Let’s spend our education dollars wisely

Our View

Let’s spend our education dollars wisely

To better understand the antics of a bunch of politicians and their inability to work together in a bipartisan effort as how to fund the state’s public schools to the tune of more than $3 BILLION let us point out some of the basic facts of the situation at hand.

First of all, these politicians, all members of the house Education Committee, failed to meet the deadline to submit a report on how to spend these billions of our tax dollars and then, just a day later, mended fences and mysteriously agreed to a plan.

This plan, folks, calls for raising public school funding by about $45.6 million in fiscal 2018 and by the same amount again in fiscal 2029, and includes a provision for schools to increase minimum teacher salaries by $400 in each of those two fiscal years, to $31,800. Bear in mind, school districts aren’t obligated to be so generous if they decide otherwise.

Let’s point out what is going on here this way:

• The fiscal funding for all public schools is more than $3 BILLION, which accounts for more than half of all of the governor’s general revenue budge for the current fiscal year, 2017.

• The school funding formula is supposed to provide an equitable and adequate education for the state’s 476,000 public school students, regardless of what district they are in.

• The most debated topics during the previous meetings if this committee were the total dollars allocated per student, currently $6,646, not including federal and local funding, which totals on average $9,538 per student in the 2012-13 school year.

• Even with all this, the state ranks No. 31 in the nation for per-student funding.

• The committee approved a $4 million increase to the special-education fund by fiscal 2019. That amount is considerably less than the $20 million increase sought by Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, who weeks ago made the motion to include the special-education funding in the report.

Now, on a related education funding issue, Gov. Asa Hutchinson says he will be asking lawmakers to approve a $10 million increase in funding to colleges and universities for the 2018-19 year but, that comes with some conditions that may be difficult to meet.

So seems our governor wants to model his Higher-Ed. formula to what some other states have adopted which is based on achievement of certain outcomes.

The way the proposal works, institutions would be rewarded for meeting goals such as increasing degreecompletion rates, increasing the level of progress students are making toward degrees, helping-at-risk students achieve academic success, reducing achievement gaps, becoming more efficient and becoming more affordable.

Schools failing to achieve these goals would be penalized. There are a number of educators and lawmakers who agree that these are very lofty and challenging goals but far better than the current and outdated funding formula that is based on rewarding numbers rather than accomplishment, goals and efficiencies.

Accountability in some higher-ed circles is something that is frowned upon, which will be the basis for some resistance from those within the system who are simply comfortable with the status quo.