Challenge West Virginia

Talkline Host Hoppy Kercheval

West Virginia spends about $3.5 billion (state and federal dollars) on public education every year.
That’s a lot of money, especially considering the state’s small size. In fact, West Virginia ranks 8th in education spending relative to income.

But West Virginia students rank below the national average in 21 of 24 categories measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So that prompts the question, is West Virginia getting its money’s worth in public education?

According to a recently released comprehensive audit of the state’s public education system by the consulting firm Public Works, the short answer is no.

The report, requested by the Governor’s Office, includes 143 pages of specific problems and recommendations for improvements in the state’s school system. It includes everything from how teachers are hired and paid to how school buses make their rounds.

The report says the state could save $116 million over five years through recommended efficiencies. Those measures are not chopping-block measures, but rather best practices that are proven money savers.

There’s way too much to include in one commentary, and I’ll be talking about it much more in the days and weeks ahead, but let’s start with the most significant finding, the discovery that explains a lot about our problems in public education.

“The system is detailed to the extreme in statutory language that results in an education system that has little flexibility to modify policy and operations without changes to the Code (state law),” the report said. “We have encountered no other state (emphasis added) that insulates its education system so much from gubernatorial—or voter—control.”

So, virtually every change must first go through the legislature, a cumbersome and time consuming process that stifles initiative and helps perpetuate the status quo.

The report says West Virginia has “one of the most highly regulated systems in the country—if not the most—with many of the details of school operations spelled out in the code.”

Naturally, with so many of the specifics of how to run the schools included in state law, it takes an inordinate number of administrative staff people to keep track.

The Public Works report found that West Virginia has the equivalent of one staff person for every 419 students. That’s the second most top heavy ratio in the country. (Alaska has one staff person for every 207 students).

Comparable states do much better on this front. For example, Nebraska, which has about the same number of students at West Virginia, has one staff member for every 1,354 students. West Virginia’s state education bureaucracy has 675 staff members while Nebraska has 215.

In fairness, one reason the staff size is higher is because the number includes staff at the Cedar Lakes Conference Center in Jackson County, which is under state Department of Education. Even so, West Virginia still has a bloated education bureaucracy compared with other states.

The report shows that West Virginia’s Department of Education has 54 senior staff administrative positions, including 20 executive directors and division directors and 27 assistant directors. Nebraska has 17. Colorado has 14.

Too many regulations etched in the stone of the state code and too many administrators to oversee all those laws have created a red-tape-filled top-heavy education system in West Virginia that badly needs an overhaul.

By Sean Cavanagh

As states seek to pare down spending, a new report warns elected officials against rushing into one popular strategy for cutting costs: school and district consolidation.

The report, based on review of available research, argues that claims about potential financial savings through consolidation are often exaggerated and misunderstood.

The review, conducted by researchers at Ohio University, concludes that savings to states from consolidating districts are often minimal, and mostly come about in districts serving a small number of students. In many instances, in fact, combining districts can create “diseconomies of scale” and result in increased costs in transportation, operations, management, security, and other areas, says the report, which was released by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Overall, the effects of merging districts and schools are “nuanced, indicating that efficiencies can be achieved in some expenditure areas and for certain types of schools or districts,” the authors say, while also suggesting “caution for policymakers pursuing consolidation in the hope of cutting costs.”

The authors’ review also calls into question the claim that consolidation produces greater academic opportunities for students, in the form of academic course offerings. In some cases, it also results in reduced student participation in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, they say.

States tend to look to consoliation during times of financial duress, like now. A major wave of consolidation played out from the 1930s to the 1970s. Unlike consolidations that have occurred more recently, that mid-century consolidation wave by and large brought many benefits, in the form of greater specialization in subject-matter teaching, more effective school leadership, and other advantages, the authors contend.

What caused the 1930s-1970s consolidation wave? One factor was the automobile. Students who previously were forced to stay close to home, the authors say, were able to cover ever-greater distances in cars and buses on an improved network of roads.

If you’re in a state that has merged schools or districts to save money or for academic reasons, what do you make of the report’s caution-on-consolidation message?

“I applaud the groundbreaking educational public-private partnership in McDowell County, West Virginia that the American Federation of Teachers has helped launch. This public-private partnership is helping to show communities across the nation—especially poor, rural communities—the way forward. It is helping to show all of America what we need to do to provide a world-class education for students in the 21st century.

“The Reconnecting McDowell partnership is a great example of how union-management collaboration and leading non-profits can come together to push for dramatic improvements in education. This partnership had its inception in a request from Gayle Manchin–Sen. Manchin’s wife and a member of the state Board of Education–to Randi Weingarten, the AFT president. More than 30 public, private, and non-profit groups have since signed the McDowell Covenant, and all of them have committed to providing services, money, products and/or expertise to McDowell County’s schools, children, and families.

“The McDowell partnership is a powerful affirmation of the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods program, which also empowers communities to tackle both out-of-school and in-school obstacles to children’s success. Just like the Promise Neighborhood program, the Reconnecting McDowell covenant recognizes that education must be the centerpiece of the effort to expand opportunities for children.

“It’s my hope that the McDowell County initiative will help move us beyond the narrow, either–or debates over the causes of academic failure. Everyone who has worked with poor children knows that poverty matters and affects school performance. But everyone who has witnessed the life-altering impact of great teachers and great schools knows that schools matter enormously, too. In America, poverty is not destiny, and neither is geography.

“The Reconnecting McDowell covenant acknowledges that poverty, job loss, drug and alcohol abuse, housing shortages for teachers, limited medical services, and inadequate access to technology and transportation are all serious educational challenges. But as the covenant states: ‘We refuse to see those challenges as reasons not to achieve.’ The Reconnecting McDowell partnership is an urgent reminder that it takes a school and parents to educate a child. But it takes a community, too.”

by The Washington Post

McDOWELL COUNTY - The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache.

The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County.

The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.

The McDowell Initiative, announced Friday, comes in the middle of a national debate about what causes failing schools in impoverished communities: the educators or the environment?

Reformers such as former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee argue that for too long, weak teachers have used poverty as an excuse and that an effective educator can transcend circumstances. Unions such as the AFT maintain that economic and social factors must be addressed for a child to succeed.

“I’ve gotten so angry in the last couple of years when people who are new to our field decide that they alone, just by exhorting, will help ensure that geography does not become destiny for some kids,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, the nation’s second-largest teachers union. “A lot of the factors that confront kids - poverty, divorce, health care - are real obstacles. People can pretend to ignore them elsewhere, but no one can ignore those factors in McDowell.”

The children who file into Anawalt Elementary School here each morning carry burdens that hang over them like haze from the nearby coal mines.

Most of the youngsters live with grown-ups who do not hold jobs, casualties of coal’s collapse. Many are being raised by grandparents because their mothers and fathers are in prison or struggling with addiction. Eight of every 10 children in the school meet the state’s definition of poor. Some rarely see a doctor.

Their 1924 school building has a failing roof, steps that tremble under the weight of an adult, an unheated gymnasium and antiquated electrical wiring that can’t power air conditioning.

There are no after-school activities because if the children miss the school bus, they have no way to reach their modest houses and trailers, which are tucked into mountain crevices.

There are no recreation centers, no YMCAs. Leaving the county is so unusual that on a school trip to the Dollywood amusement park in Tennessee last year, several children mistook a highway rest stop, with its glass doors and bright lights, for their destination.

The state, which took over the McDowell public schools nearly a decade ago, has failed to make much of a dent in the county’s abysmal test scores and a dropout rate more than three times the national average.

“I can’t tell you how appalled and embarrassed that made me,” said Gayle Manchin, the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who joined the state Board of Education in 2008. “Those children weren’t any better off.”

Manchin, thinking a more ambitious effort was needed, turned to Weingarten for help.

“I knew if we were going to do this, we had to do it the right way,” Weingarten said. “That’s why we wanted a lot of partners, and the people in McDowell had to want us to be involved and that we were going to have to deal with all the issues - education, social, economic.”

She said the McDowell Initiative isn’t about improving the image of the teachers union, which critics - including the makers of the movie “Waiting for Superman” - contend is more concerned about protecting working conditions for adults than improving student learning.

“This is not a photo op,” Weingarten said. “This is a moral commitment. We’re in the business of making a difference in the lives of people.”

It is unclear exactly what the McDowell Initiative will entail or cost. The union has committed $100,000 and staff time for planning the project over the next six months.

But it is likely to include improvements that directly affect schools, such as expanded broadband so that digital learning can become a regular component of classroom instruction, better teacher training and a fine-tuned instructional program.

Investments would also be geared to help families outside the classroom, such as better access to health care, drug prevention and treatment programs, better transportation, and more recreation.

These improvements, known as “wraparound services,” have been successful in other turnaround efforts, notably the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, where families get free access to an array of health and nutrition counseling as well as after-school programs, truancy prevention, literacy programs, financial advice and domestic-crisis resolution.

The difference between those programs and the McDowell Initiative is that the “wraparound services” will have to be created from scratch in McDowell, which spans 535 square miles, not simply imported from a nearby neighborhood.

The southernmost county in West Virginia, McDowell has produced the most coal in this mining state. For generations, that was enough to sustain the community, which swelled to 100,000 by 1950. But once coal and the related steel industry started declining in the 1960s, McDowell’s descent was rapid. The first food stamps were issued in 1961. Today, the population is about 22,000. Click to read more …