Archives for May 2011

Can any business function with a one year budget?  Can any school?

Imagine you were the Chief Executive Officer of a corporation and you went to your board of directors and asked them what was the budget you had to work with during the next business year?  How many workers would you have in order to complete the work necessary? And imagine the answer you received was, “we don’t know!  You will have to wait until next year.”

Stupid?  You bet it is.  But that is the situation that happens every school year for school boards, superintendents and school principals.  Until state legislatures, local city mayors, the U.S. Department of Education and the federal government decides how much funding to give to education everyone in the field is in the dark.

Superintendents and principals are asked to develop long-term (3 to 5 year) strategic plans with answers as to how they are going to achieve improved academic success.  They have to do so while looking into a crystal ball and using previous budgets to give a “guesstamate”. Superintendents are given a 3 or 5 year contract but only a one-year budget.  Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Their assumptions are predicated on the success of the economy, tax revenues maintaining their same levels, having the same number of classroom instructors, maintaining the same number of support personnel and that the price of fuel for school buses will remain the same.  They have to predict that the weather for the following year will be the same weather for this year so that the price of heating and cooling the schools and offices will not go up.

And legislatures do not always pass budgets in a reasonable time or in accordance with mandates.  Legislatures have demonstrated the ability to “pull the plug on the clock” before the midnight mandatory deadline so as to meet their requirement to have a budget in place before the start of the new budget year.

Schools need to benchmark businesses and begin to develop multi-year budgets.  But it is not up to them.  It is up to the state legislatures and governors.  I guess we are in for a long wait.

“I want every child in this country to head back to school in the fall knowing that education is America’s priority.” President Barak Obama

I don’t know about you but when I go to a doctor, an accountant, or a lawyer I want to go to the most experienced professional I can find. I want someone who has had the experiential base of knowledge that only time can provide.

But now I hear that a number of governors have decided that what education needs are the new, least experienced people in the classroom.  We already know that the least trained, least experienced classroom teachers are teaching those with the highest need ““ economically poor, minority students with disastrous results.  But now the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska and New Jersey want to get rid of tenure so that they can hire “newly minted “people coming into education.  While it is true that these young people bring certain skills like the use of technology with them, good teaching comes with years of experience.  Teachers frequently learn on the job what works and what doesn’t work in classrooms.

Could it be that “newly minted” educators get paid less than experienced educators and that these governors see a way to balance their budgets on the back of educators?