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June 23, 2004
Raising the Issue: Does the Constitution Require Higher School Funding?
Posted by John Hood at 2:00 PM
Few issues have drawn so much attention, spilled so much ink, and generated so many billable hours as the debate over school-funding equity in
North Carolina. Unfortunately, few issues have been as poorly communicated to voters, either.
At least since the celebrated Leandro case and related litigation began, for example, North Carolina have been told repeatedly that there
are huge disparities in public-school funding across the state. This is demonstrably untrue. North Carolina, unlike many of its peers, has long
funded public education primarily with state dollars. Local supplements play a role, of course, and I’m not denying that there are some differences
in offerings and facilities as a result, but state dollars fund about two-thirds of the operating cost, on average, with local dollars financing
a quarter and the rest being federal.
Obviously, differences in local funding can affect the length of the proverbial tail without wagging the entire dog all that much. In the 2001-02
school year, I found, 97 of the state’s (then) 117 districts had expenditures within a band that was 15 percent above and below the state
mean of about $6,700 per student. And of the 20 districts outside the band, most were indeed rural with lower-than-average incomes – but most
had higher-than-average school spending, typically due to an economy-of-scale effect. That is, smaller systems have fewer students over which to
spread fixed costs.
These statistics point to the large problem with the debate over Leandro and school equity – the idea that equal funding necessarily
leads to equal educational opportunities or results. This isn’t necessarily true.
Nor is it what the Leandro decision concluded, though plenty of folks have read
into it what they hoped it would say rather than what it said.
The state constitution contains at least two provisions of interest here. One states that citizens have a “right to the privilege of education” and
that it is the state’s duty to “guard and maintain that right.” The other stipulates that the state must provide sufficient funds
to provide “a general and uniform system of free public schools.” Previous litigation had resulted in a narrow interpretation of these
provisions, but in Leandro the Supreme Court concluded (I think correctly) that the provisions established an enforceable right to the opportunity
for a “sound, basic education” and that the state as a whole, not its local-government creations, was ultimately responsible.
What the Court pointedly did not find, but many continue to pretend it did, was that local systems had a right to equal funding, or that
judges can and should oversee every aspect of the budget for public education. The decision laid out criteria for judging whether the state was
discharging its duty. But how the state might act to ensure these opportunities was not prescribed.
For starters, the state could help to satisfy the directive by allowing systems to use their current flow of state funding to satisfy their highest-priority
needs. Many education analysts agree, for instance, that the hundreds of millions of dollars North Carolina spends each year funding teacher assistants
generate few measurable academic benefits. Local schools ought to be free to convert these positions into additional teachers to reduce class sizes
in early grades or to attract and retain higher-quality teachers.
I would argue that another way to satisfy the Leandro mandate would be to ensure that students assigned to consistently low-performing schools
have alternative schools available if their parents so choose. These are properly policy decisions, not
judicial ones.
To argue that education spending is unconstitutionally low is both dangerous (who decides?) and improbable. Remember that spending per student has
been a moving target during the course of the litigation. From 1991-92 to 2002-03, inflation-adjusted spending per student rose by 26 percent. A
while back, I tracked and compared total expenditures in the 25 richest and 25 poorest districts in the state. After adjusting for inflation and
student enrollment, I found that the 25 poorest districts are now better funded
in real terms that the wealthiest ones were when this current round of litigation began.
So the only way that current spending levels on the “poor” districts can be viewed as unconstitutional would be if spending on all school
districts in the state was unconstitutional from the creation of public schools in North Carolina during the 19th century all the way through the
early 1990s. Politicians looking for cover to justify their costly education initiatives might try to argue this, but it contains no legal or logical
weight.
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Raising the Issue: North Carolina Public Schools Have a Long Way to Go - More Resources Will Almost Certainly Be Necessary
Posted by Rob Schofield at 2:10 PM
Well John, here in our third installment of Raising the Issue, I’m
happy that we’ve picked another simple, uncomplicated subject that should be easy to resolve in a few pithy paragraphs.
In all seriousness, the question posed here is an important one that requires close and careful analysis. As with far too many fundamental issues
of public policy, much of what North Carolina does (and has done) in the education arena is a function of reactive, piecemeal decision making rather
than sober, comprehensive planning that determines where we are and where we need to go.
In the current budget debate, one need only look at the proposal in the House
budget to “fund” third grade class size with a $50 million appropriation, while simultaneously imposing $27 million in “discretionary
cuts” on the same local school districts that would be expected to shrink classes. This directive would come on top of $44 million in discretionary
cuts in 2003-’04.
While North Carolina’s system of school finance is plagued by many shortcomings, most of them can be traced to one basic flaw in the state’s
education budgeting process: Rather than honestly assessing what the state needs to spend in order to accomplish the goals that have been identified
(either by state law, the state Constitution, or, in the case of the No Child Left Behind Act, a binding agreement with the federal government),
and then making an intentional choice about what and what not to fund, North Carolina goes about things in reverse order. Instead of first determining
what they need, lawmakers first determine what they have to spend on education and then work backwards to try to divide the allotted pot of money
as best they can.
The results are predictable. Each year, state leaders express their commitment to supporting education, followed soon thereafter by an statement
of regret that budget constraints make it impossible to fully fund education initiatives that would benefit student learning such as smaller class
sizes or targeted services for at-risk students. This is not a problem of mere theory or semantics. Because North Carolina has never established
a concrete baseline of what it would really take to make its education system work in optimal fashion, it is much harder for experts, advocates,
journalists, and policymakers themselves to measure real progress.
The bottom line on the question of education funding, therefore, is that, no, North Carolina is almost assuredly not appropriating enough money.
Our needs – for high quality teachers, more and better facilities, technology improvements, and a host of targeted services for low-income
children, children with limited English proficiency and special needs, and many others at-risk of failure are evident – particularly
(PDF) in poorer rural counties. Our Supreme Court has ruled in the Leandro case that
all state students have a constitutional right to a “sound basic education.” The federal government has established a 10-year time frame
(with which we are obligated to comply) for assuring that no child is left behind.
What we need first and foremost, however, before we appropriate such funds, is a plan for getting from point A to point B. To date, 33
states have conducted (or are conducting) comprehensive “adequacy studies” in which panels of experts “cost out” what
it would take for their states to provide an adequate education system (i.e., a sound basic education). As more and more of these studies are confirming
(and as many elite public and private schools have proved for decades), the process of building excellent schools is, more often than not, a question
of resources. We know how to build successful schools and what it takes to assist even the hardest to reach, at-risk child. What we lack, is a concrete
plan and the political will to make it happen.
North Carolina should join the group of 33 as soon as possible and get on about the business of building a first rate system of public education.
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Raising the Issue: Are More Resources Necessary for School Reform?
Posted by John Hood at 2:18 PM
Rob, since I devoted quite a bit of my initial posting to rebutting (or at least attempting to) the notion that North Carolina’s state constitution
mandates additional funding for our public schools, I’ll let you respond to those arguments before adding to or amplifying them.
As to the general idea that North Carolina school reform will founder without dramatically higher spending on public education, I just don’t
think the facts bear out your case. First of all, by pointing out that lawmakers are giving to local schools with one hand and taking back with
the other, you seem to be suggesting that the General Assembly hasn’t been generous to school budgets. While there is a little “up here,
down there” dynamic in the proposed 2004-05 state budget for schools, the trend line this year and for a long time points up, up, up.
As I mentioned, North Carolina public schools are spending roughly $6,700 per student on operations, which is up from an inflation-adjusted PPE
of $5,320 in 1991-92. These numbers don’t include state and local funds for capital construction, which have also surged. The state reports
a rolling five-year average on capital spending (which is reasonable given that it’s lumpier than operating spending), and in the most recent
year that would add another $920 per student, taking the total to $7,620 (which still doesn’t include some additional government funding for
schools, such as debt service carried on county budgets and the cost of school-board elections, for example).
Yes, “elite” private schools might well cost more than that per student, but prep schools aren’t where the action is in private
education. They comprise a small share of the private-school enrollment, even more so if you add in the burgeoning home-school population. The fact
is, most private-school students attend schools that cost much, much less to attend and to operate than $7,620 — try $2,500 to $5,000, depending
on the grade and type of institution — and nevertheless deliver high-quality results. Only about 24
percent of all private-school students attend schools where the tuition exceeds $5,000. And established charter schools as a whole, the good
and the not-so-good, deliver at least similar outcomes to the district-run
public schools while spending less money (because they don’t get government funds for capital needs).
Correctly measured, North Carolina public-school teachers already receive compensation significantly
above the national average. Correctly measured, the benefits of class-size reduction outside
of small groups for at-risk kids in kindergarten don’t come close to matching the exorbitant cost to the state and localities of implementing
them.
Bottom line: I’m just not buying the notion that $160,000 to $200,000 per classroom (assuming a range of 21 to 26 pupils) is too little,
on average, to provide the opportunity for a sound, basic education. Our policy focus should be on how we deploy the resources and the incentives
within which schools operate.
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Raising the Issue: Constitution Requires Adequate, Not Necessarily Equal Education Funding
Posted by Rob Schofield at 3:30 PM
John-
This will be a two-part response.
First, the issues that you raise in your initial comments - of whether or not our state Constitution requires higher funding on schools (or
equal funding amongst schools) - are largely beside the point. What the state Supreme Court decided in Leandro was that every child has the
right to an equal opportunity to receive a sound basic education. This does not mean that every local system has to provide each student with an
identical (or identically funded) education. A sound basic education can look different in different places.
This constitutional requirement does mean, however, that every system must meet some basic standard of adequacy. Students will not truly have a
real opportunity to receive a sound basic education if they have an incompetent teacher or crumbling facilities or prehistoric textbooks. As I noted
earlier, the NC Public School Forum has some good research on the needs in rural areas. Now,
once we have established this basic premise, we move on to the enforcement of the Court’s ruling.
That’s where state policymakers, and, if necessary, the trial court (Judge Howard Manning) enter the picture. These entities must determine
what it will take to lift up the school systems that have been incapable of providing a sound basic education and then figure out a way to make
it happen. While this process can and should involve the identification and implementation of creative tactics and new efficiencies (your point
about teacher assistants is not be completely off base if we can get teacher/student ratios down to 1 to 15 levels), it must also involve identifying
and responding to system shortcomings that are a function of inadequate resources.
In this regard, where it can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court that particular school systems simply cannot meet their constitutional
requirement because their local tax base will not generate, for instance, enough revenue to provide adequate teacher supplements to attract and
retain good teachers or adequate special programs to cope with an influx of limited English proficient students, the state is constitutionally obligated
to act.
Part two of my response will be brief. I think your points about state education funding growth and state teacher compensation are also off the
mark. As to overall funding, sure we’re spending more than we did a decade ago. We’ve got about a century’s worth of catching
up to do. As for teacher compensation, I don’t think anyone can seriously argue that public school teachers are paid anything near what they
are worth. State teacher salaries continue to be a vestige of a bygone era in which so many brilliant women had few if any other employment opportunities.
In today’s world we cannot expect to hire and retain the teachers we need without paying them truly competitive salaries. While I might quarrel
with your contention about where our teachers fall within the national pecking order, a more relevant question would be where they fall within the
pecking order of professionals in whom such tremendous responsibility is vested. By this measure, they are clearly
and badly underpaid – particularly in poorer, rural areas.
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Raising the Issue: Deciding what's relevant to the school-finance debate
Posted by John Hood at 4:13 PM
Rob, I just cannot agree that the issue of Leandro’s legal requirements for school funding is irrelevant. It is certainly not beside
the point that the “poor” school districts in North Carolina now have as much funding, adjusting for inflation and enrollment, as the “wealthy” districts
did when the school-finance litigation began. This speaks directly to the legal standard of adequacy that you raise. Unless you think that the level
of funding afforded to all school districts in North Carolina was constitutionally impermissible a decade ago or longer – and such a judgment
would make a mess of sound jurisprudence, since no one can reasonably argue that the framers of the state constitution would have intended a standard — then
it is important that increases in state funding have raised the floor so much. Surely some districts, the “wealthy” ones, were above
the adequacy standard back then. If not, it is not an “adequacy” standard, but the same old kind of “equality” standard
that you properly recognize is not in force here.
As to the usefulness of the Public School Forum’s work on school-finance disparities, I am sorry to say that I don’t have the respect
for it that you do (though I do respect my friends over there). Their work has unfortunately served to perpetuate the myth that there are significant
school-funding disparities in North Carolina. Precisely because the dollar amounts involved are so small, the Forum finds that there are
dramatic percentage differences, some systems having twice as much or more than others. Again, local funds account for only a quarter of the total,
so the import of these data is unclear.
Imagine that you earn twice as much as I do from a second job — for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that both of us are so underpaid
from our primary job that we’re slaving away on the night shift. Would that necessarily mean you are better off financially than I am? No,
because the earnings might be relatively small — $2,000 vs. $1,000, let’s say. Not a large share of the total. Another problem with
the Forum analysis is that when evaluating whether counties can “afford” to hike their property taxes to pay for schools, the Forum
leaves out the extent to which counties have incorporated municipalities. Urban or suburban districts are more likely to have households paying
both city and county taxes, thus influencing the relative ranking of tax burdens vs. income.
Now, as to the efficacy of plowing more money into schools as a reform strategy, again the points I brought up are directly on point. There is no
necessary relationship between levels of education spending and outcomes. We’ve spent billions of dollars in North Carolina boosting pay to
the “national average,” though it was already there, and cutting class sizes in ways that are not likely to make much of a difference
educationally. If these dollars had been better invested — say, in attracting good teachers to difficult environments with large bonuses (not
a piddly $1,000 or two) or implementing differential pay to alleviate our shortage of math and science teachers in the upper grades — then
we would have better served the needs of those students who truly lack their Leandro-recognized right to educational opportunity.
With teacher pay in particular, I don’t think that the relevant question is what the average pay is. Some teachers are atrociously
overpaid, as they are atrocious. Some are tragically underpaid. We need to get out from under categorical systems for compensating teachers and
give principals more authority to make hiring and firing decisions, reforms that the teacher union will naturally block as long as it can.
Finally, if we really wanted to spend our tax dollars to get the largest bang for the buck, we would put more of them into innovative programs based
on choice and competition. As we and others have
demonstrated, these kinds of programs provide the greatest relative gains for low-income students – larger than class-size reductions or other
changes can offer.
Linkable Entry
Raising the Issue: Teacher Pay, Class Size, Rural v. Urban, and “Choice”
Posted by Rob Schofield at 5:00 PM
Okay, now let me get this straight. Your point on teacher pay is that we need more excellent math and science teachers and need to pay more in
order to attract and retain them. I’ll buy that. You also argue that bad teachers are badly overpaid. I take it that you mean they should
be fired. I’ll go for that. I think you may also be on to something with the notion that principals (at least the good ones) need more discretion.
Where you lose me is with the argument that average pay (and money, generally) isn’t important. How is it that we’re going to attract and
keep the good teachers to replace the “atrocious” ones if we don’t pay more and improve conditions in the schools? Whether
we’re at the national average or not seems to me irrelevant if the excellent teachers we do attract are simply throwing up their hands and
finding jobs in the private sector because they’re overwhelmed by the demands of overcrowded classes, high pressure, high-stakes testing and
inadequate resources and facilities.
This also goes to your point about class size. While North Carolina has made some important progress in this area, the research has always shown
that we really need to get to the ultimate target of 1 to 15 in order to achieve the
breakthroughs we desire. Thus, it’s unfair to criticize the move toward smaller class size until we have achieved the ratio to which we aspire.
Again, this will take resources.
As for the question of disparities between poor and wealthy school districts, there clearly is a large and meaningful difference. Anyone who doesn’t
think so should compare the applicant pool for teaching jobs in Wake County and any number of poorer rural counties. Attracting and retaining the
best teachers is a competitive business. While money is far from the only carrot for attracting quality teachers, the realities of the marketplace
dictate that districts that can offer better wages have an advantage in attracting teachers.
While many rural areas would, ideally, seek to make up for the lack of amenities in their communities (public services, shopping, entertainment)
by offering a salary premium in order to provide an incentive that will lure top-flight teachers, this is seldom possible. The systems with the
top ten wage supplement schedules are mostly urban and have average local
salary supplements ranging from $2888 to $7,122. The systems with the ten lowest supplement schedules are rural and average local salary supplements
range from $0 to $441. These are not the tiny differences you imply in your last set of comments.
Finally, the subject of “school choice” is always a hot button issue in the debate over public education. Many critics of traditional
models of public education have long touted “choice” as one of the magic bullets that will provide dissatisfied parents with an escape
hatch from schools they don’t like. Proponents also argue that by fostering market-like competition, “choice” provides an incentive
for schools to try harder and do better. The choice model is, of course, a central component of the No Child Left Behind law.
While not wholly without merit as a tool for use in specific circumstances (the Wake County schools, for instance, do a solid job
of using magnet school choice), choice is not the panacea its proponents would have us believe. In particular, the idea of using choice as an escape
hatch (as No Child Left Behind attempts) is simply not a practical or sound idea.
First of all, not only does the escape hatch premise encourage caring parents to abandon struggling schools (just what those schools need!), but
as a more general matter, crude application of choice encourages parents and students to treat public education as a mere consumer product, rather
than a collective enterprise to which we all have a responsibility to contribute. This “what’s in it for me?” attitude has much
to do with the current challenges we face in public education and is readily evident in the shortsighted opposition to adequate funding for schools
that is so often voiced by taxpayers without children in the public school system.
On a more practical level, the choice model also fails under No Child Left Behind due to the simple lack of resources and adequate spaces for kids
to transfer to. This problem has arisen in several school systems around the country where parents from “failing schools” have been
rebuffed in their efforts to transfer their children simply because there was no place to which to transfer.
In sum, the idea that we can force schools to try harder and do better simply through dog eat dog competition and threats of lost students and revenues
makes far less common sense than the notion that we should all pitch in and do our part to provide adequate resources for the single most important
public function in our society.
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