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How much is
enough?
Getting a handle on the adequacy of financial support to
schools is no small task. For one thing, no one knows
what an adequate per pupil expenditure ought to be. The
perfect per pupil expenditure is the one that reliably
accomplishes the job. But since financial support is
only one aspect of a complex of factors that contribute
to student achievement, the “right” number remains
elusive, here and throughout the nation. On the one
hand, personnel contracts alone usually account for
about 85% of any school’s budget, sometimes more. On the
other hand, the choices about the mix of personnel,
speaks to that school’s strategy for success. Some
schools invest heavily in support services for their
students – counselors, social workers and psychologists
– others might invest in academic support such as
literacy coaches. This means that no dollar figure is
meaningful by itself, but needs to be seen in a larger
context.
The funding picture statewide
This section of Information Works! is less
concerned with individual school spending than with how
the state looks as a whole, through the various
different fiscal lenses designed by the Information
Works! team. Each district sits in relation to its
fellow districts, but again, resist drawing conclusions
without investigating the district strategy for
investing its resources and what performance results
they get in return.
However, the variety of lenses tell us clearly that RI
has significant disparities in the overall resources
available to different districts.
School aid as tied to property taxes
Before the 1960's, public schools throughout the U.S.
were considered to be an entirely local concern,
supported principally by their own communities, mainly
through real estate taxes. During the Lyndon Johnson
years of “The Great Society,” and the passage and
implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA) of 1968, the federal government took an
interest in the “savage” inequities between different
schools’ resources, with an eye especially to the racial
inequality that corresponded to the general inequities
associated with poverty.
Over the years, that concern filtered down to the
states, each of which began to collect and expend at
least some portion of state taxes in the form of “state
aid” to soften the inequities. Now, at the start of the
21st century, most states are still struggling with a
way to make their school financing more equitable. Many
states are in court over the issue, which is still hotly
debated even in those states that have achieved
significant equity.
1997's Budget Article 31 and subsequent amendments
In the late 1980's, the RI General Assembly designed and
started to implement a financing formula that, overall,
would have shifted a higher portion of the burden of
school financing to the state. The recession of the
early 1990's halted the full implementation of that
formula – which was considered excellent and very
progressive in its day. Since then RI has developed a
slightly different strategy. The new aid assumes at
least level funding for all districts, even those that
experience a drop in student enrollment, and tries to
offer an across-the-board percentage increase when
possible. On top of that, the RI General Assembly
allocates money, on a per pupil basis, to support such
initiatives as professional development, early childhood
and technology. Finally, the Assembly increased the
amount of aid for the core urban districts, especially
Providence, above and beyond the basic financing and the
targeted investments.
One of the complicating factors of school financing, of
course, is the inequity between the districts in terms
of need or student challenge. Putting a realistic dollar
figure on what it would take to overcome such challenges
is also maddeningly elusive. Still, as long as we know
that the absolute scores for student achievement are
closely correlated to median family income within a
given district, funding inequities mean we are not
offering every child an equal opportunity to learn.
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