One Cheesesteak with a Side of Bullshit

One thing that I’ve come to realize about my neighbors—and by that I mean fellow Pennsylvanians and fellow Americans as a whole—is that if you feed them a plateful of shit, they’ll happily eat it as long as you tell them that it’s caviar.

It recently happened in the Keystone State, and the chef was none other than Governor Ed Rendell (or “Fast Eddie,” as we lovingly call him). Rendell recently announced that he wants to eliminate eighty percent of the commonwealth’s public school districts by consolidating them into 101 districts. He claims that such a move would save tax dollars by cutting down on administrative costs.

The account of the claim is as follows:

“We just don't need that many school districts, and more importantly, in today’s economy we cannot afford them,” Rendell said in his budget address Wednesday before a joint session of the state House and Senate. He also proposed increasing basic education funding by an average 5.7 percent to an estimated $5.9 billion.

The governor said he would set aside money in the 2009-10 budget so the General Assembly could form and fund a legislative commission.

The 12-member commission would be charged with coming up with two consolidation plans. If lawmakers vote down both proposals, Rendell said, the state Board of Education could move ahead with a consolidation plan anyway.

Rendell said consolidating school districts would save on local real estate taxes and trim administrative costs while putting needed money into classrooms. More than 40 percent of the state’s school districts enroll fewer than 2,000 students each, and more than 80 percent enroll fewer than 5,000.

Rendell gave no statistics to back up his claim. But in June 2007, Standard & Poor’s released a school merger study it conducted for the Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee.

While not as sweeping as Rendell’s proposal, the study concentrated on 88 school districts with enrollments below 3,000 that had higher than average per-pupil spending. Among them was the Weatherly Area School District in Carbon County.

The study concluded that a merger between Weatherly and the nearby Jim Thorpe Area School District could save as much as $2.5 million a year, based on their 2004 spending levels. Pairing 34 districts could save $81 million, it said.

Rendell’s plan received a mixed reaction from lawmakers and educators, who have watched the governor both succeed and fail with sometimes drastic educational reforms.

Fast Eddie is going to give the lawmakers an opportunity to vote “yes” on his plan, but if they don’t he’ll just have the state Department of Education push it through anyway. How convenient.

But is this going to really save money? This is from a story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Leechburg Area Superintendent James Budzilek wrote his doctoral dissertation on small school consolidations. Reducing the number of districts is easier said than done, he said.

“There are numerous variables that have to be worked through for any merger to occur,” he said. “There is no firm research either that merging school districts saves taxpayer money. It is difficult to create a comparison of the cost savings structure of a new district versus if the districts were left independently.

“Additionally, merging districts does not only affect tradition rich school systems; research shows that local communities suffer when schools merge or consolidate into bigger districts.”

Tim Allwein, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said he was not surprised the issue came up, but was surprised by the scope—an 80 percent reduction.

“Whenever you have a downturn in the economy, one of the first things folks want to talk about when it comes to education is consolidating and merging districts,” Allwein said. “The preconception is there is a lot of money to be saved.”

Allwein said research by the association “says if you look at other states that have gone through forced consolidation there's really no evidence to suggest there are savings, number one, or that there’s any improvement or change in the quality of education for the students.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that actual research doesn’t matter to the average voter. If a politician tells them that they’ll save money by sacrificing their first-born child, they’ll be willing to do it in a heartbeat. (And yes, they really would save on food and clothing if they did.)

In all seriousness, however, I’ll use an example of how easy it is to package bullshit and sell it as something else: the Child Online Protection Act. COPA was a piece of legislation that was passed in 1998 and was said to be designed to protect kids from online porn. While the authors of the legislation gave it a nice, warm, and fuzzy name to garner support from the public at large, the actual text of the bill was not only deliberately vague (meaning that “porn” could possibly be anything from legitimate X-rated videos to illustrations showing women how to give self-exams for breast lumps) but was an unconstitutional law because less-intrusive forms of protection (e.g., parent-installed filters on home computers to block the porn) already exist.

COPA was finally laid to rest by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2009, much to the chagrin of those who oppose parental responsibility and those who think that a nude human body is the work of Satan. When the legislation was struck down last year, one of my coworkers—who routinely judges legislative bills by their names—was outraged that a judge didn’t want to “protect children.” She wasn’t interested in reading the actual text; it had a nice name and that was good enough for her.

Similarly, in the case of district consolidation, many Pennsylvanians who might favor the plan because Fast Eddie proclaimed it a way to save money might want to consider these points before bending over for Rendell:

• Administrators do make quite a bit of money, but their jobs are also bigger than those who aren’t doing those jobs. For instance, I’m not a school administrator and I don’t have to deal with the same problems. I rarely have parents calling me to complain about things (although it has happened, and they weren’t very pleasant to deal with), and I don’t have other teachers coming to me to complain about problems in the schools.

• Even if you consolidate districts, you’ll still have the same number of students, meaning that you’ll probably have to keep all the buildings open. That means that each building will still need an administrator of some sort. Even if you change that person’s title from “principal” to something more bureaucratic like “assistant superintendent,” they’re still going to need a salary. Moreover, how many “deputy assistant superintendents” do you suppose will be hired by the Department of Education? They’ll need a salary, too.

• Have any of the consolidation supporters considered the cost of renaming the schools and in particular, their respective sports teams? All of a sudden we just might find ourselves with a county that currently has five different districts suddenly needing one name. Folks, the taxpayers are the ones who will be paying for new building names, new signage, and new sports uniforms—not to mention all the paperwork that currently has the current district name printed on it.

• Parents like to complain to administrators whom they know, whether we’re talking about principals, superintendents, or school directors. In my school district, many parents enjoy knowing that their school board members live in their hometown. How many of these parents—the same ones who might currently support the idea of consolidation—will quickly be outraged when they have to contact another town or even Harrisburg to file a complaint? Maybe they’ll then complain about that, too.

• Renegotiating multiple salary contracts will be a nightmare, and will most likely cost tens of thousands of dollars (between labor negotiators and the new boards of education) to hammer out one, unified contract for these newly created districts. Imagine having five districts in a county which are slated to become one: one district has a high pay scale with five years on the contract; one has one year left with a low pay scale; the others are in between but all over the place in terms of dollar amounts. Instead of having just one district in one town (meaning one negotiating headache), all of a sudden we have a massive restructuring and renegotiating problem that will have to be solved as soon as possible.

My guess is that this “plan” is nothing more than Rendell’s attempt to take from the financially stable districts and give to the inner-city districts. Not only that, he could hire a few of his friends to become the new county-district administrators. All the while, he can sell it to the voters as being a money-saving measure.

Real solutions might not matter, though, as was illustrated in the Crestwood School District just a few days ago. The district’s middle/high school is currently at 114 percent capacity (for anyone in Crestwood who might be reading this, that means that your classrooms are really fucking overcrowded), and officials have said that an expansion is needed to deal with the overcrowding. In a vote of 4,576 to 827, voters turned down an expansion plan but didn’t have any solutions to the crowding problem. Well, that is, all but one voter.

Mountain Top resident Tanya Kapustensky said, “They could make it two times a day.”

Um...yeah. We’ll have the kids in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade do the 8 to 3 shift and the kids in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades can do the 4 to 11 shift.

References

Buynovsky, Sarah. “Voters Reject Expansion Plan.” WNEP. 4 Feb. 2009.

Esack, Steve, Genevieve Marshall and Scott Kraus. “State Budget Plan Calls for Elimination of Most School Districts.” The Morning Call. 5 Feb. 2009.

Nichols, Scott. “COPA Child-Porn Law Killed.” PC World. 22 Jan. 2009.

Palumbo, Andy. “Residents Reject School Proposal.” WNEP. 4 Feb. 2009.

Yerace, Tom and Brian C. Rittmeyer. “Rendell’s Massive School Merger Plan Has Its Critics.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. 6 Feb. 2009.

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