Making Money Matter Financing America's Schools (1999) / Chapter Skim
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4 Equity II—The Adequacy of Education
4 Equity II—The Adequacy of Education
Pages 101-133
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From page 101... ...
To almost everyone, it is a concept that is still emerging and evolving: there is as yet no consensus on its meaning and only limited understanding about how and what would be required to achieve it. Nonetheless, a growing number of state court decisions suggests that adequacy is becoming the new equity standard to which state school aid plans should be held.
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From page 102... ...
In New Jersey, the remedy has focused on resources, curricular offerings, and support services available to poor districts relative to wealthy ones. While the idea is to provide an adequate education for children in poor districts, the method for achieving this involves a focus on the details of programs, teacher quality, and technology.
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From page 103... ...
have found the state finance system inadequate using comparisons with state and national input and output regulations and standards. Sometimes the ex post tests of adequacy are also comparative rather than absolute in nature, as when outcome measures such as test scores or graduation rates are compared with national statistics.
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From page 104... ...
To facilitate the discussion, we develop a shorthand whereby we view "adequacy of what? " as a question of qualitative adequacy and "how much" as a question of quantitative adequacy.
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From page 105... ...
On one hand, let's say that a state school finance system embodies a broad definition of qualitative adequacy, incorporating most or all of the primary educational goods that will affect life chances significantly and/or that its quantitative adequacy level is sufficiently high that spending above the adequate level will not yield much in additional returns on the critical dimension of life chances. In this case, districts' freedom to spend whatever they want beyond the threshold may result in nice extras for students but will not compromise equality of opportunity.
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From page 106... ...
could reproduce the disequalizing consequences of traditional foundation plans. Foundation plans began in the early part of the 20th century and efforts by school finance reformers to overcome problems with flat grants, the early form of state aid to school districts.
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From page 107... ...
, the state supreme court used "efficiency" language in the constitution's education clause4 to declare the entire educational system inadequate and unconstitutional. The court established the objectives of an adequate education, proclaiming that it would provide students with the opportunity to develop at least the following seven capabilities: .
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From page 108... ...
Courts in Alabama, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire relied specifically on the Kentucky court's definition of an adequate education when providing guidance to their own state legislatures about crafting remedies for finance systems that had been declared inadequate.5 Other state courts developed their own specifications about what constitutes educational adequacy. In 1993, the Tennessee Supreme Court found that the state constitution required the education system to provide districts with sufficient funds to permit attainment of certain broadly defined educational outcomes: "The General Assembly shall maintain and support a system of free public schools that provides at least the opportunity to acquire general knowledge, develop the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally prepare students intellectually for a mature life" (Tennessee Small School Systems v.
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From page 109... ...
In Illinois, where the state constitution's education clause explicitly requires the state to "provide for an efficient system of high quality public educational institutions and services," the supreme court rejected attempts by plaintiffs to evaluate whether the quality of education offered in many of their districts met that constitutional standard. According to the court, "questions relating to the quality of education are solely for the legislative branch to answer" (Committee for Educational Rights v.
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From page 110... ...
1995~. Another possible dimension of an adequate education has been proposed in two Minnesota cases seeking, among other substantive education remedies, racial integration.7 Advocates there have sought to have an adequate education defined in such a way as to include a racially integrated education.
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From page 111... ...
The case was only settled in 1998 when the state supreme court, after rejecting another legislative reform in 1997, finally approved a detailed and comprehensive reform package. Experiences in other states have also highlighted the political difficulties that frequently follow adequacy rulings by courts.
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From page 112... ...
We have already observed that adequacy requires both identifying desired educational outcomes and then making decisions about what kinds of educational experiences (qualitative adequacy) and how much achievement (quantitative adequacy)
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From page 113... ...
A key issue is whether existing tests define and measure achievement in ways consistent with standards-based reform or other statements of desired educational outcomes. Large-scale, standardized tests are tools for determining what students know and can do in specified domains.
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From page 114... ...
professional judgment; and (4) a market-oriented approach based on the development of whole-school designs that school districts can "buy." (More detail about these
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From page 115... ...
In states where such testing systems do not exist, then the third and fourth approaches, based on professional judgment or whole-school designs, seem at present to be the only alternatives, where "getting to adequate" necessitates building instructional resource models to which costs can subsequently be assigned. Each of these alternatives results in an estimate of the cost of an adequate education for a presumed or hypothetical typical student.
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From page 116... ...
The resulting "index of educational performance" for school districts in New York state includes the average share of students above the standard reference point on 3rd- and 6thgrade Pupil Evaluation Program tests for math and reading, the share of students who receive a more demanding Regents diploma (which requires passing a series of exams) , and the high school graduation rate.
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From page 117... ...
Modeling holds great academic and theoretical interest and may suggest insights that would stimulate productive further research into the relationship between spending and student achievement, as when different modeling techniques lead to different cost estimates. However, in addition to complexity, statistical modeling has shortcomings that, given the present state of the art, limit its usefulness as a policy tool for determining the costs of providing an adequate education to the typical student.
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From page 118... ...
Statistical methods for determining adequate educational costs appear to have a greater level of precision than the other methods discussed in this section, so it is important to keep in mind the assumptions and judgments behind them. Given restrictions on current ability to quantify desirable outcomes and the weaknesses in the production theory on which cost models are constructed, the apparent precision of statistical models may be misleading.
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From page 119... ...
It can encourage state policy makers to fund specific instructional components and therefore restrict the discretion and initiative of local districts to organize resources and instructional delivery differently if they believe they can accomplish the same objectives more effectively. (This same criticism can also be leveled against the professional judgment approach described below.)
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From page 120... ...
But the assumption behind the adjustments for cost pressures that all districts currently adjust fully for the pressures beyond their control seems questionable and possibly unfair to the districts facing the highest pressures. Another limitation of the empirical observation approach, as of the statistical models discussed above, is that the minimum proficiency tests measure only certain cognitive outcomes, not the full range of cognitive, value, and behavioral outcomes that courts and legislatures have used to identify an adequate education.
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From page 121... ...
It is no longer widely used, however, and this system predated a concern to link these resource models to a notion of "adequacy." The notion of input adequacy, however, was implicit in these systems. Once adequacy became an explicit concern, a professional judgment approach was developed by Jay Chambers and Thomas Parrish in proposals they made for funding adequate education systems in Illinois in 1992 and in Alaska two years later (Chambers and Parrish, 1994~.
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From page 122... ...
(For example, the cost of utilities was calculated by taking the average cost of Wyoming districts in the prior year, with no attempt to specify resources necessary to reach a target temperature for classrooms when controlled for building insulation standards.) In this case, the professional judgment approach was used not only because of concerns about poorly specified outcome measures in education generally, but because the state of Wyoming did not utilize a standardized achievement test like that in Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, or Texas, even for narrowly defined academic outcomes, and so even poorly specified outcome data were not available.
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From page 123... ...
The professional judgment approach can, as noted, be used when concerns about poorly specified outcome measures in education and/or the unavailability of outcome measures preclude inferences about adequacy from either statistical models or empirical observation. It is imprecise, but it has the virtue that its imprecision is transparent.
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From page 124... ...
Whole-school designs are constructed to elevate student achievement. They are also intended by their designers to be salable to local school districts.
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From page 125... ...
It is unfair to hold a high-cost district or school to the same standard of adequacy in its educational program as a lower-cost district or school unless the district or school is given enough resources to compensate it for the higher costs that are outside its control. Indeed, if policy makers fail to take these cost differences into account as they revise their formulas for distributing education aid, they may leave high-cost districts serving disadvantaged students worse off than they were before.
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From page 126... ...
The 2.3 factor for special education comes from a study (Moore et al., 1988) using data from a nationally representative sample of 60 school districts in school year 1985-86 and represents the average cost of serving a special education student as a multiplier of the cost of serving a regular education student.
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From page 127... ...
Counting the number of children with disabilities is complicated because each state can use its own operational definitions for classifying such children, and districts can and do use different criteria for determining whether a child with a disability is counted in the special education or regular education population. Econometricians, as noted above, have recently made important theoretical and empirical strides in developing statistical models to adjust for the cost of public services beyond a local government's control and have applied these models to education (Duncombe and Yinger, 1999; Reschovsky and Imazeki, 1998~.
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From page 128... ...
average 189. This figure implies that the cost of providing an adequate education in those districts would exceed the cost of adequacy for the average district by 89 percent.
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From page 129... ...
, the results vary with the specification of the equation (as evidenced by the variation in results for New York City) , insufficient attention has been paid to some important issues (such as ensuring that the teacher salary measures used in the analysis are outside the control of schools so they are not confounded with teacher quality, and accounting for how the cost indices would be likely to vary depending on the desired level of educational outcomes)
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From page 130... ...
If research were conducted properly, policy makers would have a better sense of the balance of advantages and disadvantages between school and district size and student performance. The solution to scale diseconomies that was most widespread in the middle of the 20th century was to offer financial inducements for districts to close small schools and for states to consolidate small school districts.
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From page 131... ...
Adjusting for Inflation After the challenges of determining what an adequate education costs in any given year are met, another task remains: adjusting for inflation each year so appropriations tied to adequacy keep up with changes in the costs of education. Failure to adjust for inflation was one key reason why state foundation grants, a common finance mechanism earlier in the century, over time fell badly below the amounts districts needed to meet basic educational needs.
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From page 132... ...
Adequacy promises to be especially important for addressing the second of the three goals: reducing the nexus between student background characteristics and student achievement. It requires, rather than just permits, attention to cost adjustments, a topic addressed further in Chapter 7.
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From page 133... ...
. This last point emphasizes the fundamental problem with adequacy as a new standard for school finance namely, that it requires better knowledge than currently exists about how to determine what an adequate education costs.
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