Making Money Matter Financing America's Schools (1999) / Chapter Skim
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9 Conclusion
9 Conclusion
Pages 263-275
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From page 263... ...
BALANCING VALUES The nation's existing education and education finance systems reflect underlying and hard-to-alter features of American education. These features include the decentralized and complicated federal structure of government in which American education is embedded and the long and revered tradition of local control, as well as certain values that Americans hold dear.
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From page 264... ...
In addition, although adequate funding may be a necessary component of a finance strategy designed to promote goals of higher overall achievement and reducing the nexus between student achievement and family background, it must be combined with other strategies designed to increase achievement. The concept of adequacy is useful first because it shifts discussion away from inputs to educational outputs and promotes discussion of how much money is needed to achieve selected ends.
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From page 265... ...
In addition, failure to adjust figures for additional factors, such as geographically related cost-of-living differences, also could be detrimental to disadvantaged students to the extent that they live in cities with above-average costs of living, and hence with above-average employee remuneration related to factors outside the schools' control. Finally, the definition of funding adequacy could be pegged so low as to trivialize the concept; alternatively, adjustments could be set so high for urban areas that such areas would have no incentive to use resources in a cost-efficient way.
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From page 266... ...
Further progress toward funding adequacy in spending and fairness in revenue raising will almost surely require an expanded role for states and the federal government. Only a larger state role in revenue raising can ensure that all schools and districts have sufficient funds to provide an adequate level of education, as defined through the state' s political process, given the low fiscal capacity relative to educational needs of some school districts.
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From page 267... ...
That review makes it clear that additional funding for education will not automatically and necessarily generate greater student achievement and in the past has not, in fact, generally led to higher achievement. Nevertheless, understanding of educational productivity is improving, both research and practice are increasingly informed by more sophisticated hypotheses about how to use resources effectively, and examples can be found of strategically chosen finance changes (sometimes involving reallocated funds, sometimes involving new monies, and frequently linked in a systematic way to other educational changes)
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From page 268... ...
In the same spirit, this committee notes that the educational challenges facing urban districts and schools serving concentrations of disadvantaged students are particularly severe. Social science research currently provides few definitive answers about how to improve educational outcomes for these children.
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From page 269... ...
The results of the small-scale efforts currently under way are often difficult to interpret, have been the subject of heated disagreements, and shed little or no light on how a large voucher program would affect the traditional public schools. These limitations arise because of the difficulties researchers have controlling for unmeasured differences among students, families, and schools and because none of the current experiments is large enough to have significant feedback effects on the regular public schools.
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From page 270... ...
The project would seek to document the educational effects of an investment in professional capacity that is comparable in magnitude to that routinely made in American industry, on the order of 10 percent of operating budgets. It would be designed around current knowledge of effective approaches to developing professional capacity and would be evaluated as a system of coherent, interdependent strategies pursued by key stakeholders in public education.
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From page 271... ...
The missing piece of this broader reform strategy is establishing conditions for the kind of ongoing and collaborative learning among teachers and administrators that can sustain improved practice around shared standards for student learning. The time is ripe to test the theory through a federal investment in supporting and evaluating a sustained best-case effort to implement the new paradigm for developing professional quality.
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From page 272... ...
Such an approach has significant conceptual appeal as a way to make money matter more for student achievement, but a large number of questions remain to be answered. Before such pay systems are introduced on a large scale, it would be desirable to learn more about their effectiveness in encouraging teachers to obtain the skills they need to increase student learning.
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From page 273... ...
The purpose of a major experiment with school vouchers would be to determine whether a carefully crafted voucher program can bring about broad-based improvement in educational outcomes, especially for children in areas of concentrated disadvantage, without either significantly increasing costs relative to the current system or significantly worsening stratification by race and income. The selection of schools and school districts is crucial for the experiment envisioned here.
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From page 274... ...
But the dangers here are obvious. If they can pick and choose students, the advantages of a randomized experiment are reduced, and if they can set tuition so high that low-income children cannot afford to attend, the experiment will not reach the children who now are often poorly served by the public schools.
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From page 275... ...
Suppose vouchers are offered to some of the children in a school district, with the intent of comparing the education outcomes of those who receive vouchers with those who do not. But now suppose that the public schools respond to expanded choice by offering their students a better education.
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