Tom Sgouros: Short Takes
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Can Central Falls afford merit pay for teachers?
I see that part of the new Central Falls teacher "contract" will include merit pay. This new deal was imposed unilaterally on the teachers, now that the administration has claimed that the city's bankruptcy means they can do as they like. The administration says teachers will get an "effectiveness quotient" or EQ, based on evaluations, but also on testing data, projects they may have completed, or a portfolio of work they've done. (If you include "quotient" in the name, it must be science, right?) A high enough EQ will get one of these "effective" teachers $6,000 more than their peers.
Here are two predictions that seem pretty safe to make about this. First, it is going to get harder to staff the classrooms of slow learners. Including testing data will make it very hard to avoid rewarding the teachers who have advanced students and penalizing the teachers who don't. I'm sure there will be claims that this can be accounted for, but I remain skeptical.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTSecond, I hope we can presume that district policy will be to encourage teachers to become "effective." But if a hundred teachers qualify for this payment, that will cost the district more than $600,000, counting payroll taxes and the like. How long before a budget analyst points out that's a lot of money? This is more than 2% of the total budget for teacher salaries, and equal to the salaries and benefits of eight or nine teachers. A provision granted unilaterally by the administration can be taken away as easily. In Tiverton, a merit pay plan established several years ago fell victim to budget cutters on the school board after only a few years of use.
Can Providence and Cranston afford charter schools?
The charter school controversy continues to swirl, and this week Providence City Council president Michael Solomon invited the proposed Cranston Mayoral Academy to open in Providence. But no one has yet met the objections I and others raised months ago: where does the money come from?
We just went through a budget cycle where the legislature ignored the state's need for revenue and turned their back on the Governor's request for more funds to meet the state's needs. Tax cuts for rich people is the order of the day, so property tax increases are the order for you and me. Prominent legislators are calling for the state to collect even less revenue than we are now (see below), so where does the money come from to establish a new school? Answer: from the old ones.
You can talk all day long about the magic of charter schools and about giving poor kids an opportunity by improving their schools. I'll even agree with you all day long, until the point where you ignore the plight of the existing schools. The funding formula for charter schools will take money from the existing schools, and that is simple fact. It's also fact that the marginal cost of a student's education in a school system with thousands of kids is almost zero. That is, adding a kid to the schools increases the cost by very little, and subtracting a kid decreases the cost by very little. This is true whether the school system has unionized teachers, or if the school is run by volunteers. It's true if the system has new buildings or old. It's a basic point of business math, and I'm surprised that so many people who want me to be impressed by their business acumen seem to ignore it.
When a student moves from the regular school to the charter school, the law says regular school saves the marginal cost of that student (almost zero), but must give up the average cost of that student (about $14,000). When we have a funding solution to address this issue, I'll support charter schools. Until then, anyone who cares about education is fooling themselves to think that charters will do anything but suck money from the regular schools.
Can Teresa Paiva-Weed be serious?
I see from a press release she sent out that Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed and Senator Louis DiPalma (that's the Newport delegation) have called for the repeal of the sales tax on tours. The press release I saw went on at great length about how important tourism is to Rhode Island's economy. It is 9.2% of total employment in the state, and about 5% of our economy. Those are interesting numbers, but so what? We tax income, and 100% of our economy is income.
Worse, I read the whole release twice, and then again, and I still can't find any mention of what spending would be cut in order to eliminate this tax. You would think that someone in a position of great responsibility would take the time and effort to act responsibly in a case like this, but apparently not.
The endless demand for tax cuts, and the logic-and-experience-defying claims that tax cuts will pay for themselves have left our state finances in a shambles. Our deferred maintenance demands are mountainous, our roads and bridges continue to crumble, our educational institutions have suffered, and our state is without the resources to answer the demands of the day. It is long past time for the proponents of tax cuts to get serious, and for all of the rest of us to demand that they do. Do you advocate for tax cuts? Unless you can tell me how to pay for them, then you are not serious and deserve nothing more than our scorn.
Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].
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