Split….And?
September 21th, 2008
The School District of Palm Beach County pays 13 (count ‘em, folks) full-time attorneys, not to mention more than a dozen outside law firms annually.
To say that this reflects our litigious society begs the question.
To say that this also affirms the need to split one of the 10 largest school districts in the nation illustrates that assertion.
House Majority Leader Rep. Adam Hasner (R-Delray Beach) has said the "archaic" current system of having only one school district per county should be replaced with one that "gets and keeps students and parents closer to the educational process."
"We have the 10 largest school districts in the nation. What we should have are the 10 best," he has said.
He’s correct.
"Studies indicate that smaller districts produce better students," Hasner says. The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR) found that there is a relationship between the smaller size of school districts and greater high school graduation rates.
"And with a smaller district, any decisions made are made closer to the students -- and parents," says Hasner.
He adds a final and compelling point that what smaller districts will create "is local access by parents to what's the most important thing in their lives - educating their children."
The present district administration says a split district is “unnecessary,” in the words of Superintendent Dr. Art Johnson.
Studies indicate that not only would more than one and smaller districts better serve children academically, there would actually be less administrative cost.
Working out the increased cost of bonding school district projects would admittedly not be easy; but that not synonymous with undoable.
But let’s say that we get beyond all of the rhetoric on both sides of the split district question. And let’s say we somehow get Tallahassee to agree -- and Palm Beach County ends up with four or even five school districts.
What then?
There remain fundamental public education issues that smaller districts won’t in and of themselves address, e.g., there’s a reason charter schools are becoming much more popular.
Public schools don't learn from experience, and consistently turn a blind eye and deaf ear to, ironically, learning. Public schools not only lack good answers to the problems that beset them, but are less than highly interested in generating answers.
There is often no systematic approach to learning from existing or proposed programs; instead, an inefficient system in clothed in new learning methods and approaches, creating lovely models on the runway, but not necessarily super kids. Private schools and charter schools are constantly modifying both approach and performance.
Despite recent and rampant rhetoric about incentive programs, public schools lack management by incentive programs that work consistently toward long-term results.
Even though inefficiency drains funding, and ultimately frustrates students, public school administration’s disregard for efficiency and productivity is legendary.
Ultimately what it comes down to in public education is what we spend -- and the truth is we just don’t truly know.
As Chairman of the Education Policy Institute, Dr. Myron Lieberman writes: “None of us knows the costs of public education, from our own pockets or the government’s. These costs are extremely diffuse and intermingled with others beyond identification. Even with the help of a supercomputer, it is impossible to ascertain what any individual is paying for education.”
And most of us won’t bother to pursue the point, shrugging that we can’t do anything about it anyway.
The bottom line here is that, and while Hasner’s ideas are laudable and smaller districts should be sought as a short-term goal, the long-term goal should be more efficiency, more accountability, and more bangs for the buck.
Starting with fewer attorneys on the school district payroll.
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