Here’s a much belated announcement. This reason this blog has been totally inactive for months is that I’m running for the state legislature, House District 199. For details, please see my campaign website.

This is a new experience for me — running for an office somebody else actually wants. (That wasn’t true in most of my school board races, where much of my energy went into trying to persuade good people to run.)

I’m even more committed to the principles that motivated this blog — transparency in all areas of public finance. If I’m elected in November, I’ll work hard to put those principles into effect where all public spending is concerned. If I’m not elected, I intend to reactivate this blog. As before I’ll focus on public school budgets and what I see as their most important and least well understood aspect: contract negotiations.

Thanks to all who’ve contributed here, and please accept my apologies for being so slow to explain my long silence.
Fred

Sadly, the Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County) strike has materialized. As usually happens, the two sides are charging each other with bad faith. I noted two days ago that the PSEA negotiator representing the teachers claimed that that board statements were designed to mislead the public and teachers. A statement by the board president on the Penn Hills district website says that the union is “playing games.”

Neither side’s assertions are easily verifiable from information available to the public in brief news reports. No one should expect transparency to be some magic way of making everyone happy. But a lot of bad feelings stem from failure to disclose the terms of proposals actually on the table (the full terms, not just the bits that will sound best or worst to whichever audience you are trying to reach).

The board president’s statement contains one puzzling line: “The item that has been most at issue, however, has been teacher accountability.” I wish he’d said what he meant by that.

If you want the quickest possible look at what’s wrong with how most school district contracts with teacher unions are negotiated, read two sentences from an online news item published by a Pittsburgh area television station.

The story is about a teachers strike called for tomorrow, February 4, in the Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County). Here are the two sentences:

The district said in a statement that the teachers trimmed their salary requests from 15 percent to 6 percent a year after it became public.
…
“Don’t believe everything you read by the board,” Union spokesman Butch Santicola told KDKA-TV. “It’s designed to misdirect and miscommunicate and put pressure on the teachers.”

What’s wrong here?
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A citizen group in Pennsbury SD (Bucks County) calling itself Better Pennsbury has created a website urging transparency in school finance — especially union contract negotiations. The group practices what it preaches by posting online a spreadsheet showing the actual salaries and benefits of all district employees.

That spreadsheet packs a punch. Of the district’s more than 700 teachers, many are at what must be the top of the salary scale: $98,222. Salaries over $80,000 are common — possibly in the majority. (I didn’t count.) Add benefit packages, almost all in the $22,000-$30,000 range, and you get a picture of a staff that’s very well compensated. These figures do not, of course, impute any value to near-absolute job security in all kinds of economic weather.

The board and the union have had a first meeting to renegotiate a contract due to expire June 30. A January 15 story in the Bucks Local News quotes the union negotiator noting that the union agreed last year to a salary freeze during a one-year extension of the current contract. (That was a smart move and perhaps not too painful, given the salaries in question.) Naturally, he declined to be specific about the union’s current proposal. He’s quoted as saying, “in the sense that money is tighter, budgeting will require more creativity in terms of funding from the school board.”

A spokesperson for the board describes the district’s financial difficulties. It remains to be seen whether the board will publish its proposal, along with the union’s, once both offers are actually on the table.

At present the district’s website has nothing that really helps a reader understand how the negotiations now underway can actually affect future taxes — or teacher retention, if that’s a valid issue. The site does include a copy of the current budget in a format basically like that required for reports to PDE.

According to a story in the Harrisburg Patriot News, the largest state teachers union (PSEA) will leave it up to local unions whether to sign a memo of understanding applying for “Race to the Top” funds. My guess is that those decisions will be made on tactical grounds. Locals in the process of negotiations may not want to be in the position of demanding more money while simultaneously blocking a district’s chances to get some of that money from outside the district. PSEA’s stance allows those locals a way out of that bind. At the same time, other locals (most of them, I’d be willing to guess) will refuse to endorse applications because they don’t want even to talk about options like merit pay.

As I understand the Race to the Top rules, a district can submit a memo of understanding that will keep it in the running for new money. If the local union co-signs, the district gets extra points. If the union refuses to co-sign, the district loses points but isn’t necessarily out of the running.

With respect to the substance of the issues, I’m wary of all doctrinaire positions. For example, although union members are apt reach for a cross and garlic at the mere mention of merit pay, I think we could find ways to reward outstanding performance if we tried. But designing a sensible system is genuinely hard, and many union concerns are valid. At the minimum districts should be fighting for contracts that permit differential pay for teacher with scarce skills. We know we need more students with higher performance levels in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, but unions insist that we ignore that when designing salary schedules. A district may have 20-30 applicants for an elementary school vacancy (a half dozen of them so promising you wish you could hire them all) but only one or two candidates for a high school physics vacancy.

The amount of money involved in Race to the Top probably won’t be very large on a per district basis. Still and all, the program offers an opportunity for useful dialogue between administrators and unions on educational issues, not just money. If money comes through without too many strings, boards should seek union input in their planning. But boards should keep themselves in the game with or without union endorsement. As always, boards need to be ready, even eager, to explain their own decisions to the public.

Jim Butt, promptly upon joining the Cheltenham Township (Montgomery County) school board, started a very classy blog. Now Jim has launched another new site called School Board 2.0.

The subtitle to School Board 2.0 is “Leading Education into the 21st Century.” It’s good to see this kind of leadership from a tech-savvy board member. This site offers an open forum and a place for forming special interest groups. One of the early posts is a funny, disturbing video: “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity.” Bear in mind that the site is still new — not many entries yet. School Board 2.0 is a work in progress and, with any luck, will continue to be one for many years to come.

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association has started a brand new PSBA blog. As of Christmas Eve there were three posts, all dealing with a pension reform bill proposed by PSBA and scheduled to be introduced in January.

The bill would create a hybrid pension plan with some features of a defined benefit plan and some of a defined contribution plan. Public school employees are now under a defined benefit plan (meaning that they are guaranteed a fixed amount of pension based on their salary history, no matter what happens to PSERS investments). They’ll be grandfathered in, but new employees would be hired under the hybrid plan. The proposed bill has been endorsed by Rep. Glenn Grell (R-Cumberland) and Sen. Gene Yaw (R-Lycoming).

It’s good to see PSBA using a blog to communicate. There are 4500 school directors in Pennsylvania, and we need lots of ways to keep in touch. (Confession…I hadn’t even noticed the PSBA blog until Jim Butt called it to my attention. By the way, Jim has a nice post on Act 1 at his own blog.)

An AP story on a survey by Pennsylvania newspapers on the implementation of the 2009 Open Records Law shows considerable progress but still a way to go.

My sense is that the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records is doing a good job of enforcing the public’s right to see public records — while fending off a few requests whose goal might be harassment. An example of the latter category, in July a judge (responding to a lawsuit by the PSEA) issued a temporary restraining order barring the release of the home addresses of school employees — a decision the Office of Open Records applied to all public employees. I agree. The judge was right.

The AP article says that almost all (64 of 65) requests to school districts for copies of a superintendents’ contracts were filled without difficulty. A more important request would be for copies of the union contract. Districts should comply with that one (or make it unnecessary) by posting those contracts online.

Once upon a time, there was a cowboy cook who acknowledged that his “rabbit stew” included horsemeat. “It’s 50-50,” he said. “One rabbit, one horse.”

Emails from Good Schools Pennsylvania, which lobbies for higher state spending on education, reminds me of that story. They rarely fail to mention a $650,000 “costing-out study” released in 2007 by the State Board of Education. It purported to show that the state’s education budget should be increased by 20%. That conclusion may be right, but it’s impossible to tell the extent to which it’s based on hard data, as its supporters imply.

The study’s long section on methodology explains that its findings were based on a mix of empirical data and the opinions of people predisposed to think that the state should spend a lot more on education. The reader is left to guess which factor – data or opinion – was “rabbit” and which was “horse. In response to my question, a spokesperson for the State Board of Education acknowledged that this haziness was intentional.
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The proverbial epicenter of Pennsylvania’s collective bargaining disputes in public education is nearing its end. On Wednesday evening, December 16th, the Saucon Valley School Board will release the final details of the “understanding” and proposed settlement with its teachers’ association.

After its most recent 14-day strike ended, the board and association have been working to hammer out the remaining details for a new contract that will be retroactive to the fall of 2008.

At a public meeting held earlier this fall, I had the chance to speak briefly with board president, Ralph Puerta. In the few words we shared, I gained much respect and insight into this difficult area of school operations.

Without a doubt, this long standing impasse has divided stakeholders and taken its toll on many. It may take many months or even years for things to slowly go back to normal. By that time, this process will have started all over again.

Nonetheless, this will remain a constant struggle for school boards across the state — trying to maintain a delicate “balance” of responsibility, expectations and perceptions — with taxpayers on one end and a teaching union on the other — and our students always in the middle.

Although some may be labeled “winners” at the end of this process, there truly are no real winners in this complex and somewhat twisted way of “doing business” to educate our children.

Thankfully, the owner of this blog has helped shed some light into what is truly needed the most…transparency!

— Posted by Paul Fisher