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Part 58: Education Financing 3:
July 7, 2003:
Recently I was talking with a friend about educational funding.
He made the flat statement that Michigan spends 1/2 of its budget
on education. My immediate response was to snap, "Nonsense!"
He replied that the financial information is printed right on
the instruction booklet for Michigan's personal income tax form
1040. Later, I looked. Sure enough, on the back cover was a table
showing the alleged state expenditures for fiscal 2001. It showed
$26,168,100,000 total and $13,407.900,000 of that for education.
That's about 51%. Mrs. Gaffer was nearby so I whispered, "Bull****!"
Ordinarily I would have shouted.
When I talked with my friend I had suggested he look into the state's financing and budget. I wanted to see if he could find out where that money was really going. That was a few months ago. I thought he would have plenty of time to find the information before I would need it for this essay. It seems he did not have plenty of time. I have received no input from him. I finally realized I would have to bite the bullet myself.
In the past few days I have looked into some of the current methods of financing education. My information is not comprehensive. As I implied my research is limited to Michigan. However, I think most of what I found will have parallels in most other states. There are two questions I tried to answer. Where is the money coming from? Where is it really going? I was stunned at how easy it was to get answers to those questions.
On Michigan's official website, I found a document called Executive Budget, Fiscal Year 2004. This is Governor Granholm's proposed budged for Michigan for 2004. In 2003 she is forced to work with the mess left by the Ingler administration. That as it may be.
I expected this proposed budged to be a bureaucratese nightmare with little information. I was happily surprised. It turned out to be a very well written document. It was not down to the penny, but in 161 pages the document managed to present all of the pertinent budget information. Almost unbelievably, it was presented in understandable English.
There is much of interest in this budget, but here I will give the educational information. The total proposed budget is $38.6 billion. Of that $14.68 billion is earmarked for education. That is 39%, a great deal less than half. I was unable to find the details of Ingler's budget which alleged 51% for education. From what we are currently learning of Michigan's financial situation, he probably did well to hide it.
Back to the proposed budget. Of the $14.68 billion for education $11.2 billion is from state revenues and the remainder is from federal revenue. About $2 billion will go to higher education. That leaves $12.4 billion for k-12. K-12 is where my interests lie. If we can't get that right, higher education will not matter. If we get it right, we probably won't need higher education as such.
The 2004 budget document shows that the $12.4 billion breaks down to $9.699 billion for the state's foundation allowance. That's the money which actually goes to k-12 education. The rest goes for special ed, adult programs, and other stuff. I was surprised to discover the Michigan lottery provides only 5 percent of that. It stuns me that there is such a small reward for such enormous dishonesty. They should get help from Ken Lay.
This foundation allowance of $9.699 billion is also stated as $6,700 per student. That all sounds very good until we look into how that is distributed. The devil is in the details. To find the details, I had to find the educational budgets for the particular school districts. That is public information. It must be available, but I did not know the name of the document or documents. I checked out several school district websites and the state's many websites. No luck. I could not find the data because I did not know what I was looking for.
In desperation I sent some e-mails. I wrote to Dr. Chow, the superintendent of the Flint school district. I also wrote to the Michigan Department of Education and to the superintendent of the Fenton school district, Dr. O'Donnell. As I did that, Mrs. Gaffer reminded me that school is out so I may not get answers to my queries. I replied that the superintendent of schools should never be out. That is a full time job at very high pay. Even if he is on vacation, someone should be taking his place. Also the Michigan Department of Education should never be out. Still I worried.
In this case, I was happily surprised. In three days I received a reply from the one I thought most unlikely. A Mr. Carter of the Flint school district responded and gave me the name and location of the documents I needed. Sure enough, they are on the Michigan Department of Education website. I really liked Mr. Carter's response. It was polite and concise. The other queries have received no response to date. I have doubts if either of them will respond. They have had three weeks to do so. I suspect the classic bureaucrat in siege mentality. "Don't tell nobody nuthin'."
I found the documents for the past four years and downloaded them. These simply give selected financial data for Michigan's 735 school districts. It was exactly what I was looking for. It allowed me to compare school systems financially. I fully expected to find perfect correlation between spending and educational success or failure. What I really found stunned me. There is no correlation that I could find. For the districts I know about, success and failure seem to be completely unrelated to spending.
Understand that successful in this context is relative to our current standards of success measured by student scores on certain tests. By my standards I know of no schools that I would call successful. Even so, these scores are something of an indicator of future success in our greed driven culture. High scorers are likely to go on to advanced education and eventually secure stable employment. Low scorers are much less likely to secure decent jobs of any kind.
Now here is some specific data for the school year 2001 - 2002. Flint school district which is considered to be somewhat unsuccessful, spent $9,651 per student. Fenton school district, which I know to be successful, spent $7,050 per student. Flint spent more money and got less for it. Flint and Fenton are just examples I chose. There is much other information, but it comes out about the same. It is very clear that funding is not the prime cause I expected it to be. Some other forces are at work.
I think part of those other forces are revealed in other financial data from the same reports. Looking at the tax base for the selected districts is revealing. Flint's tax base was a pitiful $63,198 per student. Fenton's tax base was $167,167 per student, more than twice as much. This gives us a handle on the socioeconomic situation in these two areas. Flint is a large city with real inner city problems. It has extensive unemployment, street gangs, and ongoing racial tensions. Fenton is a well off suburb with a large professional and upward mobile population.
Given that situation, throwing money at the schools is not going to have much effect. In fact, with that tax base, Flint provides very little of its own educational funding. It amounts to $959 per student. The rest comes from state and federal money. Fenton too provides very little of its own funding. It comes up with $1110 per student. Again, most of the money comes from state and federal sources. It is interesting to notice that Fenton gets punished for making a larger contribution to its kids education. I don't know the total logic behind that. I hope eventually to find out.
Now I can look at Michigan's school aid in a different light. The money is not distributed as I thought as a fixed sum per student. I found some school districts which get no state aid whatsoever. I found others that get considerably more than the $6,700 per student. There were two academies that seemed to be the big winners. One was getting $19,601 per student and the other a whopping $23,888 per student. I don't know what an academy is or why these two deserve such massive state funding.
This simply points up some of the strangeness of our current system of funding education. The whole system is a hodgepodge. When you read the state budget, it looks like education is being equally funded for all students. When you look at the details it's bull. Some of the discrepancy seems to be an attempt to level the field. As we saw in the case of Flint and other large school districts, leveling the field does not change the outcome much.
We need money, but we need more that money. We need a new way of looking at our kids and child welfare. It should be clear that there is a very difficult attitudinal problem to be overcome for kids in inner cities. These youngsters are in a desperate situation. They face multiple problems such as illiterate and non existent parents, readily available drugs, and criminal activity all around them. We have to get them earlier and work with them longer to save them. We have to save these kids if we want to save America. We need to get them out of abusive situations and give them hope.
One of the school districts I found which gets no state aid at all is the biggest spender. They put in $26,269 per student of their own money. As you might guess, their tax base is over $1.5 million per student. I probably could not afford to live in that neighborhood. This $26,269 is considerably more than the per student average spending for Michigan's kids. That was a pitiful $7680 for the 2001 - 2002 school year. Now here is my killer point. That $7680 is less than 1/3 of what the state spends to keep a criminal in prison. That costs us $27,000 per crook per year.
Let's realize that $27,000 per year for each prisoner is just a small part of the cost of crime. We must also consider the cost of law enforcement. The Michigan state police alone will be funded at over $400 million in 2004. This does not include the numerous sheriff departments, local police departments, and private police and guards. Add to that the massive financial losses to individuals and business caused by criminal activity. In addition we have the injuries to humans and the incalculable lose of human life. Let's also consider the debilitating cost of fear, folks afraid to go out on a sweet summer night, afraid to let their kids out anytime. By any rational measure the cost of creating ignorant criminal adults is untenable.
The cost of producing an extremely large criminal population
plus an extremely large population of dysfunctional adults is
beyond measure. The truth is, almost all the people who struggle
at or below the poverty level are there because of ignorance.
Ignorance is the major cause of crime and of a dysfunctional population.
The worst part is, these people absorb tax monies, but none of
them pay taxes. They represent a dead loss. It could be going
all the other way. All of these things can be eliminated or mitigated
through education. These people could be tax paying assets to
the community. Education at any cost is a bargain.
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