A Coming Crisis in Suburban Schooling? by Lewis Andrews

The following piece was sent to us by Kevin Killion of The Illinois Loop.org. If you are not a regular reader of the Illinois Loop.org besure to add it to your list. The piece below is published by the Yankee Institute. To view all of their articles on school reform be sure to visit the Yankee Institute website.


A significant and important article appears in the new July/August issue of The American Enterprise:

   A Coming Crisis in Suburban Schooling?
   by Lewis Andrews

The article is copied in its entirety below.  I encourage you to note its observations about the state of suburban education, and where it might be leading.  The key themes of the article are:

1) "Bell and whistle bonanza"
"While the vast majority of Americans have historically accepted a common interest in paying for the education of successive generations, today's suburban parents and educators have increasingly abused that sense of obligation. Families are more and more being provided with benefits that go far beyond any traditional notion of required schooling. ... very little of the heavy funding funneled into schools in wealthy commuter districts was spent on improved academic performance. ... Where then does this surplus money go? Much of what passes for a quality education today in America's prosperous suburbs has little to do with academic rigor."

2) "Middle-class racketeering"
"The existence of self-serving relationships between municipal officials and the public employees they supposedly supervise is hardly news. But suburban school boards and administrators are especially gifted in their ability to portray mutual backscratching to the broader taxpaying public as academic idealism. Organized public-school parents have in many places ensured that both Republicans and Democrats produce local candidates who think identically on the 65 to 80 percent of local expenditures that are related to public education. On most school boards and town councils, would-be reformers have little or no influence."

3) "Backlash on property taxes"
"With house assessments ballooning, the property taxes that support most schools are becoming onerous burdens for many newlyweds, widows, families with children in private or parochial schools, or older couples on fixed pensions. Property tax collections went up an average of 23 percent nationwide between 2000 and 2004 ... clearer connections are beginning to be established in many taxpayers' minds between skyrocketing public school costs and ever steeper real estate levies. ... In what is perhaps the most ominous sign for suburban parents and public educators, the leadership of local taxpayer groups -- historically dismissed as 'kooks' and 'cranks' -- is becoming more politically sophisticated."

4) "Priced out and dumbed down"
"Perhaps the most telling defectors from suburban education are the growing numbers of parents who believe that local schools are failing in their most important obligation -- to provide children ... with a challenging and academically sound curriculum. ... Many suburbanites are just as concerned about low academic standards in local schools as urban and rural parents are known to be. On April 28, 2001, the New York Times ran a front page story entitled 'Parents Hungry for ABCs Lead New School Movement.' It profiled Princeton, New Jersey parents who had become 'horrified' by the poor quality of local education and founded a no-frills charter school, free from the yoke of district bureaucracy and dedicated to a more demanding academic curriculum. Today ... charter schools are starting to become more common in affluent suburbs."  (This section has a nice mention of our Looper friend Margaret McIntyre, tireless education activist in Wilmette!)

5) "Mediocrity forever?"
"Certainly many of the suburban schools just down the street are much less successful in getting top results than many parents glibly assume. 'A lot of suburban Americans are living in a kind of fantasyland' right now, says education expert Chester Finn. ... Public education in America's suburbs could soon experience some jarring and unexpected changes. And you know what? That is long overdue."


Make use of this article in your own local efforts! You are not alone in working for better education options in the suburbs!

The article is part of several articles on education in this July/August issue of American Enterprise (it's available at Border's and other stores with good magazine selections).  The cover story on "Education Fairy Tales: Our 'money-starved' schools and other costly myths" also will be of great interest to some of the participants on the Illinois Loop list.

For more on suburban schools, see our roundup page at:
     Illinois Loop: The Suburbs
     http://www.illinoisloop.org/suburbs.html

-- Kevin Killion'

==========================================

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE
July/August 2006
A Coming Crisis in Suburban Schooling?
by Lewis M. Andrews
Lewis M. Andrews is executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Hartford, Connecticut


We are all accustomed to the idea that America faces problems in its public education systems. But mostly it's the other guy's school, in the city next door, where we think the troubles center. Suburban schools in neighborhoods with rising home prices -- those are the ones where U.S. education is just fine. Right?

Not exactly. Suburbia is afflicted with its own problems of public school mediocrity. That much is beginning to become apparent to some striving middle-class parents. And there's another threat stalking public education in upscale commuter enclaves that hasn't even begun to sink into the public consciousness: money troubles.
Bell and whistle bonanza

The tax base supporting public education in the suburbs is broad. Those who have no children contribute. So do families who send their children to private schools. Couples who have seen their children graduate and move out are also paying. The beneficiaries, meanwhile, are a much smaller group. Families with children attending public schools can easily net a yearly gain from the community of $10,000-$20,000 in educational services.
While the vast majority of Americans have historically accepted a common interest in paying for the education of successive generations, today's suburban parents and educators have increasingly abused that sense of obligation. Families are more and more being provided with benefits that go far beyond any traditional notion of required schooling. Last year, a researcher at the Yankee Institute for Public Policy at Trinity College completed a study of every school district in Connecticut, a state noted for its affluent suburbs. Using per pupil costs and student scores on mastery tests, he found that very little of the heavy funding funneled into schools in wealthy commuter districts was spent on improved academic performance. "Many affluent towns spend much more.. .for the same educational outcomes," the study concluded.
Where then does this surplus money go? Much of what passes for a quality education today in America's prosperous suburbs has little to do with academic rigor. "Quality" has become a deceptive code word for an ever-expanding menu of non-essential services, hobbies, and recreational activities for school children and their families. These include low-cost forms of day care (both before and after school), expensive and eclectic sports programs, holiday "socials," subsidized recreation camps run out of public school buildings during summers and holidays, and a variety of school-day distractions for students like pottery and ballet lessons, cafeteria pasta bars, media centers with state-of-the-art video technology, glitzy rooms overflowing with shiny electronic equipment, and even costly observatories, stadiums, and galleries.

High schools in commuter enclaves outside of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other large cities have curricula as diverse as many small colleges, offering credit for hundreds of nonacademic electives, including courses in jewelry making, computer animation, and television. The burgeoning cost of these services is only partially reflected in the staffing lines of annual school operating budgets. Much of the expense is buried in 20- to 30-year bonding for school additions and renovations. "Back in the 1950s and '60s," explains James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Public Policy at Rutgers University, schools "were so much cheaper. You didn't have the bells and whistles. A lot of high schools now have TV studios, swimming pools, and computer labs. The schools have to be triple-wired and air conditioned."

Persuading taxpayers that high school pupils should have the right to take exotic electives has proven a surprisingly easy sell -- particularly since parent-dominated school boards have crafted mutually advantageous relationships with the educators they are supposed to be regulating. That's how we've ended up with thousands of suburban schools where all students are entitled to study video production or play golf at voter expense.
Middle-class racketeering

Margaret Tannenbaum, professor of education at New Jersey's Rowan University and formerly on the school board in her home town, notes that the resulting quid pro quos are never publicly stated, but always clearly understood. In most cases, she explains, parent board members know that being "supportive of the schools" is code for accommodating generous salary and benefit increases for unionized teachers and schools administrators. In return, even the most superfluous perks for suburban schoolchildren -- like academic credit for district-subsidized trips abroad -- are deemed "educational" by local school officials.
The existence of self-serving relationships between municipal officials and the public employees they supposedly supervise is hardly news. But suburban school boards and administrators are especially gifted in their ability to portray mutual backscratching to the broader taxpaying public as academic idealism. Organized public-school parents have in many places ensured that both Republicans and Democrats produce local candidates who think identically on the 65 to 80 percent of local expenditures that are related to public education. On most school boards and town councils, would-be reformers have little or no influence.

For their part, educators have developed a language which makes the self-serving policies of parents and teachers appear pedagogically sound. More financially efficient alternatives are characterized as "too risky" or "cold-hearted." Costly requirements like smaller class sizes, which create a need for more teachers and administrators, are consistently praised for the "personal attention" and "individualized instruction" they supposedly offer students. Such glowing phrases are rarely used to describe Internet-based courses, however, though they too can provide truly individualized instruction, without the need to hire more educators.

Biased language is supplemented with selective statistics. Washington Post education writer Jay Matthew has noted how suburban principals brag about the large number of advanced placement (AP) courses their schools offer, conveniently ignoring the fact that only a fraction of the students who take them actually earn college credit by passing an objective test. Suburban administrators similarly boast about the high percentage of seniors that go on to college. Few care to find out how many of their graduates drop out of college, or are required to take remedial courses in math, reading, and writing.

The successful partnership between suburban parents and professional educators is facilitated by Americas continuing tolerance for a blatant conflict of interest, whereby a school board member is permitted to vote on an issue that can directly affect his own family. It is not an exaggeration to say that public schooling in many suburbs is a form of upper-middle-class racketeering. Under the banner of "advancing learning;' parents of district children and their public-sector allies collaborate to serve their own narrow interests, at the expense of the broader taxpaying community.
Backlash on property taxes

One need only observe the swarms of angry parents who descend on local politicians whenever the school athletic budget is threatened, or see the care school boards take not to offend the inevitable union monitor at their meetings, to conclude that the vested interests currently driving suburban education are firmly in control. Yet history shows that recipients of public subsidies inevitably court opposition from those who pay the bills. And suburban public schools are beginning to come under fire.
Those with the most obvious reason to be critical are voters without children in public schools, many of them increasingly restless under heavy and soaring local tax burdens. With house assessments ballooning, the property taxes that support most schools are becoming onerous burdens for many newlyweds, widows, families with children in private or parochial schools, or older couples on fixed pensions. Property tax collections went up an average of 23 percent nationwide between 2000 and 2004, and are now approaching $300 billion -- totaling very close to what Americans spend annually on mortgage interest.

The true costs of suburban education are obscured in many parts of the country by regionalized school systems, which tap a labyrinth of funding sources, including state income taxes, state and local sales taxes, casino gaming licenses, and lottery profits. Nonetheless, clearer connections are beginning to be established in many taxpayers' minds between skyrocketing public school costs and ever steeper real estate levies. Led mostly by activist seniors, dissident taxpayer groups in Maine, Ohio, New Jersey, and Texas have succeeded in getting property-tax reductions on state or local ballots. Politicians in Nevada, Iowa, and Indiana have been forced to establish commissions on tax reduction; and the legislatures in South Carolina and Virginia are considering annual limitations on how much their localities can raise local levies.
In the Northeast in particular, where a long-standing tradition of each town managing its own school system gives local citizens the ability to vote on their school district budgets, a tax rebellion is clearly under way. ln a special report on Connecticut's 169 towns and cities, the state's Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) found that rejections of school budgets recently reached a peak "since ACIR started tracking these figures." Less than half of the budgets going to referendum were approved on the first vote.

In what is perhaps the most ominous sign for suburban parents and public educators, the leadership of local taxpayer groups -- historically dismissed as "kooks" and "cranks" -- is becoming more politically sophisticated. Just as the 1980s saw the creation of more than 40 state-oriented think tanks devoted to monitoring and shrinking the costs of government, so today there is a similar growth of county- and town-level groups. It is not a coincidence that the increased rejection rate of local budgets by Connecticut towns was accompanied by a doubling in the number of town taxpayer groups (from 25 to 50), with many employing spreadsheets, attractive Web sites, and well-researched policy papers.
Priced out and dumbed down

At the same time that watchdogs are becoming more effective politically, discontent is also brewing among some parents who in the past would have considered themselves beneficiaries of the public school system. In a 2003 book (written before the explosion in housing prices), Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren studied bankruptcy filings in America and found that the biggest squeeze on middle- and upper-middle-class families came from high mortgage payments and escalating property taxes on homes in towns with desirable public schools. Today, says Warren, "young parents buy houses with just three thoughts in mind: schools, schools, and schools:' The problem is that "in inflation-adjusted dollars, they're paying more than 70 percent more than their parents paid for a house." ln other words, lavish "free" public education is pricing many families out of homes and neighborhoods.
But perhaps the most telling defectors from suburban education are the growing numbers of parents who believe that local schools are failing in their most important obligation -- to provide children (between soccer games and class field trips) with a challenging and academically sound curriculum. University of Missouri political scientist Martin Rochester is one such parent. The low academic expectations at his own children's schools inspired him to conduct a 2003 survey of numerous suburban systems. He found many costly distractions from the basic educational tasks that should be the central work of schooling.

Another critic is Margaret McIntyre, a member of the Wilmette, Illinois school board from 1999 to 2003, who argues that the expensive infrastructure at suburban schools is intellectually counterproductive. "The spending on special programs, technology, and 'enrichments';' she writes, "actually crowds out time for math, reading, writing, geography, and history." She estimates that more than 40 percent of families in Chicago's affluent North Shore suburbs have been forced to pay for tutors and other supplemental instruction.

A recent poll on the subject of public education conducted by the Business Roundtable shows "overwhelming support for standards-based reform among all groups, regardless of race, income, or political party." Similar polls by the non-partisan Public Agenda suggest that many suburbanites are just as concerned about low academic standards in local schools as urban and rural parents are known to be.
On April 28, 2001, the New York Times ran a front page story entitled "Parents Hungry for ABCs Lead New School Movement." It profiled Princeton, New Jersey parents who had become "horrified" by the poor quality of local education and founded a no-frills charter school, free from the yoke of district bureaucracy and dedicated to a more demanding academic curriculum. Today, notes Joe Nathan, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change, charter schools are starting to become more common in affluent suburbs.
Mediocrity forever?

Could these political, financial, and academic trends combine to force a broad restructuring of suburban education? They might if there is a bursting of to day's inflated real estate bubble. The ensuing calls for proportional reductions in property taxes would surely increase pressure for a back-to-basics restructuring of public education. Rather than being a problem, such a development might be a good thing, to be welcomed by suburban parents now coping with mediocre public schooling by hiring tutors or sending their children to private or parochial institutions.
Even without impetus from home price distortions, change could come. Certainly the decades-old alliance between opportunistic parents and self-interested local educators is not nearly as sound as it appears. And certainly many of the suburban schools just down the street are much less successful in getting top results than many parents glibly assume. "A lot of suburban Americans are living in a kind of fantasyland" right now, says education expert Chester Finn. In an era of globalization and heightened competition in education and jobs, more sober and realistic assessments of the training being offered by typical neighborhood institutions may become inevitable.
Take a critical mass of disillusioned and financially pressed parents, add in the growing political clout of taxpayers without school-age children, the lax oversight of district budgeting, and a tempestuous real estate market, and public education in America's suburbs could soon experience some jarring and unexpected changes. And you know what? That is long overdue.


--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  The Illinois Loop
  http://www.illinoisloop.org/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------