Opinion: Schools Need to Get Smart About Spending

(Sept. 20) -- Parents across the country are seeing firsthand the effects of tight school budgets this year.

Hawaii, for example, cut back to a four-day school week for much of last spring. San Jose, Calif., delayed the start of bus services for hundreds of special-needs students until several weeks after school began this fall. School districts in Texas and Alabama have told parents to buy garbage bags, Clorox wipes and other cleaning supplies, because the district will no longer provide them.

Elsewhere, schools are trimming bus routes, turning down thermostats, delaying textbook purchases, cutting school days and imposing across-the-board layoffs.

This situation is especially noteworthy because it's just the beginning.

Tighter school budgets are not a one-shot deal. Given the heavy reliance of school districts on property tax dollars, grim budget forecasts, the end of stimulus funds and the demands of underfunded pensions, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better.

"There are so many issues that go way beyond the current downturn," says Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. "This is an awful time for states fiscally, but they're even more worried about 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014." This summer, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that states are already looking at 2012 shortfalls in excess of $100 billion.

Yet, rather than seizing on these fiscal realities to streamline and improve schools, far too many states and districts are proceeding as if it's business as usual, kicking the can down the road until they're forced to make clumsy, last-minute, disruptive cuts.

Take Los Angeles, where the school district just completed a $578 million high school even as it frets about shortfalls -- and while California collects $1.2 billion in emergency "Edujobs" aid from the federal government.

For more than a half century, K-12 per-pupil spending has been higher each year than it was the year before. The problem is that no one makes tough choices in flush times. No for-profit or nonprofit executives are eager to squeeze salaries, shutter inefficient programs, squeeze out savings or trim employees when they can avoid it.

That's why economic downturns can have a silver lining. Tough times allow (and encourage) managers to tackle problems that otherwise get swept under the carpet. This permits organizations to regain their fighting trim.

Most districts haven't had a meaningful house cleaning in decades. Far too many school districts are careless about deploying talent, undisciplined at the negotiating table, lax about pursuing operational efficiencies and in need of a severe belt-tightening.

But instead of using the current climate to make the tough calls needed, schools are doing everything they can to maintain the status quo.

Indeed, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan touted August's $10 billion teacher aid bill by saying, "Today's historic vote means school officials won't need to make those tough calls." Duncan has said that while "we want people to be responsible to be efficient," the public should understand that many districts have been cutting for years and have already cut "through, you know, fat, through flesh, and into bone."

Duncan's claims are just flat wrong. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that, nationally, K-12 per-pupil expenditures climbed 17 percent from 2003-04 to 2006-07 (the most recent school year for which the organization reports spending) -- from $8,310 to $9,683. Indeed, nationally, per-pupil spending rose every year between World War II and 2007.

Even in the past two years, job losses in K-12 have been much more modest than in the private sector. It's a shame to see Duncan making excuses rather than encouraging educators to take a hard look at benefits, staffing, operations and management.

Rather than haphazardly dialing down thermostats, delaying book purchases and laying off young teachers, districts should use the current crunch to rethink how they do business.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book, "Stretching the School Dollar," was published earlier this month by the Harvard Education Press.