Tuesday, September 09, 2008 - Posts
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Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider to put a thorny issue like school funding into perspective.
Michael Barber was Tony Blair's chief education adviser, and he helped push through a major overhaul of Britain's public-education system. Now he's an educational consultant with an increasingly high profile in the United States. When I was reporting in New Orleans earlier this year, Paul Pastorek, the Louisiana superintendent of education, told me Barber's ideas had had a big influence on him. And as Sam Dillon reported in the Times last year, Joel Klein, New York City's school superintendent, is also a fan of Barber's; he "asked Sir Michael to address hundreds of New York principals at Lincoln Center about school improvement strategies."
In an interview with Education Sector, a Washington think tank, Barber listed some of the problems he saw in the American education system, including this rather jumbo-sized one:
The other fundamental flaw that I think is absolutely devastating in the U.S. is that because so much of the school system depends on very local taxation, the distribution of funding is inequitable. You can see how it originates in 19th century American history, but it is a big problem. Even the best education laws are only leveling up to the same funding per pupil so that high-poverty areas have funding on par with other communities. Whereas, in any sensible system you'd spend more money per pupil in a high-poverty area than another area. The Conservatives [in Britain] were in power from 1979 to 1997, and they never questioned that. They always thought it was absolutely right to spend more on areas of high poverty than other areas.
It seems so clear and straightforward (you can almost hear the British accent): Poor kids need more help in school than rich kids, so the government should devote more resources to their education. Let's do it! But a plan like Barber's would require a complete rethinking and reorganization of our approach to funding public education. And that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
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An unusual act of civil disobedience last week in Chicago: To protest inequities in Illinois' system of school financing, James Meeks, a Baptist minister and state senator, organized a boycott of the first day of school by 1,400 Chicago public-school students, almost all of whom were black. The twist: That morning, he bused them all to Northfield, a wealthy, mostly white Chicago suburb, to the lavish campus of New Trier Township High School, a public school with four orchestras, a rowing club, a course in "kinetic wellness," and AP classes in French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Latin, and Chinese. You know, your basic American public school. The Chicago kids lined up and tried to enroll for classes—symbolically, at least.
To their credit, the administrators at New Trier, as well as a few parents and students, welcomed the visitors with signs, snacks, and cool drinks. Every Chicago student who took part in the protest was invited to register at the school, but none of them will in fact be able to enroll because of New Trier's residency requirements. No house in the suburbs, no spot in the school.
Mayor Daley fulminated, calling Meeks's protest "very selfish." But it was a peaceful demonstration and by all accounts a successful one ("This is civil disobedience at its finest," one New Trier parent said).
As the Chicago Tribune reported: "At issue is how much money schools spend per student. In a funding system fueled largely by local property taxes, New Trier Township spent nearly $17,000 per student in 2005-06 ... while Chicago Public Schools spent an estimated $10,400 per pupil."
It's one of those basic facts of American educational life that seem inevitable and yet impossible at the same time. On the one hand, of course the wealthy burghers of Northfield are going to spend more on their public schools than the poor residents of inner-city Chicago. On the other hand: We're really going to send rich white kids to excellent, well-funded public schools and send poor black kids to substandard, poorly funded public schools? That's our plan for fixing public education in America?
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