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A surprise for California voters: the hottest race in next month’s statewide election is for Superintendent of Public Instruction, a nonpartisan office with limited powers. Incumbent Tom Torlakson and challenger Marshall Tuck embody both sides of the national conflict over public education—which has made for a close race. We’ll talk to them both about teacher tenure, standardized testing, and John Deasy, former Superintendent of the LAUSD.

Kristen Graham and Martha Woodall:

In a stunning move that could reshape the face of city schools, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted Monday to unilaterally cancel its teachers’ contract. The vote was unanimous.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was given no advance word of the action — which happened at an early-morning SRC meeting called with minimal notice — and which figures to result in a legal challenge to the takeover law the SRC believes gives it the power to bypass negotiations and impose terms.

Jerry Jordan, PFT president, called the move “cowardly” and vowed to fight it strongly.

“I am taking nothing off the table,” a clearly angry Jordan said at an afternoon news conference. Job actions could be possible, once he determines what members want to do. “We are not indentured servants.”

Jacob Fischler:

The nation’s largest teachers union plans to spend between $40 and $60 million in this year’s election cycle, two sources at the National Educational Association told BuzzFeed News.

On Monday, the American Federation of Teachers, which has about half the membership of the NEA, said it would spend about $20 million in the same time frame. Those numbers encompass all election spending, from Senate races down to local ballot measures.

While AFT President Randi Weingarten said they are spending more this year than they’ve spent in any cycle before, NEA Political Director Karen White said her union’s estimate is roughly on par for what they usually spend in non-presidential election years.

In an internal memo White sent last week to top NEA leaders, she wrote that education is “emerging as a top issue” in some of tighter gubernatorial races and in the country as a whole.

Jonathan Butcher:

First, Arizona should stop paying for ghost students.

Arizona schools can apply for additional funding for current-year enrollment growth, but they do not have to adjust for enrollment decreases in the same year. Traditional school payments are generally not updated until the following year, which means schools get funding for students who aren’t in their classrooms anymore.

As Goldwater Institute research has reported, the state pays about $125 million for empty seats every year.

Traditional school payments should be based on the number of students in the classroom, with payments updated accordingly throughout the year.

Taxpayers already pay more for schools in the lowest-performing districts than the highest-achieving districts. According to data from the Arizona Auditor General’s Office, the average expenditure per child in a “D” district (Arizona has made it nearly impossible to earn an “F”) is $11,900. For districts that earned an “A” on their report card, the average taxpayer expense per child is $9,200.

• The second step the Legislature should take is to eliminate seat-time requirements.

The late Sen. Chester Crandell was a visionary when it came to updating Arizona’s school-finance formula in this way. Two years ago, he led the passage of legislation that created a performance-funding pilot program for Arizona schools. Instead of paying schools based on how long students sit behind their desks each year, Crandell’s program based up to half of participating schools’ funding on how well students are learning.

DAN MIHALOPOULOS AND CHRIS FUSCO:

Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president now considering whether to run for mayor, has frequently railed against the influence of the wealthy.

“Why do people of wealth and privilege try to convince the world they have neither?” she said on Twitter last year. “Be honest that you don’t have a clue about poverty.”

She has ripped Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a tool of corporate Chicago, labeled him “Mayor 1%” and described herself as “not egotistical or rich.”

Lewis isn’t as wealthy as Emanuel, a multimillionaire who made his fortune during a short stint as an investment banker. But she makes more than $200,000 a year and has an ownership interest in three homes, records show.

Laura Waters:

Therefore, relying on local property taxes to fund schools is unconstitutional and adequate funding, including compensatory services for disadvantaged students in New Jersey’s poorest 29 districts, “must be guaranteed and mandated by the State.” (Those 29 districts were called “Abbott districts” because the first name on the alphabetical list of plaintiffs was Raymond Abbott, a 12-year-old student from Camden. Two districts were added later.)

The court didn’t limit its pronouncement of inequity to funding formulas. The judges also pointed to the necessity of education reform in terms that today seem prescient.

In the second paragraph of the 69-page decision, Wilentz writes (emphasis my own): “We note the convincing proofs in this record that funding alone will not achieve the constitutional mandate of an equal education in these poorer urban districts; that without educational reform, the money may accomplish nothing; and that in these districts, substantial, far-reaching change in education is absolutely essential to success. The proofs compellingly demonstrate that the traditional and prevailing educational programs in these poorer urban schools were not designed to meet and are not sufficiently addressing the pervasive array of problems that inhibit the education of poorer urban children. Unless a new approach is taken, these schools — even if adequately funded –will not provide a thorough and efficient education.”

ELC’s litigation on behalf of New Jersey’s poorest students during Abbott II (it also filed a voluminous amicus brief for Robinson) has produced the most progressive and ethical schoolfunding mechanism in the country.

While we seem to rifle through funding formulas like teenagers through clothing fads — QEA, CEIFA, SFRA — Abbott districts are no longer dependent on local tax levies. In 2012, for example, the Camden public schools, which serve 15,000 students, had total revenues of $377 million, or about $27,000 per pupil. Local taxpayers were responsible for only 1.9 percent of that total.

Tyler Cowen:

Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough.
 
 The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.

Ira Stoll:

“By the end of approximately 2007, Villalobos had made, and I had accepted, bribes totaling approximately $200,000 in cash, all of which was delivered directly to me in the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Sacramento across from the Capitol. Villalobos delivered the first two payments of approximately $50,000 each in a paper bag, while the last installment of approximately $100,000 was delivered in a shoebox.”—Plea Agreement, United States of America v. Fred Buenrostro, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, filed July 11, 2014.

The government official who pleaded guilty here, Fred Buenrostro, wasn’t some city council member or state senator, but rather, from December 2002 to May 2008, the CEO of the California Public Employees Retirement System. Calpers, the largest public pension fund in the country, managed assets of as much as $250 billion during that period.

The bribing of Buenrostro was part of a successful effort by a New York money management firm (which claims it had no knowledge of the bribe and has not been charged with any wrongdoing) to win $3 billion in business managing pension money for California state employees and retirees.

Crooked government officials come along often enough that there’s a tendency to tune them out, but this case is worth pausing to analyze further for a number of reasons.

For one thing, there’s the hypocrisy angle. Calpers has been at the forefront of criticizing company boards for practices that are not shareholder friendly. Sometimes it’s right about that, but even when it is, it manages to come off as holier-than-thou. It doesn’t exactly add to Calpers credibility denouncing board-management coziness at big publicly traded companies when its own CEO is taking paper bags full of cash from a representative of a contractor.

Laura Waters:

National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen García on the use of student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness:

They’re “the mark of the devil.” “For us, one thing is clear. Before anything is going to get better: It’s the Testing, Stupid. Better yet, it’s the stupid testing.”

New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) Vice President Marie Blistan on the use of student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness:

“We need to safeguard against a test-taking tsunami that enriches private corporations’ wallets but impoverishes our students.”

Denver, the site of the NEA’s annual meeting last week, is a long way from Trenton but you’d never know it from the sound bites.

During this past year the rhetoric from both the national teacher union leadership and N.J.’s state chapter have grown progressively more rancorous. The bicoastal target of ire is, ostensibly, the practice of linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.

Yaha Gracile:

LA Unified must come up with $16 million this year to pay an unexpected bill as a result of legislation signed by Governor Jerry Brown aimed at rescuing the state’s teachers retirement pension system known as CalSTRS, but the district’s total increase is much higher, estimated to reach an extra $1.1 billion over the next seven years.

While teachers and school districts across the state will see their contribution rates increase, LAUSD, the largest school district in the state, will pay the lions-share.

The rescue, which will help address a $74 billion shortfall in the teachers pension fund, requires school districts to radically raise their contributions to the fund from the current rate of 8.25 percent, to a rate of 19.1 percent by 2020. Teachers will see a more modest step up, from 8.15 percent to an eventual 10.25 percent of their salary, over the same seven year period. The state’s contribution will rise from 3 percent to 6.3 percent.

But In real dollar terms, the pension contribution price tag for LAUSD is steep: it will eventually more than double by the end of the phase-in period, from its current payment of $213 million per year, to $493 million per year by 2020.

Stephanie Simon:

Stephanie Simon:

Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.

The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead in the public relations initiative.

The involvement of such high-profile Obama alumni highlights the sharp schism within the Democratic Party over education reform.

Teachers unions have long counted on Democrats as their most loyal allies. But in the past decade, more and more big-name Democrats have split with the unions to support charter schools, tenure reform and accountability measures that hold teachers responsible for raising students’ scores on standardized tests.

The national legal campaign is being organized by Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who told POLITICO that she has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months to get the effort off the ground. She intends to start with a lawsuit in New York, to be filed within the next few weeks, and follow up with similar cases around the country. Her plans for the New York lawsuit were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Ann Millerbernd:

The University of Minnesota’s administrative spending is slated for $20 million in cuts next year.

President Eric Kaler proposed the cuts at a Board of Regents meeting earlier this month as part of a larger plan to reduce administrative spending by $90 million over six years, following widespread criticism of the institution’s pay to top executives.

The plan cuts 115 full-time administrative positions, mostly through methods like retirement, voluntary layoffs and by leaving some positions vacant when employees’ contracts expire, said Associate Vice President for Budget and Finance Julie Tonneson.

Administrative employees will feel the weight of $20 million in administrative cuts as part of the institution’s $90 million savings goal, and University managers say those cuts will eliminate positions and create more work for current employees.

Jobs cuts include two associate program director positions in the College of Biological Sciences and 12 spots in the College of Education and Human Development.

Caroline Porter:

Funding for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools decreased by $4.9 billion in fiscal year 2012, the first recorded drop since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1977, according to a report released by the bureau Thursday. Total funding of nearly $595 billion was down 0.8% from the previous year.

An approximate 19% downturn in federal dollars from the previous year—to about $60 billion in 2012 from about $74 billion in 2011—explains the shortfall for schools, according the Census Bureau. Revenue from state and local sources went slightly higher—about $270 billion and almost $265 billion respectively—in the same time frame.

Fiscal year 2012 represents roughly the same time period as the 2011-2012 school year.

The decrease in school funding reflects changes in revenue patterns during and after the recession, according to Mike Griffith, a school finance consultant for the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan research group.

“What we saw was the phase out of the additional federal dollars in stimulus funding,” said Mr. Griffith. “Those dollars had helped prop up state budgets during the recession. We saw state budgets recuperate in 2011-2012 at same time as federal money was disappearing…but states hadn’t recovered enough to make up for the federal dollars lost, so overall funding dropped.”

The largest slice of 2012 spending was for instructional salaries, which totaled about $207 billion, or nearly 35% of total spending.

“Expenses grow every year,” said Mr. Griffith, referring in part to teacher salaries and benefits. “The decrease in revenue is a problem for school districts because they will have to make cuts.”

Rob Nikolewski:

As a result, the Santa Fe school board recently passed a $55 million Digital Learning Plan that promises to integrate technology for students and teachers, upgrade computer infrastructure and eventually give personal computers to each of the 14,000 students in the district.

Just two years ago, Santa Fe voters approved a bond to provide $12.7 million per year for six years to fund construction and technological enhancements. That comes to $76.2 million. Included in that amount was $2.4 million to buy Apple computers and technology for students in the summer of 2012.

Carl Gruenler, the SFPS chief business officer, told New Mexico Watchdog the majority of the $76.2 million is going to building maintenance, and “approximately 25-33 percent has been spent for technology infrastructure and equipment since 2012.?

So what happened to the $2.4 million for Apple computers?

Laura Waters:

“New Jersey schools spent an average of $18,891 to educate each student last year, an increase of $866, or almost 5 percent, from 2012,” says the Star Ledger, according to the State’s annual “Taxpayer’s Guide to Education Spending.” On average, costs are up 5% from last year. The highest cost per pupil district is Avalon School District at $43,775 per student and the lowest spending district is Rockaway Borough at $12,587 per student. Also see coverage from The Record, The Press of Atlantic City, and NJ Spotlight.

Meta Brown, Sydnee Caldwell, and Sarah Sutherland:

Last year, our blog presented results from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) indicating that, at a time of unprecedented growth in student debt, student borrowers were collectively retreating from housing and auto markets. In this post, we compare our 2012 findings to the news for 2013.

Between 2012 and 2013, U.S. auto and housing markets recovered substantially. The CoreLogic national house price index rose by 11 percent from December 2012 to December 2013. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It was the [auto] industry’s best year since 2007.” Last summer, this blog post discussed the sources of the ongoing auto recovery. Here we pose two questions: What part have young borrowers, with and without student debt, played in the recent housing and auto market recoveries? And, have the housing and auto purchases of young student borrowers at last accelerated past those of nonstudent borrowers, to once again reflect their skill and earnings advantages?

The share of twenty-five-year-olds with student debt continued to increase in 2013, as the group’s average student loan balance reached $20,926. For those twenty-five-year-olds with student loans, student debt now comprises 69 percent of the debt side of their balance sheets. Given the increased popularity of student loans, some have questioned how taking on extensive debt early in life has affected young workers’ post-schooling economic activity.

Continuing to grow K-12 spending on top of property taxes is not a good long term strategy.