Minds and Money:
The Challenge to Public Education
In Jonathan
Kozol’s landmark book, Savage Inequalities: Children in
America’s Schools, he quotes Tunisia, a fifth-grader
attending public school in a poor neighborhood in Washington,
D.C.:
"It’s like this," the girl explains. "The school is dirty. There isn’t any playground. There’s a hole in the wall behind the principal’s desk. What we need to do is first rebuild the school....Build a playground. Plant a lot of flowers. Paint the classrooms....Fix the hole in the principal’s office. Buy doors for the toilet stalls in the girls’ bathroom. Fix the ceiling in this room....Make it a beautiful, clean building. Make it pretty. Way it is, I feel ashamed. When people come and see our school, they don’t say nothing, but I know what they are thinking."
With problems that range from crumbling buildings to poor student performance, the U.S. public-education system has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism. Sometimes the difficulties can be traced to mismanagement or social issues. Too often, they can be traced to inequities in funding.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, total funding for kindergarten through 12th-grade public education is more than $266 billion. That amount is supplied through state taxes, 45.2 percent; local taxes, 45.1 percent; federal monies, 7 percent; and private funding, 2.7 percent. State lotteries provide 2-7 percent of the states’ contributions.
Problems often arise with the distribution of this money.
In principle, U.S. public education is to be financed equitably according to what is called a foundation program -- the minimum acceptable instruction program. Under this system, local property taxes provide most of the funds for districts to run their public schools.
Wealthy districts can often operate their schools from these funds alone. Poorer districts, with less valuable property, often come up short. The state then steps in with funds to bring these districts to the foundation-program level.
Inequities often result. Mr. Kozol writes:
"Instead of setting the foundation at the level of the richest district, the states more frequently adopt what has been called ‘a low foundation.’ The low foundation is a level of subsistence that will raise a district to a point at which its schools are able to provide a ‘minimum’ or ‘basic’ education, but not an education on the level found in the rich districts.
"The notion of a ‘minimum’ (rather than a ‘full’) foundation represents a very special definition of the idea of equality. It guarantees that every child has ‘an equal minimum’ but not that every child has the same."
Such situations have led to lawsuits against states. There are more than 20 such suits under way across the country.
One of the earliest cases was a class-action suit filed against the state of Texas in 1968. It charged that the state, in which the wealthiest districts spend three times as much per pupil as the poorest districts, was in violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Years of litigation followed.
Texas recently was forced by court order to change its property-tax based method of funding its public schools, but the outcome remains unpredictable.
"The only way you’re going to get parity in education is if you have an equalized tax base," said Ellen Rojas Clark, a associate professor, in the division of bicultural and bilingual studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a former member of the Special Committee on Challenge in Education convened by the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry.
"And I would guess that’s what’s going to have to happen on a national scale," Ms. Clark said. "In our particular situation, we have 18 school districts in one county, all of them having different tax bases. The court said there should be equity."
Linked to the issue of finances is the question of control. Should it be local or by larger government bodies?
Most public-school systems are governed by elected members of local school boards, with varying input from teachers, parents and community members. Within their powers, local boards may be able to establish policy; hire and fire school employees; and approve the district’s budget, tax rate and textbooks. Although these boards can be plagued by cantankerous debate and bureaucratic inefficiency, which slow reform and improvement, most U.S. citizens favor local control.
"We are strongly committed to local control of schools," said Shirley Igo, vice president for legislation for the national Parent Teacher Association (PTA). "Communities make their decisions on education according to whom they elect to their school boards. The school boards are legally responsible for making the decisions, but we believe there should be parental and community input."
In an attempt to lessen bureaucracy, some school districts have approved experiments in site-based management. These decentralization efforts take such forms as local school councils or collaborative decision-making committees, which allow differing degrees of input from parents, teachers, community members and administrators.
In Chicago, for example, a local school council at Amelia Earhart Elementary School on the city’s south side, worked with the school’s principal, Hellen DeBerry, to reinvigorate the formally troubled school.
"Ms. DeBerry has helped us realize our vision for Earhart: that minority, inner-city children can learn just as well as anybody else’s," said parent Melva Pratt, who is chair of the council.
In Kentucky, a state undergoing much educational reform, most public schools have elected councils of educators and parents who perform the duties once held by school boards.
But school boards remain the primary power base in local public education. Their ability to choose textbooks and influence curriculum have helped make them the target of takeover efforts by the religious right.
"We’ve certainly seen it here in Texas," said Cecil Richards, executive director-founder of the 3-year-old Texas Freedom Network, which monitors religious political extremists. "The Christian Coalition has said that they’d rather control 2,000 school-board seats than the U.S. presidency. They have really been active in trying to elect people to the school boards who are sympathetic to their political agenda. And they have been successful."
Nanette Roberts, who tracks public education for the National Council of Churches, added:
"There’s a strong movement in the most conservative religious communities to control public schools according to their own political and religious convictions. They really believe that the public schools are centers of anti-religious, anti-American teaching. They look at multiculturalism as an erosion of quality in education. They want to get back to the days when the dominant group -- meaning white -- determined what was taught."
Ms. Roberts is retired secretary of public concner and education for the United Church of Christ. She served as that denomination’s point person on education issues for 17 years.
Increasingly, state governments are taking control of low-achieving school districts. Twenty-three states have laws enabling state or municipal governments to enact such measures. This has raised concern about possible violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most state takeovers have involved minority districts, and there have been questions about whether such actions constitute rescinding voter decisions.
Baltimore recently entered a city-state partnership to manage its floundering public schools. The partnership has brought with it new leadership, $30 million in state aid, and reforms such as smaller classes and longer school hours. The district is required to make academic improvements before it can gain additional state money.
The Baltimore arrangement seems to offer hope to its public-school system, but given the magnitude of the district’s problems and the failures of previous reform efforts, its leaders are cautious in their pronouncements.
U.S. public schools were recently brought to task after the announcement of the results of the 41-nation Third International Mathematics and Science Study. Conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, a research cooperative based in the Netherlands, the assessment placed U.S. high-school seniors, including the brightest, near the bottom in math and science.
"These essentially are just devastating results," said William H. Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing and the U.S. national research coordinator for the study. "There’s no other way to cast them."
Such student-performance assessments have helped make the public-school system, despite the presence of some exceptional schools and students, the object of widespread discontent. A recent Phi Beta Kappa/Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of U.S. adult residents are dissatisfied with public schools.
This situation has led many citizens to seek alternatives to the traditional public-education system. Among them:
The public and politicians are increasingly supporting experiments that place education in the hands of the market economy. Privatization efforts have taken various forms, including the use of private firms to run public-school systems. (See Response, April 1994.)
Advocates of privatization believe it can bring more efficiency and productivity to a faltering system. Opponents contend it puts more emphasis on profits than student achievement, threatens union gains and offers no more competence from its private managers than from public-school administrators.
The jury is still out on privatization. There are programs under way in Minneapolis, Boston, Wichita and a few smaller cities. They await assessment. Privatization efforts in Baltimore and Hartford, Conn, recently ended in money disputes.
The profit motive alone could perpetuate the idea. Lehman Brothers investment house recently pitched the idea to some of its investment clients, noting that the education market represents an estimated net worth of $619 billion for investors.
Buffeted by many issues and faced with growing competition, the public-education system no longer enjoys the luxury of being the only education game in town. However, it still instructs 90 percent of U.S. children, a job that bears a tremendous responsibility to the nation’s future.
To meet that responsibility -- and indeed, to survive -- public education must improve. It must recognize parents as customers with growing options. It must meet its mission: to provide all children equitably the kind of quality preparation that will enable them to realize their greatest potential.
Herschel Lee Johnson is a freelance writer living in New York City.
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