Experience learning – the E3 Fair

We know that when students are excited about a subject, the effect of that enthusiasm spills over into other areas of learning and enhances performance.  We also know that experiential learning is internalized far more readily than passive learning.  Given the importance of such things, several blogposts over the coming year will be devoted to learning experiences that can be life changing because of the stimulation and new exposures they provide.

One such unique event is next week, the annual E³ Fair at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  E³ stands for Engineering -Exploration - Experimentation.  This fair is sponsored by RIT along with the Rochester chapters of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and AMSE (American Society for Mechanical Engineers).  Many local engineering firms also participate.  The objective is to provide students an opportunity to learn about engineering professions, to meet and interact with practicing engineers, and to begin learning how to "engineer" solutions to problems. 

Research has shown that the seeds of interest in STEM subjects are often sown in middle school, and this fair is for students in grades 6-8.  The students can participate in the fair by creating an exhibit about an experiment or project that involves engineering or technology, or by being part of a team of students who build a motorized LEGO vehicle or LEGO robot to perform a specific task.  In preparation for the fair, teams of students spend weeks working with mentors in their home schools to design and prepare their LEGO constructions for these competitions. 

Over the past two years more than 1400 middle school students from throughout the surrounding area have participated in the fair.  High school students also attend to talk with exhibitors about career opportunities in engineering and technology.

The fair, which is free to attend, is open to parents and community groups as well.  This year the fair will run from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM at the Clark gymnasium on the RIT campus.  For more information, go to the event website at http://www.e3fair.org .

Math Awareness Month - Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge

The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has announced that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month, April 2012, is Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge.

In the world of education reform, few concepts have received more attention than data, or rather the acquisition of data.  Data and credibility are often seen as one and the same.  Some people believe data can replace verbs and adjectives to describe complex activities such as what makes up good teaching.  New data is used to create statistics, and for some purposes, statistical analysis is officially usurping judgment as the basis for decision making.

This pursuit of data and the interpretation of the statistics that result has fundamentally changed our education system.  The mass of data school districts are required to report to governing authorities has changed the job description of school administrators.  The need to collect and process this data has changed the nature of the work being done at BOCES.  The difficulty of creating a statewide computer system to process the data has plagued the State Education Department, which is investing new millions after old millions to try to get a system that can handle this ever growing mass of data.  Meanwhile at the district level Assistant Superintendents for Instruction are spending hundreds of hours learning how to evaluate their staff in a manner that supports the conversion to data.  These changes are driven by the demands of collecting data, not by what we learn from the analysis.

When new ways to create data are put into law or regulation without establishing the validity of that same data, major political problems result.  Case in point, witness the conflict over our state’s new teacher and principal evaluation system’s use of data to measure performance.  For educators who have lived through successive redesigns of assessment systems to measure teaching and learning, only to see each rejected by next set of leaders, the most recent assertion that everyone should accept and trust information gleaned from the new data is not sufficient to instill confidence. 

We are witnessing a growing urgency about measuring things that were not measured numerically in the past.  Albert Einstein had a favorite quote, "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts.”  

The theme of Math Awareness Month merits thoughtful reflection.  The data deluge the math organizations are concerned about is real. Most people don’t have the time or sophistication to determine if a statistic is revealing truth or obfuscating it.  Accumulating data should not become an end in itself and collecting data should not be allowed to disrupt the real work of education.  

Health Insurance - Rochester Area School Health Plan (RASHP)

Health insurance is a difficult issue for our nation.  Depending on your perspective you may be a person trying to secure and pay for health insurance, a patient in immediate need of insurance coverage, an employer feeling the pinch of the cost of insurance, a doctor trying to negotiate overwhelming paperwork, or the US Supreme Court trying to make sense of conflicting arguments for how insurance should be obtained and provided. You may have one or even several opinions about how health care issues should be dealt with. 

But even though the major questions regarding health insurance availability, cost, and coverage are national in scope, local organizations don’t have to be passive about dealing with them.

Most school districts in Monroe County participate in a variety of cooperative self-insurance plans that enable employers to reduce insurance costs without reducing coverage.  By coming together in a group, districts can better control the risks associated with a self-insurance plan. 

Particularly notable among the local self-insurance programs is the Rochester Area School Health Plan (RASHP).  Although it took several years for RASHP to become the main source of health insurance for school employees, the effort to establish and build this cooperative has been very worthwhile.  Since 2009, RASHP has saved the school districts over $361 million (yes, million) compared to what they would have had to pay had they remained on the community rated plan.  By enabling districts to help contain the rising cost of health insurance, this cooperative has had a direct and positive effect on district budgets.

Information on the several local school district self-insurance plans can be found on page 30 of The Best for Less at http://www.mcsba.org/exemplary/2011BestForLess-Web.pdf.

Mandate Relief – Another opportunity for success, or failure

New York State’s new Mandate Relief Council is holding a public hearing here in Rochester today, Friday, March 16, 3:00 PM, at City Hall.  They are seeking information about how changes in state regulations and laws would enable local government and school resources to be used more efficiently and productively.

This Mandate Relief Council is the newest group designated to address the problem of unfunded and under funded mandates.  Convening a group to study mandates and make recommendations is not a new idea in New York.  Commissions for this purpose have come and gone with virtually nothing to show for the hours of testimony and preparing reports; it is easy to understand why many people are skeptical of this new effort.

Yet, despite the frustrating history of past commissions, it is important to participate fully in this effort.  This year this process is being organized in a way that may make it more likely mandate issues get public attention.  If every school district and local government flags the same few issues for Council review, perhaps the pollsters will notice and ask the kind of questions that creates buzz around issues, perhaps the public will embrace the message, and perhaps the legislators will discover they are compelled to vote with the public will. 

This Mandate Relief Council is made up of seven members of the Governor’s staff and four legislators.  The Commission has established a procedure on their website (http://www.governor.ny.gov/mandatereliefcouncil)

where both citizens (http://www.governor.ny.gov/webform/mandatereviewpubliccommentform)

and elected governing boards (http://www.governor.ny.gov/webform/mandatereviewrequestform)

can formally submit requests for changes for the Council’s review. 

The Commission will review the mandates submitted for consideration and also seek public comment on the proposals.  If at the end of their review the Council votes to support a change, they can direct the Governor to change regulations or, in the case of laws, prepare a program bill for the Legislature to vote on.  With regard to changing laws, nothing about the process compels the Legislature to vote to approve a change.

The burden created by costly mandates has been detailed in numerous reports over many years.  MCSBA annually updates and circulates our position papers on mandate relief as do other school board groups.

(http://www.mcsba.org/legislative/positions/2011-11%20Mandates%20approved.pdf)

As to formal reports, in my office is a 4-inch stack documenting the need for mandate relief.  It includes numerous efforts done during the past decade by both state agencies and state organizations.  Although the Mandate Relief Council is requesting new information, there is no shortage of information identifying the specific problems created by unfunded mandates or proposed solutions.  In reverse chronological order here are some of the major reports along with links to most of them.

2012 –

Let NY Work, A Common Agenda for the Common Good, by a consortium of 11 statewide organizations

http://www.unshackleupstate.com/assets/news/letnyworkagenda.pdf

2011 –

NYSSBA Essential Fiscal Reform Playbook
          http://www.nyssba.org/index.php?src=news&refno=1742&category=Guides

Mandate Relief Redesign Team Report, commissioned by Governor

Cuomo

http://www.governor.ny.gov/assets/documents/finalmandate.pdf

Special Education – New York State Law, Regulations, and Policy Not required by Federal Law/Regulation/Policy; an annual update from the NYSED

http://www.p12.nysed.gov/specialed/publications/partb-analysischart.htm

2010 –

You Can’t Cap What You Can’t Control, Recommendations from the Mayoral Task Force on Mandate and Property Tax Relief

http://www.nycom.org/documents/email.pdf

Property Tax Cap: Pass or Fail for School Districts, NYSSBA

http://www.nyssba.org/clientuploads/nyssba_pdf/nyssbapropertytaxcap

report.pdf

List of Mandates Frequently Raised in Discussions with School Administrators, Board Members and the Public, NYSED

http://www.p12.nysed.gov/fmis/mandaterelief/documents/mandates.xls

2009 –

Memorandum from the Conference of Big 5 School districts – Mandate Relief Recommendations

2008 –

New York State Commission on Property Tax relief, commissioned by Governor Paterson

http://blog.syracuse.com/indepth/2008/06/Suozzi%20report

21^st Century Government, Report of the New York State Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness, commissioned by Governor Paterson

http://www.nyslocalgov.org/pdf/LGEC_Final_Report.pdf?pagemode=bookmarks

Report of the Task Force on Maximizing School District Resources, NYSSBA; Excelsior! Key Drivers Behind New York’s ‘Ever Upward” Property Tax Burden

http://www.nyssba.org/clientuploads/nyssba_pdf/CommExcelsiorReport.pdf

Testimony by Thomas Rogers, Executive Director of NYSCOSS to the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief, Helping School Leaders Control Costs

http://www.nyscoss.org/pdf/upload/TestimonyPropertyTaxCommissionOct2008.docx.pdf

The State of New York Schools: Addressing the Burden of Unfunded Mandates Real Solutions, Real Relief, Assembly Republican Conference

2002 -

A Compilation of Mandatory School District Planning & Reporting Requirements, Drowning in a Sea of Paperwork, NYSCOSS

http://www.nyscoss.org/pdf/upload/Plansreports.pdf

Saving money by working together

MCSBA’s member districts collaborate with municipalities, businesses, and each other to offer excellent services in a fiscally prudent manner. MCSBA and professional organizations provide opportunities for planning to provide cost efficient programs and services. Cost efficiency is defined two ways:
- Programs and services of the same value at less cost, and/or
- Programs and services of added value at the same cost.

This sharing of resources saves local local school districts millions of dollars every year while improving the quality and variety of services provided by the county’s public schools. These collaborations, whether long standing or relatively new, provide a wide range of services in the areas of:
Instructional Program Service
Central Services
Insurance Cooperatives
Operations and Maintenance
Transportation
To read about detailed examples of how Monroe County school districts accomplish this, go to http://www.mcsba.org/exemplary/2011BestForLess-Web.pdf .

Voters misled about 2% property tax cap

We have all heard the much used phrase “2% tax cap.” Last year almost every member of the state legislature voted to impose a limit on increases in local property taxes for all local governments. Although widely referred to as the “2% cap on property taxes,” the law actually refers to the permissible increase in the total levy, not to any single property tax payer’s property tax bill.

Unfortunately the popular sound bite has seriously misled the public about what this law will and won’t do. And school leaders, who must put their budgets before their communities for a vote, worry that a confused public will be angry when budget increases do not match the sound bite.

People are expecting their personal property taxes will increase by no more than 2% but here is what the law really does:
- People used to vote on the school district’s total budget; now they will vote only on the levy.
- The law governs the permissible increase of the levy, the total number of dollars to be collected from the entire community. It does not limit the increase for any individual taxpayer. For any given property, changes in assessments and equalization rates may result in increases greater than 2%.
- The allowable increase may be more than 2% because the permissible increase is calculated using a formula with several variables. The formula can, and often does, result in a permissible increase larger than 2%.
- If a proposed levy is no greater than the calculated permissible increase, even if it is more than 2%, school district budgets can be passed with a simple majority yes vote. Communities do have the right to approve a larger increase in the levy if 60% of the voters vote yes.
- But if voters reject the proposal twice there can be no increase in the levy over the amount levied the previous year. In the past after budgets failed, there was an allowance for inflationary increases, but no more.