Finding the Keys to School Funding in your Pocket
Have you ever lost your keys? I did recently. I searched everywhere. I looked in the cushions of the sofa (always the most likely spot). I looked in yesterdays jeans (second most likely spot). I thought perhaps they might even be in my dirty laundry— so shirts— and other things— began flying through the air as I went through the hamper (I have history of finding them here too). I thought maybe they might have been lost in the bed covers so I tossed them aside (guilty). I thought maybe I might have left them in the car in the ignition (have done this many times before). Suffice to say that I tore the house apart. Misplacing your keys also happens at the most inconvenient times, the morning when you really urgently need to be somewhere to get something done or have an appointment. After an hour of looking high and low for my keys, and silly and stupid as this sounds, I found my keys in the pocket of the suit jacket I was wearing. Which was insane! All this time I had been looking everywhere, and the keys were in a very obvious place. It occurred to me this morning that this experience is an allegory for school funding.
I travelled to San Antonio Texas last week to serve as a panelist for the Intercultural Development Research Association’sJose A. Cardenas School Finance symposium held at Our Lady of the Lake University. The specific topic of the symposium was the weighted funding approach utilized in many state school finance systems and to “examine the amount of supplemental funding that is required to effectively implement appropriate services for English Language Learners at the secondary level.”
I understand if ELLs are not typically on your radar, but stay with me because there is a broader, more general argument to be made here about school funding. First, there is this:
It’s very clear from the data that states are unequally provisioning education. It’s on purpose because policymakers are determined that some children will be provisioned with a high quality education and then at the same time ration that opportunity for the poor. They say that money doesn’t matter for a high quality education, but what they actually mean is that money only matters for the education of the wealthy and not for the poor. In other words, throwing money at education for wealthy kids is okay, but not poor kids. Have you ever wondered what the funding situation looks like for high performing versus low performing schools? Since money “doesn’t matter” there should be no Finding the Keys to School Funding in your Pocket | Cloaking Inequity:
