Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte

Appendix

247 Appendix Although there is considerable debate about the extent to which increased expenditures improve educational outcomes, I consider local funding a good measure of civic capacity for several reasons. First, because North Carolina law deprives CMS and almost all of the state’s other school districts of taxing authority, they must rely on their county commissions to place bond referenda before voters as well as to supply a significant portion of their operating budget, in CMS’ case, about 30 percent of annual expenditures. That reliance requires CMS to develop the kinds of arrangements with government officials, members of the business elite, other sectors of the community , and the public that are a defining characteristic of civic capacity. Second, there is growing evidence that properly targeted expenditures do improve outcomes.1 And while all of the evidence about the relationship between funding and outcomes may not yet be in, perceptions are themselves relevant. As Stone and his collaborators note in explaining their use of financial support as a measure of civic capacity, “Local citizens and public officials strongly believe that money is very important. It seems most reasonable, therefore, to regard the commitment to raise and spend public funds as a necessary but not sufficient precursor to effective education. And high-mobilization cities [in their study] spend more of their own resources to educate their youth.”2 To gauge local financial support for CMS, I draw comparisons with other large, consolidated North Carolina urban systems. Data comes from the Public School Forum of North Carolina. Since 1987, the forum has published yearly reports that compile data on local tax bases, school enrollments, and expenditures to rank each North Carolina county on its ability to fund public education, the amount it actually spends on K–12 public education, and the relationship between ability and expenditures. Over the years there has been some variation in the definition of key measures, but the reports have generally employed three main ones: Ability to Pay, Actual Effort, and Relative Effort (RE). Ability to Pay represents “a measure of a county’s per student fiscal capacity to support local public schools,” while Actual Effort 248 Boom for Whom? “reflects the actual dollar effort of communities to fund local public schools without taking into account property wealth,” and RE “is a measure comparing Actual Effort and Ability to Pay.”3 Because RE compares actual expenditures with a county’s financial ability to support public education, it provides a useful gauge of civic capacity. Based on the values of Ability to Pay, Actual Effort, and RE, the Public School Forum also has computed what it calls a district’s Overall Rank. In the 1987 report, the computation of RE was based on the five-year average of expenditures for education for the school years 1981–82 through 1985–86. The second report (issued in 1989, there was none in 1988) differed from 1987’s in that RE was computed based on expenditures for just the 1987–88 school year rather than a period of years. Beginning with the third report (issued in 1990), the forum began breaking down RE into Relative Current Effort (RCE) and Relative Total Effort (RTE). The former was based on county appropriations for just one school year, while the latter included both appropriations for one year and a several-year average of capital expenditures. These two measures of RE thus provide different, but complementary , ways of gauging civic capacity. The use of these reports raises two sets of methodological concerns. The first involves the possibility that the manner in which the Public School Forum computes its measures biases comparisons among localities. For example, as the forum notes in its 1998 report, because of the way that RE is computed, “in general, low-wealth districts with comparatively high spending levels rank highest in this measure.”4 That helps explain why North Carolina’s wealthiest counties never rank very high on this measure, and why it is thus important to compare Mecklenburg with other large, relatively wealthy urban counties rather than with every county in the state. As chapter 2 indicates, North Carolina historically has had five such counties: Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, and Wake. However, in two of these counties—Guilford and Durham—consolidation between the city and county school systems occurred too recently to allow meaningful historical comparisons with Mecklenburg. Thus, my analysis focuses on Mecklenburg, Wake (the county in which Raleigh is located), and Forsyth (in...