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.
