May 6, 2010
New book by Marguerite Roza exposes flaws in school finance
Given the fierce debates about K–12 education spending in recent decades, it is surprising that so little is known about the connection between spending and outcomes — in effect, why a doubling of money spent on public schools the past 30 years has yielded only slight improvements in student achievement.
Marguerite Roza, research associate professor of education and senior scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, addresses this question in her new book, Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go?
In the book, Roza studies public school finance with a focus on how education dollars are spent. Too often, dollars intended to bolster spending in the poorest schools actually wind up going to schools in wealthier neighborhoods, she writes.
Roza exposes some misleading school district accounting practices: “In a game where school budgets are based on the districtwide average salary, affluent schools get a bargain on their pricey, veteran teachers, while high-poverty schools pay a premium for their low-cost novice teachers.”
The politics of public school financing also gets a sharp airing. Roza writes, “(W)hen the federal government invests funds to ensure that the highest-poverty schools have more resources, local governments counteract this investment by directing their resources disproportionately to lower-poverty schools.”
She later describes how policies, regulation and bureaucratic oversight hamstring principals who, if given the authority, could better use resources to improve student and teacher performance. “So from the school level,” writes Roza, “when people ask who makes resource decisions, it becomes clear that individuals, leaders, groups, and forces outside the school building are largely responsible. With so many cooks, it is no wonder that the pot is so unsavory. In effect, the education finance system operates without any locus of control.”
Roza concludes: If public education is to accomplish goals that have never been met before, educators must search for new ideas, try out new models of teaching and learning, and always be ready to abandon a less productive practice in favor of a more effective one. A finance system based on these design specs can achieve these objectives.”
Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? was published in April by the Urban Institute Press.
Learn more about the Center on Reinventing Public Education online here.
