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By Dr. Harry Tennant
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by Dan S. Martin
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Posts 1 - 17 of 17
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Friday, April 15, 2011 Random Education Facts: A Dollar Spent, Is A Dollar Burned? The United States is now spending more than $100 BILLION dollars a year on the war in Afghanistan. -CNN ($2 BILLION a week) We have been there almost 10 years.  ...there are education funding issues across America.
Posted at 4:56 PM (permalink)
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Thursday, April 14, 2011 In The News: A Wise Approach To Difficult Decisions---> Ask The People!Quite a different context, but the same fundamental problem--->Decatur ISD is one more Texas district struggling with what connective tissue to cut from their already trim existence. They are also wisely considering how to raise revenue. I recently worked as a principal in this district. There was little--if any---fat to cut. Nonetheless, due to the state budget slash of 2011, they must now cut millions. The district recently conducted a survey of parents (47%), students (17%), teachers (21%), staff (12%), and community members (32%) to gauge acceptability of a full slate of potential cuts. Below is an image of the final three categories. The first six are Administration, Benefits, Facilities & Transportation, Instruction, Salary & Pay, Scheduling & Staffing. As a side note: I wonder if the district can further disaggregate these numbers by respondent category (parent, student, teacher, etc). This is an interesting document that you can download here.  Posted at 5:09 PM (permalink)
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Trends: All The World's A Customer---->Is Your School Ready To Reap The Rewards?In these tight budget times we are especially reminded of how limited resources can be. Financial, material, and human resources always seem tight and barely sufficient in schools. Now, the bite of recession and education restructuring is hitting bone in many places across our country. One other precious resource proactive schools constantly nurture and covet is community support. To the proportion your school has this, you probably have a smoother time weathering shortages of the other resources mentioned above. In thinking about this, I recalled Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Effective People as an interesting framework for considering a school's responsibility and wisdom in extending their base and degree of community support through outreach, accessibility, and quality.
 The list below is from the book above (that seems oddly dated given its publication year of 2000), nonetheless the list is timeless. It is all about building capital with your customers. The efforts your school expends to build community support and participation will be rewarded many-fold. What is your school currently doing well? Where does it need to improve? How can you get there? In coming posts I will share more ideas about maximizing your school's standing with your community. Posted at 12:46 PM (permalink)
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Wednesday, April 6, 2011 Trends: The Young Will Pay, Working Educators Will Pay, & So Will Our Retired EducatorsAre you an educator who has served your time and thought you were out of the vicissitudes of the daily education business? Well, not so fast! The Texas Education Budget Slash of 2011 makes it harder on all educators, even those who put in their years and are now living on fixed incomes. Good grief. For the full WFAA article and/or a video version, click the image below.  Posted at 9:50 AM (permalink)
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Monday, April 4, 2011 Trends: The Pendulum Is SwingingUntil recently, being an educator was a very secure career path. Now, with tight budgets, staff layoffs, and increased "accountability stress"----in states across the nation----post-secondary schools are beginning to see declines in the number of people training for a career in education. Demand for educators will ultimately rebound by virtue of "market forces." We hope. Education may again become a priority in America! We hope. Posted at 3:10 PM (permalink)
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Friday, March 25, 2011 In The News: How Can You Earn Five Billion Dollars In America And Pay Zero Taxes?At a time when our schools and personal budgets are struggling to meet basic needs, stories like this can be somewhat discouraging. It seems that the federal debt & deficit are on the backs of laboring Americans, while companies like GE are using every means necessary to get away without paying taxes like so many of the rest of us. Sad. $5.1 billion from U.S. operations alone last year. Tax bill=ZERO!?!? That is not counting everything moved and sheltered overseas. It pays to have what some refer to as "the world's best tax law firm." Posted at 9:45 AM (permalink)
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Tuesday, March 22, 2011 In The News: Principals In Plano ISD Have Been Invested With Tremendous Power To Remove Their Bottom Tier TeachersIn a school board meeting last night, Plano ISD committed to eliminating teaching jobs as part of their second round of layoffs they've deemed necessary in response to looming cuts of $35-65 million. Perhaps the most interesting sentence in this article is: "Principals are tasked with figuring out who will go." We all know that even the most well-meaning educators can be ineffective in the extreme, yet under normal circumstances it is extremely difficult for principals to remove ineffective teachers from campuses in Texas schools. It is even more difficult in many other states. Having said that, Plano ISD (and many other Texas districts) will likely have a unique opportunity to terminate their bottom tier teachers soon without so much of the necessary due process required in "normal" budget times. According to the WFAA story below, Plano ISD will ask principals to make the decision based upon certification, documented performance, professional background, and seniority. I would bet most districts are asking central administrators to do this task, with significant input from campus administrators. Seems like it is in reverse in the example here. There are so many varied responses by Texas districts to the 2011-2013 budget slash. Feel free to share your comments below! Posted at 6:37 PM (permalink)
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Tuesday, March 8, 2011 In The News: Who Needs Teaching Jobs, Texas Is Looking For Jobs In Other Sectors Of Our EconomyThe WFAA.com article below details Governor Rick Perry's efforts to produce jobs in Texas by spending big money....while allowing education jobs in Texas to evaporate like never before. The loss of these teaching jobs is sure to have a ripple effect on local communities, in varying degrees. A few key quotes follow: "He used the word 19 times in his recent state of the state address and has made it a top spending priority. But if Perry realizes his vision of a budget balanced through cuts alone, 100,000 teachers could lose their jobs. That's about a third of the 333,000 teachers employed by Texas public schools....." ....."In the current budget, schools got $50 billion in state and federal money to teach 4.8 million students. Proposed budgets would short Texas schools $10 billion, a figure that includes money that would be necessary to pay for an estimated 160,000 new students expected to enroll over the next two years." Click the photo above to access the full story on WFAA.com
Posted at 12:12 PM (permalink)
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Tuesday, March 8, 2011 In The News: Each Texas District Must Decide What Connective Tissue Is UnnecessaryThis blog has spotlighted how several districts in Texas plan to survive the loss of one-fifth of their finances for the coming two-year budget...give or take a bit. Keller ISD is a very respectable, healthy district north of Fort Worth. They are winners. Here is how they plan to run the next leg of the race despite slashing key connective tissue formerly important to holding their skeleton together. Posted at 9:38 AM (permalink)
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Monday, March 7, 2011 In The News: Federal 'Impact Aid' Is Promised-----> Only Half Is DeliveredWhen it comes to our federal government, money isn't always where the legislative pen is. I was previously unfamiliar with the under-funded "Impact Aid" program, which is "a 60-year-old federal program designed to ease the burden of having military bases or tribal reservations that pay no local property taxes within the districts' borders, yet send hundreds of students to their schools." Well, they only came out a billion dollars short. Included at the end of this story is a chart of how much each state qualified for in fiscal year 2011 versus how much each actually received. For Texas the numbers are 107.9 million dollars promised, 48.4 million received. The full article from USA Today can be accessed by clicking the image below.  Posted at 1:30 PM (permalink)
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Tuesday, March 1, 2011 In The News: An Interesting Excel File---> Center For Public Policy Priorities Breaks Down Projected Texas School Funding & Job Loss Numbers...County By County.The Center for Public Policy Priorities just released four analyses that "are useful for estimating the effect of proposed budget cuts to (Texas) state services on local communities." One shows "roughly how the state's $27 billion revenue shortfall would be allocated county by county in public education." Importantly, it includes calculations of anticipated private-sector job loss associated with these cuts.  For the entire study, click the image below to access it from the Center for Public Policy Priorities  Posted at 7:16 PM (permalink)
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Monday, February 28, 2011 Pass It On Education Content: Keep Your Brain Healthy By Communicating In Two TonguesIf you are on the fence about the value of learning another language...or teaching them in your district, school, or home...perhaps this will sway you in favor of doing so. Bilingualism promotes good mind-health! Is foreign language funding in danger in your district? "The skill improves multitasking and prioritizing, and helps ward off early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, experts say." Learning Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic would be a near lock on a decent career in the first half of the 21st century. (BTW, this is not an intentional advert for CIA linguists...though that would be a decent career!) Posted at 3:51 PM (permalink)
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011 In The News: Who Needs This School Anyway!I have been documenting the variety of responses Texas school districts are devising to address the budget massacre coming out of Austin. Grand Prairie ISD is a large district in North Texas. They, and others, are likely to close and consolidate campuses. Three points to remember from past posts:
Posted at 9:03 AM (permalink)
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Monday, February 14, 2011 In The News: Next Year Texas Schools Will Have Around 100,000 Fewer Employees To Educate 85,000 Additional Students...hmmmmI've mentioned it a time or two...Texas is cutting funding for education drastically. Check out a few of the details the New York Times published in the much more lengthy and detailed article that follows these telling quotes:
"All across Texas, school superintendents are bracing for the largest
cuts to public education since World War II..." "...Gov. Rick Perry, easily re-elected in November, made it clear in his annual speech to lawmakers last week that he regarded raising revenue for schools as out of the question.." "To balance the budget with cuts alone, the governor and Republican leaders in the Legislature have put forth bills that would reduce the state’s public school budget by at least 13 percent — nearly $3.5 billion a year — and would provide no new money to schools for about 85,000 new students that arrive in Texas every year. School administrators predict that as many as 100,000 school employees would have to be laid off to absorb the cuts. "Not only are the proposed cuts to school aid draconian, but in addition the Legislature in 2006 put strict limits how much districts can raise local property taxes. That means local school boards find themselves trapped between rising enrollment, double-digit drops in state aid and frozen local taxes. Many school administrators blame the current budget crisis on an overhaul of the school finance system five years ago, which Mr. Perry and Republican leaders pushed through in response to popular anger over high property taxes. The Legislature put a cap on property taxes for schools and promised to make up the difference with a new business tax. But that tax has never produced enough revenue to make the districts’ budgets whole. The chronic shortfall in money for schools was papered over in the last two-year budget passed in 2009. Mr. Perry and Republican leaders in the Legislature used about $3.3 billion in federal aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to plug the hole. That aid has disappeared this year."
Posted at 11:53 PM (permalink)
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Sunday, February 13, 2011 In The News: Irving ISD Offers An Incentive For Educators To QuitYesterday's theme turned out to be IDEA. Today's is becoming deep education budget cuts in Texas...potentially as high as 25% in most districts. One prong of Irving ISD's response is a resignation bonus. See below. Posted at 11:23 AM (permalink)
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Sunday, January 30, 2011 In The News: Hiring Freeze Will Likely Not Be Enough In Many Texas School DistrictsA district very close to my heart--->Denton ISD could face a 20% budget cut. That will come with a side order of more students and increased testing accountability. Posted at 1:00 AM (permalink)
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011 In The News: Is Texas Preparing To Rob The Cradle?Is this the sort of symptom the Romans were experiencing a couple of thousand years ago? Is this yet another symptom of the decline of one of the greatest "powers" the world has ever known? Can there be a healthy, dynamic democracy and market system without having a healthy education system? It seems like we are in a cycle of demanding more from schools...but providing less to accomplish that end. It hasn't just started with this financial crisis...nor this budget. The "growth" in public education spending over the past decades was due primarily to the growth of special programs (particularly, special education). Bottom line, we are asking fewer people to do much more with less time. It seems that the cuts could start to reach the depth of major arteries this go-around in Texas. Am I wrong? Are we willing to invest in young people to keep our country from growing "old?" Do we already invest too much? And so on...and so on. Here is a video story from last night on WFAA.com. You can also find the story in print here. Posted at 9:13 AM (permalink)
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