How appropriate that the sun is shining this morning, after a a stormy first half of the week.

Yesterday, HB1849/*SB0872, a bill allowing elected superintendents (at the discretion of County Commission) failed in the House Education Committee on a 6-9 vote. For that, I am thankful.

Superintendents (now called Directors of Schools, but old habits die hard) have a difficult job — one of managing large budgets, personnel, and implementing policy set by an elected board. It’s decidedly a job for a professional, and the type of expertise needed by a school system varies depending on its immediate and long-term goals.

The qualities needed to be elected to public office may or may not be consistent with the qualities needed in a professional director of schools. Worse, most school systems in this state would have a rather limited pool to choose from simply due to population limitations. When Oak Ridge chose a new Director of Schools several years ago, the Board conducted a national search with the assistance of the Tennessee School Boards Association for recruiting and screening.

The present system demands a largely cooperative relationship between the Director and the elected Board of Education, with the former being accountable to the latter. The Board is accountable to the electorate, with the front-line educators insulated from the politics of it all. As they should be.

Voting against HB1849 in committee yesterday were John Hood, Mark Maddox, Joe Towns, Ulysses Jones, Larry Turner, Tommie Brown, Gerald McCormick, Dolores Gresham, and Speaker Jimmy Naifeh — I’ll be writing each of them today to thank them.

Voting for the bill were Les Winningham, Harry Brooks, Richard Montgomery, Beth Harwell, John Mark Windle, and Eric Swafford. These are not bad people; indeed, at least two (that I know of) have served as school superintendents before. They were, however, pressured by their respective county commissions, and voted wrongly on this one.

* * * BEP/Fiscal Capacity
On Tuesday, the News Sentinel reported that House sponsors of an effort to change the BEP’s fiscal capacity formula to a flawed model favoring the four largest metro school systems abandoned the cause for this year, with plans going forward for a study this summer to achieve a consensus on funding changes.

Change is desperately needed, but not the kind where money is just moved around from one system to another. If we are to improve statewide, then the State must commit to pay for those things it requires, while giving local governments the option to provide more if they so choose.

I’ll take a temporary win over a permanent loss, but we have to make sure that cities like Oak Ridge, Kingsport, Athens, Cleveland, Tullahoma, Clinton, and Murfreesboro have a seat at the table when changes are discussed.

Having dogged this issue for almost two years now, I’ll say it again: we can’t give up until this proposal is dead, buried, with grass growing on top.

The Commercial Appeal reports that an education task force formed to study consolidation of the Memphis and Shelby County school systems has instead reported on three potential methods to change the way those school systems are funded, without consolidating.

All three freeze the current school system boundaries, to avoid the conflict that inevitably arises when Memphis annexes property, and the residents don’t want to change from Shelby County to Memphis City Schools.

The differences fall in who gets taxed more, and whether those tax dollars stay in the resident’s school district or go predominantly toward the other. In all cases, taxing authority is removed from the City or County government, and placed in the hands of the school boards (and/or State Legislature).

Despite the fact that under the current system, for every dollar raised by Shelby County taxpayers for their own schools, $3 goes to the Memphis City Schools (due to the fact that the County system has three times as many students), the fact that Memphis teacher salaries are the highest in the state, and that Memphis spends more per student than any school system in Tennessee, Memphis school officials aren’t happy with the proposals:

“Every time the community, the powers-that-be, have a conversation about schools, I feel like Memphis city schools comes second,” Memphis school board member Wanda Halbert said. “That’s starting to weigh heavy on me.”

I think what would weigh heavy on me is spending that much money to produce the worst results in the state. I know that Memphis has a higher density of students that are more difficult — more expensive — to educate, but sooner or later, someone’s going to have to come up with a plan that correlates dollars with results.

That doesn’t mean that they have to produce the greatest number of National Merit Finalists, but there has to be a workable plan for improvement. Perhaps a good start would be to require that teachers show positive value-added scores for any pay increase (including cost-of-living); step increases should require documentation of extraordinary gains — perhaps measured by a combination of value-added test scores and other means.

Just paying the same teachers more — more than any others in the state — clearly isn’t getting the job done.

One of the drivers behind the move to a system-level fiscal capacity formula for determining levels of state education funding is the phenomenon of shared vs. unshared revenue. In short, counties must share all locally-derived education funds between all school systems in the county, where cities with municipal school systems may augment that funding from additional property or sales taxes, without sharing with the county.

Of course, this means that city residents are paying higher taxes in order to support funding their schools better; it also means that counties have no way to close the gap in per-pupil spending, since any increase on behalf of the county generates a proportional increase to any municipal system within the county as well.

SB888/HB1263 (McNally/Winningham) would provide a remedy to that problem, but one that is completely at the county commission’s discretion, by enabling counties to increase property taxes in areas outside municipal school districts, with the proceeds going only to the county school system. In short, it would give counties a source of unshared revenue just like cities have, enabling them to narrow or close the gap in local per-pupil funding.

Passage of this legislation would remove the purported justification for the mistreatment of municipal school systems in TACIR’s proposed system-level fiscal capacity formula, where higher taxes paid for education by city residents are counted as a measure of wealth (reducing state funding) rather than effort (which should increase state funding, but does not).

It would not fix the core problem, which is the State’s chronic underfunding of education generally. It would, however, provide local governments with a way to address the problem of disparity between city and county school funding at the local level. It would also cause TACIR to re-evaluate the formula for determining fiscal capacity, and eliminate the factors that penalize cities for doing what they should be doing — and what the State should encourage rather than punish.

It survived the Senate committee process last year, but never made it to a vote in the full Senate (although it’s still active, being the second year of a two-year session); this year, the House companion has been deferred twice in the State & Local Government Committee, now scheduled for a committee vote on April 4. Stay tuned.

Since it’s entirely permissive rather than mandatory, there’s no reason to oppose it.

Tennessee has a number of “special school districts,” which differ from any other school district only in that the tax rate for education operations is set by the Legislature, by private act, according to the school board’s request. The result is that the county commission (or other local government) doesn’t have control of school funding; the other side of the coin is that school board members may incur greater blame for raising taxes (albeit indirectly).

For some years now, no new special school districts have been allowed to form. Legislation was introduced last year (HB1982/SB2062) that would allow existing school districts to convert to a special school district.

In counties that have been starved for funding by their county commissions — given only the amount required by law, which is not less than the year before — this bill would give relief and enable the school boards to make necessary budget improvements.

I wouldn’t advocate that Oak Ridge do so, but we have a much better working relationship with our City Council than most. Still, it could help many struggling school systems.

Although it passed the full Senate on May 11 of last year, it was amended as follows:

… any LEA in a county containing more than one (1) LEA with a total average daily membership (ADM) combined population that exceeds one hundred thousand (100,000), may convert to a special school district.

The only county in Tennessee with more than 100,000 students (average daily membership) is Shelby County. And they just happen to have two LEA’s (local education authorities, or school systems). Memphis City is already a special school district, so this bill was amended to apply only to Shelby County Schools. Who, incidentally, are not among the chronically underfunded.

The House version has not yet been amended, and is scheduled for subcommittee hearing tomorrow. I hope that they decline to amend it, and that the amendment can be dropped in conference committee.

I’ve long despised our Legislature’s practice of crafting generalized legislation then amending it to fit only a few; it’s always done is such a way that one has to look up population data to figure out who gets the benefit or the shaft. This case exemplifies the reason for my distrust.