The School Poverty Gambit

In National Review Online, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn, and Rick Hess argue that any kind of stimulus-driven state revenue sharing program that prevented painful budget cuts to the public schools would be bad for students, because what the public schools really need right now are painful budget cuts:

There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value — and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions...Team Obama and its Congressional allies could...require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.

So, a combination of regulatory malpractice in DC along with greed and incompetence on a world-historical scale on Wall Street creates the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, pushing the already-shaky American auto industry over the brink. Republican senators from non-union states see this as an opportunity to destroy the U.A.W., which bears a significant but ultimately (having not caused said economic crisis nor designed and marketed cars people don't want to buy) minority share of the responsibility for the auto industry's woes. And Hess, Finn, and Petrilli say "Hey, good idea, and while we're at it, let's go after the teachers unions too!" Investors and shareholders are being forced to take a haircut because the greedy, incompetent companies they own drove themselves into bankruptcy. Teachers are supposed to take a haircut because--just because?

Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work. It's true, as the authors note, that funding for public education has grown faster than inflation over time and that the system hasn't had to deal with a debilitating financial shock in a long time (Most people, I suspect, consider this to be a good thing.) But there have been recessions and financial crises and plenty of marginal changes in the rate of education spending growth. There have even been budget cuts, once you start to break down the numbers at the local level. Are there any examples--any?--of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefitted students in the long run? Overall spending differences also provide some useful information here. Which state has better education policies and results: Mississippi or Massachusetts? 

Or to put it another way, Petrilli et al seem to think that because more money won't make a bad school system better (which is often true), less money will do the trick. In reality, the most likely consequence of massive school budget cuts--besides taking a lot of money out of the hands of middle-class workers who will respond by reducing consumption and driving us further into a Depression--is to cause everyone to hunker down in survival mode and make school reform harder. Successful school models, e.g. KIPP, often require extra resources to implement. Ditto grand bargain proposals like the Michelle Rhee tenure-for-merit-pay plan. The idea that the public school establishment can be impoverished into submission is unsupported by evidence and too clever by half.