Cost studies needed, Augenblick says

OKLAHOMA CITY —State leaders need a much better understanding the costs associated with meeting new education standards, the author of a controversial Oklahoma education study said this week.

John Augenblick, the president of Denver-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, defended his firm’s 2005 study of the way Oklahoma’s education system is funded, saying the questing of how much it cost a state to provide education services which meet governmental standards is “a pretty new question.”

Augenblick’s two-part study, “Calculating the Cost of an Adequate Education in Oklahoma,” analyzed the “adequacy of revenues available to elementary and secondary school districts in Oklahoma” for the 2003-2004 fiscal year.

The second portion of the report — finished in April of 2005 but never released by the House of Representatives — said state per-student spending would have to be increased to almost $7,000 to “ensure school districts have a reasonable chance” to meet state and federal student performance expectations.

With more than 600,000 students enrolled in Oklahoma public schools, records show the state would need to spend an additional $844 million in new education funding to meet standards set by state lawmakers and the federal No Child Left Behind law.

“One question — and it’s a relatively new question that leaders are asking — is ‘what does it cost for school districts to reach (those) standards,’” Augenlick said. “No businessman would last 10 minutes if they didn’t ask a similar question.”

The answers, he said, are often controversial.

“I’m not going to tell you that this stuff isn’t controversial,” he said. “Sometimes it becomes dangerous for a state to sponsor this type of study; by sponsoring it, it becomes official and has more power.”

And then, Augenblick said, the information becomes the legal basis for a lawsuit.

“Quite frankly, there are people who go around telling Republican leaders that ‘you are silly to do this type of analysis,’ that if the result is a number which you may not want to fund, because the study was sponsored by the state it could become the basis for a lawsuit.”

While then-House Speaker Todd Hiett has not said why Augenblick’s 2005 study wasn’t released during his tenure as House leader, Damon Gardenhire, a spokesman for current House Speaker Lance Cargill, claimed the study was made available, but that its conclusions “were questionable at best, since the firm was clearly a tool of the NEA.”

“Other studies reach different conclusions,” Gardenhire said in an e-mail to The Transcript Sept. 10. “And other states are experiencing fiscal problems because of similarly flawed studies by Augenblick. Meanwhile Oklahoma continues to make record investments in public education.”

This week, Augenblick refuted Gardenhire’s claim.

“We have no relationship with the NEA,” Augenblick said. “We don’t have a contract with them. He (Gardenhire) would have to tell me what he means by that. We don’t take orders from anybody. We do what we’re asked in the best way that we can.”

Augenblick also said Gardenhire’s statement that his firm “seems to reach strikingly similar conclusion in state after state” was wrong.

Augenblick cited studies his firm did for Maryland and Kansas, where, he said, the states used “our numbers in (their) education funding system.”

“Maryland was very proud of their accountability system,” he said. “But they wanted an answer to what it cost and we set about doing the work. Later, the Legislature created a new school finance system and used our numbers in this new system.”

Maryland officials, he said, “knew there was no way to fund” their formula so they used a six-year phase-in process. “They now have reached a point were they are funding schools at a level sufficient so districts have no excuse. And, as far as I know, they weren’t bankrupt.”

Gardenhire countered, saying the form “seems to find that the only way to solve a state’s education problems is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars more at the system.”

This almost always seems to hinge on “adequacy” with lawsuits by state-level teachers’ unions and public policy fights hanging on Augenblick’s intriguing findings, he said.

“Last year, the OEA filed one such lawsuit against the Oklahoma Legislature, and it was dismissed. This seems to follow a pattern of lawsuits seen in other states. Other education experts have questioned Augenblick’s methodology.”

Gardenhire, however, did not say which experts have questioned the firm’s work.

Still, Augenblick said he was surprised the study was paid for and not released.

“It would be unusual for a state to do a study and for it not to be made public somehow,” he said. “It’s unusual in our experience. That doesn’t mean people like them and people agree with them; because it’s public money, they are normally released.”