What's so bad about NCLB?

This summer, a friend asked me what was so bad about NCLB, after all (NCLB=No Child Left Behind). (A shout-out to Peter.) I was slightly taken off guard, and the first thing I said was, well, it makes fundamentally good schools look bad. They are identified as "in need of improvement" if they can't get their numbers up to a certain level for all their sub-groups. (I'm not going to try to explain all this lingo--or maybe I will in later comments/posts.) Even schools that everyone, and I mean everyone, will admit are good schools. Peter was unimpressed. He said, and I paraphrase, if their subgroups aren't proficient, then they are, quite literally, in need of improvement. So what, he continued, is the problem? Ah. Touche (I can't put the accent grave on the e). So I figured I would use my blog to talk about what is so bad about NCLB. Because it is a messed-up law.

First of all, we have to realize that NCLB is not just about improving education in America. First and foremost, it makes education a civil rights issue. This is not a bad thing. But we have to recognize this fact in order to evaluate NCLB appropriately, and in this way: if you are the federal government, and you want to even out educational opportunity because unequal access
to a quality education is a civil rights issue, what should you do? In other words, what can the federal government do that most improves educational equity? Is the best that the feds can do pass NCLB?

Here is what it should NOT do: impose requirements that guarantee that the execution of NCLB will involve one set of adult bureaucrats in conflict with another set of adult bureaucrats, with no real consideration given to the needs of students. What do I mean? NCLB has imposed a testing regime on schools and students that has, at least in most states, nothing to do with the success of the students in school, or in their post-high school career. Instead, the numbers generated by the tests matter only to the administrators/board members in their district, as proof that that
district still merits federal Title I money.

It's true that many issues are in play here. For one, everyone praises local control of education (though it's not clear how many people really mean it). For the feds (the Dept. of Ed) to do something really radical, like forcing students to pass achievement tests in order to graduate from high school, would be seen as an unacceptable infringement on both states' and local school
districts' turf. So, respecting local control, they don't do that. Instead, they simply require that a higher and higher percentage of kids score as proficient every year (in every subgroup)--and the states specify what counts as proficient--so that the local school district will continue receiving its Title I funds. The result, then, is that NCLB is more about how one set of bureaucratic adults (the Dept. of Ed) relates to another set of bureaucratic adults (state depts. of ed, and local school district administrators/board members) than it is about improving educational equity in America.

Let me try to find another way to say it: the federal Dept. of Ed avoids questions of educational content and substance, because those have to be left to the local (and state) level. However, they have to "do something." They have to make local schools (and states) accountable. So local schools are required to show improvement in their test scores every year, for every sub-group (every racial group, socioeconomic group, learning disability group, native language group, etc.). The states decide what the content of the tests will be, and what scores will count as proficient
or not.

But then, at the state level, the state can't do anything radical like require the test to count towards graduation, or to be passed as a prerequisite to graduation. At this level, too, local control is held up as a Holy Grail (and maybe it should be--we'll get to that), so the tests are simply seen as a means for measuring school and district performance. The decision about the educational substance of the test, viz., what effect it should have on the student's academic career, is left to the individual district.

At this point, then, we see that the federal government and the state governments are rigidly neutral about the educational substance of the testing regime that is being imposed on local school districts. Now, are local school districts going to take up these tests and make them an integral part of their curriculum? Well, in a way, they'll have to: they have to get enough of the right (aggregated and disaggregated) scores. But will the test scores be incorporated into the school curriculum such that they are seen as integral to a student's education? On the one hand, why would they? Why design your school's curriculum around a generic state-wide exam. Assuming you have talented, creative teachers, why would they accept the role of passive recipients of a curriculum?

And, if we're talking about requiring a proficient score on the exam in order to graduate from high school, why would a district do that, and put itself at a disadvantage with respect to other districts? For it's not enough to get the right scores: you must also have a high enough percentage of your students graduating. You would simply be insuring failure to meet the standards of NCLB were you to require proficiency on the achievement tests as a condition for graduation.

So here's the situation: you have tests that supposedly determine the quality of a district or school that nobody (not the federal government, no state governments, and no local school districts) will stand behind as educationally choiceworthy, or educationally substantive enough to anchor a curriculum or education. But it's how our students perform on these tests that determine if our school needs improvement, needs to offer extra tutoring and other help, or needs to be entirely restaffed!!!

In other words (I'm afraid this isn't getting clearer, but maybe this will help): when the feds talk about "accountability," about making schools accountable, they seem to mean: "Prove to us that you deserve your federal Title I money. And what counts as proof, by the way, is test scores." So the local bureaucrats go to work producing test scores. With the numbers generated by test scores, you can quantify the determination of accountability. Instead of teachers' going to work to show the substance of the education that happens in a district or school (for any and all sub-groups!!!), which could then be shared with a federal representative from the Dept. of Ed, who also could discuss the substance of the education going on in that district or school, administrators and teachers have to work together to make sure that the numbers come out right when all the tests have been taken.

I think I'm going to have to rewrite this; it's getting clearer to me as I write, but what is written above might show more the struggle for understanding than the finished, clear, and transparent product.

By the way I just heard two cats fighting outside my window.

Losing a home

Losing one's home is a horrible and, up until now, relatively rare thing. But there are three ways to lose a home that have recently been receiving lots of attention.

(1) The massive increase in foreclosures due to the subprime loan crisis.

(2) Economic development incentives have spread in such a way that municipalities and counties are more willing to use eminent domain to take private homes for the sake of increased property tax/sales tax revenue. (See Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London.)

(3) With respect to our discussion here, at least in a rapidly rising real estate market: the prospect of senior citizens on fixed-incomes losing their homes due to an inability to pay their increased property tax.

As I read about the increase in foreclosures, what becomes palpable to me is the fear and anguish that people experience when faced with the prospect of losing their home. Even when a homeowner is fairly compensated--e.g., in the case of a municipality's use of eminent domain and complex economic development tools--many such homeowners are outraged and will fight even a very generous buy-out offer.

One obvious way to understand that anger, fear, and anguish is to recognize that the value of one's home is not the same as its monetary value, and that that former value often far exceeds any monetary value that that house might bring in on the free market (or even in the skewed but more favorable market conditions that sometimes result from economic redevelopment plans).

If we really respected the private lives of citizens, we'd make it harder for government entities to take homes from private citizens. We wouldn't think that that a private space could somehow always be legitimately appropriated, at some specific dollar amount. To thrive, people need both private and public lives; people need to be able to leave the public sphere to seek shelter and comfort in private. People can't lead decent public lives without a decent private life (see Hannah Arendt's reflections on privacy in The Human Condition--they're really quite brilliant).

That doesn't mean that eminent domain should never be used. Public use does sometimes trump private use. Private property rights shouldn't be taken as absolute simpliciter. Sometimes you have to build a road or utility precisely where someone is living. But that's different from saying that your private use of this property is less lucrative to the city than this other kind of private use would be, so we're going to displace you for the sake of these other private citizens.

I gotta stop--more later, in particular about the threat of rising property taxes forcing people out of their homes.

Property Tax and Justice, Part Two

So: property taxes go up too much, thanks to a great real estate market, and incomes only increase by moderate amounts--what really is the source of the injustice at hand? Is it that taxes go up precisely because of non-liquid wealth (again, you can't "cash in" your house at the bank and have money to pay your bills), and precisely on people who don't have the liquid wealth to pay them (incomes only go up moderately)?

If this is the problem, then there's one obvious solution, but one that would be remarkably hard to implement, politically speaking: don't tax property to pay for schools. Tax income instead. This makes very obvious sense when you think about the especially burdensome nature of property tax on people who are living on fixed incomes, e.g., seniors living on pensions/social security benefits. Property taxes tax many people who don't have the wherewithal to pay those taxes. Why not tax the people who have the money to pay tax, i.e., the people with higher incomes? In other words, if the taxing authority expects "liquid" payment of your property tax bill, why not tax "liquid" wealth: income?

To me it makes a world of sense. Here are (some of) the political difficulties, though, to paying for education with income tax: it's usually states and the feds who collect income tax; it's rare that municipalities and counties (or school districts) do. If the state were to levy an income tax to pay for educating Missouri's students, how would we distribute that money to our school districts? Many people would rebel at the idea that it should be distributed equally, or even according to the needs of the students. Let me be totally blunt here: people who live in affluent districts are used to having the best schools, with beautiful facilities and all the wonderful extras. If the state provided equal, or need-based funding for education from income tax, how would these districts be able to single themselves out as the best? They wouldn't . So very few of the voters from these districts would go for such a scheme.

So what can policymakers do, if income tax isn't an option, to tax in such a way that those without the ability to pay aren't taxed at too high a rate--or more exactly, aren't driven from their homes by their inability to pay their increasing property tax bill?

I'll have to write more in part three, later.

Property Tax and Justice

"Let justice roll down like a mighty stream," say the lines from the prophet Amos (lines often quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr.). But when you're talking about property tax justice, that's just a little too florid. "Let property tax justice roll down like a mighty stream"--who's going to get behind that? What could be more pedestrian than property tax?

Anyway, here goes the start of a multi-part posting.

Property tax is a tax on wealth. The more wealth you have, the more property tax you pay. That seems fair, doesn't it?

Usually it is fair. Problems arise, though, when the housing market in your area heats up, and then the county assessor decides that you are more wealthy and should pay more tax. Assuming the assessor assesses fairly, he/she is right: you do become more wealthy when the real estate market booms in your neighborhood. But the problem is, it's not the kind of wealth you can cash out and use to pay your property tax bill. In other words, if your assessed valuation goes up 10% every reassessment period, but your income only goes up 2% for the same periods, then, over a number of years, paying your property tax bill is going to become more and more difficult.

In still other words, just because your property wealth increases, that doesn't mean that your income--what you'll use to pay your property tax bill--increases at the same rate. And that's when things start to seem unjust. Property taxes can get so high (based on higher assessments, not on higher rates) that people can be priced out of their homes by their property tax bill.

So how do we set tax policy to address this problem? The Hancock Amendment was one serious attempt to deal with it. But as you can see from my earlier postings, it provides protection to taxpayers on average: in any given reassessment year, about half the taxpayers will pay lower tax, the same tax, or a barely increased tax (increased at the rate of the Consumer Price Index or lower). The other half of the taxpayers will pay a higher tax bill, one that could be raised at a significantly higher rate than the Consumer Price Index. The people in this second half clearly won't feel very protected by the Hancock Amendment.

What to do? I'll have to write about it in the next part(s) of this post. And though I don't claim to have the answers, I think it'll become clear that many of the simple solutions floating around in Jeff City are totally inadequate.

One more attempt to underline the effects of the Hancock

Maybe my last posting went on way too long. But in a nutshell, here's the way to think about the Hancock Amendment and how it affects your taxes and the revenues of taxing authorities:

• about half of all property-tax payers will wind up paying more than they did last year; furthermore, their increase will probably be greater than the rate of inflation. These are the people whose homes go up in value more than the average increase for the district.
• about half of all property-tax payers will either wind up paying less than they did last year, or will pay a slight increase in taxes that will be at the rate of inflation or lower. These are the people whose homes do in fact go up in value, but go up in value less than the average increase for the district (or, of course, those whose home-values remain unchanged or decline).
• no taxing entity that rolls back according to the Hancock Amendment will realize any revenue increase greater than the rate of inflation.

I hate to complicate things, now that I've reduced it all down to three bullet points; however, for the sake of accuracy, I have to point out that this is true for each taxing entity, and not necessarily true of your whole tax bill. I pay property tax to 14 taxing authorities; the three bulleted items above are entirely accurate about the taxes I pay to each of those taxing authorities when they roll back in accordance with the Hancock Amendment. However, if a taxing authority like a city, library, school district, etc., passes a new operating tax levy, there will not necessarily be a rollback for that taxing authority. Thus 12 of the 14 taxing authorities to which I pay taxes might roll back as detailed in the Hancock Amendment; if the other two don't because they've passed a new levy, then the whole of my tax bill (the sum of the tax I pay to all 14) might not be accurately described by the above three bullet points.

The Hancock Amendment does in fact do what it was intended to do

There are a handful of politicians--state legislators mostly--running around right now talking about how local taxing authorities, mainly school districts, aren't "rolling back" their tax rates the way the Hancock Amendment requires. When pressed, these legislators usually admit that local taxing authorities are violating the "spirit" of the Hancock Amendment and not the "letter" of it. At any rate, they're feeding taxpayer anger and misleading the public for the sake of political gain, it seems to me. They can do this in part because the Hancock Amendment is so hard to understand. So here are a few short paragraphs that I hope help to explain it.

Imagine that your school district in 2006 has a tax rate of an even $5.00/$100 assessed valuation, and that the total assessed valuation in your district is $20,000,000. Your school district will thus generate $1,000,000 in revenues. The calculation:
Assessed Val. x Rate = tax revenue. So:
$20,000,000 x $5/$100 = $1,000,000.

Now let's say that inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, is 2% this year. The Hancock Amendment thus requires that your district can only take in $1,020,000 in revenues in 2007, even if assessed valuation in your district goes up 10%, 20%, or higher.
2% of $1,000,000 (2006 revenues) = $20,000.
So 2007 revenues max out at $1,000,000 + $20,000 = $1,020,000.

Let's say for the sake of the example that assessed valuation in your district increased by 25% from '06 to '07. So your district's total assessed valuation has gone from $20,000,000 to $25,000,000. To get the maximum allowed (Hancock permitted) revenues, your local school board has to approve a new tax rate of $4.08--in other words,
they have to "roll back" the rate from $5.00 to $4.08. Here's the calculation:
$25,000,000 x New 2007 Rate=$1,020,000. So
$1,020,000/$25,000,000=New Rate=$4.08/$100.

The law requires these rollbacks; no school district has the option of simply ignoring them. Our Chief Financial Officer has to send an elaborate set of tax rate calculations into the State Auditor's office so that the State Auditor can make sure that we are rolling back correctly according to the provisions of the Hancock Amendment and Missouri Statute (and case law).

So why, the taxpayer will ask, does it happen that my property tax bill from one year to the next can increase by more than the consumer price index? Typically, there are two ways this happens. First, and more commonly, you have the bad luck (or good luck, if you're trying to sell your house), that your house goes up in value more than the average increase in your district. Let's say that you live in the district in my example above, and that your $150,000 home goes up in value by 50% and is now worth $225,000. The Hancock Amendment requires the district to roll back the rates for the district taken as a whole; in other words, one rate is generated through the rollback that applies to every house in the district. So your rate will be $4.08, your neighbor's rate will be $4.08, everyone in the district's rate will be $4.08. That's so whether your house goes up in value 50%, 25%, 5%, or even declines in value. So, anyway, back to your house. Last year, at $5.00/$100 as the rate, on your $150,000, you paid approximately $1425 in property tax to your school district. (Remember, in Missouri, there's a .19 multiplier: you don't pay property tax on the entire value of your home, but on 19% of it: your "assessed value" is 19% of what the county assessor says your house is worth.) In 2007, however, you'll pay a lower rate ($4.08), but on a more valuable home, and you'll wind up paying approximately $1744. (Here's the calculation: $225,000 x .19 x $4.08/$100 = $1744.) So you're paying $319 more! But the Hancock Amendment did exactly what it was supposed to do. You are in fact paying about 22% more to the school district than you did last year. But it's not the school district's fault, or the Hancock amendment's fault--it's that your increase in assessed valuation went up so much more than the average increase in assessed valuation. If your house had gone up in value at the average increase of 25%, you'd be paying 2% more in tax to the school district. And, in fact, if your house had gone up in value, but had gone up less than 22.5%, you'd be paying less in tax to the school district than you did in 2006.

So here's a simple rule of thumb to remember about how the Hancock Amendment works: if your house goes up in value more than the average in your district, you'll probably be paying an increase to the taxing authority that's more than the rate of inflation. But if the value of your home goes up--just less than the average increase in your district--you'll probably be paying less to the local taxing authority in tax than you did last year. So the Hancock Amendment does work.

(True life example: in our school district this year (reassessment year 2007), total assessed (residential) valuation increased by 29%; my assessed valuation, on the other hand, went up 54%. As a result, my tax bill went up 28%. My tax bill didn't go up so much because taxing authorities violated the law and simply chose not to roll back; it went up so much because the assessed value of my property increased so much more than the total, or average, assessed valuation did. Notice though that a 28% increase in my tax bill is a lot better than a 54% increase!!!)

OK I'm tired of writing my blog, but now, briefly, for the second way in which a property tax bill can increase at a faster rate than inflation/the consumer price index: when voters approve a tax levy increase, the Hancock Amendment doesn't require any rollback in that taxing authority's property tax rate. The voters are taken to be saying, ''I know what my assessed valuation is, and I know what the increased property tax rate is that the taxing authority is asking for, and I approve that tax rate for that level of assessed valuation." I just looked at my personal property tax bill today; there are 14 different entities receiving property tax revenue from my personal property tax payment. I know at least two of them received voter-approved tax levy increases in the past year. Those two rates don't have to be rolled back, according to the Hancock Amendment. However, I believe the city of Maplewood did do a voluntary rollback, even though, after the voters approved a 20-cent tax levy increase in April, they were not required to roll back their property tax at all.

There's still a lot more to say here. I do welcome questions!!!

A corollary

If education is a public good, it's also a public responsibility. In other words, if everyone benfits from public education, then everyone has a duty to contribute towards it.