Eligibility for the Tennessee Lottery Scholarship is very simple: a 3.0 grade point average upon graduation from high school, or a 21 on the ACT (required for admission to all Tennessee public universities).

Either / Or.

It allows for both kinds of students to succeed: those who have learned the material and can adequately perform on a test, as well as those who have learned the material and demonstrated as much in classroom performance, regardless of test-taking ability.

It is rather generous in terms of the preparation needed to succeed in a 4-year college or university, allowing also those who will seek an associate’s degree, technical school, or who will attend community college first.

Yet, Sen. Thelma Harper blasts the lottery scholarship program in today’s Chattanooga Times:

State Sen. Thelma Harper, D-Nashville, today criticized the Tennessee Education Lottery scholarship program for shortchanging black and low-income students, calling it a “disgrace.”

“I want you to tell me what’s wrong that black people can’t get scholarships,” she told members of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission’s regular quarterly meeting. “It sends a horrible message, and someone needs to re-evaluate how those lottery scholarships are being made.”

It’s a deeper question, Sen. Harper. The problem is not with the lottery scholarship; it’s with educating poor and black students to the same levels as everyone else. Any student who cannot attain either a 3.0 GPA or a 21 on the ACT doesn’t need to be in college — they cannot and will not succeed.

The problem is, to a large degree, cultural. It is one of role models, and of “fitting in” with the various groups of other students that inevitably form in school. It is a problem to some degree of parental involvement, expectations, and discipline.

Playing the race card in this way insultingly implies that poor and black students are unable to attain these minimum standards for college readiness — and it just isn’t true. They ARE able.

The real question is, how do we make them want to attain a higher educational standard?

Tennessee House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh announced his committee appointments on Thursday, yielding a similar “no surprise” composition as in the past. Of the 18-member committee:

• 6 represent Shelby Co./Memphis
• 11 represent the four Metro areas (Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville)
• 11 represent only school systems that would gain under the TACIR funding prototype (67% of school systems lose funding under that plan)

Four others represent mixed districts, where some school systems would gain while others lose. John Mark Windle is one of those, where Fentress and Overton counties would gain funding, while Morgan County would lose. It’s tough to know how a legislator in that position would tend to vote — does it depend on how many votes are in the winning counties versus the losing, or the legislator’s own philosophy about education funding, or whether it’s a net gain overall? Or maybe something else?

The Committee Members are: (newly-elected reps in italics)

• Les Winningham (D-Huntsville), Chair
  
• Tommie Brown (D-Chattanooga), Vice Chair;
• Joe Towns (D-Memphis), Secretary;
• Barbara Cooper (D-Memphis);
• John Hood (D-Murfreesboro);
• Ulysses Jones (D-Memphis);
• Mark Maddox (D-Dresden);
• Mike McDonald (D-Portland);
• Larry Turner (D-Memphis);
• John Mark Windle (D-Livingston);
• Harry Brooks (R-Knoxville);
• Jim Coley (R-Bartlett);
• Dolores Gresham (R-Somerville);
• Beth Harwell (R-Nashville);
• Phillip Johnson (R-Pegram);
• Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett);
• Gerald McCormick (R-Chattanooga);
• Richard Montgomery (R-Seymour).

Any plan that takes from some districts to give to others is a bad plan. While it may be necessary to provide additional state funding to some areas based on the local tax base or special needs, Tennessee is not a state that over-funds any school system. If we are to improve, funding must improve overall.

This House committee doesn’t look like one that will do so, though I hope I am wrong.

Education funding is the talk of the Tennessean, with two legislator guest columnists and an editorial on the topic today.

The main editorial opines that the rural schools’ funding woes have been satisfactorily addressed, or at least so sayeth the court, but that urban systems have fallen behind with their greater proportion of expensive-to-educate (at-risk and ELL — kids who don’t speak English).  They close with the easy point:

The state should not have to see another lengthy legal battle to bring fairness to the urban schools. But it should be clear that there are flaws in the current formula. The heart of the matter is the needs of the students in those urban districts. The General Assembly should address those needs in K-12 school funding. The formula should be revisited.

Rep. Gary Odom’s piece calls for a system that is more “simple and fair.”  Notably, he points out that all school systems have high risk and ELL students… and they do.  While it may indeed be true that the urban schools have greater numbers of ELL students, it’s not necessarily true that they have greater percentages — and it’s certainly true that they see more benefits from an economy of scale.

Smaller systems with a small number of ELL students still have to provide extra teachers (and often, extra instruction) to those students, even if there are only five spread across elementary, middle, and high school.  That gets expensive in a hurry.

Rep. Jason Mumpower points out some of the flaws in the current system, but also the glaring flaws of what he terms the “lead replacement plan” — the system-level model put forth by TACIR, which I have written critically of so many times in the past.  However, he also questions whether Tennesseans are seeing value for the additional dollars poured into education over the past decade, and calls for a system that goes beyond funding alone to ensure measurable results.

Everybody wants a system that is “fair,” but only Mumpower points out the gross unfairness of the direction to date:

However, the front-running replacement plan actually double-counts the tax bases of cities and counties, according to the BEP Review Committee, and creates huge winners and losers in terms of funding distribution.

The principle behind the BEP was that local governments with large tax bases should bear a greater share of the burden for their school systems, while those with meager revenue sources need additional help from the state.  It was a Robin Hood plan from the beginning, but any system that provides substantially equal opportunity would have to be thus.

Taxation is, quite simply, a pooling of resources.

What none of today’s writers dared say is that to provide an increase in education funding for anyone, and to do so fairly, will require a net increase in education funding overall.

While there will always be differences in the relative wealth of local governments across the state, what I would like to see examined is a system that shows the following:

1. If every local government had the same property and sales tax rates, and
2. If every local government allocated the same percentage of tax collections to education,
3. The amount of augmented funding needed based upon the true ability of the local government to fund schools, not their willingness.

I suspect that for some of the urban schools, part of the problem is simply allocation of resources to projects other than education.

KnoxNews reports that Farragut folks are concerned because they’re afraid that too many students will be zoned out of their overcrowded school and into the new Hardin Valley High School.

Farragut High administrators fear that electives like the chorus, as well as honors and Advanced Placement classes and sections, may disappear should many students be zoned to the new Hardin Valley High School.

“When you cut too low of sections and (teachers) can’t teach other things, you start looking at cutting positions,” said Farragut High Principal Michael Reynolds. “The course selections have taken 20 years to grow, and for some teachers, that’s their entire career invested in this. If we cut courses, it’ll be hard to grow them back.”

Jacket, I think, has often made the point that smaller high schools (just a few hundred students) are better.  A smaller student body may make for more personalized instruction, but it does definitely cut into the course offerings.

Still, it seems that being around 1,500 students — even 1,400 — would yield a workable number to keep the AP curriculum.  After all, Farragut is a fairly homogeneous community: mostly upper-income, mostly white, mostly English speaking… if Oak Ridge (with a more diverse student population) can maintain a broad range of AP classes with a student population of 1,542, I would think that Farragut could as well.

* * * * *

From this morning’s paper, it’s evident that the big-city mayors are still leaning on the Governor to hurry up and do something about education funding.  I concur that we need to do something, but unfortunately, the four mayors seem to be pushing for a solution that would help their cities at the expense of others.

I had to smile at the Gov.’s response though:

The governor said he has told the mayors to “just cool your jets a little bit, we’re going to tackle this issue.”

So long as he tackles it fairly, and devises a solution that hurts NO ONE.  In a state that’s at 90% of the nation’s per-capita income but only spends 76% of the national average per pupil on education… well, we have our priorities out of order.

This powerpoint from Matt Murray at UT’s Center for Business and Economic Research is worth the read.  (Right-click the link and select “save link as.”)

A few weeks ago, I groused about noted my suspicion that the BEP Review Committee scheduled its next meeting two days before Thanksgiving, when many are either out of town, preparing to leave town, or preparing for company… and thus, the committee might be able to do its work free of some of the public scrutiny.

It was obvious from the lack of “audience” seating in the room that they didn’t expect many to attend. I think they had to bring chairs from every office in the building.

Traditional plans were scuttled and rearranged, and I attended anyway — with company: a representative of the Chamber of Commerce, the schools’ finance officer (technically, Director of Business and Support Services), the city’s finance officer, the mayor, the city’s lobbyist, and our own State Representative. Kingsport showed up with a very similar contingent. All in all, the edges of the room were lined with folks from places with municipal school systems — the only exceptions being one person from Knox County, and one from Shelby County.

Presentations from the meeting should be on the web by tomorrow, and I’ll post them as soon as I have them. The primary topic of today’s meeting was to hear Comptroller John Morgan’s proposal for the State to assume full responsibility for funding education — no local match required. Local governments would still be free to augment funding, but there would be no such requirement, as there is now.

But here’s the part that got to me, and I confess that it didn’t fully sink in until after we’d left the meeting: at each meeting this Fall, a different funding mechanism has been presented. First, it was TACIR with their variety of formulas. On Oct. 11, we learned the details of the Peabody Alternative… followed by another look at the TACIR prototype. On Oct. 23, the committee reviewed all the options (including the Comptroller’s plan, which hadn’t been presented it detail yet at that point), followed by yet another discussion of the TACIR prototype.

Today, the Committee met again, and John Morgan presented his plan in detail. (Here’s the powerpoint he presented at TSBA; I’ll link to the updated version as soon as it’s posted to his website — probably tomorrow). Followed by yet another presentation about the TACIR plan — this time, their attempt to dumb it down so that ordinary mortals understand it.

(Do you see a common, repeating element here?  Think the committee might be a little biased in their agenda?)

We understood it. We still didn’t like it.

Finally, shortchanged on time because the building had to be evacuated for exterminators, Committee member Richard Kitzmiller (Kingsport Director of Schools) gave a brief presentation of his own — why the TACIR plan is overtly and deliberately harmful to municipal school systems, and why harming them is generally bad for education in Tennessee. He promised to post it on their website when he gets home, but I know that he’s not there yet. I’ll post that when it’s available, too.

The support for municipal schools couldn’t be any stronger in that room today. Still, I’m keenly aware (reminded again today by Rep. Hackworth) that the big cities combined with the west Tennessee delegation are a powerful force — and they want the TACIR plan. Simply put, they favor statewide consolidation, so that there is only only one school system in each county.

I will fight that bitterly, openly, and with many allies across this state. I will need your help, and the help of any legislators you know in other parts of the state. I will camp out in their offices, will blog their committee meetings, and make dear friends of those who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.
Stay tuned.

The BEP Review Committee meets again on Wednesday in Nashville, where there are several items of interest on the agenda. One is a discussion of the impacts of alternative fiscal capacity scenarios, including a proposal by Jim Guthrie of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt.

The basics of Guthrie’s proposal are in the tax base methodology document, but there are no numbers yet. I’m working on it.

I won’t be able to attend this one, but I’ll get a report from someone by Thursday.