Report signals push to change school system
The K-12 Student Success Interim Study Committee wisely decided Tuesday that its draft report needed to be rewritten by legislative staff, with more language tied to testimony the panel actually heard.
But it’s not too early to start reading between the lines, and getting ready for a well-coordinated effort to dynamite some of the fundamentals of the Kansas public school system.
Legislative researchers had no role in writing the draft, for which Committee Chairman Ron Highland, R-Wamego, claimed principal credit. And some other panel members viewed the provocative document as too limited in scope, and its proposed reforms suspiciously aligned with the free-market agenda of the Kansas Policy Institute.
If this first official step in replacing the state’s defunct school finance formula is to have credibility, the committee needs to value the input of all stakeholders statewide.
Curiously, the rough draft also failed to serve the committee’s stated purpose of identifying a formula to fund schools once the two-year block grants expire in July 2017. But as written it surely points to where some state leaders would like to see K-12 schools go. Judging from its proposals, Kansans should be ready to discuss, among other topics:
▪ Whether “the funding mechanism needs to be redesigned to focus on the individual student” – which some read as code advocating publicly funded vouchers going to private schools.
▪ Whether the system of annual assessment testing developed by the University of Kansas should be scrapped and the state should pay for all students to take the “unbiased” ACT.
▪ Whether the current use of eligibility for free- or reduced-price lunch to identify children who are at-risk academically “implies that poverty determines an individual’s ability to learn” and “is discriminating.”
▪ Whether districts should have to secure a state committee’s permission before putting their school bond proposals to local voters and involve a state architect and project manager, and whether the state dollars supplementing local bond plans should be strictly limited.
▪ Whether districts should be mandated to use regional service centers and perhaps private contractors for functions such as transportation, accounting, information technology, food service, maintenance, payroll and purchasing.
▪ Whether legislative committees should get involved in issues including teacher pay, special education and a cost-benefit analysis of accepting federal education funding.
More broadly, the draft report also should stir questions about whose job it is to make policy for public schools in a state with 286 elected local school boards and an elected State Board of Education – and a Legislature that has enough trouble fulfilling its constitutional obligation to fund schools suitably.
This story was originally published January 6, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Report signals push to change school system."