Educational Mandates: Unfunded

And Unwanted

The President is freezing federal wages, except for the military. The governor-elect is promising new taxes and spending cuts. The first selectman is warning local budgetmakers that the political and financial hurdles facing them for 2010-2011 will be higher than any they have encountered yet. Like every other city and town, Newtown is shackled to the bottom links of the fiscal food chain of public money. The federal and state governments can pass responsibilities and costs they find unpalatable down the line. For local officials, however, there is only one place to pass to: the local taxpayers, who increasingly are making it clear they have taken just about enough.

Fortunately, voters are learning to push back, not just against local officials, who are closest at hand, but against federal and state officials, who are looking pretty disheveled in the aftermath of the angry elections of 2010. Whether the political survivors learned anything in the process remains to be seen, but one indicator of whether the lesson took hold will be the fate of one particularly egregious unfunded mandate that will weigh heavily on Newtown and other Connecticut municipalities in the coming budget cycle: Substitute Senate Bill No. 438, Public Act No. 10-111.

The worthy intent of the act is to raise educational standards in the state and narrow the achievement gap between Connecticut’s best and worst schools. The worthless effect of the act is to bypass local boards of education with what can most charitably be characterized as a mess of micromanagement. The act stipulates detailed and specific curricular requirements without regard for particular strengths and weaknesses of individual schools that inform local school boards as they allocate resources. And speaking of resources, the state, crying poor, offers none.

The mandated changes in this act need to be in place by 2018, which seems pretty far in the future, but gearing up to meet that deadline will have to begin in the next fiscal year. Last week, First Selectman Pat Llodra offered some cost estimates: salaries and benefits for 11 new teachers plus ancillary costs for texts, material, and other support — roughly $1 million annually. Given the way local budgets are shaved and minced these days, $1 million is a pretty big slice for a program that has been tailored not for Newtown but for Connecticut’s overall lowest common educational denominator.

In comments to the Housatonic Valley Council of Elected Officials November 30, Mrs Llodra tried to rally chief elected officials of the region to demand that the new governor and legislature freeze all unfunded educational mandates. If the state wants to dictate curriculum changes to local boards of education, it should be prepared to pay for them — which clearly it is not. The frequent town/school divide on budgetary issues disappears when it comes to unfunded mandates. Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson closed ranks with Ms Llodra on the issue, arguing, “If they’re going to mandate these changes, the state is going to have to step up and pay for them.”

If elected state officials want to avoid in 2012 the kind of buffeting candidates of all stripes sustained in 2010 from an angry electorate, a freeze on unfunded mandates like Public Act 10-111 is a good place to start.