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.
