The latest version of the House budget cuts over $900 million from public schools, slashing as many as 10,000 jobs including teachers, teacher assistants and key administrative and support personnel at the Department of Public Instruction and local school systems across the state.
 
The anti-public school forces are jumping at the chance to weaken the public education infrastructure they have long demonized.

The John Locke Foundation issued a report this week with the title "No Bureaucrat Left Behind," trying to reinforce the mistaken impression that public schools are spending far too much money on "administrative, non-instructional, and instructional support positions."

The people with those jobs are all considered bureaucrats by the Lockers, who use the term disparagingly at every opportunity.

Locker Terry Stoops starts the report citing the 2008 North Carolina High School Resource Allocation Study and says that after two years of exhaustive work, researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill and East Carolina University concluded that "high schools are not using their funding to maximize achievement for all students."

In other words, schools are wasting money on administrators and support personnel, resources that should be redirected to the classroom. Listed as a "key fact" on the report's first page is that student enrollment in public schools has increased by 13 percent since 2000, while "school personnel" has increased by almost 18 percent," presumably all "bureaucrats."

But Stoops' not only fails to support the report's pandering title, his conclusions are barely related to the headline and initial premise. More importantly, its clear by following the footnotes that the study Stoops uses to kick things off does not conclude that high schools are misusing their money.

It does include a series of interesting findings and recommendations that Stoops fails to mention, presumably because they don't support the Lockers crusade to dismantle public schools.

After discussing the student-to-staff ratio at length, Stoops concludes that the move to reduce class sizes has increased the number of teachers and teacher assistants, but says that growth in those positions has been modest.  So that's not a problem.

The next conclusion is that state and federal reporting requirements have increased administrative staff and that other funding from federal, state, and local governments has meant more personnel in specific areas.

So part of the staffing increase is the result of more reporting and accountability measures that the Lockers strongly support and some of it was mandated by the federal government. It doesn't sound like state education officials have created a bloated bureaucracy at all.

Stoops then says that schools should pay attention to personnel costs and tie salaries to performance measures, though it's not clear who would do the measuring if administrative positions were cut.

The 2008 study that Stoops uses to begin his confusing argument does have plenty of insight for state policymakers, though none of it appears in the Locke report.

The study finds that "local income students perform worse on EOC (end-of-course) exams when they are in schools with high percentages of other low-income students." 

That means that poor students do better in economically balanced schools, which directly supports the diversity criteria Wake County uses in its student assignment policy that the Locke Foundation vehemently opposes. 

The study finds that increasing funding for classroom instruction does have a positive impact on student performance, but includes teacher assistants as part of that formula. The Locke Foundation has consistently argued that teacher assistants do not matter and the Senate budget eliminates them in third grade classrooms.

The study also includes libraries, media centers, and tutors as part of instructional funding, all of which are generally not considered classroom expenses by the critics of public school budgets.

The study says that transportation, district services, and transportation are also important, a thought that runs directly counter to Lockean view of public education.

There are four recommendations for state education officials to improve the academic performance of students. The first one is to reduce the concentration of poor kids in schools. The second is to spend more money in the classroom and on other parts of what it defines broadly as regular instruction.

That means more support for teachers, more tutors for struggling kids, more teacher assistants, and economically balanced schools.

It does not mean devastating budget cuts or slashing support personnel. It means maintaining Wake County's reassignment policies and replicating them in other school systems.

It's all there in the latest Locke report. All you have to do is follow the footnote.