Tomorrow is summit day

Our education summit is finally here. YorkCounts will be at the Pullo Center all day Thursday hearing four morning presentations and an afternoon panel discussion talk about the current state of public education. The panel discussion will focus on fiscal matters, with particular attention to the looming pension crisis.

I wanted to take a minute today to review some of the great education posts we've had on the blog over the past six weeks. We had a chance to talk to Elaine Weiss, who will be our keynote speaker. Elaine's big thing is we can't fix schools in isolation from the surrounding community. Where there's poverty and crime and drugs and family issues at home, the community and the school have to work together.

We heard from Brian Jensen of the Pennsylvania Economy League, who made it plain that the pension obligations that school districts are facing will overwhelm many districts and be a burden on taxpayers for decades unless we figure something out quickly.

We heard from Dayna Laur, who said that districts should be doing more to collaborate and share costs on professional development - and, presumably, in other areas - in ways that would improve training and student outcomes AND save money.

And we heard several people argue for the need to reduce our reliance on property taxes as part of a fix to the way we fund education.

If you didn't register, don't worry. You will still be welcome tomorrow. And if you can't make it, read these posts to get caught up on some of the issues. And if you did register, thank you, and we hope the conversations are the beginning of a process for making York County schools the best they can be.

- Dan Fink

Education Summit preview: Brian Jensen

We asked participants in "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit" to respond to three questions about our schools, and we're sharing their responses on Mondays through the week of the summit on April 14. These are the questions we posed:

• What’s the biggest challenge confronting public education in York County today?
• What can the community in York County realistically expect to achieve to deal with that challenge?
• What would your first priority for action be?

Today, we hear from Brian Jensen, senior vice president at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the executive director for the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

By Brian Jensen

I have spent the last 23 years of my life in the Pittsburgh region, and while no expert on the state of public education specifically in York County, I would venture to say that school districts across the Commonwealth face the same basic set of challenges.

School district healthcare and other benefit costs continue to rise. Pension contributions, in particular, will escalate for decades to come (see chart above). In the 2010-2011 fiscal year, the local share of public school pension contributions were $277 million. In the 2035-2036 fiscal year, they are projected to reach $3.8 billion.

My daughter, now in fifth grade, will be nearing middle age before pension obligations begin to decline, and it is likely that her children will be starting to put their own children through school by the time the unfunded accrued obligations of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System are made whole.

I wonder how we would feel about our great grandparents if they had left such legacy costs for us to pay. How can we Pennsylvanians in 2011 continue to justify such generational theft?

Is there a way to at least lessen the burden on our great grandchildren?

We shouldn’t expect much financial help from the Commonwealth: Its share of school district pension costs will mirror those of the local districts. At the same time, the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System is also severely underfunded and will need to be restored. And it doesn’t appear likely that general state support for public education will increase any time soon. With increased state support unlikely and local sources in the form of property taxes nearing the tipping point or already tapped out, revenue solutions are at best limited.

It seems clear that benefits will need to be restructured. A law passed late last year took some rather modest steps in this direction. Much more aggressive action, such as implementation of defined contribution or hybrid systems, will need to be taken, if Pennsylvania is to continue to prepare its young people to compete in the global marketplace.

It is too late to protect our children from this pernicious fate. We need to demand prompt and fearless action from our state government if we are to protect our grand children and great grandchildren from the mistakes of their ancestors.

Brian Jensen is a senior vice president at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the executive director for the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania. He manages the civic policy portion of the competitiveness program. One of his primary responsibilities over the past several years has been to develop a strategy in support of municipal pension reform and service sharing between the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Brian led PEL’s participation in the joint efforts that resulted in the 2008 passage of legislation to consolidate earned income tax collection and in the 2010 passage of legislation to make municipal merger and consolidation more straightforward.

Municipal government issues have been a theme of Brian’s 24-year career with PEL. He played a major role in the development of ComPAC 21, the process that led to the reengineering Allegheny County government. He facilitated the extensive multi-year effort to implement the ComPAC 21 recommendations, including drafting enabling legislation to expedite Allegheny County home rule, coordinating the home rule charter drafting process, drafting the county administrative and ethics codes, training the new County Council, and staffing transition committees. Brian has a Ph.D . in History and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in the mid-1980s. He lives in the borough of Ben Avon and is active in the Community Presbyterian Church of Ben Avon as an elder, deacon and a tenor in the chancel choir.

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IF YOU GO

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5.
Confirmed participants: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context. An afternoon panel discussion will focus on school district budgets and the looming pension crisis. Presenters and panel discussion participants include:

• Brian Jensen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern PA and senior vice president of civic policy for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development;
• Dennis Baughman, president of the Board of Trustees for the York Academy Regional Charter School;
• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association;
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association;
• Republican State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, who represents parts of York and Lancaster counties and serves on the Senate Education and Appropriations committees
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships;
• Republican State Rep. Will Tallman, who represents York and Adams counties and serves on the House Education Committee;
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships;
• Dayna Laur, award-winning and nationally recognized teacher from Central York School District;
• Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center;
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council. 

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.
For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.

Education Summit preview: Interview with Elaine Weiss

Elaine Weiss

On Mondays between now and the YorkCounts York County Education Summit on April 14, we'll take a look at some of the issues surrounding public education today. Most of the posts will be written by participants in the summit. Today, we'll start out with an interview with Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. At the summit, Elaine will talk about the state of American education from the national perspective. Here's an edited version of the phone interview we did recently.

DAN FINK: Tell me about your background and how you ended up at Broader, Bolder Approach.

ELAINE WEISS: Well, I used to be a lawyer. I went into law school wanting to do good stuff. And I was always interested in poverty and finding remedies that worked to get people out of poverty. After I was in it for awhile, I realized that law might not be the best way for me to accomplish that. So I went back to school to get a degree in public policy. I studied urban policy at George Washington for my doctorate. I wanted to find out: What does the evidence say about what helps people out of poverty? And it seemed to all go back to education. K-12 reforms weren’t working, and a lot of problems opened up earlier than that, which is how I got interested in early education.

DF: Here in York County, people have done work around improving early education as a way to avoid later problems like truancy and dropping out, and we've had some blog posts about that recently. So where did that take you?

EW: I focused my doctorate on early education, and that's how I ended up at Pew (Charitable Trust). While I was there, I learned a lot about education and policy reform. I began to see that American education tends to go through these cycles, where people decide, "This reform will work," and then a few years later, "Oh, wait, this reform will work." In the course of doing all this reading, I came across Richard Rothstein's book "Class and Schools." It's a wonderful book that brings together all these factors - early education and poverty and reform. I can remember thinking if this comprehensive approach to education policy ever becomes a campaign, I want to be part of it. (Editor's note: Richard Rothstein is one of the original founders of BBA and a member of the BBA National Advisory Council.) (The book) is not at all an apology for schools, as some would paint it, but it points out all the factors that interfere with a teacher's ability to teach and a student's ability to focus and learn, which are pretty obvious to anyone who has taught or who has been in a poor neighborhood or, frankly, has been a parent. Schools are only part of a child's education experience, and reform traditionally didn't incorporate non-school issues that kids face.

DF: What do you mean by non-school issues?

EW: One example is mobility. In urban schools, families move a lot, for reasons usually associated with financial instability, so the kids are constantly having to adjust to new classrooms, new teachers, and schools and districts spend money trying to deal with administrative hurdles that don't exist in less mobile areas. In Flint, Mich., they looked at this mobility issue, and they decided to offer rent subsidies. If the problem is parents don't have enough money for the rent, let's give them money for that, and the kids won't have that disruption to their learning. And they had a dramatic improvement. In York, if you have an instability problem, find a pot of money to help keep these kids in one place and one school, and you can make a difference.


DF: Talk a little bit about No Child Left Behind and the role the federal government should play in education reform. There's a pretty broad range of views, from President Obama's plan for reauthorizing NCLB, to doing away with the Department of Education.

EW: Dismantling the Education Department would do away with many critical programs. But I think (those that promote that) are right the federal government does not belong in state and local education policy to the extent they have come to be. The idea (among federal policy makers) is that states and localities will mess up and the federal government will not. But we have seen that the federal government standards have not really brought about student improvement, they have not provided realistic mandates, they haven't given the state governments and localities the flexibility they need to make the changes required to improve student performance. We need to get back to broad accountability, not the narrow mandates that are required in these tests. Use the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's not gamed by the system; it shows good results; and it can be used across states very well. It allows states to disaggregate data to show who is and who isn’t doing well compared to other states and would allow more policy comparisons across states.

DF: Here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there's a lot of talk about choice and vouchers. What do you think about free-market competition as a way to improve the performance of public schools?

EW: The Broader, Bolder Approach doesn’t have a specific position on charter schools and vouchers, because the issues facing schools are not, as many suggest today, based on lack of competition. The market is a very important thing, but it's not the right model for every one of our institutions, and it has serious flaws, as recent years have shown us. Schools, like families, work well when they’re collaborative - when teachers work together, when they work with principals and parents, and with students, and when they collaborate with one another. It doesn’t make sense to have a market model where you have “winners” and “losers.”

DF: How we fund public education will come up in policy discussions here and in other states. Talk about the connection between adequate, equitable funding and reducing the achievement gap.


EW: States vary greatly in the way they redistribute funding across districts to make sure schools have the resources they need. Decades of research suggest that what happens within the school walls – classroom, administration, peer effect – accounts for somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of student outcomes by the time they are done with school. If we had total equity and schools were being run perfectly, we’d still only to be able to close about a third of the achievement gap. We definitely need more equity in funding, but it’s the resources outside of school that account for the majority of the gaps we see. Where the community and the people are connected to the school, you will get good outcomes. Some people will say: "You’re giving teachers excuses; you’re letting them off the hook." That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying, "We know there are things that are outside your control, things that happen outside the schools, and we will support that to help you do your job." That is empowering.
 
- Dan Fink

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IF YOU GO

What: "State of the Schools: A Countywide Education Summit"
When: 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. April 14
Where: Pullo Center at Penn State York, 1031 Edgecomb Ave., York
How much: Admission is free, but advance registration is requested and box lunches will be available for $5.
Confirmed participants: Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, will provide the national context. Other presenters and panel discussion participants include:

• Brian Jensen, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern PA and senior vice president of civic policy for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development;
• Dennis Baughman, president of the Board of Trustees for the York Academy Regional Charter School;
• Thomas Gentzel, executive director for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association;
• James Testerman, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association;
• Republican State Rep. Ron Miller, who represents southwestern York County, including York, Springfield, Shrewsbury, Codorus, Manheim and West Manheim townships;
• Republican State Rep. Will Tallman, who represents York and Adams counties and serves on the House Education Committee;
• Democratic State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, who represents York and parts of Spring Garden and West Manchester townships;
• Joel Sears, president of the York County Taxpayers Council

To register: Send an e-mail with your name, school district and phone number to events@yorkcounts.org, and if you plan to purchase one of the $5 box lunches, please indicate your lunch preference from these wrap choices: turkey, ham, chicken salad, tuna salad or veggie.

For details: Contact Dan Fink at YorkCounts at 717-650-1460 or at dfink@yorkcounts.org.