Since 1989, the state of Arkansas spent $1.2 billion on the recently settled school-desegregation lawsuit, without clear evidence that the money improved learning or increased integration. As the New York Times reported earlier this month, all sides admitted that the extra cash “had not changed the realities in the district.”
That’s nothing compared to the mother of all desegregation lawsuits, Jenkins v. Missouri. A federal judge took over the Kansas City Public Schools, tripling spending from 1985 to 1992 in order to desegregate the district racially and bolster it academically. Unfortunately, while the new money provided jobs and contracts, it did not make schools better or more integrated. Many people profited from all that new spending, but students were not among them.
Compressed in time and space,Kansas City mirrors the nation. As Mike McShane and I detail in President Obama and Education Reform, since 1961 spending per student, controlling for inflation, roughly tripled. From the 1950s to today the ratio of students to staff has fallen from 19.3 to 1 to just over 8 to 1.
Yet student learning, which the government has measured since the early 1970s, remains flat. And that’s not necessarily because today’s kids are harder to teach. Demographic trends that complicate teaching, like more English as Second Language students, have accompanied demographic trends which should make kids easier to teach, like smaller family size and more educated parents.
What gives? Why don’t more money and more staff lead to more learning? Why aren’t teachers paid better? And given the increases in spending over the years, why do school budgets always seem tight?
For some of the answers, taxpayers and educators should read Nathan Levenson’s Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools. Levenson, a successful businessman elected to the Boxford, Mass., school board and eventually chosen as nearby Arlington’s school superintendent, diagnoses the problem and details solutions better than anyone I’ve seen.
The first thing to know about public school spending is that it is about as transparent as Bernie Madoff’s balance sheet. Even in medium-sized districts, public schools may rely on dozens of separate state, local and federal pots of money, in addition to grants, each with its own “owner” in the bureaucracy who may focus more on defending their private turf than on serving the public’s children.
All this complexity makes it tough for educators, much less the public, to understand where spending goes. Budgets rarely contain such basic information as the number of special-education teachers, meaning you can’t make reasonable decisions about whether kids get what they need.
Most important, schools typically lack information on which spending helps kids learn and which doesn’t.
In the absence of meaningful data, schools just keep doing what they did last year, only a little more or less of it. Not knowing which programs help kids makes it irresistible for people to favor their buddies rather than making the tough calls on what to grow, what to cut, and what to kill.
As Levenson’s own time as a school superintendent showed, even obvious inefficiencies can be hard to touch in a culture that values getting along.In the funniest example, Levenson caught flack for trying to downsize the roughly one-third of school crossing guards who had no students to help across the street. Critics didn’t care that he wanted the savings to improve learning.
Levenson offers numerous solutions. School districts should consolidate operating and non-operating budgets so educators and the public know what goes where. Schools must go out of their way to recruit and retain top teachers, and consider larger class size if the money goes to higher teacher salaries.
Most of all, as Levenson said in a recent interview, successful schools “have a burning desire to know what’s working by program and teacher, a passion to expand best practices and an equal passion to stop well-intentioned, but ineffective efforts.” That culture involves will more than the wallet.
As U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan points out, the decades of steady spending increases have ended. To serve kids, we can’t keep doing the same old things the same old ways.
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Robert Maranto ([email protected]) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 01/31/2014