Tag: school funding

Reform School Funding, End Zip Code Education

This week, we have seen poor parents fight fiercely to improve the quality of education for their children — and run up against institutional and political obstacles that should never…

This week, we have seen poor parents fight fiercely to improve the quality of education for their children — and run up against institutional and political obstacles that should never exist.

In Ohio, Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of violating the law by placing her two daughters in the relatively high-performing Copley-Fairlawn school district(where few of the black students drop out) instead of keeping them in the woeful Akron district (whose Balfanz rate for young black men and women, respectively, is 62 percent and 76 percent) in which her family resided. Her case has gotten national attention because few parents are ever convicted of what is laughably called tuition fraud, and because of her willingness to even risk prison to get her kids the high-quality education they deserve.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, East Orange resident Lisa Brice joined other parents to stare down state legislative Democrats and get them to approve a bill that would allow 40,000 poor kids a chance to escape the worst of the Garden State’s well-funded dropout factories. They face a tough battle thanks to the National Education Association affiliate — which needs a victory after Gov. Chris Christie has clubbed them senseless politically this past year — and school funding equity advocates (who demand that the state pour more money into districts covered by that state’s Abbott decision despite evidence that past spending increases haven’t improved student achievement).

Kelley and Lisa have taken different approaches, legally and otherwise, to improving education for their children. But they shouldn’t have to fight so hard in the first place. Asking children and their families to be shackled to dropout factories and failure mills is absolutely criminal. They should have the ability to escape those failure factories and attend any high quality school available to them. And we should reform how we fund education — both in the sourcing of those dollars and how they are packaged — in order to make choice a reality.

The philosophical reasons why defenders of traditional public education (and some centrist Democrat school reformers) oppose more-expansive school choice — from the belief that vouchers will lead to the end of public education as they prefer it (government-run and no private sector players) to the queasiness over funding parochial schools — is well-known. So is the general reason why suburbanites oppose school choice — because they have already exercised what they think is adequate choice by buying into their homes. These qualms, however, would have little staying power if not for the critical systemic problem in making school choice a reality: The hemming and hawing among states about taking over the full funding role that they need to undertake in order to make choice and other reforms a reality.

Thanks to decades of battles over equal funding of schools and efforts at property tax relief, states now provide the plurality of all school dollars, accounting for 48 percent of all school revenues nationwide (with Ohio providing a bit less — 45 percent — and New Jersey at the national average). Given that adequacy and equity remain key issues in education, and that property tax relief still remains a goal in many states, that percentage will increase. Replacing all local funding with state dollars would certainly begin improving equity in education if done the right way: Essentially turning the dollars into vouchers that follow every child to whatever school, public, private or parochial, they so choose. It would also spur the next steps in reform; districts can no longer use the argument that reforms will cost them in terms of local tax dollars as their justification.

Yet governors and legislators — especially those of a school reform orientation — haven’t fully embraced moving towards full state funding, even though it isn’t that hard to do politically. Part of the problem is that doing so can be fiscally difficult to do; increasing state income in exchange for reducing local property taxes — the common way states have used to take over education funding (as part of property tax relief efforts) — does mean funding education with a less-stable source of revenue. That problem, however, can be mitigated by financing education with a basket of different revenue sources. The bigger problem is political will. The fact that some still believe in the myth of local control despite evidence that states dominate education policymaking also means that they believe that education funding should also be a local matter. Teachers unions and suburban school districts also oppose a state takeover of education funding because it will lead to some logical steps, including weighted student funding formulas that will lead to the creation of school vouchers.

This stalemate over the direction of education funding has consequences. Districts can justify opposition to school choice; after all, they can oppose school choice because they still collect local property tax dollars and parents outside their boundaries don’t provide those funds (even though they are financing the same schools through their state income taxes). At the same time, the districts can even deny choice to the children they are supposed to serve by continuing zoned school policies. All children no matter their economic status — but especially those from poor families such as the kin of Kelley and Lisa — pay the price.

The only way school choice can become a reality is by overhauling school funding. This means state governments must pick up the tab, and ensure that funding follows children by ditching program-based formulas. Taking these steps will ultimately open up opportunities for improving the educational destinies of the children of Kelley and Lisa. And improve opportunities for all children.

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Voices of the Dropout Nation: The Need for a New Normal in Education


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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…

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… But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century….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.

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are tough issues. Rethinking the status quo, by definition, can be unsettling. But I know that these discussions will be taking place in the coming year in schools, in districts, in union headquarters, in statehouses, and the governor’s mansion. The alternative is to simply end up doing less with less. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, proclaiming during yesterday’s American Enterprise Institute conference that the status quo in American public education has to change. Well, it needs more than that: A revolution, not an evolution.

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Are Adequacy and Equity Funding Suits On the Comeback? Oh Yeah!


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Yesterday, after analyzing a school funding adequacy case in Washington State, Education Sector analyst Robert Manwaring whether such torts (and their twins, funding equity suits) were on the comeback. The…

All about the Benjamins: Equity and adequacy lawsuits may be on the comeback

Yesterday, after analyzing a school funding adequacy case in Washington State, Education Sector analyst Robert Manwaring whether such torts (and their twins, funding equity suits) were on the comeback. The answer is yes. And the Obama administration, through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, may be aiding those efforts.

Back in November, at the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s annual confab, Pennsylvania Congressman Chaka Fattah announced that the department would be stepping up its efforts on that front — and reverse Bush administration policies on addressing adequacy and equity. Declared Fattah: “We need to use… the leverage of the federal dollars… to cause the other dollars to be spent more equitably.”

A day later, the Assistant Secretary of Education overseeing OCR, Russlynn Ali, admitted that the office has begun investigations into alleged violations of Title IV provisions, and is looking to provide “real data” that can help advocates and school funding lawyers advance their goals. Although the former Education Trust official cautioned those advocates that a school equity agenda needed to be more than about lawsuits and funding, she also declared that OCR was “back in business.”

All this comes as such suits are on the decline. Until the Washington State decision, the last major school funding tort was Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. Most of these suits have fallen to seed partly because Centrist Democrat school reformers have found charter schools and standards-and-accountability to be better solutions for educational inequities. As seen in New Jersey with Abbott, funding equity and adequacy suits also fail to do little to fix the underlying problem of big urban school systems (and their suburban counterparts): Restrictive teachers union contracts; state laws that limit the ability of districts to remove laggard teachers; and systemic bureaucratic incompetence. The fact that these urban districts already yield per-pupil dollars from past funding formula revisions in their favor that make their spending nearly as high as their suburban counterparts often shows that more money doesn’t equal better student performance.

This also comes as states and school districts wrangle with strapped budgets. Already, Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s Michael Rebell is arguing that cutting school funding — which often accounts for at least a quarter of state budgets — is unconstitutional. Expect Rebell to make those arguments in court — complete with the usual citation of constitutional provisions that states must provide for free education.

Then there is the reality that as much of the problem lies with overall urban policies — including the granting of tax abatement that reduce tax revenues and a lack of focus on solving crime and other quality-of-life issues — which districts can’t solve without the backing of municipal governments. One important reason for mayoral control of schools is that the mayor must also think of schools as he considers whether to hand out another tax break to a favored property baron.

But more adequacy and equity lawsuits are coming.

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Read: Monday Morning Edition


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What’s happening inside the dropout nation: The Detroit News takes Michigan’s public education leadership to task for subjecting kids to woeful standardized tests that don’t meet the National Assessment of…

What’s happening inside the dropout nation:

  1. The Detroit News takes Michigan’s public education leadership to task for subjecting kids to woeful standardized tests that don’t meet the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ much higher standards — and damning the children to low expectations. Declares the paper: “e standards for passing the exam — called the cut scores — have been lowered so much, a student who tests well on the Michigan assessment would not score nearly as well on the NAEP or even the national ACT test.” As Dropout Nation readers already know, this, unfortunately, isn’t an isolated occurrence.
  2. Clarence Fanto argues in The Boston Globe that charter schools are a problem in school reform. Why? He uses the long-refuted position that charters take money from traditional public school districts. Actually, the fact that states don’t divert funding from traditional districts — and, in fact, offset enrollment losses with additional funding — is the very reason why there isn’t true competition within education. If traditional public schools truly had to compete with charters for funding — and in the suburbs, compete for students in the first place — school reform wouldn’t be such a hot topic in the first place.
  3. On Red State, Vladimir asks why can’t Republicans make the expansion of charter schools a winning platform in their 2010 election campaigns. My response: Republicans first have to embrace school reform; and save for centrists and conservative elements in the party, many in the GOP are either uncomfortable with a form of school choice that still involves government funding, or represent suburban areas, whose school districts are aggressively opposed to charter schools.
  4. The Washington Post details efforts by the U.S. Department of Education to focus states on turning around laggard public schools. Whether it will work or not? Andy Smarick doubts it, as everyone already knows.
  5. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson thinks schools should add computer science and programming to their curricula. Meanwhile, programs are sprouting up encouraging more children and teens to take up computer science. This is fine, but schools need to focus mostly on the things they are struggling to do. Like teaching reading and math.
  6. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation streams a video of New York City school czar Joel Klein discussing his own background growing up in the projects and his efforts in education reform. Interesting and worth watching. By the way, you may also read my Foundation Watch report on the Gates Foundation’s efforts in the education reform arena.
  7. And speaking of Klein, Dropout Nation thoughts: In the comments of Thursday’s edition of Read, Kathy offers a rebuttal to his decision to close Jamaica High School.

Finally, subscribe to the Dropout Nation Podcast. This week, the focus is on giving parents power in school reform. Enjoy.

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