On New Year’s eve, the Readiness Finance Commission presented a report to Governor Deval Patrick outlining an alleged combination of cost savings, school district restructuring, education reform strategies and potential new investments to help achieve the Governor’s Readiness Project. As you may recall, in June of 2008, Governor Patrick assembled the Readiness Finance Commission and charged it with presenting a variety of alternative means to achieve sustainable education funding for current needs and the sequenced investments necessary for a ten-year Readiness Project implementation plan.
The plan as presented by the Commission can be viewed by clicking here. A list and links to all of the other Readiness Project reports issued to date can be viewed by clicking here.
The goals and intent of the project are lofty, but some of the conclusions must be met with skepticism. The finance report focuses first on cost savings, presenting strategies for reducing employee health insurance and retiree benefit costs, maximizing Federal reimbursements to offset special education costs and promoting greater efficiency through regionalization and procurement and energy reform. Recognizing that cost savings and efficiencies alone will not be sufficient for full implementation of the Readiness Project reform strategies, many Commission members acknowledged that new investment would be required to fund current and future education reforms. In this context, many Commission members called for a balanced, multi-pronged approach requiring cost-cutting and efficiency strategies along with educational reform and revenue measures.
Initial reports on the Commission’s declarations point out that the assumptions of cost savings are noble but overstated. Also, as Glenn Koocher, the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, noted: “It reflects a real lack of knowledge about what it’s like to be in a community that supports its schools and the real lack of respect for parent empowerment and civic engagement that is the Achilles Heel of national education reformers.”
With regard to supposed enhanced revenues, it is important to point out that on the day before this report was issued, the Governor announced that he was preparing for up to $1 billion in additional mid-year budget cuts, raising the specter of possible reductions in local aid to municipalities and additional layoffs of state employees. This left many of us wondering how these expensive and well-intentioned projects can be pursued in the context of these other budget cutting measures.
We all support the notion that we must provide a public education system that more fully educates all students. Indeed, we have been working at this for many years. The problem is that we have educational theoreticians who produce reports, issue unfunded mandates, and forget that they are not elected lawmakers. Those of us who deal regularly with the real people they seek to control know that there are difficult tasks ahead, but we need collaboration and resources rather than dictates.
We must remember that all the policy recommendations outlined in the Readiness reports are just words on paper until the real policy makers – the state legislature – takes it all up anew. Until then, these reports will remain as untested theories, leaving those of us who are in the trenches to figure out how to manage our educational systems at the local level in the face of further budget cutting proclamations.
