We Like to Believe Our Story About a Generous Society, But the Plot Has Shifted
Let’s just suppose you are watching one of those TV movies for the holidays. Or maybe you are reading an old novel by Charles Dickens or going to the theater to see A Christmas Carol. Generosity of spirit is a theme you will encounter especially in this season. Throw an extra crust of bread to Tom-all-Alone living in the street; help Tiny Tim.
What if our society were to try out that idea on a scale that might matter? What if, instead of spending more tax money on schools for children in rich suburbs, we were to fix state school funding formulas to spend even a little more on schools for children in, say, Philadelphia or Cleveland or Dayton or Detroit? It isn’t something that has been talked about much lately as we continue to focus on punitive policies for big-city school districts—policies like closing “failing” schools, opening privatized charters, and blaming teachers. Maybe we could consider it as a sort of fresh idea in the spirit of the season.
Interestingly three school finance experts this week have raised the issue of adequate and equitably distributed school funding. Yesterday in her Washington Post column, Valerie Strauss features Matthew P. Steinberg and Rand Quinn, professors and researchers in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, writing about Surprising New Research on School Funding. Noting that the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) is regularly condemned as a low-performing district, Steinberg and Quinn share, “preliminary findings from an ongoing study of school funding suggest(ing) that the SDP does more, per pupil, with its current resources than its closest counterparts in terms of student poverty and
