efforts over the years to define “return on investment,” productivity, efficiency and outcomes of education, it is extremely difficult to accomplish due to the complexity of education. This does not mean that we can ignore this issue as educators. Given the difficult economic situation that most states and school districts are facing, this is a time when we as educators must have a better understanding of terms like productivity and efficiency. A quote from the report provides insight into the debate:

"Our nation’s school system has for too long failed to ensure that education funding consistently promotes strong student achievement. After adjusting for inflation, education spending per student has nearly tripled over the past four decades. But while some states and districts have spent their additional dollars wisely—and thus shown significant increases in student outcomes—overall student achievement has largely remained flat. And besides Luxembourg, the United States spends more per student than any of the 65 countries that participated in a recent international reading assessment, and while Estonia and Poland scored at the same level as the United States on the exam, the United States spent roughly $60,000 more to educate each student to age 15 than either nation."

For additional information on quality, continuous improvement, productivity, efficiency and similar terms in education, I offer some of my favorite resources.

Baldrige National Quality Program -- http://www.nist.gov/baldrige
Readers may be most interested in the education criteria and the award recipients from education.

American Society for Quality -- http://asq.org/education/index.html

American Productivity Quality Council -- http://www.apqceducation.org

All three of these resources offer a number of free materials for educators. Educators will need to make their own decisions about purchases of products. I am not endorsing any particular product.

Look for more resources and links in the coming months. While I will continue to focus on asking legislators to fully fund SEEK and Flexible Focus Funds, educators also must look to productivity and efficiency for savings. I am excited about the work being done with energy management in most school districts in partnership with the Kentucky School Boards Association. This model is exactly the type of approach that educators can use in other operational processes.