Money, Mandates, and Local Control in American Public Education

2. Mechanical Advantage? : How the Piper Link May Work

—chapter two— Mechanical Advantage? How the Piper Link May Work Q Q Q a proverb is an attempt to express the essence of a complex truth in a few words, but the relationship between funding from centralized levels of an intergovernmental system and the autonomy of decentralized levels is anything but simple. Even those who believe in a strong relationship between the two would agree that the failure more clearly to hypothesize the Piper Link has made the critical empirical research needed to confirm its existence difficult. This chapter presents four main theoretical questions that guide the subsequent empirical analysis of the Piper Link: the definition of local autonomy; the relationship of federal, state, and local governments to each other; the effect of increases in centralized-level finance share at different parts of the 0–100 percentage continuum of possible contributions ; and the lag between finance centralization and the hypothesized loss of local autonomy. Scholars of intergovernmental relations and federalism literature may find these factors worthy of inclusion in a framework that describes the conditions under which centralization promotes regulation and decreases local autonomy across all policy areas. What We Already Know Some major works in the study of state politics have posited a strong relationship between state financing and state regulation of local affairs. 17 Joseph Zimmerman writes, “In view of the fact that the exercise of local discretionary authority is dependent to a great extent upon the adequacy of local financial resources, [local financial autonomy] may be viewed as an approximate measure of the degree to which political power is centralized in each state” (1995, 68; see also Berman 2003, 10). Other scholars who have directly addressed Piper Link–type concerns have argued that money and control can be separated (see, for example, Hovey 1989). For the most part, these observations are offered more as suggestions than as empirical truths, and holding any of these authors to a few sentences in book-length works would be a mistake. The Piper Link simply has not received much attention from the contemporary fields of intergovernmental relations and federalism. Some older studies find that finance centralization may lead to an increase in state regulation of local fiscal policy, but other studies find that a host of mitigating factors lessen or erase this connection.1 Perhaps because of the importance of local control in public education , the study of education policy has produced a few studies on the Piper Link. A 1972 report by the President’s Commission on School Finance and the Urban Institute examined the relationship between state share of finance and state control in eleven other educational policy areas (including curriculum, budget, tax policy, and personnel) in ten states. The commission found “little direct relationship between the percentage of state aid provided and the degree of state restrictions on the operation of local school boards” (249). The commission’s findings are based on correlations between state finance share and variables measuring other state education regulations. Correlations between two variables do not control for the effect of other factors that may influence state education policy, meaning that the commission’s results do not describe school finance ’s independent causal effect on state regulation. Frederick Wirt (1982) uses ordinary least squares regression analysis on a 1972 data set to attempt to identify whether finance centralization has an independent effect on an index that measures the strength of thirty-six state education regulations: he finds that state finance share has no impact on his index. By using multivariate statistical techniques, Wirt extends the findings of the President’s Commission. For contemporary policy debates, his study still has some drawbacks. It focuses only on state laws that may curtail local autonomy and cannot measure their effects on school and school board behavior. His results speak to the effect of state funding on regulation without describing whether finance cen18 • money, mandates, and local control in american public education tralization changes how school boards approach writing a budget, how extensive they view their discretion in curriculum and teacher hiring, and so on. Wirt acknowledges that his results cannot describe how finance centralization affects what local school districts do and argues persuasively that laws still matter. Nevertheless, a full examination of Piper Link dynamics must consider both state regulations and their effects on local actors. The primary drawback of both the Wirt and Presidential Commission studies is their age. Several seismic shifts in state...