Making Money Matter Financing America's Schools (1999) / Chapter Skim
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7 Achieving Goal 2: Breaking the Nexus
7 Achieving Goal 2: Breaking the Nexus
Pages 196-231
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From page 196... ...
Finance policies with particular relevance for goal 2 include costadjusting school funding formulas and addressing inequities in access to facilities and technology funding; investing in children's capacity to learn via early childhood interventions and links between education and other community services; investing in schools' capacity to educate via reforms to enhance teacher quality, reduce class size, or adopt whole-school redesigns; altering incentives by rethinking the use of categorical programs such as Title I and special education; and giving schools or parents or both more control over how education dollars are spent. REDUCING FUNDING INEQUITIES AND INADEQUACIES If money did not matter, the large disparities in school funding across districts and states that have been so persistent over time might not matter very much.
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From page 197... ...
While we have no easy solutions to the political challenge, we have no doubt that districts or schools serving disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged students will need more funding than other schools if they are to have a chance of raising their students' performance to acceptable levels. To that end, education finance programs will need to be adjusted to reflect the additional demands that educationally at-risk students place on schools.
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From page 198... ...
Failure to take cost differences into account is detrimental to the districts and schools with large concentrations of disadvantaged students and can reinforce rather than reduce the nexus between family background and student achievement. At the same time, the committee is well aware that any additional funding for such districts and schools will not by itself ensure higher student achievement.
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From page 199... ...
Facilities In 1995, the General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted the first comprehensive survey of school facilities in 30 years, examining the condition of 10,000 schools in more than 5,000 school districts.
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From page 200... ...
The connection between the quality of school facilities and student achievement has been difficult to demonstrate (Monk, 1990; Duke, 1998, suggests it has not been much studied) , but it has been suggested that the quality of school facilities is important in that they serve to attract teachers and families differentially to particular school districts where conditions are better and worse (Murnane, 1981~.
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From page 201... ...
The Pelavin/AIR report (1997:39) points out that "Lliow-income school districts are likely to face the greatest funding challenge, not only because their sources of funding may be limited but also because the cost of deploying technology in their schools may be high for various reasons, including having more older buildings and greater security problems." While states and local areas devote about equal resources to current (operating)
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From page 202... ...
Numerous ongoing programs providing early childhood intervention and schoolcommunity linkage provide evidence of the promise and problems of such policies, suggesting that there is still much to learn about how to make these investments most effectively. Early Childhood Interventions A major question for school finance is whether the nation is underinvesting in preprimary school education and child care and whether greater investment would contribute to minimizing later gaps in academic performance between advantaged and disadvantaged students.
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From page 203... ...
if disadvantaged students later attend less effective elementary and secondary schools than their preschool counterparts from more advantaged backgrounds. Enrollment of children ages 3-5 in preprimary programs has grown rapidly over the past 30 years, from 27 to 65 percent of the population between 1965 and 1997 (U.S.
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From page 204... ...
Despite their shortcomings, however, when evaluated together they lead reviewers to a consistent set of conclusions about what is known and unknown about early childhood intervention programs. Early childhood programs can benefit participating children and their families along a number of dimensions: "The hundreds of studies of demonstration and large-scale programs that now exist provide very strong evidence that most programs of relatively good quality have meaningful short-term effects on cognitive ability, early school achievement, and social adjustment.
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From page 205... ...
Another trade-off may face policy makers in states striving to reduce class size in the early grades of elementary schools at the same time they are expanding early childhood programs. Both strategies increase the demand for well-trained personnel, who may not be in sufficient supply (at least in the short run)
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From page 206... ...
While we cannot neatly quantify the need, this variability suggests that some states should give greater attention to developing high-quality early intervention programs for at-risk students as one facet of their overall approach to developing the capacity of all children to learn. Linking Education and Other Community Services In recent years it has become increasingly evident to policy makers and practitioners that improving educational opportunities for at-risk children requires not just reforming schools but also addressing the health, social, financial, and political inequities of their families and communities.
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From page 207... ...
Title XI of the Improving America's School Act of 1994, for example, funds programs designed to encourage local education agencies, schools, or consortia of schools to undertake coordinated services projects. State efforts mirror the federal concern: for example, the 1991 Kentucky Education Reform Act, passed in response to a court decision invalidating the state's school system, required the formation of Family Resource and Youth Support Centers.
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From page 208... ...
It gave each of five mid-sized American cities5 between $7.5 and $12.5 million over the fiveyear period to restructure how they planned, financed, and delivered educational, health, and other services to at-risk youth. The goals for each city were to improve student achievement, reduce adolescent pregnancy and school dropout rates, and increase the number of youth who go on to a job or college after high school.
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From page 209... ...
While substantial test score gaps remained between black and white students, there were measurable gains in reducing the numbers of low-achieving students on reading tests. The proportion of sexually active teens declined, and the reported use of birth control devices among sexually active teens increased.
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From page 210... ...
Enhancing Teacher Quality or Reducing Class Size Despite the fact that it is often difficult to specify precisely the characteristics of high-quality teachers, research increasingly substantiates the fact that some teachers are more successful than others in fostering student learning. While scholars continue to disagree about the effects of particular teacher characteristics such as education level and experience on student achievement, several studies using large databases and sophisticated statistical methodologies (Ferguson, 1998; Ehrenberg and Brewer, 1994)
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From page 211... ...
Clearly some special efforts will be needed. Any general policy, such as increasing teacher salaries across the board, may well exacerbate the problems of schools serving disadvantaged students, as the wealthier school districts are in a better position than the poor ones to pay the higher salaries.
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From page 212... ...
As part of the settlement in a school desegregation court case, each of 15 elementary schools serving large numbers of disadvantaged students were given $300,000, above normal school spending each year for five years (Murnane and Levy, 1996~. All 15 of the schools reduced class size.
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From page 213... ...
Whole-school restructuring has focused heavily on schools educating large numbers of disadvantaged students, where prior piecemeal reforms have generally failed to raise academic achievement from levels that begin distressingly low. While it is too early to have much evidence about whether whole-school restructuring will live up to its promise or about which whole-school designs will prove to be lastingly effective, the logic behind this approach to building school capacity is compelling.
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From page 214... ...
In 1993-94,92 percent of all school districts, 62 percent of all public schools, and 45 percent of all low-poverty schools (less than 20 percent poor) received Title I funds, while 19 percent of the highest-poverty schools (at least 75 percent poor)
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From page 215... ...
receiving Title I funds has dropped to 36 percent, and these schools receive only 18 percent of Title I funds. Overall, 58 percent of public schools receive Title I monies.
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From page 216... ...
but failed to appropriate sufficient funds to include all the study topics and features mandated by the law. The national assessment, for example, had to rely primarily on other sources rather than its own surveys of policy implementation and student achievement.
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From page 217... ...
General Accounting Office, 1998:221. Special Education As Chapter 2 noted, the costs associated with federal requirements that all children with disabilities be provided with a "free and appropriate education" have been rising rapidly and have become a major financial concern in many school districts.
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From page 218... ...
The growth in the numbers of special education students has occurred largely among students with so-called mild or moderate 8The civil rights of Americans with disabilities of all ages are also protected under two other pieces of federal legislation: Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (P.L.
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From page 219... ...
have given rise to widespread allegations that special education entitlements are encroaching on funding for so-called regular education. In some resource-strapped school districts, the use of the special education designation has been seen as an opportunity to obtain additional resources and has led to concerns about overidentification of special education students.
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From page 220... ...
In the early 1970s, school districts in only 17 states were serving half of their known population of children with disabilities, and 26 states were serving less than a third of this group (Martin et al., 1996~. IDEA ensured that public education would embrace all children, including those with disabilities, by creating a policy framework emphasizing individual rights and procedural requirements (National Research Council, 1997~.
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From page 221... ...
Distinguishing between severe and other disabilities is useful in thinking through funding options. At the same time, the goal of an integrated services approach for students whose disabilities are not severe, with a unifying system of policies and procedures and a common set of measures and outcomes, is to move away from the fragmented and differentiated policy frameworks that have traditionally guided general education, special education, and other categorical programs.
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From page 222... ...
Although most children with learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, mental retardation, and serious emotional disturbance have mild disabilities, the size of these categories means that the minority of students in these categories with more disabling conditions still outnumber the students who are autistic, blind, deaf or hearing impaired, or who suffer from multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment, other health impairment, traumatic brain injury, and visual impairment.
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From page 223... ...
Our suggestion to move in the direction of integrating special education more fully into the regular education system is not an original idea and in fact is consistent with a number of reforms already taking place around the nation. It is also consistent with funding changes that rely more on census-based approaches for determining how much federal or state aid flows to the local level for educat 1lThe three principles are: (1)
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From page 224... ...
are also piloting efforts to relate state aid to student learning characteristics and service needs, rather than placement or disability. For students with mild and moderate disabilities, we are encouraged by the development of new approaches to special education finance like census-based funding that reinforce the move to accommodate students with disabilities as fully as possible within general education.
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From page 225... ...
Including students with disabilities in regular education requires extensive professional preparation at several levels: preservice teacher education for both general and special education personnel, in-service education within school systems, and ongoing technical assistance and support to ensure effectiveness of programming. IDEA recognized that the nation's schools were not prepared to provide an appropriate education to all students with disabilities and included requirements for states and local school districts to provide programs for personnel development (Turnbull, 1993~.
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From page 226... ...
New approaches at the state and federal level to special education finance like census-based funding and less reliance on individual entitlement and classification pose potential risks to localities. Some of these risks will be magnified if school finance becomes more school- or pupil-based (rather than district-based)
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From page 227... ...
Many urban residents are black, and the residential segregation of blacks is still strong. This is true within school districts as well as across district lines.
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From page 228... ...
Hence one would expect neighborhood school organization to be less effective in large city systems with predominantly renter-occupants than in small suburban districts with predominantly owner-occupants. Finally, urban residents arguably have benefited least from prior school reforms: urban schools still produce the lowest academic achievement and suffer from high dropout rates.
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From page 229... ...
However, to the extent that charter schools remain an intradistrict mechanism, subject to the authority of existing district management, there may be limits to the extent to which they can bring about change where change is needed most. Vouchers that enable students to use public funds to attend private schools may offer city residents the most effective enrollment vehicle for improving educational quality by rewarding schools that perform well and punishing schools that do not.
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From page 230... ...
One day after the law was signed on June 21, 1999, the first lawsuit challenging it was filed.l3 Legal issues apart, many opponents see private school vouchers as a threat to traditional American support for public schools. Some urban educators argue that they would remove much-needed funds from public education just as urban districts are engaging strenuously in efforts to improve their academic performance.
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From page 231... ...
Charter schools are in effect a naturally occurring experiment, although one that is not being as fully and systematically evaluated as it might be. Also, the fact that charter schools have unequal access to capital funding means that they do not face a level playing field with traditional public schools.
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