Financing Public Schools

Theory, Policy, and Practice

Kern Alexander, Richard G. Salmon, F. King Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415645355
• eBook ISBN: 9781135106553
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Financing Public Schools moves beyond the basics of financing public elementary and secondary education to explore the historical, philosophical, and legal underpinnings of a viable public school system. Coverage includes the operational aspects of school finance, including issues regarding teacher salaries and pensions, budgeting for instructional programs, school transportation, and risk management. Diving deeper than other school finance books, the authors explore the political framework within which schools must function, discuss the privatization of education and its effects on public schools, offer perspectives regarding education as an investment in human capital, and expertly explain complex financial and economic issues. This comprehensive text provides the tools to apply the many and varied fiscal concepts and practices that are essential for aspiring public school administrators who aim to provide responsible stewardship for their students.

Special Features:

• "Definitional Boxes" and "Key Terms" throughout chapters enhance understanding of difficult concepts.
• Coverage of legal, political, and historical issues provides a broader context and more complex understanding of school finance.
• Offers in-depth exploration of business management of financial resources, including fiscal accounting, school facilities, school transportation, financing with debt, and the nuances of school budgeting techniques.

Chapter 1
The Nature and Theory of the Public School

Topical Outline of Chapter

• The Theory of Public Schools
• Virtues of Public Schools
• The Public School Philosophy
• The Enlightenment and Public Schools
• The French Connection
• Adam Smith and Public Instruction
• Economic Development and Public Instruction
• Common Schools for Public Instruction
• A System of Schools
• Public School Precepts

Introduction

An understanding of public school finance requires some basic knowledge of the nature of public schools and how they developed in both their philosophical and historical contexts. To know only the mechanisms of how public tax dollars are distributed by governments for the purpose of education without knowing the purpose for which they are distributed is to know the means but not be aware of the rationale for the ends to be achieved. This book will go into substantial detail about the technicalities of the allocation of funds for public schools, but first it is appropriate that a few words in this chapter be devoted to the philosophy and purpose undergirding the idea of public schools.

The Theory of Public Schools

Public schools are an organized means to educate the citizens of a republic, schools of a republic. Public schools were not created merely to teach persons to read and write but, importantly, to provide universal education for the purpose of maintaining a republican form of government. It is a tenet of public school philosophy that a knowledgeable people will reject tyranny, and if the people understand their options, they will recognize and revere liberty and equality. Yet, learned people do not choose a republican form of government in the abstract; rather, they adopt such a government to acquire and maintain a government of virtue. A virtuous government holds freedom, liberty, and equality in the highest regard and dispenses social justice to achieve that end. A government without virtue is not worth preserving. It is believed that an educated populace is a condition precedent to achieve virtue in government. Sustaining a virtuous government requires a people of sensitivity and compassion willing to act for the commonweal. Knowledge elevates persons above the state of nature. In an uneducated world without governments to regulate and without “Knowledge of the face of the Earth,” Hobbes’ language in Leviathan, citizens cannot discern between the individual liberties that must be subordinated to the mutual benefit of society and those that should not.

A virtuous government must be buttressed by an educational system that instills ideals reflecting the social justice that should be fostered in society. The system of public common schools as envisaged by the American founders and their contemporaries in France represents society’s best effort to broadly diffuse knowledge to effectuate the end of a desirable government. The United States is still involved in the public common school experiment, started less than two centuries ago, that seeks to achieve these ideals.

Virtues of Public Schools

In a 2008 book of remarkable scholarship, Goldin and Katz,¹ two Harvard economists, capture the unique historical essence of the American public school. They assert that the twentieth century could be appropriately called either the “American Century” or the “Human Capital Century” in which great strides were taken toward worldwide mass education, and at its base in all of the developed nations was the American concept of public schools. Other countries that had become economically developed with high standards of living had emulated or adopted the American model of public schools. Goldin and Katz tell us that from about 1830 to 1900 the United States set out on a path of public universal education of which European philosophers had dreamed, but America implemented. This “American Century was an era of long-term economic growth and declining inequality.”² At the heart of this undiminished progress, “the secret of American success,” was the system of public schools.³ Following the American lead, the now advanced nations of the world adopted, with slight variations, the concept of public schools. That which was unique about American education were attributes that Goldin and Katz identify and group into seven categories of virtues.⁴

These virtues, Goldin and Katz say, are “a set of characteristics that originate in basic democratic egalitarian principles” unique to a new nation unshackled by old world culture and mores. The virtues they discern as inimitable and peerless elsewhere among nations produced a rapid pervasive unparalleled diffusion of knowledge.⁵ The virtues of American public schools are these:

1. Public funding
2. Public instruction
3. Secular control
4. Open access
5. Lay-controlled independent districts
6. Gender neutrality
7. Forgiveness

Goldin and Katz summarize these virtues to be basically a common system of equality of opportunity.⁶ Briefly, these may be elaborated as follows: Public funding means “free,” no fees for the children, all costs are paid by the public collectively. Public instruction is “public provision,”⁷ meaning that children are instructed by publicly employed teachers certified by the state who teach a publically, democratically approved curriculum. Secular control refers to separation of church and state as standard; sectarian ideologies and religious dogma are not a part of the curriculum and are left to home and church. Open access is an implicit virtue, but at times it is easily overlooked or desensitized as with issues of nationality, race, culture, ethnicity, disability, etc. The virtue of lay control is an unexcelled earmark of the American public school. Systems in Europe were by and large controlled by a state central authority, certainly France, England, countries of northern Europe, and arguably Germany, after Bismarck. In America, local control pervaded; control was vested in 50 states composed of thousands of school districts, run by a hundred thousand or more democratically elected lay persons. Goldin and Katz recognize that the downside of the American system was a high degree of fiscal inequality, yet it had a compensating and contrasting attribute of being of the local community, non-elite, and close to the people.⁸ Of singular importance is the virtue of gender neutrality. American public schools, from the origins, rejected the idea of separate schools for boys and girls, as had been practiced in the private systems of Europe, primarily religious schools that had prevailed for centuries. In America, the “[h]igh school entering classes in 1900 … contained an almost equal number of boys and girls. Considerably more girls than boys were in attendance in the upper secondary school grades, and a larger proportion of females than males eventually graduated.”⁹ Finally, the last virtue expounded by Goldin and Katz is that of forgiveness. Unlike most education in European countries, the American public school system has the quality of tolerance, indulgence, and pardon. It offers at various levels a second chance for children or youth who at some point in their education did not attain a requisite level of performance. The system has extended allowance to those who for some personal or societal reason have not mastered or cleared a particular educational hurdle.

In various ways most of these virtues have been emulated, in some measure, by advanced countries of the world; yet, in no instance have such virtues been as pervasive as they have been in the American public school system. Today, however, there is a tendency in the United States to question the efficacy of certain of these virtues with centralizing legislation, reducing lay local democratic control, decreasing public funding, practicing unequal fiscal distribution, and reducing government funding of public instruction in favor of private instruction.

The Public School Philosophy

The public schools were formed from philosophical reasoning that aspired to betterment in government through commonality, mutuality, and harmony of interests. The common school followed the idea of community as opposed to that of “individual self-interest” and elevation of self over the interests of the state. The public school’s philosophical foundation is found early in Aristotle’s Politics¹⁰ wherein he says that each citizen is pledged in allegiance to the state to place the interests and common good of all above those of self and separate interests. Aristotle maintained that the impulse of man, a “political animal,” is to increase individual pleasure and reduce personal pain by the elevation of the condition of the entire community. The state, according to Aristotle, “has a natural priority over the household and over the individual among us. For the whole must be prior to the part.”¹¹ This pursuit of the common good through political association enables liberty and justice for the individual to prevail.

BOX 1.1 Aristotle on Education

… it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private … Neither must we suppose that anyone of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.

Source: Aristotle, The Politics, Book VIII, in Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, edited by Stephen Everson, translated by Benjamin Jowett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 195.

The Aristotelian argument simply maintained that all are better served by the “wisdom of collective judgments” than by determinations of individuals.¹² In Aristotle’s view, popular judgment was also more efficient simply because in the long run decisions made in consideration of self-interest will only consider a part and not the whole. The vagaries of decision by many parts without considering the common good will inevitably result in an inefficient government. Public schools are no different. Decisions to advance the conditions of all people are more likely to be effective and efficient if made by the many rather than the few. It is said that Canning, the prime minister of England, in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Nature and Theory of the Public School
• 2 Fundamental Rights and State School Finance Litigation
• 3 The System and Public Schools
• 4 Equality of Opportunity: The Rationale
• 5 Education as an Investment in Human Capital
• 6 The Politics of School Finance
• 7 Fiscal Capacity and Tax Effort in the Funding of Public Schools
• 8 Taxation for Public Schools
• 9 The Federal Role in Financing Education
• 10 Teacher Compensation
• 11 Public Funding of Private Schools: Charter Schools and Vouchers
• 12 Education Production Functions: Whether Money Matters
• 13 Analyzing Equity and Adequacy of State School Finance
• 14 State School Funding Methods
• 15 Financial Accounting
• 16 Financing School Facilities
• 17 School Budget Development and Administration
• 18 Risk Management, Student Transportation, and School Food Services
• Index