New study evaluates school system productivity nationwide

A new study on educational spending sponsored by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, suggests that strong ties within the broader community can prompt some schools to produce better results than others, given the same amount of funding. The new report examined student performance in 9,000 school districts that teach 85 percent of America's K-12 students resulting some interesting findings:

A few of the study's most significant findings:

• The least-productive districts across the nation spend 3 percent more of their budgets on administration and operations than better-performing districts.

• Poor students are more likely than wealthier ones to be attending an unproductive school district. More than a million students overall are attending schools the study labeled as unproductive.

• More spending -- above a certain threshold -- does not guarantee higher productivity. More than half the school districts in the study showed no relationship between the amount of money spent and student achievement. For example, two very similar school districts of about 10,000 each in Wisconsin produced students with virtually the same average test scores. But one district, Eau Claire, spent about $800 million more than Oshkosh did.

• Especially productive school districts appear to share some traits, according to the study's authors. These districts were often located in "supportive communities" and spent about 3 percent more of their budget on instructional costs -- e.g., teacher salaries, curriculum materials -- than lower-performing districts did.

Here are some more interesting traits found in successful districts:

Strong community relations
Many of the highly productive districts worked closely with their communities to help maximize education spending.

A willingness to make tough choices
Reducing spending while maintaining strong outcomes takes fiscal acumen, political savvy, and a willingness to make hard choices.

A priority on quality instruction
The country’s highly productive districts devoted 3 percentage points more of their budget to instructional costs than did the least efficient districts.

Smart use of data
Most of the highly productive districts reported having sophisticated data systems that provided detailed information on a variety of school outcomes, from parent satisfaction to student success in college.

This year-long study is chock full of much more information. To read about it and download the report visit the link below found at the Center for American Progress website.

Return on Educational Investment
A District-by-District Evaluation of U.S. Educational Productivity
Interactive Map: Check out DeKalb County's ROI here

It’s time now to bring parent revolution here

Check out the editorial with this heading at the AJC written by Glenn Delk, an Atlanta attorney. Say what you will about the dangers and ills of charter schools, I have to believe that we have come to the point where a charter school simply cannot be nearly as corrupt and wasteful as some of our current billion dollar school systems. School systems have been found to be nothing more that money troughs for those who are big enough and powerful enough to barrel their way over smaller, weaker beings to gorge.

Enough. We have to try something else. Give the power to the people. Some may do a better job, some worse. But at least we wouldn't feel so hamstrung and ripped off.

Here are some quotes from Mr. Delk's column -

...But if the Atlanta cheating scandal has shown us anything, it’s that the wrong people control public education and that real accountability in the traditional public school system does not exist.

Neither the parents of students attending the 58 schools, nor Atlanta’s taxpayers footing the bill, have any real alternative to the status quo.

But what would happen if we changed the current system of governance and offered parents and taxpayers the chance to assert control over public education in Georgia by convincing local school districts and the General Assembly to pass Georgia’s version of the Parent and Taxpayers Trigger? ...

The problems facing Atlanta’s parents and taxpayers are certainly not unique to Atlanta.

Whether it’s the soaring costs of public education, abysmal test scores and graduation results, loss of accreditation by Clayton County, or alleged corruption in DeKalb County’s schools, the simple fact is that we have a system of public education in Georgia and throughout the country in which the people who pay for the services (taxpayers) and the people who use the service (parents) have little or no real power.

It’s time for a coalition of parents, taxpayers, business and political leaders to join forces to bring the parent revolution to Georgia by implementing Georgia’s Parents and Taxpayers’ Trigger that will provide:

• 51 percent of the parents whose children attend any public school in Georgia can, with a petition, trigger one of three options — charter conversion, closing the school, or use of tuition tax credit scholarships to enable students to attend a private school;
• Fifty-one percent of the taxpayers of a county or city can, at a specially-called referendum, vote to trigger one of the three options for all schools in its jurisdiction;
• the trigger applies to all public schools, not just failing schools;
• charter school funding will equal that of traditional public schools;
• parents and taxpayers can elect to close the schools and give parents a tuition tax credit-funded scholarship. Georgia currently has a $50 million annual cap on the scholarships; the cap should be lifted.

Some people will argue that such a mechanism will cause chaos in our public schools, or that the approach is too radical. My response is that perhaps the chaos resulting from a parent and taxpayer revolution is necessary to bring about real change, since I believe AJC columnist Maureen Downey was right when she wrote: “cheating on the CRCT did not help the children of APS, many of whom have poverty and family chaos already working against them.”

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For more on the subject, read this post about Arnold Schwarzenegger's article on the subject in the Washington Post.

For more conversation on the topic of education reform, check out these two grass-roots blogs I recently discovered.  We are certainly not alone.

Knitting With Pencils - A Failure of Imagination

Dr Kwame M. Brown: Move Theory - Child Development Specialist, Thought Leader, Change Agent