Tips for Tom: What Luna Must Do to Save Idaho’s Public Education System

During the last eight years of Marilyn Howard's reign as Superintendent of Public Education student enrollment increased 4.8%. At the same time the cost per student increased 48% or ten times faster. If Idaho’s public schools had simply stayed as productive as they were eight years ago, taxpayers would have saved over $2.2 billion dollars. Can Tom Luna do a Reagan and turn this money-inhaling dinosaur around? Here are five things the Gipper would do:


1. Stop Confusing Spending with Productivity

BYU-Idaho President and former Dean of Harvard Business School Kim B. Clark outlined three "imperatives" in his inaugural speech: raise quality, serve more students, and lower relative costs. President Clark has clarified a major issue in education as being one of raising productivity.

Do you know of any industry, besides public education, that boasts about how high their costs are? Dozens of studies have concluded that there is no correlation between money and achievement growth. Yet we are constantly reminded that we don’t spend enough on public education. It's like arguing that if we paid more for gas, our mileage would increase.

2. Report Real Numbers Promptly

Define productivity as achievement growth divided by cost. Then measure and report it by individual teacher in June of each year so we all know who is creating value and who isn’t. The SEC requires quarterly accounting reports from corporations. Why can’t our public school system be held to the same standard?

3. Don’t Hire Inbreds

Forget about hiring “experienced” educrats. FedEx didn’t go to the post office to create their innovative management team. Nor did Apple go to IBM to create their culture of creativity. Put Professor Caroline Hoxby from Harvard on retainer. She has the brains and the research and isn’t protecting her assets.

4. Create Opportunities

Taxpayers are currently billed $8,000 per student per year. Seeking opportunity means designing vouchers and tax credits that give parents and entrepreneurs incentives to improve quality and reduce costs. Begin the 2007-2008 school year by offering $5,000 vouchers and tax credits. If 20 percent of Idaho’s 250,000 public school students used this program, taxpayers would save $150 million a year. This program could also dramatically reduce property tax increases in fast growing districts like Meridian.

5. Eliminate the State Department of Education

This is maybe the best idea of all. Remember you’re in the business of educating students, not building an empire. New Zealand eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. Talk about your local control! They funded schools based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached and no Byzantine formulas. Most importantly, they told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. The country’s 4,500 schools were converted to this new system all on the same day. They also made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars at the school best-suited to their children’s needs. New Zealanders learned that competition drives quality to the highest common denominator, while monopolies drive it to the lowest.

Republicans are out of power nationally because they forgot Reagan’s principles of entrepreneurial conservatism. By replacing politics and bureaucrats with free markets and entrepreneurs, Mr. Luna has the opportunity to win one for the Gipper.