But as bold as that was, it was not the biggest trick played in Alabama Thursday. It is hard to get attention for acting crazy these days. The competition is stiff.
Republicans in the Alabama Legislature, in a move that would make junior high SGA political operatives jealous, pulled the old switcheroo. The House of Representatives had been debating the "Flex" Education Bill, House Bill 84, for two or three weeks. It was an eight page proposed bill that allowed schools to request to be relieved of certain restrictions and requirements of the State Board of Education in order to experiment with new and hopefully better practices. The bill was in committee for discussion on a couple of points of contention. Four Republicans on the committee excused themselves from the meeting, leaving the two Democratic members behind, and returned an hour or so later with a 28 page bill that bore little resemblance to the one they left with, or to the one that had been debated for days, or the one that legislators had read.
It came out of committee immediately. It was passed by the House within minutes. The Senate quickly followed suit by passing the newly revised House Bill. Governor Bentley issued a prepared statement while the lights were still on reflecting the votes.. All of this was done, over the wailing and gnashing of teeth by minority Democrats, in a period of two or three hours.
I wonder how many legislators knew what they were voting on. I still have not been able to read the bill that was passed. The HB 84 I could find as of tonight was still eight pages. The one that came out of committee is unpublished.
But, according to a bushel of news reports, the act will allow parents of students who are attending "failing" schools to transfer their kids to another public or private school, and take a tax credit of up to $3500 for tuition paid to the new school. There are other things in there too, I am sure. I will read it as soon as I can.
I don't know whether the new law is good policy or not. I hope it works out. I do have some questions.
Is it wise, when the education budget and state revenues are already in peril, to pass a new law that could quite reasonably be expected to reduce state revenue by millions of dollars?
What are "failing" schools? The initial list, which is unofficial, circulated by Republican legislators last week, had about two hundred schools on it. Two of them are in Blount County. Some of those schools have shown improvement in the recent past and seem poised to make rapid improvement. Improvement which will be wiped away with a reduction in students and loss of funds.
Was it wise to formulate and pass this major change in educational policy with almost no input from teachers and education administrators, including the State Board of Education?
Are private schools going to submit to State requirements for determination of whether they are also "failing"?
Are private schools going to willingly submit to the requirements that may be imposed on them by this subsidizing of their revenues by the State government? That might be a little tricky for the private religious schools. Maybe the legislature thought about it. Maybe they didn't. But that's what we have courts for, unless they decide to continue to reduce funding for that as well.
One might ask why the Republican legislators moved so quickly, so secretly. It was as if they were planning to go after Osama Bin Laden. Oh wait, that's been done. But the Alabama legislature has a knack for avoiding real present problems by revisiting the past.
The obvious answer was that they didn't want input. Everyone familiar with educational legislative proposals knows that educators are one of the few groups who will get on the phone, or come to the capitol, to let their legislators know what they think about proposed legislation. Thousands of them.
And the Republican legislators did not have time to listen to that. After all, they only had a couple of hours to get this done.
Before somebody found out. Before somebody discovered they were impersonators, pretending to represent the people.
But it was quite a trick.
If you're in junior high.
I wouldn't say they aren't representing the people. They are representing me. They just aren't representing the AEA exclusively anymore...which can only benefit the school children.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very interesting bill (I can only assume since it's not available), with all kinds of potential unintended consequences, as is the case any time you incentivize an action within the tax code.
ReplyDeleteWithin the context of a state budget, Republicans (and perhaps some Democrats) would tell you that the bill will save the state millions of dollars a year on education if the tax credit was utilized at some level, primarily by students switching from public to private schools. They are absolutely correct on that. It costs public and private systems much more than the $3,500 dollars per student to run a school, and the total of local and state funding would be reduced by much more than the $3,500 tax expenditure(although this certainly would not be a dollar for dollar reduction between the cost of the tax credit and the average cost per pupil). Where might the extra monetary burden be shifted?
While the short term budgetary impacts could be positive, here are a few long term issues I worry about...
The first and most obvious, this wreaks of being another tax break to assist individuals who already send their children to private school rather than an incentive to get parents to move their children from failing schools. Show me a private school where tuition is close to $3,500 and offers a quality education. I've never heard of one. Probably not an effective incentive to tell parents they now have the freedom to move their children to a terrible private school. If children already enrolled in private schools are the main beneficiaries of the new law, then the state would stand to lose a great deal of revenue, without the commensurate improvement in educational outcomes.
I would also question what type of "private schools" might arise out of such a law. In Tennessee we have a high number of bad, yet relatively expensive private schools, especially in rural areas. I fear parts of Alabama might suffer a similar fate. I think the problem of providing quality education to rural areas was one of the original reasons for state funded and (in most cases) mandated childhood education.
How does this law impact education? Its two most likely effects are to reduce tax revenue and/or to incentivize the creation of inadequate private schools. Neither of these most likely scenarios helps to improve long term education outcomes in the State of Alabama.
It is likely that over the course of decades the state could stand to lose many more millions of dollars by implementing this policy, relative to a concentrated focus on improving the existing education system (whether through charter schools, pay for performance, common core, union busting). The lost revenue resulting from the reduced earning power and subsequent reduction in tax revenues of a less educated workforce, increased spending on projected outlays for entitlements such as Medicaid and increased expenses relative to the criminal justice system, both of which are shown to increase as education decreases, are likely to more than offset the potential savings to education.
Not only is it a bad idea, but the scope is all wrong. This is the type of policy that is typically tested and targeted to a small specific area with a high number of failing schools and a reasonable number of private school alternatives. A large urban area might make sense for such a policy to be implemented, but certainly not an entire state, at least not initially.
Disclaimer: It is possible that parents who currently send their kids to under performing schools, might be able to afford the additional payments of anywhere from $7,000-$17,000 a year to send their kids to a good private school. It is also possible that private school prices might decrease by 50-80% making it an affordable option, but for some reason I'm a little skeptical.