In a small river town in southern Illinois, Mrs. Jones prepares to start the day in her 4th grade classroom. Hundreds of miles away in a northern suburb of Chicago, Mrs. Smith is getting ready to greet her 4th graders. Today, 4th graders throughout Illinois will take the Illinois Standards Achievement Test. Both 4th grades and their teachers will be held accountable for the state educational performance and content standards. Both teachers worked hard to prepare their students, and both classes studied diligently.
Although in Illinois and many other states, 4th grade classes are similar in some ways, it is not uncommon to see great disparities in the available resources between school districts, schools, and classrooms. Sometimes the disparities seem perfectly understandable; other times they seem cruel. For example, when they retire, Mrs. Jones will receive a pension of $37,000 a year, whereas Mrs. Smith's annual pension will be $60,000. Both teachers have taught for 30 years, both graduated from a state-accredited teacher education program, and both went on to earn a master's degree. In the course of her 30-year career, Mrs. Jones earned $250,000 less than Mrs. Smith. This discrepancy exists because the state funding formula relies so heavily on local property tax. Almost every aspect of the education program is similarly affected in the two schools.
Parallel to the development of our public school system has been a system for funding schools. The two key questions that currently guide the school funding debate are How much money is needed? and What is fair in the distribution of available funding? Contrasting our modern concepts of adequacy and equity with the history of U.S. public school funding sheds light on the shifting and evolving priorities of the times, and the means by which we reach for our goals.
Tuition and Charity Support Schools
In America's colonial period, schools were scarce and funding was a matter of family and church concern. The New England colonies saw the first efforts at community-supported schools (Cubberley, 1948), but for the most part, schools were privately funded by tuition or charitable donations.
In the early nation-building period, one can see the nascent moves toward government-funded education. Even before it ratified the U.S. Constitution, the Continental Congress viewed schools as an essential vehicle for developing the nation. Thus, in 1785 and 1787, Congress enacted the Land Ordinances that, in part, provided a means to stimulate the funding of schools in the new Northwest Territories (Alexander & Alexander, 2001). As a prerequisite to be admitted to the union as a full-fledged state, each territory had to demonstrate to Congress that it had established certain civic institutions (for example, a legislature and a court system). A system of schooling, however rudimentary, was also considered important.
Flat Grants Encourage Building of Schools
By the early 19th century many states began to promote the establishment of government-financed schools. New York Governor George Clinton in 1795 secured an appropriation from the state legislature of £2,000, from which he offered a flat grant to cities and towns as an incentive to hire teachers and start schools. He appointed a state super-intendent in 1812 (Cremin, 1980). Thus, within the first few decades of the 19th century, the Common School Movement was on its way and the idea of schools supported by tax dollars took hold in many parts of the country. The South was the exception, with its own unique regional development.
Although concern about the fair distribution of resources for schools was ever present, the emphasis for school funding in the 19th century was in building capacity. Industrialization, urbanization, and a tidal wave of immigration forced school leaders to concentrate on building a system able to educate the flood of new students showing up at the schoolhouse. For example, in the last quarter of the century, enrollments grew by 100 percent (Tyack, 1974). Compounding the problems of burgeoning school populations was the political design of the day, characterized by cronyism, machine politics, political patronage, and corruption. Added to this mix were 19th-century notions about race, gender, and social class (Peterson, 1985). Thus, fairness in school funding remained a distant ideal.
The Foundation Approach Sets Minimum Spending
Not until the early part of the 20th century did a new theory of school finance, based in part on adequacy and in part on the fair distribution of resources, begin to emerge. The seminal study by graduate student Ellwood Cubberley at Columbia University exposed the gross funding disparities that existed among school districts. The study also considered the amount of funding needed to provide a basic education to each child and investigated the sample school districts' ability to finance that basic education. Keep in mind, however, that “basic” at that time really meant basic. Interests were in standardizing schooling within a state for such matters as the school year, length of day, curriculum offered, and minimum qualifications of teachers. Later, Harlan Updegraf, George D. Strayer, Sr., Robert Haig, and Paul R. Mort built on and refined the concepts of adequacy and equity in school funding (Johns, Morphet, & Alexander, 1983).
From this work, the theory of the “foundation method” of school funding emerged. The foundation approach, a concept embedded in most state school finance systems to this day, functions to guarantee that no child will have less than a predetermined minimum amount of money underwriting his or her education, regardless of the local school district's ability to finance that education. In its simplest form, this finance system operates by having the state legislature declare a foundation, floor, or minimum guarantee per student. Theoretically, this amount covers the cost of a basic education, including a qualified teacher, books, and operating expenses. When the local school districts collect their taxes, usually a property tax, the state determines whether they meet or exceed the state minimum guarantee. Those school districts that cannot meet the minimum or foundation level receive additional state aid to help them reach it.
Extra Funding Is Allocated for Poor Children
The foundation method was a giant leap forward from the lump sum and flat-grant approaches, which fostered great disparities among school districts. But by the 1970s, new concepts of fairness began to emerge. A highly influential court case in California, Serrano v. Priest (1971), led the way for similar cases around the nation. The plaintiffs in that case successfully argued that the wealth of a local community should not be the determining factor in the amount of money spent on a child's education. They demonstrated that Californian children in poor neighborhoods had less money spent on their education than students from affluent communities. This, declared the court, was a violation of the California state constitution. To this day, the courts are major arbiters for determining equity in state school finance systems (NCSL, 1999).
But the courts have also retarded efforts at refining state school finance systems. The landmark case San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez (1973) bracketed the era of equity in funding litigation by citing the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Here the court determined that education was not a fundamental right, thus redirecting school finance litigation back to individual state courts. That five-to-four decision still has an impact on school finance cases.
At the federal level in the 1960s, civil rights and the role of the schools in overcoming economic and “cultural” disadvantage were the focus. Thus, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a centerpiece of his Great Society initiative. This legislation, which has been recast as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, provides extra funding to schools with high concentrations of students from poor families. Title I is the most recognizable program within this federal grant-in-aid legis-lation. Other federal grant programs target populations ranging from the disabled to immigrants, with the same general aim of providing incentives to states to serve heretofore underserved students. In all, however, federal funding accounts for only about 7 percent of the total funding for K-12 education (NCES, 2001).
Funding Is Tied to Student Learning
For the past two decades, the debate about funding for schools has shifted back to questions of adequacy, but with a new twist. Unlike the dialogue of the late 19th and early 20th century, in which adequacy was a much more quantifiable concept, adequacy of education resources now encompasses not only the inputs to the education system, such as the length of the school year and teacher qualifications, but also the outputs or results achieved by students. An adequate amount of money for a child's education is that amount needed to help the student reach the academic and performance standards established by the state.
The original hypothesis regarding this form of adequacy first surfaced on a national scale in the early 1990s as part of the congressional reauthorization debate surrounding the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The proposal from the Clinton administration proffered a school reform initiative on the basis of three measures: academic content and performance standards, student assessment standards, and opportunity-to- learn standards.
As conceived, the opportunity-to-learn standards would have established criteria by which policymakers and educators could calculate the differential in the financial resources needed for students to reach the academic standards, as measured by the state assessment system (Smith & O'Day, 1991). As the dialogue unfolded, the vision of a bottomless pit appeared to many legis-lators, and they dropped the concept of opportunity-to-learn standards from the adopted reauthorization bill.
Two of the three measures—academic standards and assessment—remain a policy centerpiece in most states and in the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. But an ironic dynamic is developing in state legis-latures and courts. The academic standards and state assessments are pointing straight to school districts and schools with inadequate academic performance, and many policymakers now see that improving the academic circumstances for the students in these school districts will require a lot more money.
Rethink the Means to the End
Depending on your perspective, funding for schools has grown tremendously or has barely crept along. What should be a straightforward discussion based on objective numbers quickly becomes a quagmire of ifs, ands, and buts. From 1980 to 1999, the annual amount spent on K-12 public education grew from $97 billion to $347 billion (NCES, 2001). But when adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power represented by the increased dollars shows a much more modest gain. Nationally, spending per individual student approached $6,600 a year by the end of the last decade, and teacher salaries, on average, were about $41,000. So where does all the money go? Two areas in particular consume large amounts of the money: state and federal mandates and technology.
Federal and state lawmakers, with the backing of the courts, have mandated that schools provide certain services and programs to designated classifications of students. The disabled and new learners of English are the most prominent. Unfortunately, a limited or non-existent funding stream accompanies these mandates in most cases.
Additionally, the computer and telecommunications revolution of the past two decades has seen schools spend large sums on infrastructure, equipment, software, and training—again, with little support from the state or federal government. Further, technology has ushered in a whole new category of school district employees that did not exist two decades ago.
Of course, services to special populations and technology in the schools are necessary and important. The problem is that funding has not kept up with the increased demand for services, so the regular classroom must make sacrifices. A surprising amount of new per-student funds added each year to the budget is diverted to these underfunded programs (Bracey, 1995).
Schools have little control over the individual needs of students or the economic conditions of the students' community. Uniform standards do nothing to address the unique circumstances of every school and its students. A school with a large number of English-language learners, for example, must have additional resources to help it reach some parity with schools that do not. If the state imposes mandates to educate every child to established academic standards, then it must also devise a system of funding to enable educators to help their students reach those standards.
Political leaders and the courts have shaped the education system that we have today, and the goals of the system are worthy. Standards are being set to prepare students for life after high school: admission to quality colleges and universities, success in the workplace, participation in the civic life of the community. We know the end. It is time to revisit the means.
