The Stafford Voice

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education

Is Kansas Spending Enough on Education? Judges Say No

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TOPEKA, Kan. — A Shawnee County District Court consisting of a three-judge panel ruled on Tuesday that the state is not spending enough on its schools.

The state budget was a highly contested issue during the mid-term elections, and the aggressive personal income tax cuts put in place by Gov. Sam Brownback almost cost him re-election. This court ruling could complicate his effort to curb spending.

There is a little history to the Kansas courts stepping in and ruling that education spending wasn’t adequate enough. This goes all the way back to 1972 where a Johnson County District Court finds the Kansas public education funding system unconstitutional in Caldwell v. State of Kansas.

Since then, the state has been challenged on their education spending, and they have responded by an increase in spending on each account.

However, in recent years the state has been directed to use a per-pupil spending model starting at $4,492 per student. Current spending levels are down to $3,852 per student due to rising teacher pension costs. Add in those costs and the state is spending $13,269 per pupil.

In total, $3.4 billion is being spent on education by the state. And that number reflects a recent increase in funding in order to meet rising teacher pension costs. Spending within lower income district received an increase of $129 million for the year.

But that’s not liberal enough in the eyes of these three judges and that spending should be increased by an additional $548 million to $771 million a year.

In fact, this panel has declared in their 139 page ruling that it is “inadequate from any rational perspective of the evidence.”

They also stated that the state has failed to meet its obligations so declared in the Kansas Constitution. This is in reference to a more recent passing of the Rose standards contained in HB 2506, citing that the level of funding does not adequately provide “sufficient training or preparation for advanced training in either academic or vocational fields so as to enable each child to choose and pursue life work intelligently.”

Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute says that the court failed to take into account that many districts within the state don’t have a method to measure the success of the Rosestandards. In fact, some districts have asked for “the development of a system to define and measure…” the Rose standards.

Also not taken into account by the court is that some districts are not spending all of their operating funds, and the inefficiency at which districts operate.

When asked, Gov. Brownback responded by saying, “I continue to believe that restructuring the school funding formula and implementing education policy reforms is critical not only to getting more money into our classrooms but also improving student achievement. I will be working with legislative leadership to address the best path forward.”

 

This article is posted with permission from ANM News.

#CommonCore: 10 Reasons To Oppose It

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Common Core is just plain wrong for tomorrow’s generation and wrong for America. It does not elevate the education standards, rather it dumbs them down to give the illusion of a flourishing education system. Listed below are 10 reasons why you should oppose Common Core.

  1. It further nationalizes our education system.
  2. It’s bad for students.
  3. It’s bad for parents.
  4. It’s bad for teachers.
  5. It’s bad for taxpayers.
  6. It violates privacy.
  7. It resembles No Child Left Behind.
  8. It is unConstitutional.
  9. It requires some states to move backwards.
  10. Have you seen the curriculum? i.e. math problems and reading assignments

h/t: @JulieBorowski w/ FreedomWorks

Do you know where your 2013 Taxes went?

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Have you ever wondered just where and what your 2013 taxes were spent on?

The illustration below can help shed some light on this. According to the Office of Management and Budget, 49% went to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Sadly, we spend more on transportation than we do on education. Education is a measly 1%.

Where did your 2013 Tax money go?

 

h/t: Heritage.org

The New Common Core Tactic: Rename and Rebrand

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For good reason, parents continue to be in a uproar over Common Core. But with the new tactic to rename and rebrand is causing even more to voice their opposition.

With angry parents protesting the standards, and curriculum they say is tailored to it by writers of textbooks and lesson plans, several states have decided the solution is all in the name. Common Core is now referred to as “The Iowa Core” in the Hawkeye State. Florida calls it the tongue-twisting “Next Generation Sunshine State Standards.” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently signed an executive order to erase the name “Common Core” for their new math and reading standards and Louisiana lawmakers are mulling a name change as well. – FoxNews.com

It has been said numerous times before that the only way to fix Common Core is to scrap it completely. This federally controlled top-down approach to education standards will do more harm than good.

Glyn Wright, executive director of the Eagle Forum echoes this saying, “Rebranding the Common Core does not change the fact that it is still a top-down, federally controlled approach to education that is untested and unproven. We know that Americans will not be fooled by dressing-up this failed initiative.”

Common Core is Fast Approaching

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You are probably familiar with names like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top but have you heard of Common Core? If not, don’t worry. You aren’t alone! One recent poll showed that almost 65% haven’t heard of it either.

So why should you be concerned? Education! It’s the backbone of everything. It seems like anymore you have to have a top notch education to get ahead.

Well, thanks to Common Core you don’t have to worry about that.

So what about No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top? Aren’t they still around? You bet! They have just been renamed and repackaged into some grand and amazing new government initiative called Common Core.

Like everything the government does, this will be good right? WRONG!!!

Common Core standards will not improve education, but will lower the standards to make schools and teachers score better. The kids were left out!

Look, here’s the thing: YOU need to do your homework and you are late getting started!

Start with this video and go from there:

Click chart to view larger:

2013 0906-1 chart

Making Higher Education More Affordable: Presidential Weekly Address

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In his weekly address, Obama talks about making higher education more affordable. He states that over the past four years, he has helped millions.

But what he is failing to remember is that the only people he has helped are those who are illegal. He has helped promote states who offer lower tuition to those who are here illegal.

He then goes on to talk about how the price for higher education is hurting the middle class. So, how does he plan to do it?

  1. Rate colleges based on opportunities
  2. Start competition between colleges through innovations
  3. Help students responsibly manage their debts

Sounds good on the outside, right? But it will come with a cost. Everything does, and it falls on the taxpayer. That’s you!

Watch the address below:

Obama math: 3 x 4 = 11 Under New Common Core

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Quick: what’s 3 x 4?

If you said 11 — or, hell, if you said 7, pi, or infinity squared — that’s just fine under the Common Core, the new national curriculum that the Obama administration will impose on American public school students this fall.

In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer.

Watch:

via The Daily Caller.

The Falling Promise of Public Education

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by Joseph Phillips

We, the American public, hold it as an article of faith that those responsible for devising and implementing public policy have our best interests at heart. Our best minds are hard at work, striving to make the world a better place. Our elected officials are dedicated to protecting our freedoms, increasing our prosperity, and securing justice for all.

What, then, is the public to assume when, in spite of the best efforts of our most brilliant thinkers and politicians, freedoms erode, prosperity decreases, and for a great many, justice seems elusive? Surely, sinister forces must be at work.

Let us take for an example the nation’s system of public education. For years, American taxpayers have been sold on a triad of public policy fixes for public education. In order to improve student performance, state and federal governments must dedicate a greater portion of their budgetary dollars to education; class sizes must be reduced, and there must be greater oversight by the federal government. So fervent is the belief in this holy trinity of education, that to even ponder the efficacy of the federal Department of Education is seen as heresy. Any politician who attempts to curb the unrestricted flow of tax dollars to public schools is accused of not wanting to “invest in education.”

Continue reading . . .

Money Is Not What Schools Need

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by John Stossel

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: “Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone … .”

Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years?

Give me a break!

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That’s a fraction of 1 percent in each case.

Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year’s allocation. But that’s not what bureaucrats mean.

“They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year’s spending,” Coulson writes. “What they’re doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having.”

So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. “Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars),” Coulson says.

Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions.

Continue reading . . .