In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: Do corporations prefer markets or big government? Legislative malpractice in Kansas. Education reform, or lack thereof. View below, or click here to view at YouTube. Episode 115, broadcast April 3, 2016.
In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: There are a few things that make Bob wonder. Then, a troubling episode for Wichita government and news media. Finally, the harm of teachers unions. View below, or click here to view at YouTube. Episode 114, broadcast March 27, 2016.
KNEA says: “Jeff Melcher, the man who has fought to completely eliminate collective bargaining and other rights for teachers continued his war today with his bill intended to end teacher representation.”
The bill simply mandates elections every three years on whether teachers are satisfied with their current representation, which is almost always KNEA or an affiliate. It’s not surprising the union is opposed to this. Accountability, after all.
KNEA says: “Make no mistake, the intent of this bill is to end professional representation for teachers and leave them as at-will indentured labor.” Indentured labor!Government employees as indentured labor! By whom are teachers indentured? Other government employees (principals and superintendents)? What, do principals and superintendents get masters and doctors degrees in learning how to indenture the teachers that work for them? Why do professionals like these need a labor union to manage their relationship? Who would want to enter a profession where a labor union is needed to protect them from their bosses (or oppressors, as the teachers union would lead us to believe)?
KNEA says: “In a very fundamental way, this war on teachers and schools is about selling off public schools to the highest corporate bidder and making a quality education a privilege not a right.”
Here we see bashing of capitalism. You see, the teachers union believes that education can’t be run by the private sector. Never mind that charter schools and for-profit schools are successful in many areas of the country — but their teachers are not often union members. Second, with school choice programs the state still pays for students to attend private and charter schools. All that changes is parents have the privilege of choice for the children.
KNEA says: “Would force the teachers to pay for state mandated elections.”
No, the union pays for the elections.
News that a Wichita-based company is moving to Colorado sparked a round of Kansas-bashing, most not based on facts.
When a Kansas company announced moving its headquarters to Denver, comments left to a newspaper article made several statements that deserve closer examination.1
One reader wrote “Yup another example that the tax relief for businesses is working in Kansas.” Another wrote “The biggest takeaway here is that then didn’t bother to mention the benefits of lower taxes meaning the tax policy Kansas touts really has no bearing on company decisions.” Another wrote “Just low taxes is not a magnet for business or people wanting to move here.” Let’s look at a few statistics regarding Kansas and Colorado business taxation.
In the 2016 State Business Tax Climate Index from the Tax Foundation, Colorado ranked 18 overall, while Kansas ranked 22.2 According to this measure, Colorado has a better tax environment for business, even after Kansas tax reform.
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2014 shows that Colorado collects $2,195 in taxes from each of its citizens. Kansas collects $2,526.3 That’s after the Kansas tax cuts took effect. Kansas would have to cut taxes much more before it reaches the low level of taxation in Colorado.
The takeaway: Even after Kansas tax reform, Colorado has lower taxes.
Another commenter stated “People want to live and businesses want to be located … where education is important and supported.” The writer didn’t elaborate, but generally when people say “support” education, they mean “spend” a lot on public schools. Another commenter wrote “Public schools are treated as an afterthought by our Governor and Legislature.” So let’s look at spending.
Colorado and Kansas schools, according to NEA. Click for larger.Regarding school spending, the National Education Association collects statistics from a variety of sources and uses some of its own transformations.4 A collection of statistics from that source is nearby. Note that Colorado teacher salaries are higher, while revenue per pupil is lower. Colorado spends more per student when considering current expenditures. Colorado has a higher student-teacher ratio than Kansas.
Colorado and Kansas NAEP scores by ethnicity. Click for larger.The U.S. Census Bureau has different figures on spending. In a table titled “Per Pupil Amounts for Current Spending of Public Elementary-Secondary School Systems by State: Fiscal Year 2013” we see Colorado spending $8,647, and Kansas $9,828.5 This tabulation has Kansas spending 13.7 percent more than Colorado.
Looking at scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — a test that is the same in all states — we see that when considering all students, Kansas and Colorado scores are very close, when measuring the percent of students scoring proficient or better. White students in Colorado, however, generally score higher than in Kansas.
Colorado and Kansas NAEP scores by free/reduced lunch eligibility. Click for larger.For NAEP scores by eligibility for free or reduced lunches, we see that Kansas and Colorado are similar, except that Colorado has made progress with eligible students in math, catching up with Kansas. (Eligible students are students from low-income households.)
For what it’s worth, in Colorado 10.4 percent of students who attend public schools attend public charter schools. In Kansas the figure is 0.6 percent, due to Kansas law being specifically designed to limit charter school formation and survival.6
A writer expressed this in his comment: “Colorado also presents a more stable political environment as well.” While this is something that probably can’t be quantified, a recent New York Times article disagrees, quoting a former governor:7
“Colorado is subjected to extremes,” said Roy Romer, a former governor. “It’s not just blue and red. It’s also urban and rural. We have a history to this.”
Of note, Colorado has initiative and referendum. Citizens may, by petition, propose new laws and veto laws the legislature passed.8 Kansas does not have initiative and referendum at the state level. This is one way that Kansas has a more stable political environment than Colorado: Citizens have less political power in Kansas. For example, the law that made marijuana legal in Colorado was passed through citizen initiative. I think it’s safe to say that it will be a long time — if ever — before Kansas has medical marijuana, much less full legalization.
Further, Colorado has TABOR, or Taxpayer Bill of Rights. This is a measure designed to limit the growth of taxation and spending. Whether one likes the idea or not, it has had a tumultuous history in Colorado, according to a Colorado progressive public policy institute.9 And if you thought Kansas was the only state that — purportedly — underfunds education, welcome to Colorado. The same report holds: “As 2016 approached, the [Colorado] General Fund remained nearly $900 million short of what it needed to fully fund K-12 education and well below what it needed to restore postsecondary education and other programs to historic levels.” This is in line with the amount Kansas school spending advocates say Kansas needs to spend, adjusted for population.
Colorado also has term limits on its state legislature and elected members of the state executive department (governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and treasurer.)10 Kansas has term limits on its governor, but on no other offices. This argues in favor of Colorado having a more dynamic and less stable government.
Bell Policy Center. The road to 2016: More than three decades of constitutional amendments, legislative acts and economic ups and downs. Available at http://www.bellpolicy.org/research/road-2016. ↩
The average Kansan is misinformed regarding Kansas school spending, and Kansas news media are to blame, writes Paul Waggoner of Hutchinson.
Math Quiz on Kansas Spending
By Paul Waggoner
Math questions, one would think, are very straight-forward and easy to answer. At least easy to guess the right answer in a simple multiple choice test. Such is not the case however with the average Kansan who follows state issues relying on the headlines in the Kansas press.
The reality of how poor a job the Kansas press is doing with numbers is found in a December 2015 SurveyUSA study of 500 plus registered voters in Kansas. This scientific study of voters’ knowledge of educational spending in Kansas was virtually ignored by the Kansas media. Most likely because its implications don’t fit the media narrative on education in this Year 5 of the Age of Brownback. Even worse, the poll was commissioned by a conservative think tank, the Kansas Policy Institute.
As to voter (mis) understanding this 15 question poll hit the jackpot. All the questions were multiple choice with only 4 options given.
Question #6 asked how much state funding do you think Kansas school districts receive per pupil? The correct answer is well over $7,000 per student. 39% of Kansas voters thought it was under $4,000, another 22% thought between $4,000 and $5,000. Only 7% of voters guessed properly.
The follow-up, Question #7, was how much total (federal/state/local) funding do you think Kansas school districts receive per pupil? The correct answer in 2015 was over $13,000 per pupil. Only 5% of registered Kansas voters got that one right. 40% thought the total was under $7,000, and 21% said $7,000 to $10,000 which were the two most inaccurate options!
At this point I was even wondering how the accepted wisdom is so far removed from the truth. So I went to ksde.org, the website of the Kansas State Department of Education, to verify the precise figures. At that website every school district in the state is listed.
What our local school districts spend is very close to the state averages. The Hutchinson USD 308 budget was over $60,000,000 in 2014 with 4,836 full-time students or $12,449 spent per pupil. 5 years earlier the USD 308 budget was $57 million, 5 years before that it was about $41 million.
The comparable figures for USD 313 Buhler are $12,360 per pupil in 2014 with a $26,300,000 budget that 5 years earlier was $22,200,00 and 5 years before that was $18,000,000. For USD 313 that meant students were educated for just $9,000 per pupil as recently as 2005.
Kansas school districts total spending is $2.0 billion higher now than just 10 years ago ($6 billion versus $4 billion). That is an incontrovertible fact. Which leads to two immediate questions: How can the Supreme court keep claiming the spending is constitutionally inadequate? And what exactly do taxpayers have to show for the extra $2,000,000,000 every year?
The reality of those numbers are nowhere in the publics’ consciousness currently. For instance, SurveyUSA question #8 was “over the last 5 years how much do you think total per pupil funding has changed?” The correct answer is that it is actually up 9.92%. But fully 47% of Kansas voters confidently said it had dropped over 5%! Another 15% were sure it had dropped but thought the percentage was smaller. Only 7% of voters knew that school spending was up “over 5%’.
The budget trajectory has changed and is on a much flatter curve than ever before. Taxpayers are mostly rejoicing, tax spenders (and their allies) are howling mad.
My revised school spending narrative is frankly the story of the entire Kansas budget (as can be easily accessed at budget.ks.gov “Governors Budget Report FY 2017”).
The state general fund budget first hit $1 billion in 1980 and grew consistently under Governors Carlin/Hayden/Finney at about a 6.5% annual rate.
Under Graves and Sebelius that accelerated growth rate continued until the 2008-09 recession when the state budget dropped dramatically for 1 year under Governor Parkinson. This made a cumulative annual growth average of around 3% for those three administrations.
Under Governor Brownback the general fund budget is still going up, but at a 5 year annual growth rate of 1.8%.
On February 20th one Hutchinson News columnist’s headline blasted the “Deliberate financial starving of the state of Kansas.” I see this as more of a diet, and I say it is about time.
The numbers on the state budget spending (and taxation) are readily available online. The execution of the plan for this new governmental trajectory leave something to be desired, but that is the topic for another day.
Paul Waggoner is a Hutchinson resident and business owner. He can be reached with comments or questions at waggonerpm@gmail.com.
There are competing claims. Some look at total spending. Others, as noted in the article, say analysis of spending must be nuanced by consideration of “special education, retirement fund contributions and aid for special budget funds such as bond and interest funds and capital outlay.”
The same article also notes: “But because lawmakers converted school funding to a block grant system last year, combining several different kinds of aid into a single grant, exact comparisons to previous years are difficult to make.”
All this is true to some extent. But there is a way to clear some of the fog, and that is to look at the number of employees in a school district compared to the number of students.
Schools tell us that their largest expenditure is on personnel costs. Across the country, the portion of current expenditures going to salaries and benefits hovers around 80 percent. 1
So looking at the number of employees tells us a lot — almost everything, in fact — about how the school district is faring.
When we look, we find that starting in 2011 the number of employees in the Lawrence school district has risen faster than the number of students. (The count is divided into certified employees and K-12 teachers, and does not include special education teachers.) Correspondingly, the ratios of these employees has fallen over the same period. The pupil-teacher ratio has fallen from 17.28 to 15.47, and the certified employee-pupil ratio has fallen from 11.70 to 10.85.
So however spending is compartmentalized, whether KPERS contributions are included or not, whether the funding comes from state or local sources, whether spending is adjusted for inflation, the Lawrence school district has been able to improve its employee-pupil ratios substantially.
Lawrence school district employment and enrollment. Click for larger.
National Center for Education Statistics: The Condition of Education, Elementary and Secondary Education, Finance, Public School Expenditures. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmb.asp. ↩
A proposed bill in Kansas should make us question the rationale of continuing medical education requirements for physicians.
The bill is HB 2615, titled “Charitable healthcare providers; continuing education credits for gratuitous care of eligible patients.”
The bill’s supplemental note explains the bill “… would allow charitable healthcare providers and dentists to fulfill one hour of continuing education credit for performance of two hours of gratuitous service to medically indigent persons.”
Contrary to Hawkins, the care won’t be free. It may not cost the state anything, but it will have a cost to the doctors who supply the “free” care.
Perhaps more importantly, this bill should make us question the purpose of continuing medical education requirements for physicians and dentists. In Kansas, physicians must participate in 50 hours of continuing medical education annually. This education requirement is satisfied by participating in “activity designed to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance of persons licensed to practice a branch of the healing arts.”
But HB 2615 will let physicians satisfy 20 hours of this requirement by providing 40 hours of health care to needy people. Having doctors perform routine medical care — doing their daily job, in other words — doesn’t seem likely to advance the “knowledge, skills, and professional performance” of doctors, which is the stated goal of the regulation.
We have, therefore, a regulation that seems reasonable — ensuring that doctors are up-to-date in professional knowledge — instead being used by the state to “encourage” doctors to provide free labor.
Episodes like this should be a lesson in the powers and abuses of the regulatory state.
The Kansas regulations
According to the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, physicians must participate in continuing medical education each year, earning “50 hours with a minimum of 20 hours of Category I and a maximum of 30 hours of Category II.”
In more detail, the regulations state the continuing education is “activity designed to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge, skills, and professional performance of persons licensed to practice a branch of the healing arts.” 1 Category I continuing education is “presented by a person qualified by practical or academic experience” and may consist of lectures, panel discussions, workshops, seminars, symposiums, and other formal learning opportunities. 2 The requirements are 20 hours of this education annually.
Category II continuing education comprises activities that are less formal, such as “clinical consultations with other healing arts practitioners that contribute to a practitioner’s education, participation in activities to review the quality of patient care, instructing healing arts and other health care practitioners, patient-centered discussions with other health care practitioners, participating in journal clubs, using searchable electronic databases in connection with patient care activities. and
using self-instructional materials.” 3 The requirements are 30 hours of this education annually.
Of note, HB 2615 doesn’t seem to specify into which category will fall the hours of continuing medical education earned by providing service to needy patients.
Kansas National Education Association, the state’s teachers union, opposes a bill that empowers teachers.
A bill in the Kansas Senate would give teachers an ongoing voice in determining who represents them in their relationship with their employer. The bill is SB 469, titled “Recertification of professional employees’ organizations under the professional negotiations act.” It would require that the Kansas Department of Labor hold an election each year in each school district regarding whether the current representation should continue. These elections, in effect, would be referendums on the teachers union, by the teachers. (Update: The bill has been revised to call for elections every third year.)
We’ve known for a long time that the purpose of teachers unions is to advance the narrow, parochial interests of teachers instead of Kansas schoolchildren, parents, and taxpayers. Now we see that the leadership of the union is more concerned with the existence of the union and their highly-paid jobs. Who cares what teachers think?
As it turns out, the union believes it knows what teachers think. In a message, the Kansas teachers union writes: “So, in short, anyone who works in our schools — board members, superintendents, administrators, and teachers — all oppose the bill.” I’d like to know how the union knows that everyone opposes the bill. The union might be surprised to learn there are teachers who are opposed to the union. These teachers, as professional employees, might not like working under rules more suited for blue-collar labor. These teachers might not like being paid according to a schedule that pays bad teachers the same as the good. They might not like being associated with an organization that promotes a false assessment of Kansas schools that is harmful to Kansas schoolchildren. These teachers might like to work in a charter school, something that the teachers union fights. There are even more reasons why Kansas schoolteachers might not like being associated with the Kansas National Education Association and its affiliates like United Teachers of Wichita.
A bill requiring teachers unions to stand for retention elections each year would be good for teachers, students, and taxpayers.
The bill is SB 469, titled “Recertification of professional employees’ organizations under the professional negotiations act.” It would require that the Kansas Department of Labor hold an election each year in each school district regarding whether the current representation should continue. These elections, in effect, would be referendums on the teachers union, by the teachers. (Update: The bill has been revised to call for elections every third year.)
That’s a good thing. The teachers union monopoly ought to stand for retention once in a while.
The bill has an estimated cost of $340,000 annually, including the hiring of 4 employees. But this is a situation ideally suited for outsourcing to one of the many companies that can perform this work. It would undoubtedly be less expensive and would not require the hiring of employees to do a job that is seasonal in nature.
Further, the professional employees’ organization (union) that represents each district ought to bear the cost of the elections, if they want to continue representing a district.
How effective has the teachers union been in advocating for teachers? In particular, teachers in the Wichita public school district ought to be wondering about the benefit of its union. The contract for this year did not include a pay increase, although the teachers do get some additional time off as the school year was shortened by two days. (Which makes us ask: Where is the concern by the board or teachers for the welfare of the students?)
Wichita public school salaries and change. Click for larger.As far as performance over time, since 2008 teacher salaries in Wichita rose by 2.6 percent. Salaries for principals rose by 8.1 percent over the same period. Statewide, the increase in teacher pay was 7.7 percent, and for principals, 10.9 percent.
On top of that, the Wichita teachers union takes credit for providing benefits that aren’t really benefits, such as when it promoted that only United Teachers of Wichita members would receive a copy of the employment agreement. In reality, it is a public document that anyone has the right to possess.
There are many reasons why Kansas schoolteachers might be unhappy with their current union representation, including:
Creating an adversarial environment for public schools in Kansas. Instead of cooperating on education matters, the union foments conflict with taxpayers.
Forcing professional employees to work under rules more suited for blue-collar labor.
Working to deny Kansas teachers a choice in representation. 1
Promoting a false assessment of Kansas schools that is harmful to Kansas schoolchildren. 2
Forming a task force to promote a false grassroots impression of support for the teachers union, complete with pre-determined talking points on a secret web page. 3
Encouraging party-switching to vote in primary elections to protect union members’ “professional interests.” 4
Constant drumbeat for more school spending without regard to competing interests and taxpayers.5 and taxes to support it.6
Opposing the introduction of a modern retirement system, instead preferring to saddle Kansans with billions of dollars in debt.7
As you might imagine, Kansas National Education Association and its affiliates like United Teachers of Wichita are not happy that teachers might have an annual opportunity to judge the union, and in a way that has consequences.
