Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

The problem? Cheerleading and Ceramics, of course! « School Finance 101

The problem? Cheerleading and Ceramics, of course! « School Finance 101

The problem? Cheerleading and Ceramics, of course!

David Reber with the Topeka Examiner had a great post a while back (April, 2010) addressing the deceptive logic that we should be outraged by supposed exorbitant spending on things like cheerleading and ceramics, and not worry so much about the little things, like disparities between wealthy and poor school districts. I finally saw this post today, from a tweet, and realized I had not yet blogged on this topic.

This logic/argument comes from the “research” of Marguerite Roza, who, well, has a track record of making such absurd arguments in an effort to place blame on poor urban districts and take attention away from disparities between poor urban districts and their more affluent suburban neighbors.

This new argument is really just more of the same ol’ flimsy logic from this crew. For the past several years, Roza and colleagues have attempted to argue that states have largely done their part to fix inequities in funding