The real path to quality, equitable and adequate schooling (hint – It’s not Vergara!)
Posted on June 23, 2014
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The blogging has been sparse lately because my head is buried in really cool and important projects these days. My apologies to those anxiously awaiting glib, sarcastic updates and smackdowns on issues such as the Vergara case (where the logical fallacies run wild – more later if I ever get the chance) or the multitude of nonsensical reports that continue to flow out of beltway think tanks.
Here’s a quick summary on a topic I’ve addressed previously – but with some new studies included – That is, what do we really know about the importance of school finance reforms – equitable and adequate distribution of resources – for providing the necessary underlying conditions for equitable and adequate system of elementary and secondary schooling?
Over the past several decades, many states have pursued substantive changes to their state school finance systems, while others have not. Some reforms have come and gone. Some reforms have been stimulated by judicial pressure resulting from state constitutional challenges and others have been initiated by legislatures. In an evaluation of judicial involvement in school finance and resulting reforms from 1971 to 1996, Murray, Evans and Schwab (1998) found that “court ordered finance reform reduced within-state inequality in spending by 19 to 34 percent. Successful litigation reduced inequality by raising spending in the poorest districts while leaving spending in the richest districts unchanged, thereby increasing aggregate spending on education. Reform led states to fund additional spending through higher state taxes.” (p. 789)
Evaluating whether state school finance systems, or reforms to those systems lead to increases in spending generally, or targeted to children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds is of little relevance in the absence of evidence supporting effectiveness of such reforms. There exists an increasing body of evidence that substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter for improving both the level and distribution of short term and long run student outcomes. A few studies have attempted to tackle school finance reforms broadly applying multi-state analyses The real path to quality, equitable and adequate schooling (hint – It’s not Vergara!) | School Finance 101:
