Imagine two public schools within a 10-mile radius of each other. Imagine the buildings. What do the classrooms look like? What kind of technology do you see? How many students fill the desks? What about the students can you see? Can you tell what kind of potential they have or their socioeconomic background?
Chances are high that your visions of these schools are really similar. Maybe you allowed for some architectural differences. Perhaps one classroom has a new, younger teacher and the other has an older, seasoned veteran. However, there is no human instinct that assumes one of those buildings hasn’t received proper maintenance since the 1950s. No one imagines that in one of the schools STEM education is defined by pipe cleaners, scissors, and cardboard while the other school provides each student an iPad and digital printers.
Did you know that our human instinct is to assume equality! Wonderful!. But, right now, in public education, equality is not a reality.
As we enter into the months of national, state, and local budget building it is important to equip ourselves with information on how education is currently being funded and how funding allocations are ensuring each student has access and opportunity to economic mobility.
The Dysfunction of Funding Formulas
Today, equality in educational funding is nonexistent. Here’s how funding disparities that perpetuate inequality happen and sustain themselves in CA and other states:
- Each public school district is independently run, and their primary funding sources are property taxes collected within the school district.
- The state determines the budgetary baseline allocation per student, per year.
- If property taxes collected in a school district don’t meet the budgetary baseline, the state makes up the difference. These are called “state-funded” school districts.
- If property taxes collected in a school district exceed the budgetary baseline, the district gets to keep the excess. These are called “community-funded” school districts.
An example of a substantial funding disparity can be seen in Santa Clara County, CA, also known as the heart of Silicon Valley. In Santa Clara County:
- A state-funded school district receives $10,000 per student per year
- A community-funded school district receives between $13,000- $21,000 per student per year
As you can see, the disparity in some districts is more than double. What is the result of this difference? The result is that many community-funded schools are state-of-the-art, sprawling campuses with amenities that not only lead to better academic performance, but improved student well-being.
The higher the academic performance, the more likely a school or district is deemed as “good”. These “good” school districts then attract more affluence to purchase homes in the neighborhoods. More affluence drives property values higher, which lead to continued property tax excess that a school district collects. This disparity becomes self-perpetuating and increasingly extreme.
The Impact of Funding Disparity and Dysfunction
Now, let’s revisit our imaginations. You and your neighbor that lives across the street have the same technical experience, the same job, at the same company. You report daily to a ramshackle warehouse and climb five flights of stairs to reach a spartan office space with desks held together by duct tape. The lights flicker. The pipes hiss and groan.
Your neighbor reports to a modern cathedral, sleek and futuristic, equipped with the latest technology and office space that invites collaboration, ideation, and enthusiasm. Since your neighbor lives on the “right side of your street”, they get to work here. Because of your address, on the “other” side of the street, your key fob won’t work at this job site.
If this sounds absurd to you that’s good—because it is absurd. Yet, this is the daily reality of our public education system. Some students are given selective access to a better education—and thus a better future—based on where they live.
Worse yet, the impacts of funding disparities exacerbate disadvantages for students already facing the steepest odds. Most of the students on the “other” side of the funding lines come from lower income families, are English language learners, and face terrible food and housing insecurities. Add to this education inequality, and now too many students become trapped in a cycle of poverty.
If you hold any doubts, or think success is just a matter of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, consider the following statistics from Santa Clara County, CA:
- State-funded school district’s math and science test scores see a near-80% failure rate.
- Roughly 40% of students in state-funded schools leave high school ineligible for college.
- Teachers in state-funded schools often have to teach groups of students in different grades in the same classroom at the same time.
- Field trips at state-funded schools are financially impossible.
As you can see, this is a math and policy problem. No individual student is responsible for these outcomes. No alternative personal decision tree would solve the problem for these students. Students are participants in a system that says to them “You live there, so you get less.”
The Funding Disparity Distorts Everything
Teachers who are properly supported can truly change lives. I’ve seen it happen. I hope for some, I’ve made it happen. But, the funding disparity has made it so that teachers who want to make a difference and help the students who need it most can’t do it. Teachers making this choice face innumerable hardships and make profound sacrifices that we ask of no other profession that requires a secondary degree. When students are given the bare minimum, so are teachers.
This status quo is nothing short of a crisis for state-funded schools. Teacher compensation is typically the #1 expenditure in the budget of every school district. So, the competition for the best teachers is fierce. And it should be!
But, when community-funded schools can offer higher pay, smaller class sizes, state-of-the-art facilities, cutting-edge technology in every classroom, and discretionary budgets for field trips and other experiential learning, state-funded schools—that often report teachers taking second jobs to make ends meet—aren’t even able to play the same game as community-funded schools, much less compete in the same ballpark.
The advantage is so outsized that no one should resent teachers who need to make pragmatic decisions for their families. That outrage would be another distortion. They too are participants of the systemic inequality propped up by today’s funding formulas.
The Solution is Obvious
The amount and quality of resources made available to students is directly linked to academic outcomes. Following along, that typically leads to improved economic outcomes and mobility later in life. So when I say that the disparity is real and that it fundamentally alters lives, that is what I mean.
And the solution is obvious: parity.
If you thought I was going to say equality, you wouldn’t be wrong, but I think that word is imprecise. While “inequality” and the sense of justice it entails is apt when discussing the systemic quality of the issues, there’s a reason the word disparity has come up more frequently in this discussion.
When we call for equalization, it can evoke a scarcity mindset in critics who immediately wonder who the money is going to be taken from. Parity instead calls for raising the per-student budgetary baseline at such a level that would guarantee equal opportunities for every student. Such a raised baseline should ensure the material conditions of receiving an education in this country aren’t limited to one group of students and propulsive of another based solely on where they live.
This is NOT a radical idea. Even in Switzerland—a country synonymous with affluence—it would be considered strange to finance public education based on income levels and not parity. I would argue that “strange” is being kind.
There are an abundance of choices to make to ensure an abundance of options for all our students. Our current formulas for financing public education are unjust. It is our moral imperative to fundamentally rethink our funding formulas. We know what’s right. It’s time to make it happen.
Data Source: Fiscal Year: 2021-22 P-2; Source: CA Dept. of Ed. Fiscal Services Division Apportionment