YOUR TENNESSE LEGISLATURE RULES OUT EFFICIENCY

 

With all the controversy about the City Council cutting the budget of the Memphis School System and possible lawsuites, I decided to look at the law that they are arguing about. I looked up the applicable portions of the Tennessee Code Annotated and found the following law.

	(B)  (i)  Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, for fiscal year 1992-1993 and any subsequent fiscal year, if state funding to the county for education is less than state funding to the county for education during the fiscal year 1990-1991 or less than the previous fiscal year's state funding to the county for education (except that a reduction in funding based on fewer students in the county rather than actual funding cuts shall not be considered a reduction in funding for purposes of this provision), local funds that were appropriated and allocated to offset state funding reductions during any previous fiscal year are excluded from this maintenance of local funding effort requirement;

		(ii)  It is the intent of this provision to allow local governments the option to appropriate and allocate funds to make up for state cuts without being subject to a continuation of funding effort requirement as to those funds for any year during which the state reinstates the funding (or restores the previous cuts), and during any subsequent year should the state fail to restore the funding cuts.

 

What this means to me, a non lawyer but a businessman, is that you cannot save money by running a more efficient school system. I do not know the history of this law but it obviously was promoted and sponsored by the public teaching establishment to keep the possibility of cutting job off the table. It says that you cannot cut the budget from the previous year unless you have fewer students. But suppose you come up with a more efficient management or teaching plan that requires fewer administrators or fewer teachers but improves efficiency and learning? Sorry, you cannot cut the budget. It completely destroys the incentive to run a system more efficiently.

Under this law, the only way you could cut the budget would be to have the same budget as the year before and because of inflation, you would be spending less due to the lower value of the dollar. The politicians thought that they were doing something good but what they accomplished was a monument to inefficiency with no incentive to improve the system. We need a change in the law that would allow efficiency savings which would lower the school budget without a state penalty due to the above law.