Money, Mandates, and Local Control in American Public Education

3. The More Money We Come Upon : Finance Centralized and Negative Local Autonomy

—chapter three— The More Money We Come Upon Finance Centralization and Negative Local Autonomy Q Q Q although local control is made up of hundreds of possible decisions, some decisions are more central to the core mission of public education and therefore more important than others. All else being equal, a school district that can independently choose its curriculum has more local control than one that can choose only its lunch menu. Fortunately, for many of the biggest decisions that determine the course of contemporary public education, aggregate statistical data exist describing how extensively each state has pursued some of the most popular contemporary education reform strategies such as standardized testing. As states pursue such regulations, they decrease local actors’ negative autonomy, or their ability to act without compulsion or constraints from centralized levels of the intergovernmental system. This chapter presents estimates of multivariate statistical models employing as dependent variables measures of state standardized testing, high-stakes testing, teacher certification requirements, school safety legislation , and state takeovers of failing school districts. The key independent variable in all models is the state share of the school finance burden. The statistical techniques employed allow for the control of numerous other factors that political science scholars have found to influence state 31 government regulation and isolate the independent effect of finance centralization on the level of each regulation. The ability to examine all fifty states in a systematic fashion and identify, as far as is possible, finance centralization’s role in promoting state regulation provides powerful evidence regarding the existence of the linear Piper Link. If finance centralization in the 20–90 range leads to a loss of negative autonomy, one would expect state governments that contribute a higher share of total school spending to regulate other aspects of education more extensively. Other Factors That May Influence State Education Policy The level of state funding is not the only factor that may cause states to adopt a centralized level of education regulation. This chapter’s statistical analyses include variables that control for the effects of several factors that can influence state education policy and state policy-making in general . These controls allow one to see the independent effect of finance centralization on education regulation. One possibility is that the level of government that contributes the greatest share of the total funding may be less important than the total funding itself. More affluent states may be more able than poor states to afford to regulate public education. To be fully implemented, these regulations require adequate funding. Systems of statewide standardized testing that use results to diagnose problems and craft solutions require personnel and equipment to grade the tests and a bureaucracy capable of monitoring both the results and compliance with any mandated changes.1 At the local level, school districts must have the resources to comply with reporting requirements and to implement mandated changes. States with high centralized levels of educational funding may feel they have the resources to attempt ambitious and costly statewide reform efforts. Poorer states may feel that extensive regulation costs more than they can afford, forcing them to adopt a much lower level of regulation. The racial and ethnic composition of a state’s populace may have a powerful effect on the course of state education policy. Scholars have shown that the size and diversity of a state’s racial and ethnic populations significantly affect a host of social policies, including education (Morgan and Wilson 1990; Hero and Tolbert 1996). In most measures of academic achievement, African American and Hispanic students lag behind students from other racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that states with larger shares of these students may be more likely to adopt pro32 • money, mandates, and local control in american public education grams designed to eliminate this gap, such as extensive systems of standards and tests and state takeovers of academically failing districts. Mainstream American society has painted areas in which African Americans and Hispanics live as dangerous, which may lead (primarily white) state legislators to regard schools in those areas as unsafe and to pass more school safety legislation. Others may point out that many of the most highly publicized school shootings occurred in suburban and rural districts and hypothesize that race and ethnicity variables will have a negligible or negative effect on school safety regulations. Partisanship may also affect a state’s willingness to regulate public education, with high levels of support for...