Budget cuts - never fun

Even though the state of Minnesota has a $1.9 billion budget surplus this year, propose funding for K-12 schools will result in...

North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale [school district] is looking at laying off 90 teachers and staff members next year. South Washington County must find more than 60 positions to cut by next fall, most of them teachers.

Burnsville-Eagan-Savage* will lay off 50, Bloomington almost 30 and Wayzata 25. Minneapolis has already shed 120 jobs from its central office — a move depicted as pushing resources out into schools.

Indeed the only metro-area districts that are not facing cutbacks are those that recently asked voters to raise property taxes to cover past rounds of cuts. Many of those districts now will be unable to fulfill promises to use the money to staff back up. School districts foresee yet another fiscal cliff, despite Dayton's ed plan. MinnPost, 4/9/15

After working 25+ years in Minnesota schools, this boom-bust funding cycle has become sadly familiar. If the legislature would simply tie school funding to inflation, might the histrionics accompanying each legislative session might involve something other than K-12 education?

My fiscally conservative side (never use two mules when one will do), sees budget cutting as an opportunity for districts to take a hard, critical look at its programs, staff, and services and determine which are worth keeping and which are not. To a large degree, this is a subjective task, but increasingly less so, with performance on state tests** being the defining measure of school (and administrative) success. 

Or do we really know what impacts student performance on tests? Might, just might, a happy child who gets a balanced educational diet of the arts, physical activity, vocational studies, and constructivist activities perform better that the child who is test-prepped at the expense of such balance.

Is any school courageous enough to experiment?

*My district - the numbers are a very rough, very early estimate, but the cuts will be felt.

** Education could save a lot of money buy reducing the amount of testing it does. Hmmmm.