Local school district referenda on school construction often serve as a barometer of the voters’ willingness to support costs of public education. If that truism is correct, than New Jerseyans are spent out and fed up. For example, in 2002, reports New Jersey School Boards Association, 102 districts held special elections and 72% of such proposals passed; the total amount of spending approved was $1.329 billion. Not so much this year: results for 2010 are: 34 elections for school construction and passage rate of 50%. Total approved spending is $218.667 million. Another comparison: in 2002 66.1% of total proposed spending was approved by voters and in 2010 26.3% of total proposed spending was approved by voters.

From NJSBA: “The 50-percent success rate for 2010 – which is the lowest record since NJSBA began tracking school construction proposals in 1998 – reflects voters’ reluctance to take on additional debt during a struggling economy.”

The answer is not to spend more money. The answer is spend less in a more intelligent and productive way. Here’s U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan describing what we do wrong in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute called “The New Normal: Doing More with Less:”

Our K-12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools.

But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century. Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers–and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology. Teachers cannot be interchangeable widgets. Yet the legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems.

And here’s Harvard Professor Paul Peterson on how to do it better:

As I explain in Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, we need fewer teachers, not more, and those few teachers must reach thousands of students at a time. Fortunately, this possibility, once remote, is now arriving with a speed as rapid as that of the avatar-laden space ship zeroing in on the planet Pandora. As we enter the world of high-powered notebook computers, broadband internet connections, 3-dimensional curricula, open-source product development, and internet-based games, both co-operative and competitive, students will learn by accessing dynamic, interactive instructional materials that provide information to each student at the level of accomplishment he or she has reached.

That’s why the NJEA’s tenure reform proposal, “Making Concessions Count for Kids” is wrong-headed and anachronistic. According to the marketing material, the union is pushing hard on Assembly bill 2772 (it’s already passed the Senate as S-1940) which would “require that the monetary equivalent of any wage or benefit concession agreed to by a collective bargaining unit must be used by the school district to offset any reduction in force initiated for economic reasons.” In other words, if a local bargaining unit of NJEA agrees to any salary or benefits concessions, the money the district saves must be spend on re-hiring laid-off teachers.

But in ten years (maybe less, though the NJ DOE better get their data systems out of the 20th century) we’ll surely need fewer teachers, maybe fewer buildings as students work from home or from community college campuses. Hopefully the smaller cadre of NJ’s teachers will be uniformly effective, subject to professional accountability measures, and paid in a way commensurate with their performance. Like professionals, not factory workers.

That is, if we want concessions to count for kids, not teachers.