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        Perhaps the two most common complaints of school boards is that they don't have enough money, and they face too many "unfunded mandates."

         These complaints are rarely accompanied by specifics, such as what are these mandates and how much do they cost?  Some years ago the Education Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives held unstructured informational hearings to hear whatever educators wanted to discuss.  At one hearing a committee member, himself a former public school teacher, asked a superintendent what would be the one regulation, law or mandate he would like to eliminate.

         He couldn't think of one. The legislator asked the next three presenters, all superintendents, the same question and got the same answer.  So much for intolerable burdens.

         While specifics vary among the states and the nation's 14,000+ public school districts, there are generalities that apply.  One is that, constitutionally, public education is a state responsibility, indicated by state constitutions and by no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution.  Another is that every state provides substantial sums of money supporting local schools.

         This is not to imply there are no mandates that cost money but if they are a major cause of expenses, how can per pupil spending range from $8,000 to $45,000 in New York state, for example, where all districts are subject to the same state and federal mandates?

          For example, districts must have teachers but, with some exceptions, neither states nor the federal government mandate how many staff or what they are to be paid.  Staff salaries and fringe benefits  - all staff, not just teachers - typically are 75% or so of a district's budget.  That leaves 25% that could theoretically be the result of mandates but most of that 25% is also decided locally.

         Districts are not ordered to have large consolidated schools, as they are wont to do, or, as a result of such schools, to collectively spend billions of dollars annually on busing students to and from such schools.

         One mandate is a common state requirement directing districts to pay into a staff retirement program, usually at the state level.  But its effect varies.  Since the payment is commonly a based on a percentage of staff salaries, the more staff a district has, and the more they pay, both decided locally, the higher the retirement costs.

         The complainers rarely mention that the states pay a significant part of the annual costs of K-12 schooling.  The average for all states is said to be about 50% of the total

         Consider K-12 funding in Pennsylvania.  Its recently adopted 2006-7 budget includes a list of education line items.  Special education, a common local complaint, receives $1.2 billion.  There is $250 million for an Accountability Block Grant to assist pre-kindergarten, full-day kindergarten, smaller classes and other programs.

         Other items are $20 million for Classrooms for the Future to increase use of laptop computers, $10 million to upgrade elementary science programs, $8 million for a High School Reform program; $127 million for charter schools which local districts complain cost them too much, and several others.

         And this doesn't include considerable numbers of dollars for state support for transportation, capital costs and the Public School Employees Retirement System.  This last causes hundreds of millions of state dollars to be appropriated directly to the PSERS, hundreds of dollars per pupil that don't show up in local budgets and are thus often ignored.

         And Pennsylvania is a state that provides less than half the cost of it public schools.

         But one item should warn local districts to be careful with their complaints.  Beyond appropriating these billions of dollars to specific items - mandates if you will - the state budget provides $4.8 billion as a Basic Education subsidy, money to local school districts to be spent at their option, as long as it is for legitimate expenses.

          For a state to pay for alleged mandates, all it has to do is line-item its general subsidy.  This result is no additional cost to the state but local districts will lose much or all of the flexibility they currently have with general funding.

         If that's what they want, they should keep complaining.

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         "A Rand Corporation study has concluded that...The bigger the school system, the less likely it is to be willing to try new things, the less likely it is to be responsive to the community, and the less likely it is to change with the times." Andrew Barnes, "Study Disputes Money-Education Link," p. A14, The Washington Post, March 8, 1972

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Copyright 2006 David W. Kirkpatrick
108 Highland Court,
Douglassville, Pennsylvania 19518-9240
Phone: (610) 689-0633