School Funding Equity Smokescreens: A note to the Equity Commission
In this blog post, I summarize a number of issues I’ve addressed in the past. In my previous post, I discussed general reformy myths about school spending. In this post, I address smokescreens commonly occurring in DC beltway rhetoric about school funding equity and adequacy. School funding is largely a state and local issue, where even that “local” component is governed under state policies. So I guess that makes it a state issue, really. Occasionally, the federal government will dabble in the debate over how or whether to intervene more extensively in state and local public school finance. Now is one of those times where the federal government is again at least paying lip services to the question of equity – with some implication that they may even be talking about school funding equity. The federal government has created an equity commission!
One of my fears is that this current discussion of funding equity will be typical of recent beltway discussions of
