Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S.
The Post-Equity Era in School Finance
Posted on December 30, 2013
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I’ve written a few posts in recent months where I’ve raised concern about the apparent complete disregard (& outright ignorance) for the role of equitable and adequate financing of our public schools. The bottom line is that providing for a high quality, equitably distributed system of public schooling in the United States requires equitable, adequate and stable and sustainable public financing. There’s no way around that. It’s a necessary underlying condition.
I too often here pundits spew the vacuous mantra – it doesn’t matter how much money you have – it matters more how you spend it. But if you don’t have it you can’t spend it. And, if everyone around you has far more than you, their spending behavior may just price you out of the market for the goods and services you need to provide (quality teachers being critically important, and locally competitive wages being necessary to recruit and retain quality teachers). How much money you have matters. How much money you have relative to others matters in the fluid, dynamic and very much relative world of school finance (and economics more broadly). Equitable and adequate funding matters.
But alas, it seems that one of the first things to go when the economy tanked a few years back was any sense that equity could ever be important. Take, for example, NY Governor Cuomo’s recent
