Argue: 245 districts is too many
Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2008
It isn’t enough for the state to send money to school districts. It should also tell them how to spend it, Sen. Jim Argue said in an education conference Tuesday.
Argue, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the past eight years of education legislation has brought equitable financing to all Arkansas schools. Now, he said, the state needs to ensure that money is spent properly.
That may mean consolidating some of the 245 public school districts, he said.
“Educating children is a state responsibility, so what are we doing with 245 branch offices ?” he said.
Argue, a Democrat from Little Rock, is term-limited and won’t return to the 2009 session of the Arkansas Legislature, but he offered his “swan song” of advice to education leaders who gathered in downtown Little Rock for a daylong conference.
The conference — “Adequacy Achieved... Now What: The State of Education in Arkansas, 2008” — was organized by the Office for School Reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
About 100 legislators, state Department of Education staff, education organization leaders, school district superintendents and school board members as well as foundation operators attended Tuesday’s panel discussions on public school funding, student achievement and education initiatives.
Now that each school receives an adequate amount of money, Argue said in his keynote speech, the state needs to follow that money with a demand for more accountability.
Argue said school district leadership across the state is inconsistent, ranging from excellent to mediocre. Reducing the number of districts would make delivering a high-quality education to every child more efficient, he said.
“We have far too many districts that are still focused on survival, rather than on enriching the opportunity of the students,” Argue said.
Some school district consolidation has already occurred. Act 60 of the special legislative session on education in 2003 set 350 as the minimum number of students necessary to operate a school district. More than 50 Arkansas school districts have had to merge with other districts since 2004 because of the law.
Argue called the past eight years an “era of progress,” in which academic achievement increased and financial support of schools became more equitable. Now the state needs to focus on closing the academic achievement gap between white and black students, improving teacher recruitment and retention, paying higher salaries to teachers of critical subject areas, reducing the employee cost of health insurance and recruiting more children into highquality preschool programs.
Later Tuesday at a panel discussion, Sen. Steve Bryles, D-Blytheville, said it’s hard to find a sympathetic ear at the state Capitol for rural schools. Many face a cycle of losing students and then losing financing, he said, which leads to the loss of more students and ultimately a merger with another district.
“We all know the issues that face rural schools; it’s no secret,” said Bryles, a member of the Senate Education Committee.
He said many rural school districts in Arkansas are declining in enrollment.
“Our school funding system is based on per-student funding; it’s based on growth.” Nevertheless, Bryles said he supports efforts to improve schools and that the movement to raise student achievement isn’t going to end.
“You are hearing this from someone who has a rural constituency, and I have a district that is slipping below 350 [students ], much to my chagrin, and I love them and want to see them be successful and will do everything I can to be helpful.
“ Yet I want those children to have the opportunity to participate in an enriched curriculum and if we can’t provide it under the law,” he said, “then something’s got to happen.” The topics of the three different panel discussions Tuesday focused on education in the aftermath of the 2002 Arkansas Supreme Court decision that found the state’s public education system to be inequitable, inadequate and, as a result, unconstitutional. Lawmakers in the 2003, 2005 and 2007 legislative sessions responded to the court order by revamping the school funding formula, creating a state funding system for renovating and building schools, and giving the state authority to hold districts responsible for their student achievement and financial solvency.
“In the past four years, general education has received about 50 percent of the entire state’s budget,” Joshua Barnett, a senior research associate in the Office for Education Policy, said in a session on school finance, facilities and academic achievement. “Over the last four years we have increased total funding — from state, local, federal and other sources — for education by 27 percent.” About $ 4. 5 billion from the various revenue sources is now earmarked for public, general education, up from $ 3. 4 billion in 2003-04. That is attributable to a “huge effort” by the state Legislature, he said. The average amount of funding per student in 2003-04 was $ 7, 696. That increased to $ 9, 736 in 2006-07.
Average per pupil expenditures have increased by 26 percent from an average of $ 6, 578 in 2003-04 to $ 8, 315 last year.
Barnett, who recently completed a study analyzing school district spending, reported that the state’s average teacher salary that once dragged near the bottom of the 50 states is pushing the national average. And he determined that per pupil funding in Arkansas is second only to Missouri among the neighboring states and is equal to the national average.
“That is something Arkansas should celebrate,” Barnett said. “Legislators should be congratulated on that but we should not rest on our heels. We should continue to push forward.” Barnett determined that there are some growing differences in expenditures among districts. But he suggested that some of those disparities are acceptable because the greater per pupil spending is occurring in districts with higher percentages of poor students and / or black and Hispanic students. The poor and students in minority groups on average achieve at lower rates than their white or more affluent classmates.
More of a concern, he said, might be findings that larger districts continue to pay higher salaries than do smaller districts, and that districts serving higher percentages of low-income students are paying lower average teacher salaries than districts with low rates of student poverty.
Gary Ritter, director of the Office for School Reform, said he anticipates making the conference, held at the Peabody Little Rock hotel, an annual event.
“This falls within our general charge — sharing information with policymakers and creating discussions among policy makers and researchers to help folks make the best decisions,” Ritter said. “We are to be watchdogs and information disseminators.”
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