Don’t Just Stop At The Top

This week’s guest “Daily Journal” columnist is Terry Stoops, education policy analyst for the John Locke Foundation.

Last year, the legislature’s Program Evaluation Division commissioned a study of the structure and organization of state education agencies. The study’s major finding was that the governance structure for the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and State Board of Education (SBE) is broken. As a result:

From the perspective of thoughtful and consistent public policy, this shifting every few years of authority and roles has been confusing, inconsistent, and largely politically driven. Good public policy of governance demands a consistent application of a sustained governance model with assigned roles and authority, and not one constantly changing by being politically convenient or driven. (p. iv)

The General Assembly could do North Carolinians a great favor by defining the roles of the state’s public school leaders. The Public School Forum of North Carolina recently proposed a series of sensible reforms to the state education hierarchy that should serve as the starting point for lawmakers’ discussions.

Governance issues aside, the report also contained a number of important insights into our state education agencies. One main finding was that the Department of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education are overstaffed. According to the report, “While the North Carolina DPI Web site cites 530 employees, a recent headcount shows that the DPI employs 781 full-time staff.” (p. ix) Researchers found that there were 211 additional employees and 40 vacancies not acknowledged by the DPI Web site. According to the 2008-2009 Education Directory, DPI currently employs 763 individuals. The average salary of a DPI employee is more than $60,000 per year.

For comparison purposes, researchers chose five states – California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and Kentucky – that, like North Carolina, have significant percentages of low-income, minority, and special education students. With the exception of Kentucky, North Carolina had the lowest staff/student ratio in the comparison. In North Carolina, there is one DPI employee for every 1,814 students. Florida, in comparison, boasts one state education employee for every 2,322 students, while Georgia has one state education employee for every 2,081 students. Similarly, North Carolina had the highest staff-to-district ratio at nearly 7:1. Only Florida, with a ratio of 17:1, had more staff per district. Georgia had a staff to district ratio of only 4:1. These statistics suggest that North Carolina has a top-heavy state education department compared to its peers.

Researchers also identified ways to save North Carolina taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. They recommend eliminating the Executive Director, Assistant Executive Director, and two support positions at the State Board of Education at a savings of $527,000 per year. Unfortunately, the researchers did not acknowledge other areas of potential savings. If the General Assembly eliminated the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, for example, the savings to taxpayers would exceed $300,000 per year. Moreover, if the General Assembly merged the state’s early childhood programs, More at Four and Smart Start, the state could recover a portion of the $1.4 million used to fund salaries of those who oversee North Carolina’s early childhood programs at DPI. Similarly, if the state contracted with a testing company to use an off-the-shelf, norm-referenced test, perhaps half of the nearly $2 million used to fund salaries for the state’s testing division would no longer be needed. Finally, DPI spends approximately $750,000 on salaries for the teacher licensure division, which enforces rigid certification rules that do not guarantee a high-quality teacher workforce. A more efficient and less burdensome licensure process would reduce that cost significantly.

Of course, there were a number of important issues related to the structure and operation of the Department of Public Instruction and State Board of Education not discussed in the report.

• Transparency: How does the current structure of DPI and the SBE discourage the public from providing input on rules, regulations, and operations, as well as complicate the process for obtaining public information?

• Redundancy: What kind of duplication exists within programs and departments at DPI? Could our state education agencies realize cost savings by consolidating or eliminating programs?

• Human Resources: Are there any mechanisms in place to keep DPI employees and SBE members accountable for school performance in North Carolina? That is, what incentives are in place at the state level to encourage outstanding performance, innovation, and efficiencies?

• External Influences: What are the formal and informal roles of the community college and university systems as it relates to the operation of DPI and the SBE?

• Accountability: The report noted that internal auditing at DPI did not comply with the 2007 State Audit Act, which is a serious problem. However, independent contractors do not appear to be subject to any rigorous fiscal and performance accountability measures.

It would be worth the time and resources of the General Assembly’s Program Evaluation Division to address these and other important organizational issues in subsequent studies of North Carolina’s most critical government agencies.