Thank you Delegate Comstock for looking out for our kids in McLean and Great Falls!

Del. Comstock fails to provide state funding provisions to her HB 1556 and HB 1700 bills. Changing the Standards of Quality to require school divisions to calculate class size at the school level, as opposed to the current method of doing it at the division level WILL necessarily cost more. At certain schools, more teachers and classrooms will be needed. Certainly, directing funds away from central administration and into the actual schools will help, but it may not cover all of the costs. And, what about the school divisions in Virginia that are not as bloated as FCPS but also have teacher-student ratios that are too high? What are they to do?

Additionally, Del. Comstock mentioned this morning that funding for HB 1700 (Admission of students domiciled in Virginia at public institutions of higher education) could come from our public colleges and universities going into business by selling online courses and allowing groups to use their campuses during the summer for conferences. Revenue from these sources is nibbling around the edges. Besides, most of our of public colleges and universities already do these things (see http://www.vto.vt.edu/catalog.php?ug=wx, http://www.wm.edu/offices/auxiliary/conferenceservices/, http://president.umw.edu/events/campus-event-venues/, http://communityrelations.gmu.edu/dmg/conference_meeting_services.asp). The sad fact is that Del. Comstock fails to acknowledge that the General Assembly needs to fund public colleges and universities to the recommended 67% level recommended by The Virginia Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2011.

Del. Comstock fails to put real money into education. Let's see what she does with the General Fund and transportation.

Before we put more "Other People's Money" into public higher education, let's undertake an extensive look into how Virginia's public colleges and universities similar to what was done with respect to the University of Texas at Austin. That study found,
"Recently released preliminary data from the University of Texas strongly suggest that the state of Texas could move towards making college more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching. Looking only at the UT Austin campus, if the 80 percent of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads were to teach just half as much as the 20 percent with the highest loads, and if the savings were dedicated to tuition reduction, tuition could be cut by more than half (or, alternatively, state appropriations could be reduced even more—by as much as 75 percent). Moreover, other data suggest a strategy of reemphasizing the importance of the undergraduate teaching function can be done without importantly reducing outside research funding or productivity." http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Faculty_Productivity_UT-Austin_report.pdf
Dollars to donuts, we'd find the very same crap in the Old Dominion's public colleges & universities.

Other key findings from the Texas study included:
20 percent of UT Austin faculty are teaching 57 percent of student credit hours. They also generate 18 percent of the campus’s research funding. This suggests that these faculty are not jeopardizing their status as researchers by assuming such a high level of teaching responsibility.
 Conversely, the least productive 20 percent of faculty teach only 2 percent of all student credit hours and generate a disproportionately smaller percentage of external research funding than do other faculty segments.
 Research grant funds go almost entirely (99.8 percent) to a small minority (20 percent) of the faculty; only 2 percent of the faculty conduct 57 percent of funded research.
 Non-tenured track faculty teach a majority of undergraduate enrollments and a surprising 31 percent of graduate enrollments.
 The most active researchers teach nearly the average of all faculty; increasing teaching loads of others would trivially impact outside research support.

Texas is not a role model for Virginias to aspire to. See following statistics:

From fiscal years 2002 to 2006, average tuition and fees at public universities increased 61.4%. Average tuition and fees at community colleges increased 51.3%.
• From fiscal years 2002 to 2007, the Texas state budget was cut in terms of real dollar, per-student funding for universities by 19.92%; for community colleges the per-student cut was 35.29%.
• California has nine nationally recognized research institutions; New York has seven; Pennsylvania has four; while Texas, the second most populous state in the nation, has only three.
• Out of Texas’ 145 public and private higher education institutions, only one private institution, Rice University, ranked among the nation’s top 50.
• The number of students attending Texas colleges and universities increased by 23.6% from Fall 1999 to Fall 2005 with the highest growth in community and technical colleges.

Source: Texas Controller of Public Accounts

Mr. Volkert, your retort ignores the report. It addresses the problems with the lack of correlation between teaching loads and research projects and compensation. All you do is quote data about tax dollar support for schools. What about output? What about equity for students, parents, other faculty? What happened to state funding for colleges and universities in Pennsylvania? California? New York? What happened to the incomes of the residents of those states? Of Virginia residents? Why do you believe taxpayers need to hold the public sector harmless?

You seem pretty cavalier with other people's money. Why don't you believe Virginia's colleges' and universities' efficiencies should be examined before taxpayers pay more?