-
Preface
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
PREFACE In many ways, this book returns to concerns about school resources that started my research career nearly forty years ago.The examination in my dissertation of a problem in the “old” school finance—the issue of how district financing responds to state revenues—was incorporated into an early book with Stephan Michelson, States and Schools, which developed a conception of the differences among money, inputs, and outputs that was close to the analysis of money, resources, and outcomes developed in this book. I then joined the Childhood and Government Project at the University of California at Berkeley. Those were heady days. The California Supreme Court had just decided the Serrano case, throwing out the financing system based on property taxes.We all looked forward to more equitable financing, vast improvements for students in low-spending districts, and a future in which California would continue to be a leader among the states in education .The project’s mission was to spread this strategy to all states: lawyers would stride across the land with the moral certainty of federal and state constitutions, school finance experts like me would improve the “minutiae” of finance formulas, and equitable and powerful schooling would spread to all children. None of this came to pass.The Rodriguez decision inTexas demolished the strategy of using the U.S. Constitution as the basis for school finance cases. The Serrano case itself had to be relitigated several times, and its equalizing intent was subsequently undermined by other developments, including Proposition 13, which put a limit on property taxes. California began its long slide “from first to worst” among the states, weakened by a citizenry prone to harmful initiatives, a series of dreadful governors, a legislature afflicted by term limits and therefore lacking in any real understanding of educational problems, and now—as in much of the nation—a deep and seemingly unbridgeable divide in the electorate. Other states did indeed follow the Serrano case with litigation against inequitable school finance systems, but as clarified in chapter 11, these lawsuits had only fitful effects on funding and no effects in most states on the equity of outcomes.The dream that litigation could bring a new era of equity to education faded fast, and the excitement of working in this area faded as well. Something else was missing from litigation efforts, as I came to understand only later.The litigation strategy, as well as more general legislative strategies to revise school finance, was built on the money myth—the idea that more money leads to improved outcomes, that the solution to any educational problem requires increased spending, and that, as Ellwood Cubberly put it a century ago,“the question of sufficient revenue lies back of almost every [educational] problem.” Several beliefs developed in the nineteenth century—the idea of education as a panacea, the specific economic version of this idea I call the Education Gospel, and the money myth—have continued to exert great power over educators, even though they are overblown and sometimes just plain wrong. One ambition of this book, then, is to analyze the money myth more carefully, to clarify when it is right and when it is either wrong or misleading.This is not, of course, the argument that “money doesn’t matter,” and fiscal conservatives and antitaxers should not take comfort from anything in this book.Of course money matters,since teachers cannot be paid,schools cannot be built,and computers and books cannot be bought without money. But, in a logical approach I use throughout this book, money is usually “necessary but not sufficient” (NBNS). It is therefore crucial to understand when it is necessary and when other kinds of resources—leadership, vision, cooperation among teachers, effective instruction,unbiased information about effective versus ineffective practices, stability, consistent district and state policies—are necessary as well. In addition,the debates about constitutional principles and school finance formulas, the jousting over equity principles and the minutiae of school finance , never reached the classroom—that is, these debates never engaged with instructional issues, or imagined how teachers might teach differently, or modified the ways in which principals and districts organized schools. This provides yet another illustration of one of the many great divides in education —between, on the one hand, lawyers, economists, historians, sociologists , organization theorists, and policymakers, who are all concerned with macro perspectives on education but have little interest in classroom instruction and school conditions,and on the other hand,the teachers,principals , and curriculum and...