Stretching Truth, Not Dollars?
This week, Mike Petrilli (TB Fordham Institute) and Marguerite Roza (Gates Foundation) released a “policy brief” identifying 15 ways to “stretch” the school dollar. Presumably, what Petrilli and Roza mean by stretching the school dollar is to find ways to cut spending while either not harming educational outcomes or actually improving them. That goal in mind, it’s pretty darn hard to see how any of the 15 proposals would lead to progress toward that goal.
The new policy brief reads like School Finance Reform in a Can. I’ve written previously about what I called Off-the-Shelf school finance reforms, which are quick and easy – generally ineffective and meaningless, or potentially damaging – revenue-neutral school finance fixes. In this new brief, Petrilli and Roza have pulled out all the stops. They’ve generated a list, which could easily have been generated by a random search engine scouring
