15 years ago when this reporter was working on his PhD in Educational Leadership, we had an assignment to learn about public school finances. I figured why mess around, so I went straight to the top. I interviewed Pedro Martinez, Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time, who later became the Chicago Public Schools, Chief Financial Officer.
The point of publishing this interview now is to understand the foundational philosophy of the new CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. George Schmidt taught me, facts and primary source documents are irrefutable and everything else is just lip flapping …
Interviews with CPS Directors
Pedro Martinez
The following interview with Pedro Martinez, Director of the Office of Management and Budget April 28, 2006, explains how and where CPS spends its money. This primary source data explains the spending focus of CPS. The interviews are presented in their entirety within the text of this report to integrate current ideas with academic research to symbolize the impotence of the need for communication between the different structures that govern educational policy.
JK: How does your school district allocate funding by function, whether the school district is funding allocation by function? One of the first things that I want to show you is we’ve been doing a lot in what we’ve been working with in this unit…and I guess…you know there’s a bunch of statistics out there and we’re downloading them and comparing them, so they want me to find out the real stuff what’s going on. So here’s what the statistics show. This is the National Center of Education statistics. I think this is from 2002 and 2003 [JK shows Figure1]. Now that’s two years old and we’ve been complaining about it in our course and we’ve been talking about the assessment is old, three years old. Now in your experience now doing your job, how do these statistics look to you? And if you see any difference maybe you can mark it on there.
MARTINEZ: I mean, I would say it’s how you count it, our percentages have are more like 44 [percent Local]…36 [percent State]…and 20[percent Federal] right now.
JK: Really? So it’s going up then?
MARTINEZ: It depends if you calculate it like we do.
JK: All right, so that’s good. That’s a big difference then. And how do you see the state? Because I know the government now is talking about increasing funding from the state.
MARTINEZ: I would say 36%. State funding is and it has been at this level for a number of years.
JK: All right. Now here’s another statistic. This is from the Department of Education. Now this is from 2000. What are the total and current expenditure per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools?
[JK shows, Figure 2.] Does it look about right to you? This is first season spending. I have an easier one here, which is the same thing – about $8,000 [per pupil annually]. Are we getting about that much?
MARTINEZ: Umm…
JK: You probably know more how to read these papers than I do.
MARTINEZ: For this year, we’re spending about $10,000 a child right now.
JK: $10,000… Let me write it down here. That’s here in Chicago you’re saying? This is a lot for Illinois.
MARTINEZ: Yeah. About $10,000…
JK: So about $10,000?
MARTINEZ: And then we have districts that spend more, the highest school districts will spend about $23,000.
JK: Here in Chicago?
MARTINEZ: No, in Illinois, and then the lower school districts spend probably around $6,000. JK: Okay, so we’re about right in the middle.
MARTINEZ: Hmm.
JK: Now what about for the $10,000? On the average is it because we get a little more money here in Cook County or from the City?
MARTINEZ: Well, your numbers, I think, are [from] 2000; this could be 2006. This would be the current number. JK: So it has gone up.
MARTINEZ: Everything looks like it is going up.
JK: That’s one of the things. Now this is the same thing – median, so that’s a little higher.
MARTINEZ: $8,500.
JK: Now this is the one thing that we’re all talking of. There’s a lot of fuss on the new development of No Child Left Behind; it’s not federally funded. This is one thing one of my professors sent us, because we did an assignment and we’re all saying, well, No Child Left Behind is not funded, when in fact he sent us this table and this table. I don’t [know] who produced these…Department of Education also, and it actually shows an increase in Federal funding, but this is a little older, right? This is 2000…what is it – ‘99 to 2001, so that’s about five years old now. What do you see [as] the trend with Federal funding?
MARTINEZ: We’ve been getting increases of about…[with] the No Child Left Behind alone [of] about $20,000,000 a year now, for, like, this is the fifth year coming up, which [inaudible] the third. The last probably four years it has been about on average a $20,000,000 a year increase.
JK: An increase?
MARTINEZ: Which for us that’s increased funding by…I think our total funding is about $830,000,000.
JK: So now it’s $830,000,000?
MARTINEZ: Federal funds. So if you figure four years ago…[MARTINEZ retrieves figures from registry]
JK: You probably had a course just to read that stuff, right?
MARTINEZ: [Laughs.]
JK: Where did you go to school?
MARTINEZ: U of I. Yeah, I would say the Federal revenue in 2001 was $600,000,000 and now…
JK: $600,000,000…
MARTINEZ: And now we’re at 830.
JK: In 2001, and now we’re at 2005.
MARTINEZ: Fiscal year of 2006?
JK: Well that’s more than a $30,000,000 increase. MARTINEZ: That’s from Fed. JK: Can you give me any figures on State?
MARTINEZ: State was… State didn’t go up as much. We went from a billion-four to now a billion 619. JK: In 2001?
MARTINEZ: And now we’re doing 619. JK: In 2002?
MARTINEZ: Yes.
JK: That’s some increase. What do you think in your opinion was it – like, inflationary increases?
MARTINEZ: That’s always true.
JK: But there’s no major major increase? MARTINEZ: There hasn’t been any.
JK: Okay. Let’s switch gears to Chicago public schools. How do you split up this funding? How do you decide where…like let’s say the Federal funding, all of the money together–what’s the most important [source?] here and what’s the most important issue?
MARTINEZ: Well, there’s the classroom, the regular classroom instruction that’s funded based on the enrollment of the children, that we get teachers for every classroom based on enrollment. That’s the biggest driver for, I think, the norm.
JK: The biggest criteria, right?
MARTINEZ: The enrollment. JK: Let me put a quotation there [“the enrollment”]. So whatever school has the amount of students in there, that’s the amount of money you get per head basically, right?
MARTINEZ: There’s that and then also the type of child they have. So if they have special ed children, there’s more resources. If there’s bilingual children there’s more resources, and then also we give poverty funds to the school getting poverty-level children.
JK: Special Ed, bilingual and poverty. MARTINEZ: Basically the driver is enrollment, the for regular ed [sic] traditional kids, and then if they are special ed, bilingual or say a poverty there is more funding. (What is this dude saying here?]
JK: There’s some issues there, you know. I’m also teaching, you know that – at Hyde Park Academy. MARTINEZ: Yeah.
JK: I have just a little experience with that. My next question is looking at these graphs and figures. Are they pretty much accurate in your view? I mean—naturally, they’re old. That’s the first thing we see.
MARTINEZ: They are outdated and I would say… I think for the most part they are probably accurate, but they are just outdated.
JK: I have a statement here. The only way to improve public schools is to dramatically increase resources available. I think you’re an important part of it. If I give you a bunch more money, whatever you wanted, would that help us out?
MARTINEZ: It would help us out but it wouldn’t be the country’s solution. Reality is we will need…The current improvement is still going to have…Well, there’s two things that we are going to try to improve on and that’s going to both resources and leadership, and so there are cases where we’ve had additional resources to schools but we didn’t have the right leadership and the school didn’t do well.
JK: Okay.
MARTINEZ: We’ve had cases where schools didn’t get very much of the general resources but they have great leadership and they did well.
JK: Okay.
MARTINEZ: And then we’ve had cases where they had a little bit of both and they did amazingly well. So for us it’s a combination of both.
JK: It’s a combination.
MARTINEZ: But it’s not a… Again, I would say leadership… If I had to give you a formula, I would say leadership is about 70% of the battle and then 30% would be additional resources.
JK: Resources would help. If we got more funding, we can have everybody equal, we can have good textbooks and good equipment in [all] the schools. But it doesn’t matter if I have all new computers in my room and nobody knows how to use them or nobody wants to use them or whatever. How about this idea about incentives for students and schools and teachers to try to improve their performance? Kind of like performance-based. We do well so we give you more money. What do you think about that?
MARTINEZ: I’m very supportive of that. I don’t believe it is right to have every teacher making the same salary based on seniority and that elementary and high school teachers [should] make the same. I just don’t believe that. I believe that it should be based on…There should be incentives for the really great teachers, and I think teachers and kids know who the best teachers are; I really do believe that, and I think there should be some process where we can say these teachers are so great that they should get a bonus or they should get a differential because of that, even if they had to do it every year. To me that’s one of the…again, I think that’s going to be one of the keys. And also the fact that you have some schools that are more difficult than others. If it was up to me, I also think there should be funding for that [problem], and I think there should be an incentive for those teachers that are teaching and excel; I really do believe that.
Chicago Public Schools Funding, Martinez, P. (2006). Personal Communications with Director of Management and Budget, Chicago Public Schools, April 28, 2006, as part of a paper submitted to Instructor Dr. David Bail, Capella University, School of Education, ED 822 The Funding of Educational Institutions.
