White Paper on Elementary and Secondary Education
Issue 3	September 2003

Executive Summary

    Public elementary and secondary education in Louisiana has historically ranked at the bottom of the nation in measures of education performance and funding levels. But, in recent years the state has made some gains in these areas. The school and district accountability system has prompted increases in student performance and closer scrutiny of problem areas. A higher budget priority for state-level education funding has increased the per-pupil and teacher salary funding levels. However, in spite of that effort, Louisiana has barely kept up with other southern states as they, too, strive to increase student performance and teacher pay.

    In terms of the funding effort Louisiana taxpayers put forth, the state ranks quite well in comparison to its southern peers and the nation as a whole. Considering that Louisiana citizens devote a higher percentage of their personal income to education than the national and southern averages and given current economic conditions, substantial increases in funding for education will be difficult to achieve.

    Rather, education reform in Louisiana needs to incorporate programmatic, governance and funding changes to effect lasting, comprehensive improvement. Reforming the state’s elementary and secondary education system is key to building Louisiana’s reputation as a state worthy of corporate investment and economic development. A strong education system ensures that prospective employers, whom the state is trying to attract, will have a strong candidate pool from which they can draw future employees. Additionally, high quality public education is essential to improving the overall quality of life in the state, making it an attractive place to live for recent college graduates and corporate executives alike.

    A top priority for education reform in Louisiana is to fix the state’s failing schools. A means must be established for temporary state takeover of schools that consistently fail to meet the new quality standards outlined by the accountability system and reinforced by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. Also, until a failing school can be fixed, its students should be guaranteed school choice by a limited voucher program that subsidizes their attendance at a private school when no other acceptable public school option exists.

    Accordingly, to assist every school in meeting the improved performance standards, the state must find innovative and effective ways to attract and retain highly qualified, motivated and professional teachers to its classrooms. Effective recruitment and retention strategies incorporate mentoring, scheduling and placement tactics designed to reinforce a teacher’s commitment to the profession, but also include fair and competitive pay as their foundation.

    Adjusting the state’s tenure laws is another strategy for improving teacher quality. The teaching probationary period should be more flexible, tenure should be awarded according to the attainment of professional standards and loss of state certification should result in loss of tenure.

    To reinforce the ability of district superintendents to make necessary personnel decisions, local school boards and their political tendencies should be removed from personnel decisions. However, school board power should be expanded to allow districts complete control over their provision of transportation, janitorial and food services. Outsourcing such services is a viable and more cost-effective option in some cases and should be allowed.

    State-level funding of local districts should continue to be examined to ensure maximum equity and adequacy around the state. Thus, statewide teacher pay raises should be resisted, and the state’s funding formula for school districts, or Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), should be adjusted to base high school funding on student credit hours per semester. Further, state funds for high school students should be more flexibly distributed to allow for the expansion of vocational and technical programs for students who are not college bound and college-credit options for those who are.

    Elementary and secondary education in Louisiana has the potential to play a major role in improving the state’s economy and breaking the cycle of poverty prevalent in many of its communities. First, however, policies must be established to break Louisiana’s education legacy of unstable education funding, low student and school performance expectations and inefficient delivery of services. The next governor and new Legislature face major challenges in determining the proper level of funding for schools, how to fund teacher pay raises and the best way to improve school facilities in the state.

    A sound public elementary and secondary education system provides the state’s population with the essential intellectual basics needed to progress to the next education or skill levels required for jobs in today’s knowledge-based, high-tech global economy. Quality schools shape children into more productive and involved members of society. Also, the reputation of a state’s public education system is an important consideration for corporations as they decide whether or not to invest in an area. Thus, a good elementary/secondary education system is a fundamental building block in developing a state’s economy.

    Louisiana has ranked at the bottom of the nation in most measures of education progress. Policymakers have recognized this fact as they have struggled to implement education reforms that improve student and school performance. Unfortunately, many of the reform attempts were eventually ignored, poorly implemented, challenged in court, repealed or simply watered down until they were ineffective.

    In 1996, the state embarked on what was acknowledged as a very long journey to education reform by beginning the development of the Louisiana School and District Accountability System. Accountability is not a miracle cure that will fix the state’s education system overnight. The system must be given time and strong support from all levels of government to allow schools and school districts to implement difficult reforms before they can achieve their new, challenging goals of reducing the achievement gap between subgroups and raising student academic achievement by 2014.

    This report focuses on the status of elementary and secondary education in Louisiana and offers recommendations for improvement. The report also identifies several tough policy choices that the next governor and new Legislature will face as they set their priorities for the next four years.

Status of Education Funding in Louisiana

    Recently, a great deal of concern has been raised over the increased cost of public elementary and secondary education in Louisiana. Mainly, critics note that, while the public school student population has decreased in Louisiana, education funding in Louisiana has increased 56% from 1990-91 to 2000-01, and the average teacher salary has increased by only 28%. (See Figures 1 and 2.) These statistics by themselves raise significant red flags, making one wonder if there were misplaced priorities and inefficient operations in the state’s education system. Although inflation accounts for much of this increase (the Consumer Price Index rose 31% for this period), one questions why education spending increased at a rate significantly higher than the increase in teacher salaries.

FIGURE 1 Ten-Year Growth Comparison	FIGURE 2 Ten-Year Change in Total Staff, Teacher and Student Counts
Sources for the above figures: Education Data, Louisiana Department of Education Annual Financial and Statistical Report; Personal Income Data, U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    The major problem in looking at gross statistics such as these is that they fail to compare Louisiana’s education funding growth to the growth experienced in other states. In addition, these statistics do not compare Louisiana spending to what an adequate level of education services should cost the state.

Funding Adequacy

    Unfortunately, there is no nationally recognized or validated formula that defines an adequate level of funding for a school or school system. The main reason for this lack of a standard is that the funding a school or district requires is determined by several complex variables affected by difficult policy decisions. Some of these various policy considerations include:

• School Size. Consolidating students into larger schools allows those schools to provide more services and courses at lower costs. However, some research suggests that large schools negatively impact student motivation and performance due to their more impersonal, less engaging or less inclusive learning environments.

• District Size. Consolidating school districts into larger districts reduces overhead expenses for the district by spreading the cost of essential services such as purchasing, financial management, supervision, curriculum development, professional development and other services over a larger financial base. The trade-off is loss of local control.

• Class Size. Increasing the number of students in a class reduces costs. However, some research suggests that smaller classes, especially for high-risk students at the elementary grades, result in higher student achievement. There is no general agreement on what the optimum class size should be.

• Staffing Requirements. Reducing non-instructional staff positions allows schools to put more resources in the classroom to improve student achievement. But schools are also facing several societal and health issues that demand additional non-instructional services for students.

• Resource Targeting. Redirecting resources to areas identified by school accountability programs as needing improvement should result in higher student achievement and a reduction of the performance gap between identified subgroups. But accountability programs, especially those with "high stakes" testing, generally require summer school, tutoring, individualized instruction or other remediation programs that demand resources for schools at all levels of achievement. In addition, accountability programs require all schools to devote resources to curriculum development, professional development and other programs to improve or at least maintain their performance. With such high demand on resources statewide, it is difficult to identify which high performing schools might be able to sacrifice resources for the sake of targeting them toward poorer performing schools.

• Special Populations. Louisiana uses a funding formula, the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), to equitably allocate state funding to school districts in relation to their wealth and additional costs they incur due to their unique student bodies. However, there is no generally accepted and validated measurement that defines the additional cost of educating high poverty student bodies or children with varying degrees of disabilities, so the adequacy of the funding supplements is still up for debate.

    Without having a general consensus or established policy on the above issues, it is virtually impossible to establish what is an adequate level of funding for each school and district. On one end of the spectrum, policymakers could select a funding level that provides a very cost-efficient system that only minimally aims to improve student achievement. At the other end of the spectrum, they could select a funding level that maximizes student achievement, but also provides education services in an inefficient manner at a greatly increased cost.

National Comparison

    Since there is no accepted measurement of adequate funding for schools, we are limited to using national comparisons of per-pupil expenditures to evaluate the state’s adequacy of spending on education. The danger in using this comparison is that it encourages the use of two possibly false assumptions: (1) average state spending is adequate for the average state; and, (2) average state spending (either at the national level or southern regional average) is adequate for Louisiana. Table 1 provides a history of per-pupil expenditures and average teacher salaries in Louisiana compared to the nation and the 16-state Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) region.

    Louisiana has consistently ranked at the bottom of the SREB and nation in per-pupil expenditures and teacher salaries. Even with a significant increase in state dollars for education during the past eight years, the state’s ranking has remained low, since other states have also increased education spending.

    Louisiana’s per-pupil spending rose $1,590 from 1995-96 to 2000-01. School districts spent over $940 million more in 2000-01 than in 1995-96, accounting for some of the per-pupil increase. But, Louisiana also tied for fourth in the nation with West Virginia (also tied for first in the SREB) with the highest student loss, a 6.8% decrease. Only four other states in the South and 15 other states in the nation experienced student decreases. Thus, the rise in per-pupil spending was due partly to increased spending and partly to a loss of over 50,000 students during this period.

    At the U.S. per-pupil spending rate of $7,376, Louisiana would have spent almost $995 million dollars more in 2000-01 on elementary and secondary education. For the SREB per-pupil spending rate of $6,479, over $328 million in additional spending would have occurred. Thus, spending on education in Louisiana was well below the U.S. and SREB levels.

Personal Income and State Effort

    The lower spending did not mean that the state placed a lower priority on education. Louisiana is generally a poor state, ranking 42nd in the nation and 11th in the SREB in per capita personal income for 2002. (This was an improvement over previous years, with the state’s ranking bottoming out at 46th and 13th, respectively, in 2000). A lower per capita personal income generally means that it is somewhat harder to raise tax revenues in Louisiana than in other states.

    While Louisiana’s per-pupil spending was around 82% of the national average in 2000-01, its per capita personal income was closer to 78%. Of course, total school spending includes federal money, which inflates Louisiana’s apparent effort. While total spending cannot be broken down according to revenue source, total revenues can. Table 2 shows Louisiana’s total revenues according to source. Local and federal sources are responsible for most of the 56% education revenue growth in the state for the past ten years.

    A better measure of fiscal effort is to compare education revenues from state and local sources only, as a percentage of the state’s total personal income. As shown in Table 3, Louisiana’s education funding exceeded the SREB and national figures in 2000-01, even though the state’s per capita personal income growth was one of the lowest in the nation. Seven of the ten poorest states in the nation in 2000 (including Louisiana) were SREB states, and all of them exceeded the national and SREB figures in education funding effort. In fact, nine of sixteen SREB states are exerting an education funding effort higher than the national percentage. For this group, the average state used 4.8% of its personal income for education.

How Does Louisiana Spend Its Education Dollars?

    The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that Louisiana compares quite well in spending on instruction. (See Table 4.) The state as a whole spent 59.9% of its total current expenditures on instruction compared to 60.7% for the nation and 60.3% for the SREB. Moreover, the state exceeded the national average on the amount spent on instructor’s salaries and employee benefits. Over 55% of the state’s education expenditure was spent on teachers, paraprofessionals and other instructional employees, exceeding the national and SREB percentages.

TABLE 4

Comparison of Current Expenditure Spending on Instruction, 2000-01

Status of Public School Staffing in Louisiana

    Louisiana’s school systems tend to employ more staff than other school systems throughout the nation. As seen in Table 5, there were about 139 employees per 1,000 students for the state in 2001-02, with the state ranking 18th nationally and fifth in the SREB. The largest category of employees is instructional staff, with over 60% of the total staff employed in the classroom. (See Table 6.)

    In the past ten years, Louisiana’s student/teacher ratio has decreased 14% from 17.3 students per teacher to 14.9, and the state’s student/staff ratio has decreased 12% from 8.6 to 7.5. National data also show that overall Louisiana’s school districts:

• Tend to have more teachers and aides per student than most other states, but the state’s percentage is very close to the national and SREB percentages.

• Have fewer administrators and administrative staff than other states due to large, parish-wide school districts and economies of scale.

• Tend to have larger school support staffs than other states, in a category containing slightly less than 30% of the school systems’ total staff.

• Have considerably more guidance counselors than other states. This category is misleading in its labeling since it also contains therapists and specialists that are not performing guidance counselor duties. In addition, this is a very small part of a school’s staff, consisting of slightly over 3% of the total employees.

    The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) employment data are contained in categories that are too broad to allow comparison of most specific types of workers. Thus, it is difficult to determine why the state has more employees in certain categories and if there is a valid reason for the higher staffing levels. While the data indicate that the state does have a higher staffing level than most states, there are several plausible reasons that explain some of the variance. Further examination of how these employees are used would be useful.

    There are often significant pressures or direct demands on a school system to hire non-instructional staff. For example, instances of school violence have raised security concerns for the safety of students, adding pressure on school systems to add security personnel to school staffs. High rates of students with health problems and lacking health insurance increase the need for schools to employ full-time school nurses to handle student medications and be on hand for medical emergencies. Increased use of technology in schools has increased the need for schools to maintain full-time librarians, and desegregation has required the state to maintain more transportation staff for busing. Also, "high stakes" testing requirements and remediation programs for students who have failed or are at risk of failing place pressure on school districts to hire tutors, test coordinators and other specialists.

    Additionally, the Legislature continues to mandate that certain non-instructional personnel be assigned to schools. Besides mandating that certain schools have guidance counselors, legislation was passed in 2003 that requires all failing schools in Orleans Parish have a full-time social worker.

    School staffing is often a contentious and highly debated issue. School systems face many demands for services in their schools and must balance the cost of providing these services with the requirement to provide a quality education for all of their students. Many walk a fine line, especially during periods of limited revenues.

    Given that per-pupil funding in Louisiana is generally lower than other states, that the state spends around the national average on instruction and instruction compensation and that the state’s school districts have a high percentage of their staffs assigned to the classroom, it does not seem feasible to believe that restructuring the state’s staffing will result in a significant cost savings that can be applied to teacher pay raises. The state’s school district staffing is out of alignment with the other states, but the data do not suggest that this is a major problem that requires immediate and drastic changes.

Status of Student Performance

    One of the main components of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is that it requires states to reach a level of "proficiency" by the year 2014. Yet, it has also given states discretion in defining their own level of proficiency.

    Louisiana has defined proficient as the "Basic" level on the state’s primary assessment test, the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program for the 21st Century (LEAP). Considered a "NAEP-like" assessment of student achievement (see below), LEAP 21 is a content-based test administered to all fourth- and eighth-grade students in Louisiana. In recent years, student performance on the LEAP 21 has improved. For instance, on the language arts portion of the test the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring at the Basic level or above increased from 55% in 1999 to 59% in 2003; and, eighth-grade scores increased from 43% to 53%. In mathematics the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring at the Basic or above level increased from 42% in 1999 to 58% in 2000; and, eighth-grade scores increased from 38% in 1999 to 47% in 2000.

    In addition to the state’s annual assessment test, NCLB also requires all states receiving Title I funds to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. Administered by the federal government and often referred to as the "nation’s report card," NAEP provides an independent assessment of student achievement in Louisiana and, further, allows for comparison of student achievement across states. NAEP biennially tests a sample of Louisiana students at the fourth- and eighth-grades in both reading and mathematics, using four levels to mark achievement: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and (by default) Below Basic. The Basic level is defined as "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade."

    Louisiana’s student scores have consistently ranked at the bottom of states participating in the NAEP tests. For instance, on the 2002 reading test 50% of tested Louisiana fourth-graders and 32% of tested eighth-graders scored at the Below Basic level. However, the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring at the Basic or higher level increased from 44% in 1998 to 50% in 2002; and, eighth-grade scores increased from 63% in 1998 to 68% in 2002. In mathematics, the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring at the Basic or above level increased from 42% in 1999 to 58% in 2000; and, eighth-grade scores increased from 38% in 1999 to 47% in 2000.

    Thus, it appears that students in Louisiana continue to perform well below their peers on the NAEP tests. But, student scores on both the LEAP 21 and NAEP tests also seem to be improving with many reaching or exceeding the state’s 2014 goal of Basic.

    Louisiana administers the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) in the third, fifth, sixth and seventh grades and the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) in the ninth grade. The Iowa Tests are norm-referenced achievement tests that are standardized nationally. Thus scores can be used to compare the performance of students tested locally with the performance of students tested in the national sample. The national average is a percentile rank score of 50.

    The latest scores for Louisiana students on the ITBS/ITED also showed gains from previous years. For 2003, the state’s third- and fifth-graders scored well above their national peers at the 55th and 56th percentiles, respectively. But the scores also show a wide gap between districts and a decline in performance from the early to middle grades. (See Table 7.)