Making Money Matter Financing America's Schools (1999) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 13-25
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Port I Introduction
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But neither approach is likely to be effective in achieving goal ~ unless it is aligned with appropriate incentives throughout the education system to make performance count. Altering incentives responds to the fact that the school finance system historically has operated almost in isolation from educational performance, in that educational goals and desired outcomes have seldom been reflected in pay for teachers and budgets for schools.
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Ensuring that all students learn and achieve to high standards has posed fundamental challenges to almost every aspect of business as usual in American education. From curriculum reform and the development of national and state standards for learning to the management structures of individual schools and school districts, traditional ways of organizing and delivering education are being questioned and changed.
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The key question posed to the committee was: How can education finance systems be designed to ensure that all students achieve high levels of learning and that education funds are raised and used in the most efficient and effective manner possible? In answering this question, the committee was further charged to: · give particular attention to issues of equity, adequacy, and productivity; · be sensitive to the legal and constitutional context and constraints surrounding school finance; · examine the relationship between incentive structures and education re sources; · clarify, to the extent it could, the relationships between expenditures and performance; · identify data needed to give policy makers a better understanding of resource allocations, expenditures, and outcomes; and · consider developing funding models that would display policy options for consideration by elected officials, educators, judges, and other interested parties.
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Goal 3 embraces the belief that in raising revenues for schools, as well as in spending, school finance systems should operate fairly and efficiently. SHIFTING EXPECTATIONS OF SCHOOL FINANCE Goal 1 marks a crucial change in expectations about education finance policies.
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The most compelling of these is embraced in goal 2. Almost a century after the first school finance reforms using state aid to reduce fiscal disparities among local school districts, almost 50 years after Brown v.
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Social, health, financial, and polity capital are largely the product of broader institutional arrangements and societal conditions. These institutional arrangements and societal conditions constitute an educational opportunity structure; they "heavily influence the ability of groups to acquire and use education-relevant resources to improve their educational performance, both absolutely and relative to other groups over time" (Miller, 1995:96~.
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Attacks on public schools (which, it should be noted, have never been absent) seemed to grow steadily louder beginning in the late 1960s perhaps not coincidentally the same time when the Vietnam War and then Watergate and the economic shocks initiated by the Arab oil embargo punctured the post-World
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The downfall of communism, the inefficiencies that have been exposed in European postwar welfare states, and the uneven successes of American social policies in addressing the needs of the disadvantaged have fostered a worldwide debate on the relative role of governments and private markets in meeting society's needs and fostering economic prosperity (Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998~. In the United States, policy makers at all levels are examining previously unexamined assumptions about how to deliver publicly financed services and are moving away from an exclusive focus on uniform public provision to public financing with various forms of provision, including private-sector provision.
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They also explain why, in interpreting these goals, we adopt a broad definition of education finance systems, including within them governance as well as money-raising and resource allocation policies. This definition reflects our view that understanding and evaluating finance arrangements depends on considering them simultaneously with the governance or authority systems within which they are embedded, which in turn reflect political and historical influences that determine how decisions about education in the United States are made and carried out.
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These cross-pressures explain why decisions about the finance of schools will seldom be clear-cut, but rather must be made against a background of moral and factual ambiguity that frequently engenders passionate debate. Education policy, especially when it concerns matters of complexity such as school finance, raises difficult questions that require both moral wisdom and empirical research.
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As the school-effectiveness question is raised, it has appeared that school finance reform cannot proceed unless educational reform is guaranteed." Rather than use the results of research as an excuse for inaction, the appropriate response to the absence of clear guidance from science may well consist of invoking other sources of legitimate authority as touchstones for evaluating finance reform proposals for example, an appeal to ideas about what constitutes basic fairness in a just society. By focusing attention on scientific authority as a guide to education finance reform, we do not intend to prejudge the extent to which the use of this authority is warranted.
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Part II examines efforts to improve the fairness of school finance systems over the last 30 years and explores how the concept of fairness is increasingly and inextricably tied to questions about how to improve school performance. Part III evaluates various ways that the education finance system might be reformed to foster the three goals identified.
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