The Koch Brothers Are Part of What’s the Matter with Kansas
Since when does school funding legislation have to come with a quid pro quo legislative tidbit for the Koch Brothers?
Here is some background for what happened in Kansas last weekend. The legislature had been warned by the state’s supreme court that the state’s school funding had slipped far from parity. The Court gave the legislature until July 1 to allocate more state money to the poorest school districts in Kansas. After all, one of the primary functions of a state school finance formula is to produce at least some movement toward equity—to ensure that funding in property-poor school districts doesn’t fall so far that poor children are denied basic services.
The formulas are rarely generous, which is why Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond pointed out that in 2010, the ratio of spending between property rich and property poor school districts was over 3:1. Darling-Hammond wondered, “what we might accomplish as a nation if we could finally set aside what appears to be our de factocommitment to inequality, so profoundly at odds with our rhetoric of equity, and put the millions of dollars spent continually arguing and litigating into building a high-quality education system for all children.” (The Flat World and Education, p. 164)
Today in Kansas, they are still arguing and fighting, and it’s not just in Kansas. In the four years since Darling-Hammond published her book, the rhetoric across our states has retreated from the idea of equity. Today we talk about school choice (privatization) and we punish teachers, which is what the Kansas legislature just did as a condition for raising the state’s distribution of funding to poor school districts to the bare minimum.
At issue in Gannon v. State of Kansas was a 16.5 percent cut in Kansas education funding since 2008, “accelerated” according to a recent op ed in the NY Times, “by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.” Just over a year ago, a trial court found for the parent-plaintiffs, declaring that cuts