by James C. Sherlock

Read the story, “House and Senate lay out dueling visions for education funding in Virginia,” in the Virginia Mercury this morning by the reliably thorough Kate Masters.

If you follow it, you, like everyone else in Virginia, can pick a side or pick provisions from both houses that you prefer.

What you won’t find in either budget version is an attempt to tackle the massive amounts of money that are wasted in plain sight. Much of the waste is attributable to faulty or non-existent assessments of need and misplaced local priorities.

The rest is traceable to the self-serving inputs of the schools of education, which have owned and operated the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) for years.

Bloated staffs. The House budget has $104 million to add more school principals, vice principals and reading specialists.

Let’s go with an assumption that every school already has a principal.

So the money is really for vice principals and reading specialists. Schools certainly should have as many reading specialists as they need. Good initiative on that front.

But what in the Standards of Quality drives the increases in APs? Answer: it is a change by the Board of Education in the recommended ratio of APs to students.  So why? What is driving that? Is it “restorative justice”? Increased reporting requirements? Something else?

How many APs do we already have? What can be done with changes to laws or regulations or new software to increase their efficiency? I have written about MLK Jr. Middle School in Richmond as one example. The school, with 600 students in three grades, has three APs. Does it help, and with what exactly?

What are the new duties that require the AP expansion? Where is cost-benefit analysis? The average AP salary is $91,000 this year in Virginia. That means the cost to the average school district including fringe benefits is in the $125,000 range. Once in place, the new positions will be in the system, never to leave.

Too many school divisions. The AP issue brings me to the larger question. We have 132 school divisions in Virginia. With 132 school boards, 132 superintendents, 132 Chiefs of Staff, 132 CFOs, 132 Chiefs of Operations, 132 Chiefs of Communications, God knows how many assistant superintendents – you get the point.

The Virginia Constitution has the language “local units of government comprising such school divisions.” That has not prevented the creation of local school divisions that comprise multiple units of government. Region 7 in southwestern Virginia, forced by circumstances to be more efficient, has organized itself to do more and more at the regional level. And it has achieved marvelous results.

In this school year, 42 of Virginia’s school divisions had fewer than than 2,000 students. Seventeen had fewer than than 1,000. Two, Lexington City (476) and Highland County (178) had fewer than than 500.

Fifty-two individual schools in Virginia each had more students than 42 entire school divisions.

Merging of school divisions has happened historically, but it is proceeding entirely too slowly.

Paying for too many graduate education degrees.

Teaching salaries depend on education level and experience in the classroom. What is the measurable contribution of advanced degrees to successful classroom teaching? I should specify “measurable” by someone other than the ed schools.

The unhealthy alliance between the graduate schools of education and the VDOE  is no secret. I suspect there are more doctorates in Virginia the education system than MDs in our hospitals. Every time the Board of Education or the Superintendent of Public Instruction put together an advisory panel in the past four years it was dominated by representatives of the ed schools. Their work feathered their nests.

We pay through the nose, as do teachers, for advanced degrees that may not make better teachers. I spent a good bit of time a few years ago reviewing dissertations from the UVa Curry School of Education before that school took them offline. It was scary how weak they were.

Don’t take my word for it. When the messy affair of changing the name of that school came around a few years ago, the Board of Visitors openly criticized the scholarship of that school. Now the UVa School of Education and Human Development openly substitutes wokeness for any pretense of scholarship to improve educational outcomes.

How about paying for advanced degrees for specific positions that can be demonstrated to require them, like counseling, not across the board?

How about examining the undergraduate education programs to see if they can provide better training that can require fewer graduate degrees?

What to do. I don’t want to see any more stories about a school funding “crisis” in Virginia without these three issues being addressed. But I expect I will.

If the General Assembly is serious about school funding, it will tackle these three problems to simultaneously make far more money available for teachers and give local taxpayers in the smallest Virginia localities a break on how much they pay for their tiny school systems. It would be interesting to find out how the VEA would feel about this approach.

The VDOE should study and report on these three issues. Don’t allow the education schools to participate in the assessments.

• How much money would be saved annually if a law required the smallest school division funded by the state to have 2,000 students?
• How much money could be saved if laws and regulations were changed and investments in management software made to reduce the number of APs required?
• How much money could be saved if graduate education degrees provided more pay only for certain designated positions rather than for everyone in a school division?

The Superintendent of Public Instruction should get her staff to begin the assessments right away.

The Board of Education (BOE), as soon as it has its new members in July, should both consider what new legislation is needed and review regulations within its current powers to address these issues.

For example, the BOE approves the standards of quality that balloon the staffs. The GA is then stuck with either funding them or being guilty of “unmet needs” or, my favorite, “austerity.”

See how that works?