March 24th, 2011:

Grits makes the case.

If public school budgets will be radically cut in Texas, a prospect which for the moment appears all but inevitable, which employees should be eliminated first? Judging from the ongoing debate, maybe campus cops. Jason Embry at the Austin Statesman describes some of the debates surrounding school budgets thusly:

One of the most important dividing lines in the discussion about the state’s budget crisis separates those who think Texas schools need more money and those who think schools just need to make better spending decisions.

Those in the second group have some powerful numbers on their side. In a December report, Comptroller Susan Combs found that per-student spending increased 63 percent over the previous decade. That growth rate was nearly twice as fast as inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, and it points to a Texas school system that isn’t starving for cash.

Another statistic in wide circulation these days says Texas school districts employ about as many nonteachers as teachers. This has led many to suggest that, even as lawmakers consider billions of dollars’ worth of funding cuts to schools, local education officials can balance the books without shedding teachers.

I’ve not seen hard data, but based on anecdotal accounts I’d suggest that the growing number and size of school-based police forces likely account for a big chunk of growth among nonteacher school employees in the last decade. Shouldn’t they be among the first to get the budget axe? They’re the only sizable class of school employees we know for sure they can do without because schools did so for most of their history in Texas and elsewhere. The phenomenon of campus-based police departments is something that’s really only arisen en masse in the last 20 or so years in Texas public schools.

He notes that Sen. John Whitmire has advocated greatly reducing the amount of tickets that school cops write, which would fit well with this idea. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of savings in this – as I reported before, according the HISD Trustee Anna Eastman, HISD budgets $13.5 million for its police force, of which 95% is personnel costs. That ain’t nothing – it’s 270 teachers, assuming $50K per year in salaries – but it’s less than eight percent of the optimistic-case $171 million projected shortfall. Maybe it would be more in some other ISDs, I don’t know. I think there’s merit to the idea, and not just for budgetary reasons, I’m just trying to keep perspective on it. What do you think?

On a side note, I can’t leave this subject without pointing you to Martha’s posts about why schools need more support staff, not less, and why gutting educational service centers are a bad idea. That Jason Embry article linked by Grits also gets down to it:

In 2000, 49 percent of Texas students were considered economically disadvantaged. In 2010, that number reached 59 percent. These students often need extra attention as they move through the system.

As the student population has changed, Texas has continued to pile more demands on schools, and it costs money to meet those demands. Schools began giving the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, a much tougher exam than its predecessor, in 2003, and began that year to require students in the third grade to pass the reading section of the test to advance to fourth grade. Today the test is tied to promotion in grades five and eight. In addition, students who used to graduate from Texas high schools with three credits in math and three in science now must have four credits in each. To meet these demands, schools have spent more on student remediation, teacher training and the renovation of science labs.

Schools are preparing to give a new test next year, the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, which the Texas Education Agency has promised “will be significantly more rigorous than previous tests.” And let’s not forget that, led by our last governor, the federal government created an additional set of accountability measures for schools to meet during the past 10 years.

The increasing demands on students have put more demands on teachers and principals, particularly considering the state’s heavy emphasis on standardized testing to judge schools.

Districts across the state have therefore decided to hire instructional coordinators, curriculum specialists and others to give students extra attention and to help teachers make sure their lessons help students meet the escalating expectations.

In other words, yes, schools spend more than they used to. But the people of Texas also ask their schools to do more than they used to.

Funny how that latter part always seems to get overlooked by the “schools have too many administrators” crowd. In addition, as BOR notes, the cost of administering TAKS tests in Texas increased tenfold from 1999 to 2009. There’s been way too much talk in this debate about what schools do or don’t need by people who probably haven’t stepped foot in a public school in forty years, and it’s drowning out those who are there every day trying their best to make it all work. Martha’s a fine example of the latter, so please go see what she has to say.