TOP TASKS

Avoid going off the fiscal cliff

“As many school boards debate their budgets for the upcoming school year, a Chalkbeat analysis found a common thread: More than half of the country’s 50 largest school districts are poised to or already have made cuts, or are facing a reported deficit,” Lily Altavena writes for the outlet.

This likely won’t come as a surprise to readers of the Roundup, who have heard warnings from Marguerite Roza and Chad Aldeman since 2022 on the fiscal challenges that would beset districts when ESSER funds ran dry amidst a declining school-age population and more families taking advantage of school choice programs. 

Altavena shares the example of one district in Florida to illustrate how the budget pressure is being experienced on the ground: “Broward faces a $90 million budget deficit …To try to close the budget gap, district officials are cutting 1,000 positions. Of those, 700 are already vacant — the other 300 will be layoffs.”

While local frustrations are bubbling up in Broward, their commitment to resolving the budget crisis through hard choices will leave them on more secure ground in the future. In other states, such as Colorado and New York, legislatures have stepped in with additional funding to shield or “hold harmless” under-enrolled districts from cuts. In Vermont, property taxes have risen 40% over the past five years, due primarily to under-enrolled districts.

William E. Simon Policy Fellow Danyela Egorov has been sounding the alarm over rising per pupil costs in New York, and chimes in with a warning for Roundup readers, “Districts should absolutely not follow New York’s example, which spends $388 million every year to finance empty schools. Mayors and superintendents of large districts will have to manage declining enrollment over the next few years. Either they will have to merge and close schools or make their schools so attractive that families decide to re-enroll their kids.”

The Edunomics Lab’s Marguerite Roza, who named the current belt-tightening as the “Big Shrink” agrees, suggesting that navigating the challenges is going to require difficult choices and hard work. That hard work, in Marguerite’s view, is now unavoidable. “Part of the work will involve scrutinizing existing programs to decide which deliver measurable value for the dollar … Some districts will need to close schools or risk spreading dollars too thin across too many buildings. Our rule of thumb is that closing 1 of every 15 under-enrolled schools saves about 4% of a district’s budget, mostly in labor costs,” she wrote last December.

As for Marguerite’s current take? “The fiscal cliff is no surprise. It’s been right there in district multi-year financial forecasts. Lots of districts used one-time Covid money to add staff and raise pay. What we’re seeing now is the fallout now that relief funding is gone. Some chose to spend down reserves to put cuts off a year. But math is math.”

Take note of the challenge of finding affordable summer programs for kids 

With the school year coming to an end, Afterschool Alliance released national polling results and an accompanying report, “The Summer Struggle for Everyday Families: Affording the Opportunities Parents Want for Youth.” The headlines mirror findings from the Educational Opportunity Survey, released in February: 24.6 million families want a summer program and 12.6 million families do not have access, primarily due to costs and transportation. That unmet demand is not uniform across the country.

Nearly 4-in-10 families cited program costs as the primary reason that their student couldn’t participate in a summer program, compared to 18% who indicated transportation challenges, the next highest reason. Those cost challenges are particularly felt by families that are already struggling; high-income families are attending summer programs at three times the rate of low-income families.

The solution recommended by Afterschool Alliance is to increase the public funding of these programs, with the authors pointing to Oregon’s Summer Learning Grants as a model. Those grants, funded by the state legislature, provide money to quality programs with a focus on those that enroll low-income students and provide transportation.

Elected officials should note that public funding of summer programs is a political winner, with an immense degree of public support across partisan lines. The Afterschool Alliance polling found 89% parental support with similar support for Democrats, Independents and Republicans.

Key Resources

Brookings hosts a webinar on June 8 that examines the past, present and future of America’s school boards.

Rick Hess at Education Next interviews Knowledge Matters’ Matthew Levey on the link between history and civics instruction and improved reading scores.

The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup released a new poll of teachers, finding “most teachers are unclear about how AI tools should be used in their work.” 

A new study at Ed Working Papers states that the replacement of school accountability policies with executive actions during both the Trump and Biden presidencies focused on racial equity, gender and curriculum have “produced policy regime decay.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that hundreds of faculty in the University of California system signed an open letter last week asking leaders to require standardized tests for admissions due to “preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics.”

Urban Institute offers advice to state governments on how they can support apprenticeship programs, including tax credit incentives and modernizing systems.