Thoughts on All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say in Texas

“ Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.”*

Self-censorship, and the fear that drives it, seems to be the goal of much of the educational legislation in the last five years or so. Revamping control over the curriculum is widespread, certainly not limited to Texas or to higher education. “ Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” President Trump declared in 2019. Since then, the political machine has taken aim at education in efforts unprecedented in both pace and scope; not even the McCarthy era’s fear-mongering took aim at libraries, schools, and Universities. 

Legislation in Texas has inserted the state into governance over materials in public schools and universities, stripping educators of their roles in governance and replacing faculty with politicians as decision-makers. Serwer investigates how AI is being put to use in curriculum review in Texas’ state universities, but AI is certainly not the only new facet to sidelined educators, nor is it the largest problem. The idea that the state can and should control curriculum over and above educators is the definition of state-controlled education. The whole process is predicated on the notion that education, educators, and even ideas, are dangerous, and that there should be controls to protect us from being exposed to them. 

The creation of state-controlled education is totalitarian, authoritarian, and antithetical to the ideas and ways of freedom. Education is not about limiting investigation, and certainly not about making inquiry itself submit to a stamp of State approval.

Investigation is the path of knowledge.

Out of knowledge comes choice.

Out of choice comes agency.

Out of agency comes freedom.

I’m booked

It’s official: I’m registered for the Qualifying Exam.

Bookmark this space, and expect the long-winded, rambling rants about the commodification of education to continue. 

At some point, I’m going to have so much formal education that the only thing I’ll be qualified to do is walk around a field following sheep.

Beyond individual self-interest

Notes from "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage" 

"Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest." 

"What do we owe those with whom we inhabit the earth? And what do we owe the earth, as well, while we’re at it? And why do we owe people or other living creatures that concern? Why do we owe them regard for life or a commitment to a nonviolent relationship? Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another." 

"what would it mean to live in a world of radical equality? My argument is that then we cannot kill one another, we cannot do violence to one another, we cannot abandon each other’s lives."  (emphasis added)

"If I think of myself not just as this bounded individual but as fundamentally related to others, then I locate this self in those relations. In that case, the self I am trying to defend is not just me but all those relations that define and sustain me, and those relations can, and should be, extended indefinitely beyond local units like family and community."

"we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?”"

"We have to be able to identify institutional modes of violence, including prisons and the carceral state, that are too often taken for granted and not recognized as violent. It’s a question of bringing out in clear terms those institutions and sets of policies that regularly make these kinds of distinctions between valuable and non-valuable lives." [e.a]

Here’s the thing

Eric,
Here’s the thing.
We (as in Western culture) have been talking about “the just city” since Plato’s account of Socrates. And when we talk about “the just city,” we talk about education. I mean, we don’t even just give it a polite nod; Socrates spends a fair portion of The Republic discussing the curriculum (because, you know, you can’t go telling stories about the gods, that’s dangerous, and it stirs up the wrong kinds of imagery; everyone’s a critic, but whatever). This country’s revolution was propelled by the understanding that democracy and revolution were impossible without the free spread of ideas; it’s why Ben Franklin convinced his buddies to put their treasured books on democratic ideals at a public house and created the first lending library in the history of ever. That was in 1731, and it took a two generations — 40 years—before the ideas had grown enough in the public conversation that throwing a bunch of tea into a harbor seemed not only rational, but compellingly responsible. We’ve been talking about the Just City for three thousand years, and this country in particular conceives of itself as exceptionally just, from John Winthrop to Eisenhower, our national narrative is one of “A city on a hill” so blessed with “prayse and glory that men shall say. . . , “the Lord make it like that of New England.” A beacon shining against tyranny, a new land “with liberty and justice for all.”

We know what works to achieve good outcomes for students: low student teacher ratios in accessible, adequately funded schools. This, in fact, is what the private schools are selling and which parents buy without hesitation. If we know what works and aren’t doing it, it’s because we don’t want to. I don’t much care why we don’t want to; I’m a utilitarian, so I don’t think why we harm others through our (in)action has much weight. When I decide to have a chocolate bar, I know I’m not doing anyone any favors. I know that each cocoa bean is produced in horrible, inhumane, and at times inhuman conditions. But do I say no? No, I do not, not always. Because I don’t want to. Please do not expect me to simply overlook that the situation in United States educational policy is one of not knowing what works. We know. We just don’t care. Why don’t we have a bold federal program? Why didn’t George H. W. Bush, who decided to undertake securing better outcomes for students, launch a sweeping federal program the likes of which haden’t been seen since the New Deal? Because he didn’t want to. Please do not expect me to think that Bush, the head of the CIA, mentored by the head of the OSS, didn’t know what policies would make a difference or how to enact them. He knew. He didn’t care.

We’re the United States of America.

If we’re not doing something, it’s because we don’t want to.

I think that the way we have progressively kicked the responsibility for meaningful educational policy further down the line since Brown — from states, to municipalities, to neighborhoods, to now local school boards devolving into fights over everything from masks to comic books — shows that the educational landscape is thoroughly Balkanized, divided into increasingly smaller, mutually hostile groups. I think this is a moral failure of political leadership; I think this is a threat to democracy; and I think it is bad for everyone.

It’s a moral failure of political leadership in the most basic utilitarian analysis: to know that the action you undertake will create harm to others is only justified when not taking that action would create a sacrifice of equal or greater marginal utility. Truly, denying myself chocolate isn’t on par with forced child labor; denying myself a glass of wine isn’t comparable with enduring sexual assault. Claudia Card writes in The Atrocity Paradigm that callous disregard for the harm we do to others is the definition of evil. I don’t disagree.

I believe providing a robust educational system is essential to fostering democracy, and that the lack of actively fostering democracy opens the door to courting an authoritarian and totalitarian state. See Dewey, and Socrates, and wow, so so many people.

I believe that a well-educated society is one in which everyone is better off, not just the well educated. I believe that to diminish education in a community of any size or to let the educational institution decay is to actively diminish the scope of human wellbeing in those communities. I know that holding education as the cure for social ills carries with it a quiet trap of seeing individuals as responsible for their own mobility, but with that caveat, I also believe that education remains the single most powerful remedy and inoculation against human misery. It is the path by which communities thrive, not merely individuals. 

Public policy, especially educational policy, has the capacity to enrich lives. 

Therefore it should.

We need a new conversation about education

We've been talking about Education in economic, market-based terms for nearly a century in this country. Why? Competition has no place in educational access. We cannot and should not place education in the realm of a market. Students are not customers. Our love of economic analysis reflects a deep cultural belief in deservingness, and no other developed nation requires citizens to prove that they deserve an education. To do so is undemocratic and it's immoral. 

Educational policy leaders need to stop engaging in this sort of choice-based talk. Put in terms of choice, we are saying having a substandard option is permissible, and that choosing no education would be possible as well. Saying parents choose schools is like saying people of Flint choose the water.  

As a country, it's time to act as though we value education, at every level, for every neighborhood, as a basic common good, and not a matter of making "the best choice." We cannot compete globally without quality education, but more importantly, we are at risk of failing as a country from within. To be clear, this is not merely some historic policy position. No Child Left Behind essentially punishes schools in lower income neighborhoods by gatekeeping access to federal money through the use of our beloved test scores, a metric that reflects affluence more than any single other factor. 

The state of education in America is so abysmal, it is a miracle that we are in the global ranks at all. A century of deservingness-based policies have decimated human rights in America, and our inclusion on the OECD list seems suspect given that "today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in ... problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound."

"US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.

Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the US and its peer countries continues to grow.

US inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries."

A national commitment to education is a national commitment to its citizens, and the United States needs to right her course through an about-face approach, leaving marketplace competition at the wayside and valuing her people over profit for the first time since the founding of the country. The moral failure of leadership has been with us since we threw tea into a harbor. It will only end when we choose to treat citizens as the reason for our nation to exist instead of as liabilities on a balance sheet.

The Social Gospel and Education

     The New York Times article "Do Other Countries Teach Better?" opens with a paragraph that sets out its framework: the US labor force is at a disadvantage for global competition in the "new global economy." The headline sets the stage for this salient leap of illogic, proclaiming, in the form of an investigative question, that "other countries teach better."

     I cry foul from the starting whistle. One cannot simply take a ranking of a basic performance metric to evaluate the global success of a population, and the editors' greatest sleight of hand here is in presenting "millions of laid off workers" as the result of a faulty national education program, generally, and of bad teaching, specifically. Essentially the equation we are shown in the headline and first paragraph is that a lack of robust employment in the United States is the teachers' fault. Put this way, it seems like a silly sentence. Nonetheless, we all do love a graph, and the editors make great use of the OECD rankings.

     "The United States is losing ground in worker training to countries in Europe and Asia whose schools are not just superior to ours but getting steadily better." It's important to note that this article comes in 2013, a few years after the great 2008 financial crisis, an economic implosion that was borne by the workers, but not by the businesses that had created a financial house of cards. But let's leave these considerations aside for a moment and discuss the comparison at hand. Do "other countries teach better?"

     The editors rightly highlight two key differences between Finland and the United States: first that education is seen as a social investment, and second -- most importantly to the editors and likewise to this scholar -- that teachers have a place of high esteem in Finnish society, reflected by rigorous training and excellent relative compensation growth within the profession. The United States takes an extreme opposite approach, and the results are clear. But what makes this approach possible in Finland and impossible in the United States?

     The answer lies in the editors' analysis of school funding in Canada, where differences in neighborhood economic levels are evened out by state coffers, again an approach exactly opposite of our country. "Americans tend to see such inequalities as the natural order of things." This, along with a national sentiment of devaluing education generally, is at the heart of the situation on the table. And American disparagement of education is itself predicated on the belief of "inequalities as the natural order of things." Only in America do you hear the adage "those who can't do, teach," and one hears it quite often, a sentiment more in line with Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution,” which devalued intellectual pursuits and demonized academics. In Finland, Canada, and most everywhere in the world, even in the countries who performed at lower ranks on the OECD chart, it is assumed that if we want people to be able to do, we must at some point teach, and this gets to the heart of the editors' analysis. 

     Anywhere else in the developed world, a situation where "40 percent of ... public school students [are] in districts of 'concentrated student poverty'" would constitute a national crisis to be addressed with utmost urgency. In the United States, we take such a situation as a given, a reflection of "the natural order of things." What cultural conditions exist to make disparity "the natural order?" 

     This mindset reveals an underlying cultural belief in economic success as ultimate proof of moral superiority, an outgrowth of Frederick Jackson Turner's "rugged individualism" mythos turned into a cult of social darwinism, the so-called Social Gospel of the 1920s. The blueprint of the social gospel continues to drive political decisions in all areas of American society, but especially in the realm of education. "If you deserved an education," the social gospel seems to tell us, "you could afford one." Economic success is proof in this country of deservingness, whereas in other developed countries it is treated as luck, literally referred to as fortune, and comes with a sense of social obligation. The form and weight of this obligation varies from one culture to the next, but the presence of some form of duty of care for those less fortunate is undeniable in all the OECD countries on the list. China dominates the list because they have made sweeping social and political changes to value education, reversing inequality in education since the death of Mao. "Shanghai has taken several approaches to repairing the disparity between strong schools and weak ones, as measured by infrastructure and educational quality." The United States, by contrast, instituted the No Child Left Behind policy, which in effect punishes weaker schools by diminishing their funding and teacher salaries through gatekeeping federal money. 

     "If things remain as they are, countries that lag behind us will one day overtake us," the editors conclude. Their litmus for success is not, interestingly enough, on our rankings at mathematics within the OECD nations. Instead, it is American economic prowess that the editors say is in peril, that which is so worthy of preservation that we should bend the political will to achieve it. One wonders if this reflects an internalization of the American social gospel or if the authors are attempting to spur a national commitment to education by, as this reader suspects, speaking a language that will finally matter. 

     I return to my opening point. Do "other countries teach better?" is not exactly a fair question given the cultural differences on display. How the United States manages to rank as well as it does given the hostile social climate towards education is the real mystery. Perhaps America has no business being in the OECD list given the educational condition of the country. Instead, the results reveal a bit of a miracle, a story of overwhelming creative talent of educators combined with a foundation of capacity in students. The results show that America is squandering her greatest resource, her people, in a relentless adherence to the value of individual economic achievement. We must change our definition of success as a society and make a radical about-face of political will. The editors show that the commodification of education creates a risk to our global standing. We are not lacking teachers with the ability to "teach better." We are lacking leaders who value education enough for all citizens, and thereby the country, to succeed.

Loft life

Another semester is done and dusted.

I am looking forward to a few weeks to simply enjoy tea and curling up with a good book for fun.

Noodle Day

Using new software makes me anxious. You would think after two decades in Information Technology that I would face new software with nonchalance, but no. Quite the opposite is true.

Today I'm installing a new-to-me statistics software for one of my classes.

Noodles are the best answer to nerves, so I whipped up a batch of rice noodles in chicken broth, with strips of chicken, an egg, and some garlic chives.

There it is.

Tonight I gave my presentation in Ethics and Educational Decision Making, a very cool topic in its own right, and one that is at the core of my philosophical inquiry. 

 

I've spent the last several weeks on this, and the whole of the course knowing that this topic is where I needed to dig to find my dissertation. The readings and conversations each week were excellent and pushed me in just the right directions at just the right time. The syllabus has an elegance that can only be understood by looking back, and I'm glad I took the time to really delve into this for real answers.

 

The magic happened yesterday evening, that moment when all the side notes of analysis and the structural bits of logic and craft came together to create a fertile tendril of its own. I spent five hours letting the flower unfold, and then this morning I trimmed and shaped until it was a bouquet.

 

All sorts of stuff is happening in my so-called real life, and lately it's been a struggle to do even small things. Some days thinking is too much. the last couple weeks I'd begun to worry if it would ever come back.

 

The success of the last 24 hours was restorative, and I was fine until I started making tea ten minutes before the presentation. Not a crisis of confidence in the work, but a deep shaking desire not to be seen. I leaned against the wall, letting the undeniable tears have their way until the kettle boiled. 

 

I washed my face and changed my blouse while the tea steeped. There were four whole minutes left yet, and I moved slowly through each one, tying my hair up, fetching the pages of the presentation, opening the laptop, stirring sugar into the freshly poured tea.

 

The structure of class took over, and I barely noticed the shaking in my core -- reading a strong work is settling for me, kind of the opposite of stage fright. I didn't give any preamble about why this is the line of inquiry that spoke to me, I simply looked at the top line and let the words on the page take me, as they always do. When I got to the last line ten minutes later, I was kind of sad to see them go. I muted my mic.

I looked up at the quiet zoom room, wondering if I'd muted them instead, and then the professor spoke. I don't remember his first statements, and didn't really come back to reality until I was reaching for my pen to take a note on his suggestion for long term considerations of the avenue I had recommended. I had forgotten to bring my notebook and pen. When does that ever happen? I fetched the almost dead marker from my desk, the only writing instrument in the room, and scrawled "educational long term strategy" on the back of the presentation.

 

By the time the next presentation began, I was nearly human again. All of the presentations have been so great, and I feel honored to have had the wisdom of these fellow scholars this term. I felt solid about my work and the presentation. After class I poured the rest of the tea into my mug and talked with a friend, not realizing how keyed up I'd been until the drop came, ten minutes into the conversation, a warm weariness that oozed down through my bones and rooted me to the chair, to the floor, to the ground. I'd be asleep in thirty minutes or less, so I heated up some leftover Golden Noodle Heal All, brushed my teeth, and headed to bed.

I was drifting off when my phone chimed with a text, and I blearily realized that meant it wasn't on the charging stand -- the charging routine goes into do not disturb, possibly my favorite technological feature ever. 

 

The message from my professor made my whole day.

 

 

 

Onward, friends.

Entrenched Discouragement: Property Tax

Entrenched Discouragement: 

Critical Policy Analysis of 

Property Taxes 

in Funding Formulas

H. L. Schmidt

Department of Educational Leadership

EDL 704-201: Politics of Educational Leadership

Dr. Amanda Potterton

April 2021

Introduction

This is the third in a series of papers analyzing three elements that have a significant, and possibly outsized, impact on educational budget formulas. The first paper looked at the use of enrollment and attendance--and the varying ways in which it was measured-- through a critical policy analysis lens to determine the context of attendance as a factor and then understand how that context affects the “development, implementation, and outcome” (Sampson, 2019) of the resulting budget policies. This paper continues the analysis by investigating the context of property tax in budgeting formulas, especially at the local level, and the gap revealed between the policy intent and its practical outcome. Policy analysis shows “social stratification and the broader effect a given policy has on relationships of inequality and privilege” (Diem, Young, Welton, Mansfield, & Lee, 2014 as cited by Sampson, 2019). In the case of local budgets, this gap is stark and widening.

Property tax as a revenue stream for education is often heralded as a measure that ensures citizens aren’t paying for something they don’t use, a neo-liberal cafeteria-style allocation of municipal revenue, not from research in best practices for education. Such a framework devalues educational spending and looks at students as customers, positioning the school as a business and not as an essential institution for thriving. Seen in this way, the process of funding schools becomes adversarial, focused on outputs as opposed to outcomes. 

In times of economic recession and during a period of public outcry against taxation, this market-based rhetoric gains traction in public opinion, resulting in elected officials who reflect contemporary sentiment. Yet qualitative research found that “permanent additional money improved student achievement and high school graduation rates and decreased poverty rates, while sharp spending cuts had the opposite effect.” (Lafortune, Rothstein, Schatzenbach, 2016).

Nearly half (45.6%) of school budgets come from local revenue (EducationData.org), largely from property taxation. This paper examines the role of property tax as a significant revenue stream for educational funding, contextualizing it for modern urban home ownership and rental patterns, while also analyzing the ways in which property tax perpetuates existing systems of disparity, entrenching diminished opportunities for marginalized communities.

Property Tax

Budgets are responsible for providing “equity for students;” “adequate resources to local school districts;” “predictability and stability of education resources over time;” and a finance system that “supports student learning” (NCSL, 2021). “Local governments depend almost exclusively on property taxes.” Funding formulas that rely heavily on property tax create actively adverse conditions to all these aims: while the taxation rate is uniform, the variability of the tax base results in dramatic disparities in local budgets, even within a district. Such variance perpetuates systemic inequity by allocating greater resources for schools in wealthy neighborhoods while diminishing resources for schools in poor neighborhoods, materially affecting the outcome for students and perpetuating an imbalance of educational opportunity based on economic status. 

Economically disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower home values, leading to lower property tax revenue. At equal rates of taxation, the revenue generated by a home valued at $100,000 is only ten percent of that of a home valued at one million. Progressive taxation -- formulas that seek to lighten the tax burden of poorer neighborhoods -- often provide a lower limit beyond which property tax is not assessed. The language often reads that taxes are assessed on property valued above a certain amount, resulting in poorer neighborhoods generating even less for the public coffers. While there is no doubt that these progressive policies reduce the tax burden to disadvantaged individuals, use of property tax as a factor in budget allocation lessens the available revenue in the neighborhoods that need it most. This is especially evident in the budgets of the schools of impoverished neighborhoods. Where property values are low, educational budgets are dramatically lower than for schools in wealthier neighborhoods, a disparity that manifests within districts.

Property tax adjustments remain a key point for local officials and are affected by economic cycles of boom and bust. In times of plenty, budgets swell and it often seems that no tax increases are necessary. In times of scarcity, though, local governments are disinclined to raise taxes, an unpopular move at any time, but especially during a downturn. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, for example, local governments saw budgets shrink to record lows. The 2008 crisis was largely driven through the housing market and had a significant impact on local budgets. “To offset revenues lost during the recession, most states cut education and other spending rather than raise taxes. At the same time, municipal property tax revenues fell due to the housing crisis.” This reduction, in turn, affected school budgets and teacher pay, and many states still have not recovered.  In 2018, 24 states had school funding below 2008 levels.

Further exacerbating the problematic reliance on property tax for local revenue is the shift in residential patterns in the last twenty-five years. Americans are more mobile than ever, moving house and changing jobs at unprecedented rates. They move to find better jobs, but increasingly they are also moving to find better cities. And “more U.S. households are renting than at any point in 50 years,” with “8 million householders between the age of 35 to 44 years old made up the largest population of renters in the U.S. in 2019, followed by 7.3 million householders aged 45 to 54 years old.” Even though college-educated residents are the least likely to be renters, they reflect the trend of increasing rental residence, 29% in 2016 up from 22% in 2006.

Increasing rental rates in cities has a ripple effect on property tax revenue: renters don’t pay property tax, and often the buildings in which they reside are afforded tax incentives for development that include a period of diminished taxation or outright tax amnesty. The downstream effect is that property tax revenue no longer reflects the residential makeup of the city, long held as the foundational rationale for using property tax as a metric for providing services in proportion to residency. Residential patterns of the twenty-first century make clear that attracting high-skilled workers doesn’t necessarily translate to increased property tax revenue: a brain surgeon who rents a luxury loft apartment doesn’t pay property tax, while a working-class warehouse homeowner does. The effect on school budgets is devastating.

At its core, property tax reflects better revenue for wealthy neighborhoods and diminished funding for schools in poor sections of a city. When placed in context of modern residential patterns, the revenue stream is choked by increasing rental rates by age groups most likely to be parents of school-aged children. Reliance on property rates for local schools diminishes educational opportunities across the board, an impact that has a thunderclap impact on poor neighborhoods.

Conclusion

Examining the ways in which local school budgets are impacted by property value and property ownership reveals a reliance on commercialized, commodified, market-driven concepts, most notably from the neoliberal tradition that prefers quantitative data over qualitative research. The outsized valuation of quantitative data reveals prioritization by policy makers of market-based assumptions about the purpose of education, much in line with what Sanchez found (2019). Changing the framework of the formula and analysis of the underlying assumptions implicit in the variables themselves can prioritize best practices and increase “policy knowledge” by being based on qualitative research rather than quantitative measurements, effectively transforming budget formulas “from the ground up.” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014). 

References

Cilluffo, Anthony, Geiger, A.W., and Fry, Richard. 2017. “More U.S. households are renting than at any point in 50 years.” FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Trust, July 19, 2017.  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/19/more-u-s-households-are-renting-than-at-any-point-in-50-years/ 

Diem, S., Young, M. D., Welton, A. D., Mansfield, K. C., & Lee, P. (2014). The intellectual landscape of critical policy analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27 (9), 1068-1090. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014.916007

Dumas, M.J., Anderson, G. Qualitative research as policy knowledge: framing policy problems and transforming education from the ground up. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22 (11). https://dx.doi.org/10.14707/epaa.v22n11.2014 

Gordon, Tracy. 2012. State and Local Budgets and the Great Recession. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

EducationData.org, (2021). U.S. public education spending statistics [2021]: per pupil + total. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics 

Lafortune, J., Rothstein, J., Schazenbach, D. W. (2016). School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement. Washington Center for Economic Growth.

Leachman, M., Masterson, K., and Figueroa, E. (2017) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishing-decade-for-school-funding 

Mantel, B. (2018, August 31). Education funding. CQ Researcher, 28, 705-728. www.cqreasearcher.com 

National Conference of State Legislatures (2021). The state role in education finance. https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/state-role-in-education-finance.aspx

Sampson, C. (2019). “The state pulled a fast one on us”: A critical policy analysis of state-level policies affecting English Learners from district-level perspectives. Educational Policy, (33)1, 158-180. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0895904818807324 

Sanchez, J. (2019). Framing the common core; An analysis of four key policy actors. Teachers College Record, 121 (080306) 1-34.

Entrenched Discouragement: Assessments and Ratings

Entrenched Discouragement: 

Critical Policy Analysis of 

Enrollment and Ratings 

in Funding Formulas

H. L. Schmidt

Department of Educational Leadership

EDL 704-201: Politics of Educational Leadership

Dr. Amanda Potterton

March 22, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 cast a harsh spotlight on the weak spots across the educational system, from infrastructure concerns to curriculum design and delivery. Underlying all these challenges, schools had to find ways to respond that fit their budgets. Budgets are the silent engine that drive--and often constrain--decisions by individual schools and districts, and allocation of these funds are in turn driven by factors that have an outsized impact: enrollment, property taxes, and student test scores. Designed to help ensure equality and to provide incentives for excellence, Critical Policy Analysis of key factors that drive budgets reveals that they often create inequality and can disincentivize achievement. In their worst application, these measurements actively entrench poor conditions in schools and widen the disparity of opportunity available to students.

Critical Policy Analysis examines the “development, implementation, and outcome” of policies through examination of “contextual and social factors, including systematic and institutional- and individual-level oppression” (Sampson, 2019). Policy analysis positions policies not as things but views them instead as “encoded in complex ways (via struggles, compromises, authoritative public interpretations and reinterpretations) and decoded in complex ways (via actors’ interpretations and meanings in relation to their history, experiences, skills, resources and context).” (Ball, 1993, emphasis added). By identifying critical concerns to evaluate the gap between educational policies’ rhetoric and their practiced reality, we can better see the “social stratification and the broader effect a given policy has on relationships of inequality and privilege” (Diem, Young, Welton, Mansfield, & Lee, 2014 as cited by Sampson, 2019). For the purposes of examining key factors in budget allocation formulas, it is helpful to see how these factors are themselves determined and how they are used as a part of the formula itself. In this paper, I will examine the first of three factors: enrollment specifically attendance as a measure of enrollment.

Proponents of limiting or cutting education budgets often focus on the notion of trimming wasteful spending as a way to reduce costs, a concept that comes from manufacturing and business analysis, not from research in best practices for educational outcomes. Such a framework devalues educational spending and looks at dollars as opposed to outcomes. In times of economic recession and during a period of public outcry against taxation, this market-based rhetoric gained traction in public opinion, resulting in elected officials who reflect contemporary sentiment. Yet qualitative research found that “permanent additional money improved student achievement and high school graduation rates and decreased poverty rates, while sharp spending cuts had the opposite effect.” (Lafortune, Rothstein, Schatzenbach, 2016). 

The emergency created by the pandemic brought the funding crisis for public schools into sharp relief: “Less funding would mean cuts in programs and personnel. And the districts that would be hit the hardest would be those with the poorest and neediest students” (Washington Post, March 15, 2021). Texas, a state that uses average daily attendance to determine district budgets in the state, saw attendance drop over 4% during the pandemic, threatening a tidal wave of cuts to already beleaguered and cash-strapped districts by creating automatic reductions through the attendance-based budget formula. Texas averages total daily attendance. Other states use attendance measures as well, and they can seem confusing and downright capricious: Some states average attendance from Fall and spring terms; Colorado uses the attendance figures from a single day in October.

Funding: Attendance, Enrollment, and the Market

Schools are funded by local (45.6%) and state (46.7%) budgets, allocated to individual schools and districts through funding formulas that can be complicated and complex and that vary from state to state (EducationData.org). This source of funding results in educational budgets becoming matters of the political landscape, skewing along the lines of public opinion more than being treated as a necessary and desirable expense for the public welfare. Two things stand out in market-driven educational budget allocation: attendance-based funding and test-score derived school and teacher ratings. These matrices are intended to provide equality (enrollment) and incentives (ratings). These two measures don't achieve their aims; in fact, they create the opposite effect, entrenching or worsening the problems these policy measures seek to address.

Attendance-based funding impoverishes school budgets. Even the broadest measure of attendance -- total enrollment-- results in diminished funds as students in a district attend private schools, are home-schooled, or drop out. This encourages parents who can afford alternative education to seek extra-public solutions, creating a positive feedback loop of scarcity for those who remain on the public school roster. Using an average of daily attendance is the worst application of this measure, actively penalizing schools where marginalized students often have attendance impediments as a factor of daily life. But even the total enrollment measurement hides the result of reducing funding as students increasingly turn to alternative educational options, whether through private schools (voucher-based, privately funded), or home-school options that reduce overall enrollment without reducing the responsibility of the district to provide quality education, much of which is tied up in fixed costs that do not change during periods of enrollment fluctuation.

Budgets are responsible for providing “equity for students;” “adequate resources to local school districts;” “predictability and stability of education resources over time;” and a finance system that “supports student learning” (NCSL, 2021). Attendance-based funding formulas create actively adverse conditions to all these aims: the variability of attendance can result in quixotic budget reductions while costs stay largely the same. In particular, when resident school-age children attend private or alternative school systems, the local budgets are reduced not only by attendance-based formulas but are often further diminished by tax-offset school choice schema that divert funding from the state coffers under a matrix that “would further magnify the disparities between rich and poor, public and private” (Potterton, Waddington, LaCour, 2021).

Conclusion

Examining the ways in which we measure attendance and performance in schools reveals a reliance on commercialized, commodified, market-driven concepts, most notably from the neoliberal tradition that prefers quantitative data over qualitative research. The outsized valuation of quantitative data reveals prioritization by policy makers of market-based assumptions about the purpose of education, much in line with what Sanchez found (2019). Changing the framework of the formula and analysis of the underlying assumptions implicit in the variables themselves can prioritize best practices and increase “policy knowledge” by being based on qualitative research rather than quantitative measurements, effectively transforming budget formulas “from the ground up.” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014).

References

Ball, S. (1993). What is policy? Text trajectories and toolboxes. The Australian Journal of Education Studies, 13 (2), 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630930130203 

Diem, S., Young, M. D., Welton, A. D., Mansfield, K. C., & Lee, P. (2014). The intellectual landscape of critical policy analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27 (9), 1068-1090. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014.916007

Dumas, M.J., Anderson, G. Qualitative research as policy knowledge: framing policy problems and transforming education from the ground up. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22 (11). https://dx.doi.org/10.14707/epaa.v22n11.2014 

EducationData.org, (2021). U.S. public education spending statistics [2021]: per pupil + total. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics 

Lafortune, J., Rothstein, J., Schazenbach, D. W. (2016). School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement. Washington Center for Economic Growth. 

Mantel, B. (2018, August 31). Education funding. CQ Researcher, 28, 705-728. www.cqreasearcher.com 

National Conference of State Legislatures (2021). The state role in education finance. https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/state-role-in-education-finance.aspx

Potterton, A., Waddington, R. J., LaCour, S. E. (2021). Tax credit proposal is really a plan or private school vouchers in Kentucky. Courier Journal, Feb 26,2021. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2021/02/26/school-vouchers-education-opportunity-account-program-bad-kentucky/6801079002/ 

Sampson, C. (2019). “The state pulled a fast one on us”: A critical policy analysis of state-level policies affecting English Learners from district-level perspectives. Educational Policy, (33)1, 158-180. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0895904818807324 

Sanchez, J. (2019). Framing the common core; An analysis of four key policy actors. Teachers College Record, 121 (080306) 1-34.