One of the tots got into a fight at school. With the teacher. About the millage proposed by the Washtenaw Intermediate School District (WISD).
Education has changed since I was a kid. My teachers talked about things like the beauty of long division and the evils of sloppy cursive. The tot related the story to me, and described the teacher as red-faced and “pissed off.” Why? Because the tot argued against the not-yet-proposed city income tax and questioned whether the WISD needed the millage. Shouldn’t our schools spend the money they have more carefully, my budding fiscal conservative (at least as far as others are concerned) wondered out loud to his teacher, before coming to taxpayers for a hand-out? Is it the best time to hit up taxpayers whose economic circumstances may have changed for the worse? Why not just get rid of the WISD? All valid questions.
Funding for education is, alas, more about politics than it is about educating children. It all boils down to begging, borrowing or stealing enough money make payroll, having enough cash to keep up with the crushing retiree health care and pension obligations smothering school districts around the country, and having a little left over to give the Art Teacher $500 bucks a year for supplies to use when teaching 300 kids. Education has become like the health care industry: no matter how much money taxpayers throw at it, the results don't seem to ever be as stellar as we'd like. In Ann Arbor, our District has a pronounced achievement gap. In February 2008, the Ann Arbor News published a piece that summed it up thusly, "The district has long had a gap in the test scores, grade point averages, graduation rate and suspension rate between white and minority students." In 2004, Time published a particularly gruesome exposé about the Ann Arbor School District's achievement gap. Then, in March 2009, the Ann Arbor News published a piece titled, "Achievement Gap Tackled in New Ann Arbor Schools Policy."
And we're throwing $9,490 dollars per year at each student enrolled in the AAPS. Ann Arbor School Musings blog has an interesting comparison of per pupil spending in the entire WISD here. In 2007-2008, WISD schools spent a staggering $466 million dollars to educate a total of 46,704 students. Well, kinda. You see, according to a piece posted to AnnArbor.com, "About 23.5 cents of every dollar went toward traditional central office functions like instruction coordinators, the business office, district administrators and building administrators." That's $109,000,000 every year for the nice folks to administer the WISD. The WISD spent 58 cents out of every dollar on educating those 46,704 students. So that's $270,280,000 to educate the tots. Looked at another way, WISD administration gets almost $.40 cents for every $1.00 spent on instruction.
It's all about the Money. In this case, tax dollars.
If the WISD were a mutual fund, and tried to hit investors with a 23.5 percent management and administrative fee, the scam would die a quick and deserved death. The average management and administration fee at a mutual fund is between 1 and 2 percent per year, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course mutual funds make money to cover overhead in other ways, but my point is this, spending $.40 cents on administration for every $1.00 spent on instruction is a sign that there is something terribly out of whack at the WISD Central Office.
Over at Concentrate, guest blogger Amy Goodson (Amy's bio is here) arguesin favor of the WISD millage when she writes that "literacy builds sustainable communities." As much as I would love to jump on Goodson's bandwagon and attribute sustainable community to literacy, and literacy to the success of the WISD millage, I can't. I understand the point she is trying to make, but I think because she's using it to argue in favor of a millage to support the WISD, she simply uses the broadest of strokes to make her argument. In Michigan, there is a generation of people who worked at the auto companies and could move into high-paying jobs with, perhaps,Level 1 literacy skills. The Glass House in Dearborn is a monument to Henry Ford's ingenuity, but not to Ford's education; Henry Ford dropped out of school at 15. But in the 1920s and 30s when old man Ford was cranking out Tin Lizzies by the million, the literacy rate in the United States was 95 percent.
According to a piece about literacy worldwide published in The Guardian in March of this year, Washtenaw County has a literacy rate that is 11 points below the U.S. current average of 99 percent. Our County's 88 percent literacy rate is equal to that of Turkey (88 percent), and equal to that of the United States in 1890. Wayne County's Level 1 literacy rate is 70 percent, and only 69 percent of Lake County residents have Level 1 literacy skills. Washtenaw County, in fact, has one of the highest rates of Level 1 literacy in the state of Michigan.
Of course we can do better. However, a percentage of those 12 percent of Washtenaw County residents (about 27,000 individuals) classified as not having Level 1 literacy skills, are adults for whom English is not their first language. They are literate, just in a different language. More to the point still, according to the Washtenaw County Literacy Coalition all of the individuals in Washtenaw County classified as lacking Level 1 literacy skills are adults.
Thus, the proposed millage for the WISD will have little impact the literacy rate of adults in our county. It will, however, allow those who administer the WISD to continue to skim $.40 cents off of every dollar spent on educating our county's students.
Note: If you want to vote in the Weekend Poll: "Do You Support the WISD Millage?" click here.