Paying the Bills
Last time my smiling mug appeared in this section, I promised a discussion of how exactly we could go about paying for an education system that would do the job right. I was all ready to write that story for December, but then we had that whole wacky election and Kev just wrote one hell of a piece, which shifted Pattie’s article over to Policy and left me standing when the music stopped . . . so you got to read their pieces and I got another couple of months to think about the issue, which I think is a win-win situation all around.
When last we spoke, we were discussing the disparities in spending between distressed urban school districts and well-to-do suburban districts. My argument then, as now, is that it is patently unfair to demand that the Philadelphia School District live up to the same standard as the smaller, more affluent Jenkintown District when the latter outspends the former almost 2 to 1 on a per-student basis. I want to turn now to different approaches that are being taken to how parents, districts and states fund the education of their children.
Vouchers and Charter Schools
I’m starting with this topic because it’s one of the first things many people propose when talking about how to improve the school system, and because I want to provoke controversy by saying the following: anyone who thinks vouchers will solve the problems of urban schools isn’t understanding the problem. The reason for this is that vouchers, and charter schools, do not pump additional money into the system. They simply redistribute the insufficient funds that are already there — a public school district must cough up the funds for the voucher or the charter school tuition (and in the latter case, often has to cover added costs such as transportation.) At best, this results in no change for the school district. But if the best and easiest to manage students are the ones that go to private schools, public schools may actually find themselves with a harder task and fewer available resources, because they have less cash and because active parents who might have chipped in are no longer involved in the school.
This is not to say that I am against the idea of vouchers or charter schools in general. If public school are adequately funded, and there’s money available in a state budget, I see no problem with a private-education tax credit similar to the Hope or Lifetime Learning credits you receive on your federal taxes for college or post-graduate tuition paid. And if charter schools are held to the same standards of inclusiveness and performance as regular public schools, I see no problem with them. But these steps can not be taken until the system is reformed at its foundation, or else it’s simply trying to bail out the Titanic with a thimble. You can introduce all the competitive pressure you want, but the business world is full of failures who had the will, but not the resources, to compete.
The Wisconsin Plan
I want to discuss this briefly because it shows how good intentions and a state legislature can be a deadly combination. I am drawing heavily here from a report by the La Follete Institute of Public Affairs — if you want to go read it yourself and skip this section, feel free. In an effort to reduce soaring property taxes, the Wisconsin legislature, at the behest of Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, enacted a law called the two-thirds initiative, which established that the state of Wisconsin would pay two-thirds of each Wisconsin district’s education expenditures, while also placing caps on how much said districts could increase revenues in subsequent years — thus constraining the amount that districts could spend and constraining the amount the state would have to chip in to meet its two-thirds requirement.
Besides not addressing inequities in the existing distribution of revenue, this system does nothing to address the question of whether districts currently have the funds they need to meet the costs of education in their district. There is little adjusting for the number of students with special needs, such as handicaps or problems with speaking English. There is no consideration of the cost of living in some areas driving up teacher salaries. The emphasis is on containing the amount of taxes residents pay — which is certainly a noble goal, but as the La Follette report points out, this legislation was not accompanied by any reform of the way in which property taxes are assessed, which is a major reason why taxpayers resent property taxes as excessive and unfair. (And of course, having something as crucial as public education tied to referenda on a tax almost universally loathed is an idea too brilliant for words.)
Cost-Based Indexes
In response to this problem, organizations like the La Follete Center and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), the folks who won a major lawsuit against the state of New York a few months back, are proposing a solution that, while complex, offers some hope of achieving justice. They advocate that something along the lines of the following procedure be used to determine funding for school districts:
First, what is considered a sound and satisfactory education must be determined as explicitly as possible. What should students know when they complete a given grade? What tools are necessary for them to acquire this knowledge? Once these objectives are determined, and the resources necessary to achieve them are identified, the cost of those resources is tabulated for an a region or district that can be considered “average” for the state. A cost index is then determined for each of the other districts, similar to the cost-of-living multipliers that let you judge what, say, $100,000 buys in Philadelphia as opposed to Manhattan. This index multiplier therefore would let us determine how much money is needed to achieve a sound and satisfactory education in each district, and would serve as the minimum that each district would be required to have available to it. Efforts and research into developing these indexes are already underway — the CFE refers to a cost index in its report on reforming New York’s funding system (Acrobat format). And a group of Pennsylvania districts have proposed adjusting the state’s subsidies to districts that have a greater number of students with special needs and thus greater education costs, although the proposal described in this Pennsylvania Education Policy Center (Penn State) report is not nearly comprehensive enough.
Despite the lawsuit, and Governor George Pataki’s wrongheaded decision to keep fighting it, New York has made some significant progress toward this goal. Its Department of Education and Regents board have recently mapped out a new set of standards that lay out the minimum skills necessary to function in society, including reading and reasoning skills and sufficient information concerning public institutions. The Department of Education expects that by spring 2003 all schools will be able to give students these skills, and has made meeting these standards a requirement for a high school diploma effective at that time. The question becomes, can all New York schools accomplish this? (Read more about the new Regents standards in a report from the CFE (Acrobat format) and at the NY DOE’s website.)
My suggestion, and one that is echoed in some of these proposals, is that the state chip in the entire minimum, from a general source of funds — the state income or sales tax, for example. State taxes might have to be raised, but local and property taxes should be expected to fall to compensate. (The extent to which they would not fall is the extent to which our governments — and therefore, we — have been cheating our children, however unintentionally.) If a local district wants to spend more, it can raise local taxes to do so. Certainly no one should be stopped from spending more money on schools. But under this type of system, no school district would be held hostage to a referendum or to a taxpayer revolt, and all citizens would share in the responsibility for bringing up the next generation of citizens.
And Now a Word about Teachers
One of the key resources that children must have available to them are quality teachers. It would be unfair of me to sit here and talk about giving more money to school districts without addressing real concerns about how that money gets spent. Many parents have complaints about the quality of teachers in public schools — many are dedicated, wonderful people, but some just can not teach effectively. We just went through a teacher contract negotiation here in Philadelphia, and one of the major issues was teacher accountability and merit raises. The local teachers union was against them, claiming there were too many variables influencing a child’s performance to tie teachers’ pay to that performance. There’s an extent to which this is true — there are only so many times I can explain a concept; at some point a student has to do the homework, study the material and pass the test. But this position on the part of the teacher unions is a major public relations disaster, and it hardens opinion against the public schools. As such, it is a terrible idea.
The cost-index idea can help this situation, but at a cost. By establishing clear standards for what counts as a sound education, the procedure can hopefully establish fair and reasonable standards for student performance. Furthermore, by guaranteeing that each district has the resources it needs to provide that sound education, conditions become a bit more uniform and it becomes easier to compare student, and therefore teacher, performance. Now, in order to get enough quality teachers, it may be necessary to raise teacher salaries to increase the pool of potential teachers — and this kind of cost should be reflected in the cost index. (Yeah, I know, I’m glad I’m not in charge of developing it either . . . but I have faith in the people who are working on this project, and I believe that the only way to truly test the idea is to try it.) But at that point, the deck is no longer stacked against teachers — it becomes time to put up or shut up. And teachers who can’t or won’t do the job effectively, whose continued presence does as much to rob students of a sound education as a lack of resources does, must be removed. I hope that teachers unions will recognize this themselves, but if they don’t, I see no problem with legislation that would demand this, because the right of children to an education is not something that can be traded away in any collective bargaining agreement.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.