Starving the Schools Into Submission, Cont'd

Mike Petrilli responds to the post below and comments from Eduwonk about the Petrilli/Finn/Hess strategy to catalyze a new era of education reform through the financial immiseration of the K-12 school system by concluding:

...if you want taxpayers to provide extra resources, let’s see some serious reforms. And that means not accepting the status quo as a given.

Again, I think Mike is having trouble adjusting the realities of the world we're living in today. The last 25 years have been times of plenty in America, at least for people in the upper strata of the economy. From 1983 to 2007 we had only three mild, short recessions and a great deal of real growth. More overall wealth meant more money available for public services. As a result there have been few if any severe, lasting cuts to funding for K-12 education. Most of the salient arguments have been about whether to give the schools more money. When those proposals were debated, many people made arguments more or less like the one Mike makes above: historically, the public school system hasn't shown very much upside resource sensitivity, in the sense that new dollars haven't led to a commensurate increase in student learning. Therefore new investments should be contingent on reforms to ensure that the new dollars actually make a difference. It's a valid argument and one with which I generally agree. There's also evidence to back it up: As I've noted elsewhere, in the early 1990s Massachusetts reformed it's funding system and spent new money while simultaneously putting in place an ambitious system of standards and accountability. Ten years later, it had vaulted ahead of other states in posting the best test scores in the nation.

But that was then. We are now dealing with a set of circumstances that few people alive today have experienced first-hand. Did Mike see the terrifying unemployment graph in the New York Times this morning? Here it is:

That's the picture of a 747 in free fall with a lot air yet remaining before the ground. It's far from obvious that the TARP program is working. The stimulus bill hasn't been passed. The Fed can't drop interest rates any lower. We're in deep trouble; the only question is how bad for how long.

State and local tax revenues, which fund over 90% of public education, are going to take a huge hit. So the question on the table is this: do we pass a stimulus bill that includes state and local revenue sharing, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience serious budget cuts, or do we not, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience extremely serious budget cuts. That's the choice that Petrilli characterizes as a matter of "extra resources." In blithely transferring the logic of how best to spend more money to the present day, Petrilli, Finn, and Hess are asserting that the optimal circumstances for education reform can be found among varying degrees of fiscal pain, as if marginal changes in funding are indistinguishable regardless of where they fall relative to current norms.

This is also a good time to make another point about school funding. It's often observed that spending on K-12 education has increased much faster than inflation over time on a per-student basis. This is true. It's also true that some of those dollars have been spent in strategically ineffective ways, particularly in hiring more teachers rather than better teachers. But a lot of the money was spent simply doing what a decent society does--transferring some of the wealth created in the private sector to public sector employees whose efforts make the private sector growth possible in the first place. I've suggested that education could be more productive with technology, but that argument holds much more for secondary and post-secondary grades. Younger children in particular will always need real live teachers to learn. Some of those children will go on to create vast fortunes and it's not unreasonable that a small fraction of that wealth be enjoyed by their teacher, or the person who teaches their children. From 1983 to 2007, real GDP per capita in the United States increased by almost two-thirds. Educators deserved to share in that growth, and I'm sure many could plausibly argue they should have shared more.