Florida: The State Where Intellectual Freedom Goes to Die

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
15

As Ron DeSantis and his compliant legislature tightens their control of tenure and academic freedom in the state’s public universities, many of the faculty at the private University of Miami have joined to protest the attack on their colleagues.

It has long been said that the states are “laboratories of democracy.” If you wonder why I post so much about Florida, it is because it has become a “laboratory of fascism,” where the state’s leadership is intent on controlling thought and expression, research and study.

Nearly 1,000 faculty, staff and students at the University of Miami have signed an open letter opposing a state bill moving through the Florida Legislature that they say is an “unprecedented attempt to exert political control over free thought and professional expertise in higher education.”

As a private university, UM isn’t funded or governed by the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the 12 public universities in the state. As such, it wouldn’t be affected by House Bill 999, and its companion Senate Bill 266, which could make it harder for professors to hold onto tenure and would give university presidents the authority to hire and fire faculty, instead of deans, department chairs and faculty committees currently making those decisions.

Because of these proposals and others in the bills, some of UM’s faculty, staff and students are “standing in solidarity” with their counterparts at Florida International University and the state’s other public universities.

“We affirm our commitment to the principles and practices of academic freedom and shared governance in all Florida institutions of higher education, whether public or private,” reads the missive, which a small group of UM faculty members started in early April and now want to share with as many people as possible, particularly elected officials…

Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at UM, said she stamped her name on the open letter because she sees the bills as an attack not only on education, but on democracy.

“I’m incredibly angry, and I’m concerned for students everywhere, and I’m particularly saddened for my fellow faculty members at public universities,” she said. “Florida is becoming known as a state where intellectual freedom goes to die.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article274450640.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Academic Freedom, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Reform, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Higher Education, Racism, Resistance

New York City: Why Is the UFT President Threatening to Sue a Teacher for Writing a Parody?

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
24

Arthur Goldstein has taught in a New York City high school for almost four decades. He has been an active member of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s powerful teachers’ union. Arthur also is a blogger and a journalist. His blog “nyceducator.com” is usually witty and often hilarious.

Recently Arthur posted a parody of a letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to UFT members. Arthur used the parody to complain about the deal made between the municipal unions and the city to shift their retirees from Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan. Mulgrew was a leading advocate for this deal. The agreement saves the city $600 million a year, but forces retirees to give up Medicare for a for-profit MA plan that may deny permission for services and that may not cover the doctor of one’s choice.

Parody is no crime, but Arthur soon got a letter from the law firm that represents the UFT, threatening him with legal action.

Of course, Arthur posted the original parody and the lawyer’s letter.

Something tells me he will not back down. As he says, parody is protected by the First Amendment.

But there is something very scary when a powerful person with deep pockets threatens to sue you. Back in 2014, I received a letter from the representative for a billionaire with a lawsuit threat for something I wrote about him on this blog. It’s a bad feeling.

When a working teacher is threatened in this manner by the president of his union, it is especially bad.

Categories Education Reform, Humor, New York City, Teachers, Unions

Gary Rubinstein: Success Academy Whistleblower Makes Startling Claims

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
24

Gary Rubinstein read an account by a recently fired teacher at Success Academy, and he was alarmed. He says that Success Academy should be investigated to determine if her allegations are true.

He writes:

The brave blog post by teacher Livia Camperi was titled ‘The Cruel Dystopia of Success Academy’and I highly recommend you stop reading my analysis and read the actual source for yourself and then come back here, assuming you’re not already sick to your stomach.

Of all the atrocities Camperi reports, the one that stuck me as the most worthy of a formal investigation was this one:

“SA is a data-driven institution, just like the entire rest of the American education system. This is not a surprise. What was a surprise, though, was the lengths the school goes to attain its desired data. For nearly three months leading up to the NY State English and Math tests (January to March), the students are not learning anything. I feel the need to emphasize that again before I explain: for three months, students attending a school are not learning anything in their time there. What they are doing, instead, is practicing taking multiple-choice tests, day in and day out. This is, ironically, called “Think” season.
“During Think, the students take practice tests for the state exams in every single English and Math class, every single day. For the last two years, halfway through February, when they realized the data was not good enough yet, the network canceled Science and History classes to do more English and Math practice tests. Those are their only four content classes. I say again: students are not learning anything during that time. All they are doing is practicing test-taking skills and hating every minute of it. This is not education. This is callous data-chasing.”

HTTPS://LIVIACAMPERI.MEDIUM.COM/THE-CRUEL-DYSTOPIA-OF-SUCCESS-ACADEMY-53524CFC53D0

If this description is accurate, this, in terms of education, is a crime. To have students do mainly test prep for three months at the expense of all else is a type of cheating. Remember that these middle school students have been part of Success Academy since they were in Kindergarten. So if these middle schoolers need that much test prep in order to get 3s on the state test, then the ‘success’ of Success Academy is the mirage that I always have claimed.

In the comments of the blog post, this teacher has gotten a lot of support from her former students. If students are willing to corroborate her allegations about the test prep for three months, this could be a very big story.

Please open the link and read the rest of this alarming story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Discipline, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Standardized Testing

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

A Conversation about the State Takeover of the Houston Independent School District

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2023 //
7

The Network for Public Education sponsored a conversation among me, Daniel Santos, and Domingo Morel.

Daniel Santos is an 8th grade social studies teacher in the Houston schools and vice-president of the Houston Federation of Teachers.

Domingo Morel is author of Takeover and the nation’s leading expert on the process by which a state abrogates local control of a school district.

I am a graduate of the Houston public schools.

As background, there are two things you should know:

1. Houston is not a “failing” district. It has a B rating.

2. State law in Texas allows the state to take control of a district if only one of its schools has persistently low scores.

Students, parents, teachers, and elected officials have complained about this abrogation of democracy. Governor Abbott and State Commissioner Mike Morath ignore them.

Watch the discussion here.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Resistance, Texas

Nancy Flanagan: One of the Very Best Books About Teaching!

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2023 //
6

Nancy Flanagan, now retired, taught music for many years. She is a keen observer of teaching and also of the pundits who regularly criticize teachers. She has been there, done that, and has no sympathy for armchair “experts.”

She recently reviewed a book that won her praise: Alexandra Robbins’s THE TEACHERS: A YEAR INSIDE AMERICA’S MOST VULNERABLE, IMPORTANT PROFESSION.

This book, Flanagan writes,

does what many other books about teaching are not able to do–take the reader right into the classroom, and describe what’s happening, with empathy and perception. There are lots of books about problems in American education, and lots of books that suggest solutions for those problems, but we seldom get to see examples, conversations and the people doing the work.

If you want a drone’s eye view of American public education—where it’s been, what bedevils the century-old movement to improve it—I would recommend Diane Ravitch’s trio of excellent books that follow education reform over the last couple of decades, or A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire.

But if you want to see what happens in the classroom and in the lives of teachers, Robbins accomplishes that better than any book I’ve read since Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren, written in 1989, which now feels like ancient history. The book is a tour de force—every teacher I know who’s read it agrees—unapologetically written from the POV of teachers without feeling the need to make excuses or backpedal.

I read an advance copy of the book and was similarly impressed. I felt that at this very moment, when teachers are being vilified by the likes of Betsy DeVos, Ron DeSantis, and other red state politicians, Alexandra Robbins’ book is a necessary antidote to scurrilous claims that teachers are “grooming” students for a life of perversity or training them to be Marxists. People who rain insults on teachers should be barred from public life.

Robbins follows three excellent teachers and describes their lives, their trials and successes.

Robbins highlights things that other education books don’t notice or can’t be bothered with–in-building teacher jealousies and vindictiveness, physical violence against teachers, the long-term effects of cuts to things once considered normal in every school, what it’s like to sit in an IEP meeting with a recalcitrant parent or clueless colleague.

Flanagan writes:

This book is also the first and best description I have read about the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning. There have been endless articles and research on “learning loss”–all rife with meaningless data and numbers–but nobody talks about the impact of being expected to position family needs as secondary to students’ needs. Robbins gets this right–there is a line between acting morally vs. choosing school over family, a choice that teachers were urged to make, and reviled when they chose their own families and their own health. We have not yet reconciled that, here in America—but the book makes a good start on it.

Highly recommended for everyone, but especially teachers. It’s a fairly fast and facile read, although well-documented with endnotes, and should give teachers a lift, knowing that their work and their dilemmas have been acknowledged.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Teachers and Teaching

Tom Loveless: Why NAEP “Proficient” is a High Standard, Not “Grade Level”

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2023 //
35

As I wrote in an earlier post, NAEP Proficient is not the same as “grade level.” NAEP Proficient is equivalent to an A or an A-. Secretary of Education Cardona made the egregious error of saying at a Congressional hearing on April 18 that 2/3 of the students in this nation were below grade level. He was wrong.

Tom Loveless, then of the Brookings Institution (now retired), wrote an excellent article in 2016, providing a history of NAEP and explaining just how high the standard for NAEP Proficient is. He was responding to the wildly inaccurate claims of rightwing ideologues, who said the same things that Secretary Cardona said.

Here are some excerpts from his article, “The NAEP Proficiency Myth.”

Equating NAEP proficiency with grade level is bogus. Indeed, the validity of the achievement levels themselves is questionable. They immediately came under fire in reviews by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Education.[1] The National Academy of Sciences report was particularly scathing, labeling NAEP’s achievement levels as “fundamentally flawed.”

Despite warnings of NAEP authorities and critical reviews from scholars, some commentators, typically from advocacy groups, continue to confound NAEP proficient with grade level. Organizations that support school reform, such as Achieve Inc. and Students First, prominently misuse the term on their websites. Achieve presses states to adopt cut points aligned with NAEP proficient as part of new Common Core-based accountability systems. Achieve argues that this will inform parents whether children “can do grade level work.” No, it will not. That claim is misleading….

Today’s eighth graders have made it about half-way to NAEP proficient in 25 years, but they still need to gain almost two more years of math learning (17 points) to reach that level. And, don’t forget, that’s just the national average, so even when that lofty goal is achieved, half of the nation’s students will still fall short of proficient. Advocates of the NAEP proficient standard want it to be for allstudents. That is ridiculous. Another way to think about it: proficient for today’s eighth graders reflects approximately what the average twelfth grader knew in mathematics in 1990. Someday the average eighth grader may be able to do that level of mathematics. But it won’t be soon, and it won’t be every student.

In the 2007 Brown Center Report on American Education, I questioned whether NAEP proficient is a reasonable achievement standard.[2] That year, a study by Gary Phillips of American Institutes for Research was published that projected the 2007 TIMSS scores on the NAEP scale. Phillips posed the question: based on TIMSS, how many students in other countries would score proficient or better on NAEP? The study’s methodology only produces approximations, but they are eye-popping….

Singapore was the top scoring nation on TIMSS that year, but even there, more than a quarter of students fail to reach NAEP proficient. Japan is not usually considered a slouch on international math assessments, but 43% of its eighth graders fall short. The U.S. looks weak, with only 26% of students proficient. But England, Israel, and Italy are even weaker. Norway, a wealthy nation with per capita GDP almost twice that of the U.S., can only get 9 out of 100 eighth graders to NAEP proficient.

Finland isn’t shown in the table because it didn’t participate in the 2007 TIMSS. But it did in 2011, with Finland and the U.S. scoring about the same in eighth grade math. Had Finland’s eighth graders taken NAEP in 2011, it’s a good bet that the proportion scoring below NAEP proficient would have been similar to that in the U.S. And yet articles such as “Why Finland Has the Best Schools,” appear regularly in the U.S. press….[3]

NAEP proficient is not synonymous with grade level. NAEP officials urge that proficient not be interpreted as reflecting grade level work. It is a standard set much higher than that. Scholarly panels have reviewed the NAEP achievement standards and found them flawed. The highest scoring nations of the world would appear to be mediocre or poor performers if judged by the NAEP proficient standard. Even large numbers of U.S. calculus students fall short.

As states consider building benchmarks for student performance into accountability systems, they should not use NAEP proficient—or any standard aligned with NAEP proficient—as a benchmark. It is an unreasonable expectation, one that ill serves America’s students, parents, and teachers–and the effort to improve America’s schools.

Categories Accountability, Cardona, Miguel, Data, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Florida: Legislature Endorses DeSantis’ Vendetta Against Disney

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
28

The Florida Legislature passed amendments to laws today to revoke Disney’s efforts to escape the control of Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor was outraged because Disney openly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” law. He got the legislature to dissolve Disney’s self-governing Reedy Creek district. But before the legislature acted, Disney made an agreement with its own Reedy Creek district board to extend its control for decades.

DeSantis’s new board met today and began the takeover process, raising Disney’s taxes. The legislature acted to void Disney’s efforts to extend its own control. The new law will lead to legal challenges.

Imagine, if you dare, a DeSantis presidency. Any corporation that dared to disagree with his multiple prejudices would be singled out for spiteful treatment. DeSantis is a mean, angry, hateful wannabee dictator. Woe to those who dare to challenge him.

Florida legislators on Wednesday quickly responded to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call to retroactively invalidate an agreement between Walt Disney World and its special taxing district, adopting amendments despite warnings that the proposal will not withstand a constitutional challenge.

The Florida State Affairs Committee and the Senate Rules Committee each added an amendment to bills regulating land use and development regulations that requires the DeSantis-appointed board overseeing all of Disney’s parks and resorts to vote on the Disney agreement that limits the authority of the governor’s new supervisors to infrastructure and taxing issues.

The move came on the same day the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board of Supervisors met and announced a series of proposals that will require the governing board whose revenues come from Disney to raise taxes on itself.

Under the amendments added to SB 1604 and HB 439, special districts would be prohibited from complying with development agreements executed three months or less before new laws take effect that change how district board members are selected.

The amendment also would give new boards four months to review any development agreements and decide if they should be re-adopted. “The Legislature sets up special districts and allows them, and therefore we should be able to change how we think some of those things need to happen as we move forward,’’ said Rep. Stan McClain, R-Ocala, the sponsor of the House amendment.

IS THIS CONSTITUTIONAL?

But Democrats, who have for years criticized Republican lawmakers for their willingness to give Walt Disney World favorable treatment, said the amendments now appeared to be singling out the company for punitive treatment.

They warned that if passed, the provision would violate the Constitution. “I’m all about corporate accountability, but this isn’t it,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. “And it continues to be a distraction for us to focus on real life issues by continuing the Disney versus DeSantis drama.”

Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, said he worried the amendment would “set a very bad precedent” that “opens up the floodgates” for future legislatures. He said the Disney-backed district appears to have “operated within the law, and this shouldn’t be how we govern.”

Both McClain and the Senate sponsor, Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, were asked if they could name other special districts to which the law would apply and how many would be affected. Neither could answer.

“I’m not sure how many, but I can think of one,’’ Ingoglia told the Senate Rules Committee, referring to the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.

The amendments come after DeSantis announced there would be “more to come” in his war against Disney, the largest single-site employer in the United States with 75,000 workers and an economic linchpin of the state’s tourism industry.

DESANTIS’ FIRST EFFORT DIDN’T WORK

Last year, DeSantis wanted to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special taxing district created in 1967 to pay for municipal services to the 39-square-mile area where Disney built its theme parks, hotels and resort areas at a time when the nearest urban development was more than 16 miles away.

After Disney officials voiced opposition to the Parental Rights in Education Bill, which prohibited classroom instruction on gender identity issues in certain grades, legislators rushed through a bill to dissolve the district.

But, after it became law, Disney quietly pointed to another state law that requires the state to pay for any outstanding debts before a special district is dissolved and, if the district were to be dismantled as the governor wanted, it would cost Florida taxpayers nearly $1 billion.

Lawmakers returned in special session in February, repealed the law dissolving the district and replaced it with a plan to allow the governor to appoint the district’s governing board.

But, before that law could take effect, Disney outmaneuvered the state by adopting a series of development agreement and restrictive covenants that undermined the authority of the DeSantis-appointed board. Invalidating those agreements, however, is expected to be a lengthy legal fight.

At its meeting on Wednesday, Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board voted to void the agreements with no discussion. But because state and federal contract law may create legal obstacles to that decision, the legislation attempts to help them achieve the goal.

In the House, McClain had difficulty explaining the amendment under questioning from Eskamani. “The Florida Constitution says we can’t pass retroactive laws impairing contracts. Can you explain how is your amendment constitutional?’’ she asked. “Obviously this would be a new law,’’ McClain answered.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article274492771.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Fascism, Florida

Florida Bans Instruction about Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity in All Grades

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
34

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis thinks that if he bans or censors a subject, then the thing he banned will disappear. Obviously, he hates gays. Therefore, his state board of education voted in the last hour or so to ban any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity unless they are part of a reproductive health course. Ironically, Florida has a very large gay population in Miami and Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere. But DeSantis believes he can appeal to the MAGA base by repeatedly showing his hatred for gays. Every fascist must have scapegoats. For DeSantis, it’s gays, trans, and drag queens, but also Blacks and immigrants. And any books about them. Some Republican mega donors have decided to back off and withhold funding him to see how far he goes with his calculated campaign of hatred and divisiveness.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

The State Board of Education on Wednesday voted to bar Florida middle school and high school teachers from “intentionally” teaching students about sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the lessons are part of a reproductive health course or are “expressly required” by the state’s academic standards.

Teachers who do otherwise could be suspended or their teaching license could be revoked.

Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, the head of the Florida Department of Education, said the rule is meant to “provide clarity” to teachers about what they can and cannot teach on those topics.

The new rule goes beyond the state’s Parental Rights in Education laws — dubbed by critics as “don’t say gay” — that prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, and older grades in cases when the lessons are deemed to be not “age appropriate.”

It would also go beyond what Republican legislative leaders have proposed during the 2023 legislative session, which would extend classroom restrictions on those topics through eighth grade.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Ignorance

NEPC: How to Make School Funding Fair

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
20

For years, it has been obvious that school funding is unfair. Reliance on the local property tax widens inequities and assures that the students in the most affluent districts attend well-funded schools, while students in low-wealth districts attend under resourced schools. This arrangement assures that the poorest kids attend schools with the fewest resources.

Scholars at the National Education Policy Center have proposed a plan to wipe out funding inequities and assure that all students have the same opportunity to attend a well/resourced school. Ironically, the representatives in Congress least likely to support such a proposal are those who live in the districts that would benefit most.

School finance is unfair. Politicians should provide child’s school with the resources needed to support that child’s education. But some children live in areas that can (and do) adequately fund their schools, and others do not.

A recent report published by the Albert Shanker Institute explains this problem and proposes a plan to help fix it with a strategic use of federal funding. The report is authored by NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute, and NEPC Fellow Mark Weber of Rutgers University.

“This proposal, with full funding and compliance, would provide every school district with the estimated revenues necessary to reach the goal of average national outcomes in mathemat­ics and reading,” the authors write.

The goal is intentionally very modest. The price tag? $52 billion per year—or roughly double what the federal government currently provides to K-12 schools, which are funded overwhelmingly by state and local revenue. (About eight percent of K-12 funding is currently provided by the federal government.)

In return, state and local governments would be required, in order to participate in the program and receive the additional funding, to increase their contributions to K-12 funding by about 13 percent, or about $80 billion. But this 13 percent increase would not be required of all states and localities. The increases would be concentrated in areas that currently have the ability to contribute additional revenue to K-12 education (based on aggregate income and/or gross domestic product) but choose not to do so.

This approach to incentivizing contributions differs from current federal K-12 education spending policy. Federal funding presently takes student needs into account but does not consider the “fiscal effort” that local and/or state governments are willing to spend on meeting these needs.

Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber write:

Effort (and capacity) is an important piece of the school funding puzzle because some states’ economies are so small relative to their students’ needs that they are essentially unable to raise enough revenue to fund their schools adequately, whereas other states simply refuse to provide sufficient resources despite having the option to do so.

They continue, “California, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina currently exhibit severe and widespread funding gaps despite having the means to rectify them.”

Other states, including New York and New Jersey, also have high aggregate incomes and gross domestic products, but they choose to use a relatively high share of those resources to fund education.

Unlike the new state and local funds, the new federal funding would, under the proposal, be concentrated in districts in 34 states where small economies and/or high expense levels (due to factors such as labor costs and/or higher student needs) make it very difficult to adequately fund education. States in this category include Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Participation in the new funding program would be voluntary. States with the capacity to increase funding could choose to opt out rather than to boost K-12 budgets to adequate levels. However, if every state in the nation chose to participate, the share of students in inadequately funded districts would decline from 55 percent (about 26 million students) to 0 percent. In addition, the program would reduce the funding gap between the highest and lowest poverty districts in each state by more than 60 percent.

“While a handful of states’ finance systems do a reasonably good job of providing adequate funding for all students, most do not,” Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber write, continuing:

Insofar as roughly 90 percent of all K-12 revenue comes from state and local sources, any serious effort to improve this situation will require substantial addi­tional investment from states and districts. The federal government cannot compel such investment directly, but it can play a crucial role in helping the students most in need, while also incentivizing new state and local investment by rewarding states that contrib­ute a reasonable fair share of their resources to public schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, National Education Policy Center
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