Gov.’s efficiency task force has nothing to do with education

Gov. Sam Brownback created a “task force” to study efficiency in the public schools. It is made up of accountants and other business types. No educators allowed.
Call it a task force or a hatchet squad. The point of it is to cut spending on education. No time will be wasted on improving student performance. Only the uninformed would assume otherwise.
The need to cut spending still further on public schools increased mightily when the Legislature cut income taxes sharply earlier this year. More than half of the state’s general fund budget goes to public schools. Another big chunk goes to higher education, including community colleges, ours among them.
Cutting taxes reduces the money available to spend on schools and everything else. This rather obvious fact needs repeating these days because there are some in high places in Topeka who haven’t made the connection.
Those same people believe the tax cuts will produce new jobs which will create new tax revenues and that this more-from-less effect will happen soon enough to avoid state budget reductions.
But just in case this economic miracle doesn’t get here in time to prevent still another cruel reduction, Gov. Brownback wants to be prepared to show the state’s 293 school districts how they can do more with less.
To digress, the scenario reminds me of the farmer who decided to save money by substituting wheat straw for alfalfa hay in feeding his horse. He slipped a little more straw and a little less hay into the trough each day, expecting dobbin to adapt. “Was working great,” he told his wife, “but just as I got her broke to 100 percent straw, the darn critter died.”

WORRIED THAT Brownback’s efficiency hawks will focus solely on pinching pennies and forget why public schools exist, the Kansas Association of School Boards announced last week that it, too, is creating a task force. Theirs will be made up of school superintendents and other educators. Its mission will be to recommend ways to better prepare Kansas high school graduates to meet the state’s economic needs.
When the Legislature convenes in January to begin dealing with the needs of the state and its people in 2013 and 2014, its members should first remind themselves that education is the state’s primary mission.
The money spent on the public schools, the community colleges, the technical colleges and the state universities is an investment in the future of today’s youngsters and the state’s economy.
The quality of Kansas education very largely determines the quality of life in Kansas.
Educating Kansas kids on the cheap will cheat them. Running second class schools, colleges and universities will give Kansas a second-class future. This isn’t partisan rhetoric; it is an obvious fact that our history has demonstrated beyond argument.
It is scary — extremely scary — that the centrality of education to the essence of our state community must be debated again in Kansas.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.