School Boards In Bondage

America’s school boards want more money from American taxpayers but they don’t want to be told what to do with it. The National School Board’s “advocacy focus is to secure passage of features in the president’s plan that will benefit education and the economy,” Michael A. Resnick of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote in the November 2011 issue of American School. “Two features can appropriately deliver those results.”

Each feature involves billions of dollars. “The first feature would authorize $30 billion to be spent for school renovation projects, with funds going to the neediest schools,” Resnick explains. “Approximately 35,000 schools—more than one-third the total in our nation—qualify.”

“On the economic side, these projects would quickly put local private construction firms and an estimated 250,000 employees to work.” Your servant has lived in areas that have adopted this economic strategy: They tend to be destitute before and after doing so.

Resnick is NSBA’s associate director for federal advocacy and public policy. American School is a journal published by the NSBA.

“NSBA also fully supports Obama’s proposal to provide $30 billion to hire or retain teachers and other instructional personnel,” Resnick states. “Like school construction, this program is projected to result in the hiring of 280,000 employees and will have an immediate and positive impact on the local consumer market.”

Additionally, “Joining many other top education organizations, NSBA supports President Obama’s American Jobs Act, a $447-billion package that would help struggling school districts retain teachers and address the antiquated state of many public schools,” the NSBA predicts.

The school boards figure that their odds of achieving all of the above are not bad. “We were successful in helping schools get more than $70 billion in education grant funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act two years ago and $10 billion for the Teacher Jobs Fund last year,” Resnick claimed.

Yet while the NSBA advocates spending billions on public schools, the organization balks at expenditures of millions on their chartered counterparts: “NSBA quickly voiced opposition to the U. S. House of Representatives passage in September of a bill to provide $300 million in additional federal funds to support charter schools,” the group proudly proclaims.

By the way, it is interesting to note that proficiency scores in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina have jumped considerably at a time when the majority of the city’s public schools have become charter schools. “Five years ago, only 23% of New Orleans school kids tested at or above ‘basic’–Today that figure has more than doubled to 48%,” Deborah Lambert pointed out in an article we posted yesterday.

Meanwhile, hungry as the school boards are for redistributed cash, they want it with no strings. “Another threat, however, is simply the gradual whittling away of board authority through endless state and federal mandates and regulations,” Del Stover, senior editor of American School, the American School Boards Journal, writes.

“We’ve seen this trend…just more and more prescriptive requirements,” Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Associations, told Stover. “There’s more and more micromanagement from the state and, I’d argue, from the federal level.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars worth, no doubt.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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