Issues
Demand action on PERS reform
By Rep. Kevin Cameron (R-Salem)
There have been nearly 50 bills introduced that address, in some way, the PERS issue. So far, there has been no substantial legislation that has received a hearing. I am co-sponsoring the below four bills that were introduced by Rep. Bruce Hanna (R-Roseburg).
HB 3056 would limit the computation of “final average salary” to salary, rather than including unused sick time and vacation accruals.
HB 3057 would limit the COLA for PERS benefits to the first $36,000 of retirement income.
HB 3058 phases out the ability of employers to “pick-up” the employee’s 6% contribution into retirement accounts by 2020.
HB 3059 ends the practice of providing a supplemental benefit payment to offset income taxes for those who are not subject to Oregon income taxes.
It is my understanding that estimates of savings after instituting these reforms would be over $700 million per biennium. These alterations to the current process are important steps in the right direction to put PERS on sustainable footing for the future.
This is not a conversation about the worthiness of our public employees. It is a conversation about the absolute proven unsustainability of this retirement system. These bills deserve the opportunity to be heard, at the very least, in order to begin meaningful dialogue about how we are going to address this important issue in our state. The impact that it is having to our school districts and local government budgets is devastating and hurting our kids, our seniors, our social service agencies, and public safety. We must do better.
Reprinted with permission from Oregon Catalyst
Rep. Richardson: Rethinking education funding
Author: Christiana Mayer
By Taxpayer Association of Oregon Lawmaker Profile
Right now public education in the United States is behind such countries as Ireland, Estonia and Poland. It is clear that something needs to be done. Representative Dennis Richardson believes that local control over public education is a crucial part of reforming education and making sure that our children get the education that they need.
“Reform education by returning education control to the lowest level – The level closest to the student. And ensure that funding follows the student,” said Richardson.
Taxpayers are constantly told that in order to have a good public education system more money is needed for our schools. Several bills to reform the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) have been introduced in the current legislative session to find more money. Most school districts blame the escalating cost of PERS as one reason why they have had to trim budgets. Some of the ideas being talked about in the State Capitol are the PERS reform plan to limit the cost-of-living adjustments to the first $24,000 of a retiree’s benefits, which saves $400 million a year. Another PERS reform plan, to limit cost of living adjustments for higher end users, would save $225 million a year. Unfortunately Representative Richardson does not believe that meaningful PERS reform will pass this legislative session.
For example, there are two different state departments that are directly involved in public education. The Department of Education and the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission create a series of hoops and barriers for teachers according to Representative Richardson. It is a layer of bureaucracy that keeps dollars out of the classroom. Since Salem is always looking for ways to put money in the classroom perhaps the functions of these two departments could be combined.
Parents need to take a greater interest in the education of their children and that will help change the system. Citizens should run for school board positions and volunteer in the public schools to make sure that they understand how the system works.
Reprinted with permission from Oregon Catalyst
Dennis Richardson, of Central Point, represents District 4 in the Oregon Legislature.
Could Bigger PERS Payments Mean Fewer Teachers in Lane Co.?
Recently a highly placed official with Eugene 4J Public Schools spoke off the record with a member of Lane Solutions’ editorial staff. He revealed to us the cold, hard facts about the coming mandated increase in Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) payments and their effects on Eugene students.
During the coming biennium, mandated PERS payments by Eugene 4J will increase by 6.55%, or about $4,900,000 per year. By State law this, plus current PERS payments, must be made first. In other words, before 4J hires one more teacher, buys one new textbook, or makes one new computer available to our children, it must pay this additional amount into employee retirement.
So, what will this increase cost our children? Plenty. According to this official, a teacher costs 4J about $95,000 per year. Each one percent increase in PERS payments costs about $750,000 per year. So every one percent increase in PERS payments means that our children lose almost eight teachers!
The cost of a 6.55% PERS increase? The possible loss of nearly 52 teachers! The result – more kids per class and less education.
Should the PERS increase be covered by teacher layoffs, who will lose his or her job? Thanks to union rules seniority trumps teaching ability, performance and results. So the last hired become the first fired. This means that less expensive teachers are the first to go. A first year teacher costs about $32,000 less than a teacher with 20 years seniority, or about $63,000 per year. If all the layoffs come from this group, 4J will have to lay off 78 teachers!
In previous issues of Lane Solutions readers have learned how PERS rules and disputes concerning them are both made and adjudicated by the very State officials who profit from their own decisions, thus stacking the deck against taxpayers.
One result of this stacked deck is that PERS retirees are compensated for Oregon income taxes they must pay on their PERS income – even if they live elsewhere and therefore don’t pay Oregon income taxes. That’s right – a PERS retiree living in Delaware gets money from Oregon taxpayers for the Oregon income taxes he or she doesn’t pay!
The 4J official who revealed for our readers the true cost of PERS increases concluded the interview with some even more disturbing news: The increase in health insurance premiums is even larger than the PERS increase, and so may result in even more teacher layoffs. But more about that in a future issue of Lane Solutions.
Imagine a World…
By Steve Buckstein
Imagine a world where we buy our groceries in government stores. We can only shop at the store nearest our house. If we want to shop somewhere else, we’re forced to move our family into another neighborhood―if we can afford it.
In this imaginary world, we elect food boards to oversee our grocery stores. And many of us think the food is free. Well, not quite. We all pay taxes to the government, which then recycles those dollars to grocery store districts and eventually down to our neighborhood stores. We think we eat pretty well, although the government spends five dollars for a gallon of milk and six-fifty for a loaf of bread. The bread is often stale and the milk sour.
Each district has a central office staff of specialists and administrators who work hard designing store shelves, checkout lanes, and (most importantly) the nutritional content of every food item. Since we’re a nation that separates Church and State, the big battles at food board meetings often revolve around whether stores can sell Christmas cookies.
Now, imagine that voters decide to give the government less money for the public food system. Suddenly, food stores find themselves in a crisis. There isn’t enough tax money to keep food district central bureaucracies intact. Stores don’t have enough money to keep all the clerks employed. Food superintendents are faced with the difficult task of eliminating some items from the shelves.
How could we possibly feed ourselves without the government taxing us, building big brick food buildings, and telling us where to shop?
If this imaginary world―and its problems―sounds familiar, you’re way ahead of me. It’s the world of our public school system. It’s the world most of us grew up in. Our parents grew up in the same world, but children now are growing up in a different world.
We can no longer afford to dump more money into a system that isn’t keeping pace with the progress all around us. Technology has opened limitless ways for students to gain knowledge and skills and to interact with their instructors and peers. The landscape of educational options centered on the needs and aspirations of individual students is far more diverse than it was even ten years ago.
Many advocate that we should lead the world in education spending. But you don’t get to be the competitive leader in any industry by being the world’s highest-cost producer. Don’t you want to be the producer with the highest quality, but at an affordable cost? The driving force to achieve high quality, while keeping costs down, is the profit motive. But that’s exactly the motive that doesn’t exist in our public school system.
Why aren’t we worried about a tax revolt decimating our local grocery store shelves? It’s because our grocery stores are private. They’re subject to intense competition, and each of us has virtually unlimited choices about where we shop.
For those who can’t afford food, we don’t build government food stores. We give them food stamps, and they shop in the same stores and for the same products that everyone else does. In essence, our public schools are the equivalent of the former Soviet Union’s collective farms. Communism said government should own and run the food stores―and the farms. The result was a nation that couldn’t feed itself.
We don’t have to ask whether to replace our current public school system with a private one. We can simply let education dollars be spent where the customers (parents) think they should go.
Please don’t let the details of any specific “school choice” proposal stop you from accepting the concept. Instead, let’s figure out why so many of our tax dollars don’t reach the classroom―and why nearly half the people who work for our public school system don’t teach. Let’s look for ways to put the children first and the system second.
The only proven way to accomplish these things is through competition and parental choice. Spending more dollars in the current system will just get us more of the same. Many states are broke, preventing them from spending more money on public schools. And many parents are fed up, wondering why their kids are underperforming or unmotivated in K-12 schools and unprepared for their college courses and future careers.
School choice has entered a new world. Because Americans are increasingly vocal about providing parents at every income level with the ability to choose their children’s schools, states are adopting broad-based school choice initiatives.
Every child who drops out of school, or who graduates functionally illiterate, is being tossed into the sea without a lifeboat. If you think rearranging the deck chairs on this ship will save those children, think again. The way of the future is to put the power of educational choice back into the hands of parents, where it belongs.
Steve Buckstein is Founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
Reprinted with permission from Cascade Policy Institute
Oregon’s once proud education system is sorely in need of repair
The erosion of efficient, effective education in our public schools concerns me greatly because it means there are fewer skilled workers entering into the workforce. As a small business owner, this tells me that I will have fewer and fewer of the skilled workers I depend upon to build my company.
The perceived decline in education throughout the United States has resulted in record numbers of parents opting to educate their children in private or charter schools, and in many cases, homeschools.
These refugees from traditional education fear that, despite the presence of many dedicated, concerned teachers, their children might not even graduate from high school. And their fears are justified. Recent statistics tell us that the percentage of students who earn their high school diplomas in four years is just 66.4% and in five years only 69.1%. For non-Asian minorities this figure is a pitiful 49.8% to 55.2%. For students with disabilities, the graduation rate is an even more dismal 41.8%. (1)
Many in our State Legislature advocate increased funding for Oregon’s schools without addressing serious structural issues imbedded in the system itself. Instead of searching for ways to set the bar higher and challenge students and educators to perform at the peak of their capabilities, these legislators have opted to lower the bar so that more children can clear it by any means possible.
Looking forward, I fear that the result of a lowered bar will be an endless cycle of diminishing returns wherein each successive generation will perform at a level at or, more likely, below the previous generation.
What to do? Let’s begin by asking the right questions. First let’s look at how we’re using the resources already in the system. With a current budget of approximately $10,000 per student per school year, we need to look carefully at how these funds are allocated. With a classroom of 25 students, what competent administrator could not provide an effective and efficient learning environment with $250,000 per classroom? This leads us to ask if the right people are controlling the allocation of funds.
If Federal and State control of our local education systems were significantly reduced and authority restored to local school boards and educators, more money could be given directly to schools and administrators, enabling them to use their judgment, based on their knowledge of local conditions, to hire the very best instructors and provide the very best educational resources for our children, who must be prepared to face an ever more complex and competition driven economy.
As the system is set up now, the stakeholders – educators, parents and children – have minimal control over the education system for which they are nominally responsible. As the system is set up now, a distant, detached bureaucracy makes life-shaping decisions for countless educators and children to whom they are not accountable. As the system is set up now, it will continue to erode the foundation of our free market economy.
The education crisis currently facing Oregon is not terminal if the challenges we face are addressed immediately. However, it will take organized and strategic efforts to unclench the fist of an increasingly sclerotic education system and return to local communities the responsibility, authority and resources required to provide educational excellence.
Chris Gergen is a Springfield based financial advisor and is the author of The Quality Paradigm: Why You and Your Business Need it to Succeed. He blogs at Be Epic.Daily. He can be reached via email at chris@chrisgergen.com.
(1) Source: http://www.ode.state.or.us/news/announcements/announcement.aspx?ID=7273&TypeID=5
Which Oregon School District Teaches No Students?
by Steve Buckstein Monday, August 1. 2011
Oregon’s major teachers union, The Oregon Education Association (OEA), is seen by many observers as the big loser coming out of the recent legislative session in Salem. Why? Because it failed to convince enough legislators to stop some modest school choice bills from passing. It also couldn’t stop Governor John Kitzhaber, whom it endorsed and financially supported, from agreeing to sign these bills as part of a larger education reform package.
The highest profile bill in question was House Bill 2301, known as the virtual public charter school bill. The union has been trying to shut down online public charter schools ever since they started making inroads several years ago. This year it had hoped to cripple these schools, which it sees as competition to the brick-and-mortar schools in which its members teach. Instead, the legislature agreed to let these online schools expand from teaching about one percent of the state’s K-12 students now up to at least three percent of students in any and all school districts around the state.
In 2005 the union backed a bill to create a state-run competitor to these innovative online schools. Known as the Oregon Virtual School District, it has since been funded to the tune of more than seven million dollars. Legislators appropriated the funds with the intention that the district would “provide online courses.” But as Nigel Jaquiss reported in his recent Willamette Week exposé, “…after six years and the appropriation of $7.1 million, including another $1.5 million lawmakers just approved for the current biennium, the Oregon Virtual School District has yet to provide a single ‘course.’”*
This revelation calls into question which online schools are real and which may appear to be real, but are not. Schools like Oregon Connections Academy and Oregon Virtual Academy are real schools with hundreds of real teachers educating thousands of real students across the state.
The state-run Oregon Virtual School District, on the other hand, is truly a virtual district in the not real sense of the term. It has no teachers and no students. The only real part is that it has spent millions of real taxpayer dollars. And for what? It has a nice website and offers some helpful content and tools for teachers. But that’s about it. Somewhere along the line, its mission morphed from providing real online courses to hosting some “academic materials vetted by the Education Department and training for teachers.”
The Oregon Department of Education manager who oversees the Virtual District says that it is not an alternative to online charter school offerings. “We are not set up to compete with them from a financial point of view,” he says.* Real online charter schools, paying real teachers to teach real students, receive on average less than 5,700 public dollars a year for each enrolled student.** A simple calculation tells us that the $7 million allocated to the Virtual District so far could have been used to teach at least 1,200 students for one school year, or 200 students over the six years it has received state funding. But, again, so far the district has taught zero real students.
The teachers union keeps calling for more accountability from Oregon’s real online public charter schools, the ones with real teachers educating real students. It seems far past time for state legislators and taxpayers to call for accountability on the part of the Oregon Virtual School District. What have we gotten for $7 million in this “district”? If the answer is “not much,” then we should close it down and refocus our energy and resources on real schools with real students.
Oregon’s online public charter schools are not virtual; they are real schools where real learning occurs. Just because their teachers may not wear the union label shouldn’t give OEA the right to stop them from competing with the brick-and-mortar schools its members occupy.
Parents and students hold real online public charter schools accountable every day as they freely enroll and disenroll. More school choice will give more parents and students that power over brick-and-mortar schools as well. If OEA wants to keep students in classes taught by its members, it should figure out how to do that without holding the kids hostage. All students and their families deserve the right to choose where they get their education. Anything less is a disservice to them and to the taxpayers.
* “Virtual Combat: Oregon’s teachers union hates online charter schools. But its alternative has little to show for millions of taxpayer dollars,” Nigel Jaquiss, Willamette Week, July 20, 2011, http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17755-virtual_combat.html.
** “Unintended Consequences: an analysis of charter school funding in Oregon”, Vanessa Wilkins, Northwest Center for Educational Options, April 21, 2010http://www.nwceo.org/pdf/NWCEO_Charter_School_Funding_Study_May_2010.pdf.
The average Oregon public charter school received slightly over $5,700 per student in 2008/2009 according to the Oregon Department of Education Financial Database, depending on the district that charters them. Current online charter schools are chartered in districts that pay less than this amount; but if the Oregon Virtual School District were to accept students statewide, it likely would receive closer to the average charter payment per student. Note that the $5,700 average per student charter school funding is approximately half the total public funding of brick-and-mortar public schools in Oregon.
Steve Buckstein is Founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
Source: Which Oregon School District Teaches No Students?
Oregon loses $35 million a year to college student failure, says American Institutes for Research
Published: Monday, August 22, 2011, 5:25 PM Updated: Monday, August 22, 2011, 6:08 PM
A new report today says the cost of college students who don’t make it to graduation in Oregon is about $35 million a year in lost income and taxes.
About 40 percent of students who enter Oregon’s colleges and universities drop out before earning a degree, and that failure costs the state about $35 million in lost income and taxes, according to a report released today by the American Institutes for Research.
Nationally, the institutes calculated that 493,000 students who started college in 2002 but failed to graduate within six years cost the nation about $3.8 billion in lost income, $566 million in lost federal taxes and $164 million in lost state taxes.
Read More From The Oregonian >>>
Recent K-12 Education Reforms Let Kids Transfer to a Brighter Future
by Christina Martin Monday, July 4. 2011
Public education exists to serve children – period. However, as evidenced by the Oregon Education Association’s (OEA) ongoing actions, some believe public education should serve primarily the adults who work in the system. Thankfully, this legislative session, Oregon’s state leaders concluded otherwise.
After tense negotiations on several education-related bills, Oregon’s legislature passed the most substantial education reforms Oregon has seen in decades, at the governor’s request. The more “controversial” elements of that package will provide students – who find their traditional public schools unsuitable – more educational options from which to choose, including charter and online schools. Such student-focused, choice-based measures were a particular pebble in the OEA’s shoe. Why?
Choice threatens the OEA’s monopolistic hold on public education. That grasp has allowed the OEA (a union) to become Oregon’s most financially powerful special interest group, lobbying for, well, itself. So when something undermines that power – even if that something is beneficial to children – the OEA will stand in the way, as it did this legislative session. Oregon families should be grateful the OEA lost and the governor and legislators led. Now, many children in need of a better education no longer will be held hostage.
For example, last summer, more than 4,700 Oregon kids were on waiting lists for charter schools. Because school districts were not authorizing enough additional charters to keep up with demand, desperate families have been left high and dry. (Currently, only districts and the State Board of Education can sponsor charters.)
Now, if charter school applicants are denied by districts, they can appeal to public colleges for sponsorship, providing a new avenue for charters to grow. Although public colleges will be able to sponsor just one charter each, this should help hundreds of families find the schools for which they are looking.
Many Oregon families also have been waiting for access to virtual, or online, charter schools. Currently, Oregon’s virtual charters are operating under an enrollment cap that has kept many kids from using this innovative option. Online learning is emerging as a cutting-edge way for students to have wider access to courses that otherwise might be unavailable to them. If Oregonians want to enroll their children in such schools, why not let them?
Thanks to state leaders, kids now will be able to access any virtual charter school without having to obtain their local district’s permission – at least until three percent of that district’s students are attending a virtual school. Although still unnecessarily limited, this improvement will be life changing for families who have been denied entry. It also will make it easier for families who have received permission but have had to wade through the same transfer paperwork year after year.
The third choice measure that will benefit Oregon students essentially carries charter schools’ open-enrollment policy over to traditional public schools. Today, it is difficult, if not impossible, for parents to enroll their children in out-of-district public schools because districts often refuse to let kids transfer. Now, parents will be able to enroll their children in any public school, as long as the receiving school district is accepting transfers.
In short, districts no longer will be able to force kids to stay in their local public schools if they’re able to get a public education elsewhere.
The OEA claimed that giving parents such choices creates financial instability for schools (by losing transferees). Other states, which have such policies in place, seem to cope. Why can’t Oregon? Moreover, this begs another question: Does the OEA believe that it and traditional public schools are entitled to students?
If parents choose to leave a school, that suggests something is either wrong with the school or, even if the school is “good,” their children’s needs aren’t being adequately met. In both instances, parents believe they can find a better fit for their kids elsewhere. If the goal of public education is to educate, why deny children access to schools that could do a better job of educating?
Oregon’s lawmakers and governor finally are answering that question. They’ve put partisan politics aside to support reforms for which thousands of Oregon families have been waiting. There still is much work to be done to ensure Oregon’s children – not the OEA – are the true beneficiaries of public education. But this start will show Oregonians that the sky doesn’t fall when choice is incorporated into public education; it gets brighter.
Christina Martin is a policy analyst and the School Choice Project Director at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
Source: Recent K-12 Education Reforms Let Kids Transfer to a Brighter Future
Representative Lindsay: Reforming Education in Oregon
by In the news Wednesday, June 22. 2011
by Rep. Shawn Lindsay (R-Hillsboro)
The Bipartisan Education Package
Managing the K-12 education system is one of the most important jobs we have as legislators. It’s a role I take very seriously. As a father of three young girls, I work closely with our public school system to prepare my daughters to be tomorrow’s leaders. The bipartisan votes taken yesterday in the House of Representatives are a signal that the legislature, for the first time in decades, is serious about education reform. Together, these reforms help promote choice, accountability, and innovation in our educational system.
The list below includes some of the education bills voted on yesterday that take these necessary steps forward:
• HB 3681: Allows students to enroll in the school district of their choice, so long as the receiving district grants permission.
• HB 2301: Raises the current enrollment caps on statewide virtual charter schools and replacing them with a limit of no more than three percent of students from any single district.
• HB 3645: Allows a charter school applicant to seek sponsorship from the Board of Education, a local community college, or a public university that chooses to participate, if the applicant was initially rejected by a school district.
The package also gives us the opportunity to direct more funding to education using existing resources. Elements include:
• $25 million to the State School Fund (from the Education Stability Fund).
• $14 million to the State School Fund from savings due to Education Service District (ESD) reform.
• $8.66 million to help rural school districts address unintended cuts from school consolidation.
• $5 million to establish the School District Collaboration Grant Program that provides incentives for teachers to improve student achievement through innovative means.
• $2.9 million to fund statewide Agriculture Extension programs.
Additional bills in the package include:
• SB 248: Allows districts to offer full day kindergarten and provides Average Daily Membership (ADM) funding if they choose to do so.
• SB 250: Allows school districts in four Education Service Districts (ESDs) (Baker, WESD, Multnomah and NWESD) to opt out and receive 90 percent of the funding allotted to the ESD for the share of the children serviced by the ESD.
• SB 253: Establishes new goals on higher education, specifically that at least 40 percent of adult Oregonians have earned a bachelor’s degree, 40 percent have earned an associate’s degree, and that the remaining 20 percent or less of all adult Oregonians have earned a high school diploma by 2025.
• SB 552: Makes the Governor the state’s chief school official and allows the Governor to appoint a Deputy Superintendent.
• SB 909A: Establishes the Oregon Education Investment Board that will oversee the process of recommending strategic outcome-based budgets for public education. Subject to ratification by the Legislature in 2012, the board will oversee all of public education in Oregon from preschool to higher education. The Board will appoint a Chief Education Officer to assist in carrying out the functions of the Board. Authority for the Board sunsets on March 15, 2016.
• HB 3362: Allows districts to join together to form Career and Technical Education charter schools.
• HB 3417: Aligns the budget and accounting system of a school district with their sponsored charter schools.
• HB 3474: Creates a uniform set of performance evaluation measures for teachers.
As a candidate, I campaigned on education reform. I am proud that we forged ahead to break the status quo, and we will continue to do so.
Source: Representative Lindsay: Reforming Education in Oregon
Rep. Matt Wingard Comments on “Extraordinary” 2011 Legislative Session
by In the news Tuesday, August 2. 2011
Legislative Spotlight by Taxpayer Association of Oregon
“Extraordinary.” That’s how Rep. Matt Wingard describes the most recent legislative session that featured a split House and the first ever co-Speaker’s office.
“Republicans were able to prevent tax increases, keep fee increases to a bare minimum, and ensure that we live within our means,” said Wingard. “I’m always pleased when I and my like-minded colleagues can stop tax increases.” Wingard, a vocal proponent of charter schools and public education reform, also expressed satisfaction that the 2011 Legislature approved what he believes are “the most significant education reforms in state history.” Among other things, these reforms support and encourage charter schools and the statewide virtual school, which will expand educational choices for parents and students. And, thanks to educational service district reform, school districts will be free to shop for better, more cost-effective services.
“Oregon needs high-quality public schools. I’m pleased that we took a giant step forward in the right direction this session.”
Despite the session’s success, Wingard expressed disappointment that the Legislature failed to pass key job creation legislation put forward by his Republican colleagues, saying he hopes that changes come February. While Oregon’s 18% real unemployment troubles the lawmaker, more troubling is the fact that Oregon’s per capita income is 9% below the national average.
“In today’s economy, even when Oregonians work, they’re often poor,” said Wingard.
According to the lawmaker, Oregon’s depressed per capita income can’t simply be blamed on a bad regional economy. Washington, whose per capita income was roughly the national average in the 1990s and largely mirrored Oregon’s, now enjoys a per capita income higher than national average. Oregon’s meanwhile has plummeted.
“High taxes, excessive regulation, and onerous land use laws are preventing us from creating an environment conducive to economic growth. We have to confront these issues head on.”
Wingard also said that the current fight in Congress over spending cuts and the debt ceiling makes it even more imperative that Oregon enacts necessary economic reforms.
“The nation’s fiscal problems aren’t going away. The only way for Congress and the President to get our fiscal house in order is to cut spending. In the future, this will mean less federal money for states. All the more reason we need to get Oregon working again.”
Source: Rep. Matt Wingard Comments on “Extraordinary” 2011 Legislative Session