The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Transportation, Technology, Education -- Long Term Trends

This post has nothing to do with any decisions for this year or next, except possibly for the Superintendent search where some people might want to ask candidates for their thoughts about long term trends. The bottom line is that this week's news on transportation technology may make a cost-saving merger more feasible but less necessary, in interesting ways.

First, remember (for those who have followed my previous arguments) that I came to oppose the merger when I learned that it would shift costs (from teaching to transportation) without appreciable overall net savings. There were other issues, major issues, but it was at that point that I stopped thinking "unfortunate necessity" and started thinking "nonsense." I did, however, note that transportation costs per mile might go down, e.g. if natural-gas bus transport options improved. And this week I do see a possible future lower-cost option.

The University of Delaware (where I started out teaching computer science in 1980, back when the ARPAnet was a few sites, and international email waited until midnight to be picked up and sent via 1200-baud modem) now reports on "V2G" (Vehicle-to-Grid) electric vehicle technology; Science Daily says Diesel bus alternative: Electric school buses that power grid could save school districts millions

Choosing a V2G-capable electric bus over a diesel bus would save a school district $6,070 per bus seat, or $230,000 per bus over the vehicle's 14-year lifespan. Even with taking out the medical and climate change costs associated with diesel pollution, school districts could still save $5,700 per seat.

"They could save a large amount of money while also shifting away from the consumption of diesel and enhancing school children's health," the authors write in the paper.

There is still a way to go before such V2G-capable school buses become a reality, however. Electric school buses are uncommon, with the first Trans Tech all-electric school bus tested in California earlier this year.

While electric school buses can be cost-competitive without providing V2G services, the V2G technology would produce substantially larger savings for school districts.

That's pretty cool, and it might work -- and if it had worked already as part of the merger plan, I suspect that the numbers would have looked quite different and we'd have merged, despite the problems it would have caused in other directions. However, this week also has a much more in-the-news transportation technology announcement, in the "Official Google Blog" at Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

We’re planning to build about a hundred prototype vehicles, and later this summer, our safety drivers will start testing early versions of these vehicles that have manual controls.

And what will the long-term impact of these be? Until this week, I had mainly thought of driverless cars in the context of urban driving. But now I take seriously TreeHugger's Google unveils its designs for a self-driving car, and it will change our cities and suburbs:

The self-driving car will certainly affect our cities, given that you need far fewer cars when they are shared and they don't need parking, but the real revolution is in the suburbs, which suddenly make a lot more sense. Grandma isn't stuck in the house all day; the kids get driven to school and to soccer practice; mom can work while the car drives to the office. Parking lots and garages disappear as the cars are shared and always on the move....

Tim de Chant says...

Self-driving cars are one of the biggest threats to the future of cities... As people’s commutes are freed up for other tasks, including work, they’ll stretch their daily trips, once again allowing them to live where they want. And as we’ve seen, people want to live where they have more space.

So it may well be that improved transportation will reverse the decline in upstate population.... Or not.

It's hard to predict, especially the future.

NY Merger Study in the News

In April, the Syracuse Post-Standard had an article with an HCS picture at the top, reporting that Report says change in New York law might encourage school mergers:

Syracuse, NY - The movement to merge New York's 700 school districts has virtually stopped since 1996 hamstrung by a process of multiple votes and tax disparities,...
A report by the New York State Association of School Business Officials shows that since 2010, some 30 school districts have studied merging but failed to complete the process for a variety of reasons. ...
The report says the obstacles to school mergers are: fear of change, fear of the loss of local identity, the perception that the merging communities are incompatible, higher costs and property taxes, more time needed to transport students and job security for school employees....
Most recently in Central New York voters in the Hamilton Central School District overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to merge with the Morrisville-Eaton Central School District in a December advisory vote.

The NPR summary of the NYSASBO report was slightly simpler: Study finds New Yorkers don't want school mergers, but of course citing the same "obstacles". The report itself is at 1398091412_NYSASBO School Merger Study April 2014 (1).pdf.

Nowhere, so far as I can see, is it mentioned that the proposed merger plan for the merger which Hamilton voted down was not actually going to save money; the economy of scale offered by getting all the kids into one place (reduced staff) was almost precisely balanced by the diseconomy of scale imposed by getting all the kids into one place (increased transportation). That could change, of course; plans which actually close buildings are more likely to save money anyway, and I've mentioned before that it would be possible, with a little more reduction in the school populations, to close and sell the elementary school building that's inside Morrisville, take those students to the MECS building north of town, and bring the 12th, 11th, ... ? grade MECS students to HCS -- which would let some of them sign up for Colgate classes, too. I'm pretty sure that would save money. (It might be possible even now, but the SES merger-study group didn't think so.)

I'm not sure how live an issue this really is; I suspect that most New York parents are thinking instead about the Common Core Standards. But I'm sure it will come back; the state can balance a budget with high enough taxes, but those taxes have been fueling a vote-with-their-feet anti-tax movement: to Florida, to Texas, or just to neighboring states with lower taxes. So the state will need to save money -- state promises of long-run aid should not be relied upon. It would be wonderful to think that they'll only push for mergers that actually save money, but I have no confidence that this will be the case.

Board of Education Meeting, Tuesday 2014-03-18

It's really nice to have the BoE meetings put up on YouTube; unfortunately there was no microphone in front of Diana Bowers (Superintendent until July) so that answers to some questions are not audible to me, except in bits and pieces. Also, some BoE members leaned back too far from the microphones, sometimes. Anyway, I'll set it here with notes below so that you can find segments for particular speakers or subjects. Umm, I skipped the FFA presentation somewhere early, I see...sorry, it's not what I was focused on. (But the state FFA convention will be here, with local schools including HCS as hosts; it seems to rotate among all the participating schools.)

Bottom Line, as I understand it: We can't save money by refinancing any of our debt; we can save some by not keeping our "resource officer" (policeman), we will probably save some with an "interim Superintendent" being paid less than Diana has been paid and we may save quite a bit if that interim Superintendent is part-time or shared with another district. We may save a trivial amount of money on the GEA if the House amendment to the NY budget goes through, or a small but non-trivial amount if the Senate goes through; the Senate version does end the GEA in 2016--2017, and they have different rules about going past the tax cap (which is 2.21% this year.) We have a long-term problem of sustainability in that our instructional budget has been rising more slowly than inflation for years, while the Special Education program has risen rapidly; it's not clear that anything can be done about that, but in a world of limited resources it is unfortunately fair to say that we (and other NY districts) have increasingly been doing special education instead of general education; resources have been redirected, and the tax cap says they can't be increased at the same pace. Perhaps it has to be that way. Meanwhile, we can certainly save money by cutting art, which doesn't seem to be covered in the testing which evaluates how well HCS is doing, so obviously it's not important. (end sarcasm)

6:50--13:55 Barbara Houze, retiring art teacher; she's unhappy at being replaced by a total of 0.7 part-time people who, by "magic math", will be able to cover the actual classes, but the art program will have no planner, advisor, or advocate; only the actual classes will be covered.
14:00-16:00 John Knecht spoke up as artist and educator, to say that art should be treated like chemistry or history or math or any other academic subject. (I doubt this; I think of art as a category of subjects, not as a subject; it's of very little importance if we're just training workers with specific skills, but immense importance if we want the creative class, the "black-collar" entrepreneurs/innovators/designers/scientists of the 21st century. Or if we want artists, I suppose.)
16:20--18:15 Denise Leone as a "visiting artist at HCS" said that we evaluate cultures based on their art, and she wanted to understand why art is among the first items to be cut ... to understand the process. Molly Johnson replied that it's not, (a) it's not decided if the art will be cut and anyway (b) we've been cutting a lot for a long time and (c) the process is open, working through open meetings and openly available documents like those at boarddocs for this meeting.
20:00--21 Audrey Miller spoke as a parent of a child who hates school except art/music; this is not about saving the art program, it's about saving the children.
21--22 An HCS art student whose name I can't hear (upd: Sydney Craven) said that a lot of kids need an arts background for what they hope to do with their lives, especially of course if that involves application to an art school. It was well-spoken.
22--24 Lynn Schwarzer talked about the amazing changes wrought by the art teacher who ought to be given a full-time position, after decades of relative inadequacy at HCS. She also talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education broadening into STEAM education (I just can't think what that "A" could stand for, but I'd be happy to buy an Evil Mad Scientist STEAM T-shirt for each BoE member; I did long ago link to STEAM Learning Network site: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, to STEAM: A Framework for Teaching Across the Disciplines, and just as an example to Maker Faire and Science Education: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. - Slate Magazine.)

Art/music/theatre good, tests bad. (All right, all right -- tests are good for some things, just not for all we now use them for. Art/music/theatre good.)
24-- Carolyn Hsu wanted to know about the specific rules and limits for donations...I could hear Diana's response when I was sitting there, but I can't hear enough of it on the video.
28:15--Stephanie McClintick, as a local artist, wanted further clarification....
31:10--Molly (BoE) Somewhat into the next phase, thanks for and acceptance of the Sports Boosters donation.
31:30--40:00 Embarking on search for the next Superintendent; nothing solid yet, but looks like it has to be an interim.
40:--46 Molly, Diana, Bud -- policy on testing and opt-outs chosen by students or parents.
46--Aaron on opt-out consequences; if fewer than 95% of students participate for two consecutive years, there might be financial consequences but it's not clear in the regulations; there will be a reclassification of the school as not being "in good standing" which might hurt college applications, but (Diana) there may be a lot of downstate schools in this situation and college admissions people will understand.
47 Kevin Ellis continues same topic, but I can't hear him.
52--1:00:30 Matt Crumb on 2.21% tax cap calculation, on failure to save money by refinancing debt, and on House and Senate bills to amend the Governor's proposed budget. Get Your Protests In Before April 1st!
1:00:30 Bill Dowsland on Senior class trip to Hershey Park.
1:01 Susan Marafino pointing out that the "resource officer" is costing us $20K/year, which may be money well spent but it might be money better spent e.g. on keeping the art program going, and that a part-time rather than full-time Superintendent might save even more. (Molly replies that there is some savings implicit in having an interim Superintendent anyway, who will get a lower salary than Diana has received.)
1:05:40 Ellen Larson on testing and teacher evaluation, which ought to be separate.
1:07:50 Ryan Solomon contrasts South African actual violence with American over-protectiveness and would rather spend the resource officer's cost on art; applause suggests that this is a popular view.
1:08:50 Ferdinand von Muench talks about the art and strings programs which seem to be at risk; we just need to follow the library's example with a 3.6% tax increase. He wants to encourage people to go to the next public Finance Planning meeting, but it hasn't been rescheduled yet. He makes two major points: our Administration costs are high, with 6 people to do the admin that other similar-size schools do with 4. (Note that the most expensive of these is of course the superintendent; as he knows but does not say, "School superintendents get paid more than governors in a dozen states: New Jersey, New York,...". So a part-time or shared superintendent might be a really good buy for a financially stretched district. And Special Education of which he is very much in favor, but there is a question of sustainability. (See "bottom line" above, or better yet listen to what he's saying. The recent growth in special education is substantially larger than our deficit; the GEA is larger than our deficit; life is difficult.)


Well, I guess I ran out of steam (not STEAM) as I approached the end, but I'll post this and hope it's somewhat useful to somebody. Error-correction would be appreciated.

Update: Radio Free Hamilton reports here. Sadly, the first comment is "Are these all the same people that voted against the merger. Do they truly not get it and see what they caused". This appears to reflect a failure to realize that some of us turned against the merger when we realized that according to the merger study, it wasn't actually a money-saver -- the economy of scale (reduced staff) and diseconomy of scale (more transport) were quite close to balance. It's certainly probable that most or all of those speaking voted accordingly--I dunno. Obviously, most of Hamilton did. (It was a money-shifter, and that gets complicated. Never mind.) So it goes.

Gap Elimination Adjustment

In yesterday's post I noted parts of Wanda Berry's note on NextDoor; I should also have mentioned a very important point she brings up in that note:

Whether or not the merger goes through, it is time for us to believe in democracy enough to mobilize a citizens’ effort to get the state legislature to get rid of the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which is the real threat, along with our declining school age population.

Indeed, while the proposed merger is all about promised state aid; one irony is that it is also all about previous promises of state aid being broken. More concretely:

• as often discussed, we wouldn't be discussing a merger that doesn't actually save money, if there weren't state incentives offering an average 5.3%-of-budget aid for fourteen years, plus permanent (?) reclassification of Hamilton as part of a "high needs district". But also,
• we wouldn't be discussing a merger at all if it weren't for a fiscal squeeze resulting from the "Gap Elimination Adjustment", a formula by which the state has refrained from paying millions that had been promised.

So what, and why, is this terrible "Gap Elimination Adjustment"? Basically, it's a formula by which the state says "we have a fiscal gap this year, with more outgo than income, and sure, we promised you a certain amount of aid, but here's your school district's share of the pain." And we respond with "OUCH". Here's a Vimeo video explanation:
Gap Elimination Adjustment: An Explanation from Cap Region BOCES on Vimeo.

Wanda and many others are hoping that if we all get together and say "No!" then the state legislators will say "Okay" and the schools won't be short of money any more. I sympathize very strongly, but I think we need to consider the context. What are we actually asking the state legislators to do? They want to please their voters; they already want to restore school funding. If they restore school funding, they must either reduce funding for something else, or else they can raise taxes. (Of course they can probably borrow money now, but that means that at some future time they'll be either reducing funding for something else, or raising taxes. Borrowing money now to fix it later is part of how we got in this mess.) This, of course, brings us to the Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force (PDF,page 7)

The conclusion of the Task Force is unambiguous. The existing trajectory of state spending, taxation, and administrative practices cannot be sustained. The basic problem is not cyclical. It is structural. The time to act is now.

From their point of view, the elimination of the Gap Elimination Adjustment would be a big step -- in the wrong direction. If they remove the GEA, then the painful decisions to be made get worse -- do we cut our already-underfunded pension plans, do we cut our massive health care payments, do we just let the infrastructure rust? Or -- the most obvious answer -- do we raise taxes? Hmmm... raising taxes sounds very good, doesn't it? Or does it?

Exactly how high are our taxes, comparatively speaking? That's complicated, because it involves income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes; for Alaska it also involves some weird taxes which don't actually get collected from the individual, they're based on oil movement, but apart from that we can sort of say that NY has the highest tax burden outside Washington DC in the state tax-burden chart. That's a statement that needs lots of qualifiers about what you're including and excluding; some are noted at the bottom of the chart. Some charts will put NY as low as #5 in state tax burden, but we can definitely say that a lot of New York residents and New York businesses notice, now and then, that they could be paying a lot less by moving to another state. And what happens then? Sometimes nothing. Some of us pay, and stay to pay again. For others... Income Migration: What Does It Really Mean For States? - Forbes

New Yorkers are subject to some of the highest state tax rates in the country, so it is not surprising that commentators have suggested residents will leave the state in droves. And it appears to be true. As reported by the Tax Foundation, between 2000 and 2010, New York lost $45.6 billion in income to other states. That’s far more than any other state. The next closest is California, which lost $29.4 billion over the same period.
This is a significant amount of income migration. But where did it all go? The answer, not surprisingly, is that much of the income went down south. Florida reportedly had a net gain of $67.3 billion. ...

Or as the NYT put it two years back, At 102%, His Tax Rate Takes the Cake - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

Mr. Ross said he asked his accountant what he could do. “He said, ‘Fire everyone here and move to Florida,’ ” according to Mr. Ross. He employs 10 people in his New York office.

Of course some of the migration goes to neighboring states, which do have lower state taxes; Florida has no income tax at all. But as our taxes rise, it becomes increasingly attractive for high-income Manhattan residents to start thinking: how much of this could I do on the Web, or by teleconference? As the New York Times put it a year ago Midlevel Finance Jobs Leave Wall Street as Firms Cut Costs

New York’s biggest investment houses are shifting jobs out of the area and expanding in cheaper locales in the United States, threatening the vast middle tier of positions that form the backbone of employment on Wall Street.
The shift comes even as banks consider deeper staff cuts here, which could undermine the state and city tax base long term.
“Places like New York or London will remain financial centers, but most of the players are taking a much harder look and asking whether they can move large numbers of jobs...”

When you ask the legislator to raise taxes again, you're not just being generous with your own money. You're asking that legislator to bet the state's fiscal stability on your hope that these people, people whose lives revolve around the way they care about money, will decide that they don't really care about money all that much: they'll stay, and pay again.

They might, or they might not. State aid cuts may go away, but they might expand. They might expand a lot. Ask for state aid, hope for state aid, but don't count on it.

(My inclination is to agitate for mandate relief more than increases in aid. NYS education costs twice as much per pupil per year as the national average. We should work on that.)

Notes on Mid-York and NextDoor

  Yesterday (Thursday December 4) the Mid-York Weekly came out, with an advertisement version of the ABCs of HCS. There were also letters to the editor: our continuing commenter Wanda Berry; Alice & Peter Klepeis; Charlie Naef; Susanne Farrington; Stanley Roe.  In no particular order:

  Charlie, as former mayor, notes (as I have various times on this blog and elsewhere) that it would be possible to vote "yes" now and still vote against the merger later, concluding that "I haven't made up my mind how I would vote next February, but I don't want a determined minority to deny me and others that choice before we see a final proposal." I don't know who is in the minority here, I really just don't know -- but in fact we have seen the final proposal. The final proposal is to merge and have a single Board of Education which will then decide where all the students will go, how much in local taxes they'll ask for from all members of the combined community, and so forth. (We've also seen a "merger plan" which will very likely be followed for the first year or so, which doesn't save money because there doesn't seem to be any way to do that while complying with state mandates.) If there's some detail that Charlie wants to wait for, something which the DoE would provide but only after our December 10th vote, then now is the time to say so. His letter is the first time I've seen anyone suggesting that some such detail might exist, and I have no idea what that detail might be. (I would be happy to put up guest posts from him or from other merger supporters explaining this.)

  Alicia & Peter, like Stanley and like Susanne, are concerned with transportation both in terms of cost and in terms of quality of life. Well, yes -- if Morrisville and Hamilton were in walking distance, we'd have merged. :-) And if transportation were cheaper, so that the merger proposal represented an actual opportunity to save on costs and therefore improve district financial stability and long-run student opportunities, then I personally would still be regretfully supporting the merger, despite the quality-of-life and community damage and loss of real estate value and blah blah blah. But transportation is a big cost, in financial and in human terms, much bigger than I thought at the beginning -- so I'm with them on this.

  And back we go to Wanda, who says that HCS was "too small a social pool" for her daughters, and I sympathize...but I don't think this would help much. My three adult sons seem to have formed life-long friendships at HCS, friendships based on year after year of shared experiences of classes and athletics and music and theatre, experiences linked by walking (e.g., to after-school music lessons), by bikes, by (short) car rides to bring groups together. A week ago, walking back from PriceChopper, I was offered "a ride and an update" which included the information that my daughter-in-law, graduate of a high school in Athens, will soon be visiting his daughter on the west coast; HCS friendships don't just last, they spread. (They did attend one another's weddings, in Greece and in Hamilton.) Would my kids be better off if we'd been merged with Morrisville? Maybe, but I don't think so. As Carolyn Hsu (I think) was noting at ABCs of HCS (A), research indicates that the merged district "would be more likely to segregate internally into cliques." We get enough of that already.

  Wanda also objects to the thought that Hamilton and Morrisville-Eaton voters have made different choices, calling it "exceptionalism". She wants centralization, so that everybody has to make the same choices. Well, sure: people who want to make everybody makes the same choices should generally vote for centralization. I am not that confident that my choices are right for everybody else -- and I'm not that confident that my views will prevail in a more centralized district, where (from the CAC experience) about half the voters would apparently want the high school inside Hamilton and the other half would want it 3.5 miles north of Morrisville and one side has to win and the other side has to lose and in the end it depends on turnout. I don't like win/lose, even when it's me winning and the other guys losing. And I really, really, really don't care that the merged district would include the geographical center of the state. I'm sorry, I just don't care. People who care a lot about that should certainly consider voting for the merger.

  On nextdoor.com, Wanda comments on the Ellen Larson letter that also appeared here, saying "Perhaps our main difference is that I am less frightened of democracy." I was a bit distressed; the two-district system that Ellen supports is exactly as democratic as the one-district system she opposes, so this comes off as a piece of gratuitous nastiness. Ellen is probably opposed to motherhood and apple pie, as well. Well, perhaps it's a typo: perhaps Wanda meant to say "Perhaps our main difference is that I am less frightened of centralization." That would be true. Centralization is good and bad, and it's an issue that pervades almost everything we do. It was the center, so to speak, of one of my first blog posts, years ago. My ideal school system might have no administrators on-site because all those functions can be centralized right out of the building...even some teaching functions can be centralized. But most can't, or at least shouldn't be. If we centralize in the sense of this merger, then the new school board will do its democratic best, but it will no longer be possible for different communities to make different choices...and we won't be saving money, either. So I'm agin it, personally....and Wanda's not. (Would it be better to say Professor Wanda Berry and of course Professor Charles Naef, and similarly refer to my co-bloggers Professor Carolyn Hsu and Professor Heather Roller along with Dr. Ellen Larson on the other side? I don't think so, indeed Carolyn is the only one with relevant qualifications, but then my own PhuD is surely more irrelevant than any of theirs; I've never understood people very well. Let it be noted that many of us, with and without academic credentials, are thinking hard, and each of us has a vote. Hooray for democracy! (No, I'm not being sarcastic. May we collectively do the right thing.))

A Note on "Forced Mergers" and Incentive Aid

Apparently some people in Hamilton have been saying that they think we should go ahead with a merger because, if we don't, the state government will eventually force a merger anyway and the terms might be worse. I believe that this prediction of "forced merger" comes from a confusion, one which I shared back when I started thinking about this almost three years ago. I wrote here that

My Upstate New York village has had a school for quite a while; it may not have a school for much longer. New York has long had a consolidation "incentives" policy, pushing "central schools" like ours (which serves neighboring villages and the rural area around) into mergers into larger, more central, more remote schools. There is an argument that consolidation saves on overall costs...

And if consolidation saves on overall costs, and some of these costs are carried by your state taxes, and New York State is increasingly stretched for money, then surely it makes sense that eventually the state will say "merge, or we stop supporting you at all." Right? That's what economies of scale push you into: it's not that you want to lose your local district's independence, it's just that the economics makes this into the least bad of the available options.
The state has had thousands of school district mergers over the past century, and probably they all had bad effects but they also had economies of scale: it costs less to educate a thousand kids if you put them into one building rather than keep them in fifty one-room schoolhouses. I believed that. Hey, I still believe that. I would bet that nearly (but not quite) all of our thousands of mergers have been net positives.

So it's understandable that the June 3, 2008 Suozzi Commission Report wanted to

11. Give the Commissioner of Education discretionary authority to order consolidation of school districts based on reviews triggered by objective standards, including but not limited to the size of the student population and geography, declining enrollment, limited educational programs, ability to achieve fiscal savings, and high tax burden.... the LGEC report estimated that consolidating school districts in New York State with fewer than 900 students would result in annual savings of $158.5 to $189.2 million.

At the time, that went nowhere; six months later the New York Times reported on tiny downstate school districts in Making Sense of School Consolidation on Long Island

Members of the State Legislature long ago made this calculus for many of the state’s districts, and every year they refuse to touch bills calling for consolidation. So there is a feeling in these parts that the Suozzi commission’s recommendations will gather dust on a shelf.

And it has gathered dust; the currently applicable governor's "Recommendation 6" of the Education Reform Commission Report.pdf does say

Recommendation 6. Promote increased access to educational opportunities by encouraging school district restructuring through consolidation and regional high schools.

but it's a lot more cautious, and more open to other ways of saving money. No forced merger is on the table. Still, it seemed that some way, some how, the dragon of Economy Of Scale would end up eating up the fair maiden and any (Emerald or other) Knights trying to stop it would just have to go spin their windmills. Less money, fewer schools. Right? That's what I sadly thought in 2011.

But then we had the merger study and I spent my time on the CAC and it turned out that in our particular case, the economy of scale (fewer teachers) is neatly balanced by the diseconomy of scale (more bus runs); the difference between them is less than 1% of the combined-district yearly budget. And if fuel cost trends continue, the diseconomy of scale will come to dominate the economy of scale. From an economy of scale perspective, from a total costs perspective, this particular proposed merger is a loser and (so far as I can tell) none of its supporters dispute that. The "ability to achieve fiscal savings" mentioned in the Suozzi recommendation just plain isn't there. Maybe that's true of most of the remaining un-merged small districts: maybe that's why they haven't merged for all these years. Or maybe not, but it's certainly true of us.

Therefore, increasing fiscal pressure on the state means decreasing pressure to merge. Except of course for any remaining districts which really can save money by merging; it's possible that those tiny Long Island districts that the NYT talked about will someday fall into that category. Not us, unless transportation costs go down. For us, the relevant parts would be the other ways of saving money in Recommendation 6 and elsewhere.


Why, then, are we still considering merger at all? Well, because of the state incentive aid involved. Spread over fourteen years we would get $20 million; that's big, isn't it? If the state pays it, it's almost 3/4 of one year's expected budget. So you can think of it as a 5% budget savings for fourteen years, and then it's gone. (Or gone earlier, if the state hits a sufficient crisis before then, as now seems quite plausible.) And there's also the fact that by merging with Morrisville we would become a "high needs district" and get more aid, until we don't because the state's financial troubles force aid cuts, as they have before.

The state's financial troubles, which are very real and might get much worse without much warning, are not a reason to merge or to expect forced merger. Those troubles are a reason not to put ourselves into a position of depending more and more on state finances to fix the problem of New York's super-expensive education...twice as much as the average state, with no obvious educational benefit coming from the rules that generate that extra cost.

Or so it seems to me.



update: Forgot to mention that Ken Bausch did most of the work for this post. All the mistakes are mine, as always. -- tjm

Rathskeller PTO Meeting

Well, the PTO meeting in the Colgate Inn Rathskeller took place this evening; several people presented parts of the ABCs of HCS, and then "student presenters" Maddie Lamel-Brown and Zach Coddington presented their Student Merger Survey Results. Note that a clickable (slightly longer) version of the ABCs is available here. The room seemed pretty full; I don't know if any minds were changed.

Superintendent's Slide-Show on Merger-Related Issues

The Superintendent's blog presents More Information About the Scheduled Merger Meetings, Survey Results, and Tours at the Morrisville-Eaton and Hamilton School Districts. - Dr. Bowers - SuperintendentHamilton CSD

the power point that will be presented at the upcoming Merger Study Information Meetings

(If the slide-show at the bottom seems small, your browser probably has a "View/Zoom" menu option.)

Some of the terms will be unfamiliar to some readers; there are lists of acronyms at NYSED: State Aid Glossary but if you want to know what "High Cost Aid" actually is, look at the New York State Educational Terms Guide (pdf)

High Cost Aid – Aid available for resident students with disabilities served in a DSE approved public school or BOCES, for whom the annual cost exceeds three times the district’s Approved Operating Expense per TAPU for Expense (without limits).

Of course, then you may want to look up several other terms, or you may just say "oh, special needs kids, for whom we have a substantially expanded program over the past several years. Okay." Some terms you may want to Google for, like the GEA or Gap Elimination Adjustment

Those might now be the three dirtiest words in New York's public schools.

We see again that state aid expectations really can't be relied upon. (Some of us aren't even blaming the state for cutting aid; we're just sceptical of plans which depend on future aid not being cut.)

And each slide deserves thought... "Wealth of the Community" rising from $220M to $350M in the 2004-2010 period is of course partly inflation, but less than half, and you can think of that curve as a faded upstate echo of the housing bubble, but it's real enough, and the student decline was real enough too. Will either trend continue? We have more elementary students than at any time since 1997, and elementary students become high school students; Colgate just invested heavily in expanding the nursery school to meet expanded demand, and those are future elementary students. That suggests that the situation is much less urgent than the 2004-2010 trend suggested, but we really don't know what the trends of 2013-2065 will be, or even 2013-2026 for current students.

Note the penultimate "If We Don't Merge" slide, in particular "Increase political pressure to: return of the GEA, modify unfunded mandates." The basic problem is that New York State education, including our own, costs about twice as much as the national average without being obviously better, and many of the costs are imposed by Albany as items to be paid for by local taxes. "Return of the GEA" means paying for those with state taxes; "modify unfunded mandates" could mean funding them, or could mean removing them. Every one of them has defenders, with arguments as to why this cost isn't the one to cut.

No easy answers....

HCS Board of Education Flyer

The Hamilton Central School Board of Education had a meeting last night, and distributed a flyer briefly explaining the issues; it's public information, so I've shared a scan of that flyer on Google Docs (thanks, Amy!). It's pretty good. I would like to make a few points:

• they start out by noting that our current troubles come from an (unplanned) 21% decline in state aid, which is of course a fact, and
they list $20.29 million in future state aid as if it were a fact; it's not. It's a plan, dependent on the sustainability of New York's budget.
• Their "pro" point 1 is "Save money through economies of scale"; this only works if the plan's increased transportation costs, especially fuel, don't continue to rise.
• Point 2: "Improve the ... educational choices" might work if the economies of scale work, or the $20.29M is delivered as planned.
• Point 3: "Receive additional state aid" has the same problem.

And so on.

There are also secondary issues not raised; it's reasonably certain that Hamilton real estate values will go downwards. It's absolutely certain that the debt load to which Hamilton property owners are vulnerable will increase, since Morrisville's debt load is much higher; all such debts are subject to the usual form

The Notes will be valid and legally binding general obligations of the School District, all the taxable real property within which will be subject to the levy of ad valorem taxes to pay the Notes and interest thereon, without limitation as to rate or amount.

Of course, if the state budget turns out to be sustainable indefinitely (i.e., continues to support increased state aid rates even long after the 14-year merger period), that may not matter. It's a gamble.

On Centralization

Larry Cuban's teacher blog, which often discusses historical trends in teaching, notes the context of the Common Core at Competing Traditions of Teaching: An Old Story Written Anew | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Since the early 1990s, however, states have embraced standards-based reforms, accountability measures, and mandated testing peaking with No Child Left Behind in 2001. How, then, in the past two accountability-driven decades have most teachers organized instruction, grouped students, and taught lessons?

For those who listen to teachers, the answer is self-evident. Classroom stories and teacher surveys have reported again and again that more lesson time is spent preparing students for high-stakes tests. And what is taught has narrowed to what appears on tests.

Such stories and surveys describe classroom instruction, particularly in largely poor and minority schools, as more teacher-centered, focused on meeting prescribed state standards and raising test scores. Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

I think this is in line with Yong Zhao's discussion; centralization (and the high-stakes testing which holds it together) tends to conflict with letting students develop as self-directed learners/citizens.

Or then again, maybe not.

Yes, but...

Radio Free Hamilton editorializes that it's Time for Merger Study to Flunk Out

There is no good reason on this or any other planet for the HCS Board of Education and its counterpart organization in the Morrisville-Eaton Central Schools District to continue entertaining thoughts of the two districts merging.

None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Acun. Ninguno. Nullus.

As soon as the study is returned by the State Education Department, both boards ought to stick a fork in the proposal, declare it done, not waste the public's time with a vote and move on to more important things.

And I want to re-register my strong agreement -- the merger is not a solution to the problems we face -- but at the same time, I want to re-re-register my concern that the problems are quite real: there are bad financial and demographic trends which apply to this school district, to Upstate NY school districts, to rural school districts generally. We have a way of doing things, a model of education: that model is slowly coming apart, fastest in the rural regions, and we should be well along in the process of re-thinking and replacing it. We're not.

We're really not.

New York is #1

We're the top: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Public Schools: Unequal Spending Across States

For the U.S. as a whole, average public school K-12 current spending per student was $10,560 in 2011, with 61% of that going to "instruction," and 35% going to "support services."
But four jurisdictions--New York, Wyoming, Alaska, and the District of Columbia--spend more than $16,000 per K-12 student, with New York leading the way at $19,076 per student. Conversely, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma,and Mississippi spend less than $8,000 per student, with Utah having the lowest tally at $6,212 per student. That is, New York spends on average three times as much per K-12 student as does Utah.

Of course, the money is well-spent.
Or then again, maybe not.

Education Funding: the Null Hypothesis

It's hard to believe that more money doesn't produce better results. It's hard to believe the graphs that accompany Evaluating the Null Hypothesis in Education | askblog

there is no clear correlation between funding and school average performance; for a given level of funding, there is significant variation in performance the calculated correlation coefficient between the two variables was less than 0.1. In our view, this suggests that the level of funding, per se, is almost irrelevant as a predictor of performance.

Not absolutely irrelevant; only almost.
Or then again, maybe not.

New York State Rural Schools Association 2013 Statement

Our state Rural Schools Association has a statement to make about school consolidation...Education and Teacher Preparation Programs at Cornell University

2013 RSA Legislative Position Statement
... We caution legislators and policy makers that research on school consolidation reveals that anticipated savings from consolidation are frequently illusory, or temporary, while harm to a community from loss of a school is permanent. Consistent with their views on local choice, the RSA supports Regional High School legislation implemented after local voter approval is obtained.

(HT Ken Bausch)

Points from the April 17th "Informational Meeting"

Ten of us from the CAC, having attended many meetings and reviewed much data, met last night with the BoE scattered among forty-odd community members, Superintendent Diana Bowers presiding...and near the end, someone in the audience commented that there seemed to be two of us in favor of the merger proposal, two undecided, and six against. I think that's about right, at the moment; and at the moment, I'm among the reasonably-solidly-against. There was a camera going; the video ought to appear on the Hamilton CSD site somewhere sometime soon. My very-fragmentary thoughts:

What Next? The perennial question, Where Do We Go From Here? was answered by Dr. Bowers, as indeed I laid it out in my CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post: next comes (1) a BoE vote, and they can choose to stop everything, or to proceed. If they choose to proceed, then there's (2) a community straw vote, which can stop everything, or proceed. If we choose to proceed, then things go to the DoE and (3) back to the BoE, which can stop everything, or proceed to (4) a final community vote for district merger. Meanwhile Morrisville has the same sequence. If all the votes are favorable, then there's a merger, and then we (the combined district) elect a new combined BoE, and they decide what happens next -- who to hire, what to do with the existing buildings, whether to build a giant swimming pool instead (as Dave Hollis put it), and and at that point we ...well, it goes on. And on. And on, until Somebody gets tired of our performance and rings down the final curtain. (I don't think Diana actually got that far.)

Please Read: As Susan Marafino said, anybody who is going to vote on this should dive into the data, probably starting at the end with the 15-year Financial outline if we merge, based on the Possible Program/Staffing (where we save by economies of scale) and the Transportation Plan (where we pay to get kids together to achieve those economies of scale, and incidentally give them an hour per day extra transportation time for all HCS middle schoolers and M-ECS high schoolers.) Also please read my own collection of District Comparisons on this blog and at the accompanying site, based on the earlier documents and on reports I saw in the past year or so. (Some of these were out of date; as Susan commented at the meeting, M-ECS has in the past few years drastically cut its programs, and some of the district comparison material I linked is out of date in that respect.)

Summary: As Diana indicated at one point, the communities fit together in that our true-value tax rates are very very close (I believe neighboring communities have higher rates). As I said, I think that this equality actually indicates an additional difference: Morrisville made a choice between cutting programs and raising taxes which I do not believe we would have made. There are all kinds of reasons behind this; I'm not saying that they made the wrong choice, for them. I am saying that if a merged district were somehow to run short on money in future, I expect that most Hamilton homeowners would be voting differently than most Morrisville homeowners, and somebody would lose and be very unhappy about having merged. Of course if the merged district were never to run short of money, that's not a problem. If fuel costs stop rising (why would they stop rising? Well, they might, I suppose)...if the state doesn't run out of money (won't it run out of money? Well, maybe not...but I haven't read any economists or investors who think the current situation is sustainable. Some promises will be broken.) My feeling is that this merger is a very big gamble, which is why I wrote the CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post which goes over both of those issues, with links.

And If We Don't Do This Merger Now? Well, we may do a different merger later (such as the merger I proposed in that post), or no merger at all. A couple of people were commenting on the value of merger in terms of having enough students for advanced classes, (again, I wrote about that in the aforementioned post.) One item I wanted to repeat in the meeting, but didn't get to: the economic issues of advanced K-12 (or introductory college) courses are changing rapidly. A recently completed study is reported as Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class.... Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! ... ... Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Actually outcomes were not the same; students learned the same material faster in this "hybrid" (online + one class/week) model than in the classroom-only model.

Then again, there's the Khan Academy which I've discussed many times, as a not-yet-complete K-12 curriculum (with some college courses) of thousands of explanatory videos with software to go with them; they're not intended to make teachers obsolete, but they are intended to make "class size" obsolete as a concept. I've also discussed Khan's One World Schoolhouse book a few times, in which he explains how that can work. Will it work? Which model will win? I don't think anybody knows, but the background to the economics of education is changing faster than ever before, and the most clearly currently-effective change is happening at just the right level to make merger unnecessary. Predicting is hard, especially the future -- but there's no need for panic. There's a very good chance that we will end up replacing the traditional model of school with something that's somewhat cheaper and a whole lot better. (Or with something that's a whole lot cheaper and somewhat worse -- I admit that's possible too.)

Tell me what I'm missing...

Update: Radio Free Hamilton (i.e. Dave Hollis) reports: 'What If' Scenarios Paint Post-Merger Picture

Members of the committee of HCS district residents studying the possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School discussed the study in a forum Tuesday night in the school cafeteria attended by about 70 people.

70? Well, I guess there were more people after I counted. And yes, the picture is me. (And Susan remarks that there was one CAC member who stayed in the audience; 11, not 10.)

CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky?

The "Community Advisory Council" (or are we a Committee? I forget) had its final meeting last night, to look at the documents mentioned in the last couple of posts. My initial summary, as I said in the meeting, is that the "What If" program document suggests a economy-of-scale savings of $717,000 per year, while the "What If" transportation document suggests that in order to get the kids together for their economy of scale, we need to spend $642,000 extra per year on buses. That's a yearly savings of $75,000 out of $27,000,000 for the combined districts. Everything else we're talking about (millions of dollars in benefits) seems to be coming from the state incentives for merger -- incentives which mostly run out after fifteen years, even assuming that they don't stop earlier than promised.

Hmmm... Well, I would like to go a little further than that initial summary.

• The $717K savings looks pretty solid.
• The $642K extra cost is a pretty big gamble.
• I don't entirely trust the state benefits.
• There are also some genuine non-financial benefits to consolidation.
• I don't think they're as important as many think.
• I have another proposal. :-)

The -$717K program proposal strikes me as well-done; this is where our SES Study Group shows off the fact that they really do know what they're doing, putting together something credible and credibly saving a bunch of money at the same time. No criticism from me -- but I understand where some critics were coming from, having hoped that the program could have more in it.

The +$642K transportation proposal is understandable, and as they said they asked the local experts how to manage it and it probably can't be done much better though experience will improve it some. BUT -- As Susan Marafino said in the meeting, that $642K will rise if fuel costs rise: consolidation is a bet that they won't. As I said in response, fuel costs might not rise: natural gas prices have been falling and we are seeing increasing use of natural gas vehicles; on the map you'll see one station in Utica, three around Syracuse, three around Albany, one in Poughkeepsie...prices may fall. Or not. On the other hand, the past fifteen years have seen gas prices quadruple. On transportation cost, it comes down to this: Do you feel lucky?

Increasing transportation is a small gamble in another sense. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says

An average of 24 school-age children die in school transportation-related traffic crashes each year (11 occupants of school transportation vehicles and 13 pedestrians).

That's not many; it's not one of the major risks of childhood, it's not even a major part of the risk of vehicular death in childhood. But it's a bigger risk than random shootings at school unless Sandy Hook is the new normal; if you're worried about school shooters, if you're worried about causes of death in general, you should worry about this a little more.

The transportation plan also involves another cost, which some will think small: as I said in the meeting, we'll have some hundreds of kids spending about an hour each day (two twenty-minute rides and maybe ten minutes waiting for each, morning and afternoon) which they do not now require. Kids from Hamilton will do this for three years, kids from Morrisville will do it for four. That's not a gamble, it's just a little sad. And boring. (But it's better than exciting...gee, I remember hanging on to the bus' door handle going home from my own elementary school, with one foot on the step and a couple more kids on the steps ahead of me...boring has a lot to be said for it.)

The state benefits are the big deal here; they don't just handle impacts like the first year of extra bus usage, they pay off millions of existing debt and provide other benefits. Do they? Well, maybe they do, before they come to an end and leave us, lucky or not. But there is a New York State Budget Crisis Task Force, and they seem to me to be saying that

the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.
... Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

When you make big plans based on promises of future state aid, you are assuming that the state will be able to keep its promises. The state is in trouble, unprecedented trouble in some ways; that trouble is almost certain to get worse; that trouble might suddenly get much, much worse; K-12 aid is the biggest chunk; New York State K-12 education is more expensive than anybody else's (except Washington, D.C.?). If something's gotta give, it's likely to be us. Do you feel lucky?

Now, there are genuine non-financial advantages to consolidation. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you'll see a little Javascript widget about grade sizes that says

Here's a test of the importance of grade size, which is roughly doubled by a merger of equal schools. Suppose we have a grade of size gradeSize (say, 45) from which we want to select a Latin 4 class of at least 10; it won't be offered without 10....

I suggest that you put in your own guesses about grade sizes for HCS and M-ECS, now and fifteen years from now. Put in your own guesses about the percentages who'd like Latin 4, advanced chemistry, or jazz band. I believe you'll see that consolidation makes it easier to offer advanced courses, when schools require minimum enrollment the way ours do.

I also believe that minimum-enrollment policies will become less common in a world of the Khan Academy and Salman Khan's One World Schoolhouse, so I don't think grade size is as important as I would if I thought minimum-enrollment policy was a necessary part of school. (see footnote.) Still, the benefits of consolidation are, or might be, quite real -- but so are the costs, and consolidation is a gamble that the costs will not be too much higher than the benefits. Do you feel lucky?

I have another proposal. Last night, for the first time, I heard someone say that the M-ECS school could handle many more students; that it had handled many more students. The SES response was that it couldn't do so with the current usage pattern as defined by the Board, which is certainly fair enough. But suppose that this is true. If so, I would propose a different kind of merger, one which is probably politically impossible for excellent reasons, but still worth a thought. Leave every HCS student at HCS; close Andrews Elementary completely (this will save a whole lot of money, really), moving all those students a little ways north; now go to Hamilton with Morrisville's 12th grade, 11th grade, 10th grade...9th? Does it fit? It might...and the advanced classes can go on, even with minimum enrollment policies, and Morrisville students will be able to sign up for Colgate courses, and so on. Nobody loses, everybody wins...or not, depending on what they care about. And "what they care about" is important. Indeed, that's what it's all about...I don't think this will happen. But it's worth a thought.

---

footnote on minimum enrollment policies: My own AP classes were mostly independents; I think I had two classmates in AP English, but my own high school (it was smaller then) wasn't a good candidate for consolidation. In any case, I don't think 10 is a good minimum class size; I think it's bigger than most study groups ought to be, even considering that I think most study groups should probably be virtual -- maybe two students physically present, with webcams and big screens to connect up a virtual table, and a responsible adult who is not a "teacher" present somewhere nearby, while tutors connect mainly online... but that's just one image among many possibilities. School is changing. Prediction is hard, especially of the future. My vision is almost certainly wrong. Consolidation commits you to a single vision. I'm skeptical.

footnote on district comparison: I've tried to collect some district comparison data at this blog's disorganized companion website as well as around here. It seems to me that consolidation commits you to having a single vision; you have to agree with people about what kind of lives your kids are likely to live (and then, of course, you have to support your kids with whatever they decide for themselves, which won't resemble your visions very closely.) That's hard. Of course you might find that you really do agree on priorities. Or not. Do you feel lucky?

March 12 Update on What's Next: As I understand it, the SES Study Team will now finish their write-up as a submission to New York State, which paid for the study and expects a document. Meanwhile, the Hamilton and Morrisville Boards of Education will be talking about it. Then it goes public, as they say here:

Adopting the merger is a three-step process.

• Boards vote to move the process to an advisory referendum or "straw vote."
• The communities hold a straw vote. If this passes, the results are sent to the education commissioner who authorizes a statutory or final referendum.
• The communities hold a final referendum.

(Or then again, maybe not.)

Flipped Classrooms -- Continuing

Progress (in some direction) continues... we see Yahoo News (from AP) on students whose Teachers flip for 'flipped learning' class model:

spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble.
It's a technology-driven teaching method known as "flipped fearning" because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for homework — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice.
... the online community Flipped Learning Network now has 10,000 members, up from 2,500 a year ago, and training workshops are being held all over the country...
Under the model, teachers make eight- to 10-minute videos of their lessons using laptops, often simply filming the whiteboard as the teacher makes notations and recording their voice as they explain the concept. The videos are uploaded onto a teacher or school website, or even YouTube, where they can be accessed by students on computers or smartphones as homework....
"The first year, I was able to double the number of labs my students were doing," Sams said. "That's every science teacher's dream."
In the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township,...Flipping yielded dramatic results after just a year... Green attributed the improvements to an approach that engages students more in their classes. ....
The concept has its downside. Teachers note that making the videos and coming up with project activities to fill class time is a lot of extra work up front...
Explaining to adults that homework was watching videos was a little harder, though. "My grandma thought I was using it as an excuse to mess around on the Internet," Nguyen said.

Note that "making the videos" is to some degree a one-time cost; videos are shared to similar classes. The "buzzes from desk to desk" teacher-activity should to some extent be a slightly-older-student activity, as suggested by the "explaining the concept to other students" which precedes it. And "coming up with project activities to fill class time"...well, that's also to some extent a one-time cost. Hmm.
Then again, maybe not.

Future Finance: NY

Back in December, I noticed but did not blog when the NY Times said
Experts Warn of Budget Ills in New York State, Lasting Years

New York State faces long-term budget problems that are compounded by the teetering finances of its local governments, an aging infrastructure and the possibility of severe cuts in federal funding......New York’s problems had been “papered over with gimmicks” for decades...
... outsize spending on health care and education, its vulnerability to the ups and downs of Wall Street, and the struggles of its local governments to pay retirement obligations. ... “Albany has increased dependence on a small number of very wealthy taxpayers to keep the state going,” ... New York... is particularly vulnerable to possible cuts in federal aid resulting from efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit....The report said New York’s local governments were “facing a rapidly deteriorating fiscal future.” ...Syracuse... annual pension costs had increased 50 percent since ... 2010, to $30 million from $20 million. “If you say to the municipality, ‘You’re just going to have to figure out how to pay for it,’ what you are saying is that now bad people aren’t going to be arrested, fires aren’t going to be put out,” she said. “Snow will not be plowed from the roads. Trash will not be collected.

The 69-page PDF Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force reports on many sources of instability and unsustainability, including

A new top rate of 8.82 percent applies to individuals with taxable income above $1 million and married couples above $2 million and does so in a more concentrated way than has occurred previously. Further, this “millionaires” bracket brings increased dependence on a relatively small number of taxpayers (estimated to be 31,000), roughly half of whom live outside the state.

In other words, the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.

State general aid to local governments is moderate ($873 million in 2010), and is procyclical, increasing when state revenues are strong and remaining flat or decreasing during downturns. Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

And the result for K-12 education?

95 percent of school district leaders said they were drawing on reserves to pay for recurring operating expenses, with two-thirds indicating they were “very concerned” at the extent to which they were doing so. Compensation costs represent 70 percent of school district budgets, but contractual cost relief is difficult. Few districts are negotiating contracts with zero across-the-board increases. Built-in annual step increases remain in place; increases in pension and health care costs are in the double digit range. Further, the savings from the generational turnover of teachers seems to have peaked. All other things remaining constant, status quo contractual terms and ordinary retirements will drive larger average annual salary increases than in the recent past. Add to that any increase in costs other than compensation.

Unsustainable trends will not be sustained indefinitely. They will end.
Or maybe not? No. They will end.

Saving Money

The "Conversable Economist" keeps looking for research supporting low-cost school reform proposals. Lately he's seen Classroom Evaluation of K-12 Teachers

"During the TES [Teacher Evaluation System] evaluation year, teachers are typically observed in the classroom and scored four times: three times by an assigned peer evaluator—high-performing, experienced teachers who are external to the school—and once by the principal or another school administrator. ... dozens of specific skills and practices covering classroom management, instruction, content knowledge, and planning, among other topics.... the evaluators are often pretty tough in grading and commenting on lots of specific skills and practices, but then they still tend to give a high overall grade.... almost everyone was ending up with fairly high overall scores, so the practical effects of this evaluation in terms of pay and jobs was pretty minimal.
Nevertheless, student performance not only went up during the year that the evaluation happened, but student performance stayed higher for teachers who had been evaluated in previous years. "... Imagine two students taught by the same teacher in different years who both begin the year at the fiftieth percentile of math achievement. The student taught after the teacher went through comprehensive TES evaluation would score about 4.5 percentile points higher at the end of the year than the student taught before the teacher went through the evaluation. ..."

It's a substantial change, presumably higher for some teachers (and students) and lower for others. It would be interesting to see how much the effect depended on the administrator evaluation vs. the external evaluator evaluation; what could be done by variations in the rubric, or self-evaluation, or even student evaluation using different rubrics. But mostly I'd be interested in how this would work with classes structured in non-traditional ways, especially flipped classrooms.

Taylor (the Conv. Econ.) links to his earlier low-cost reform research post at Low-Cost Education Reforms: Later Starts, K-8, and Focusing Teachers

three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K–12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments.... We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform.

Again, my main concerns would be how this interacts with modified classroom structure -- and with consolidation, which tends to separate the age groups from one another, and by increasing mileage among low-density populations tends to increase the cost of separating transportation.
Or then again, maybe not.