State-level school finance reforms and, to a lesser extent, increases in federal funding for schools have worked: America’s shamefully persistent inequities in school funding are finally a thing of the past. School funding is now generally progressive, meaning that students from poor families typically attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families in the same state.
In the 1920s, the NAACP conducted a series of studies showing that segregated Black schools in Georgia and Mississippi received just one-eighth and one-fifth, respectively, of what segregated White schools in the same states received. The period of school integration following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and other successes of the civil rights movement brought welcome changes but did not come close to ensuring that schools were appropriately funded. Finally, beginning in the 1970s, state supreme courts and legislatures began to force changes to school funding. Funding continued to increase, but it also began to be allocated differently. These reforms eventually eliminated the gaps in school funding for more and less affluent students.
In a new installment of Fordham’s Think Again series, I show that the era of “savage inequalities” in school funding has been over for years, presenting equity advocates and school reformers with new challenges.
State-level school finance reforms and, to a lesser extent, increases in federal funding for schools have worked: America’s shamefully persistent inequities in school funding are finally a thing of the past. School funding is now generally progressive, meaning that students from poor families generally attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families in the same state.
A number of studies cited in the policy brief make clear that the era of “savage inequalities” has been over since long before the Covid-19 pandemic:
The equalization of school funding in the United States is a major achievement, however belated. It is also not the end of the road for school-funding reform. Policymakers now face a new set of questions.
For example, many classroom resources, such as high-quality teachers, cost more to supply in high-poverty schools. At the same time, higher-poverty schools tend to have more students who are English learners and special education students. The combination of more expensive resources and student populations who need more special programs implies that, even when dollars are equalized, other types of resource inequalities will persist. Although education policies that make schools more efficient are the bread and butter of education reform, funding schools so that they can do better at equalizing those classroom resources would also help provide real equality of opportunity in America’s schools, even when it requires even greater funding progressivity.
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of the most recent edition of the Fordham Institute’s Think Again series of policy briefs, “Think Again: Is education funding in America still unequal?” written by Fordham National Research Director Adam Tyner.
Editor's note: Read more about this topic in Finn's essay in National Affairs, "The Accountability Challenge."
True “accountability” is fast vanishing from K–12 education in the U.S., whether we’re talking about results-driven accountability for schools or performance-based accountability for students. It’s definitely exited from the priorities of today’s reform leaders and policymakers. We are replacing academic achievement, gains, and gap-closings with whole-childism, “multiple measures,” holidays from testing and certainly from consequences, and we’re engaged in a myopic emphasis on “supporting” schools and “building their capacity” without also holding them to account for their performance or lack thereof.
Like a golfer who over-corrects his swing, we’re now missing the green, and likely to keep doing so.
I say over-corrected because, as I’ve acknowledged before, our original conception of school (and student) accountability—a tripod of standards, assessments and consequences—didn’t pay enough attention to “capacity.” We assumed that the skill needed to make things better—to turn things around—already existed within a school, a district, a CMO, even a state agency, and what was lacking was the will to change. So early accountability focused almost entirely on revving the will, the motivation to change, via an elaborate set of rewards for success and interventions (and embarrassment) when goals were not met. Very behaviorist.
We now know that that was partly wrong. A lot of places didn’t just lack the incentives to do things better, but also lacked the capacity to make that happen. “Capacity” is a loose term that spans many elements from knowledge to money, from time to energy, from organizational structure to leadership and “running room,” i.e., the freedom or autonomy to make big changes. Some places understood what they should do differently but were hemmed in by regulations, union contracts, politics, or plain old inertia. (Which begins to get us back to “will.”)
All those issues arose long before the pandemic, as did backlashes against testing and top-down efforts to change familiar institutions. Thus the easing of NCLB accountability for schools via waivers, then via ESSA, even as states backed off from end-of-course exams for students, colleges grew skittish about SATs, and grades inflated. The resurgence of “whole child” concerns such as social and emotional learning further drained whatever energy there was for an incentive system keyed to reading and math scores.
Recall that those scores had improved during the early NCLB years. I can’t prove that the easing of consequential accountability for schools and kids caused the leveling-off that followed, but they did coincide.
Then came the pandemic. Testing and accountability “holidays” became the norm. Nobody failed. We were pleased when schooling occurred. We were grateful when teachers and students showed up in school. But much learning time was lost forever and scores have plummeted. And the backsliding continues, long after the Covid emergency has passed, thanks to chronic absenteeism and other problems that pre-dated the pandemic.
All of which, you might think, adds up to the clearest possible sign that it’s time to revive old-fashioned results-driven accountability and put the tough back into tough-love. That’s where I am.
But that’s not what’s happening most places. Instead, we’re continuing to soften.
Consider two live examples.
First in New England, where a big contributor to the impressive if incomplete “Massachusetts miracle” over three decades has been the Bay State’s commitment to student-level accountability by requiring high schoolers to “pass the MCAS” in order to graduate. (You can read about it in an excellent account by former state education commissioner and Fordham board member David Driscoll.) Yes, accountability via students, combined with a lot of transparency for school performance, some school and district “takeovers” for non-performance, a soupçon of school choice, and a bunch more money.
Today, however, the MCAS graduation requirement is under assault from multiple directions, and there’s a fair chance that lawmakers will do away with it.
The argument won’t surprise you. As stated by Northampton legislator Joanne Comerford, “a single test shouldn’t determine if a student graduates from high school…. This is a test that disproportionately fails our most vulnerable and at-risk students…. We need to bring an end to punitive high-stakes testing.”
“Punitive high-stakes testing.” Now shift to the Midwest where the same argument caused Ohio legislators the other day to put a stake through the heart of the Buckeye State’s “third grade reading guarantee,” the requirement that kids pass a reading test before being promoted to fourth grade. Going forward, they won’t be “held back” unless their parents consent, which it’s fair to predict won’t happen very often. (I should add that the multifaceted state budget bill containing that setback also did great stuff on other K–12 fronts.)
Understand that neither the MCAS graduation requirement nor the third-grade “reading guarantee” (found in several states, including Mississippi with its own recent “reading miracle”) is cruel, insensitive, or rigid. Tough, OK, but accompanied by work-arounds, exceptions, second chances, and remedial arrangements for kids who for various reasons just can’t pass the standardized test on schedule. The point isn’t to punish. It’s to ensure that youngsters moving on to the next stage of their education—or their life—have learned the essentials that they will need to succeed there. Be tough about that now or they’ll run into tough problems later.
The same principle holds for school-level accountability, which was the essential element of NCLB—and earlier efforts by a handful of states to focus on the results achieved (and gains made) within individual schools and sometimes classrooms. Praise and reward success—but also intervene in ways that force changes in event of failure.
The interventions and turnaround efforts took many forms, often not too threatening or disruptive—and therefore often not too successful. Takeovers of districts by states seldom led to academic gains, while districts were loath to intervene in schools in drastic ways: replacing the staff, replacing the education plan, outsourcing the school, even closing it entirely and moving its pupils to better schools. Instead, interventions often took the form of plans and promises, of meetings and “technical assistance” and paper shuffling. Which is to say, not really tough.
Are we at a point in time when a renaissance is possible, when the woes of student achievement and pandemic learning loss could relaunch a regime that’s both tough and loving—well, let’s say skill-developing and capacity-building—for schools that aren’t cutting it? Can we get that balance right? Or are we totally gun-shy when it comes to “tough”?
A worrying sign is a brand-new report on “The Path Forward for School Accountability” from the generally-estimable National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. Its sixteen pages are long on helping, stakeholder engagement, “principled design processes,” “support systems,” “improvement planning,” and “comprehensive” approaches. Nothing in it is objectionable, and much is worth taking seriously. But you will search in vain for consequences, for interventions, for what to do to or about a school that may lack the will even when it possesses the skill.
As I said up top, we’ve overcompensated. Perhaps, as in so many other realms of modern American life, we’ve also gone soft, forfeiting the will to deal with “will” by compelling changes that people don’t much want to make?
It’s not easy in a free society. Make too many people do things they don’t want to do and you’ll probably get voted out of office.
But it’s not impossible. Restaurants get shut by the health department if they have vermin. Pilots and bus drivers get grounded if they can’t pass the licensing test. Swimming pools and water systems are supposed to get shut if contaminated. You can’t cross bridges that fail safety inspections or inhabit a house that doesn’t meet the fire code.
It’s not impossible. We can be tough when health and safety are at stake. Why would we keep a school open when its students aren’t learning? Why would we “license” a kid for fourth grade or graduation who cannot pass the test?
We need a rebirth of accountability in American K–12 education—while also still taking “capacity” seriously. Skills for sure. But when the will isn’t there, consequences must follow.
You may have heard that conservative parent groups are banning books. From the Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel Maus, to seemingly anything that addresses LGBT themes, such groups are challenging their inclusion in libraries and on curricula. In fact, the American Library Association (ALA) lamented a record number of book “bans” in 2022.
Well, I spent years as an English teacher, spending my days reading books with kids. These aren’t book bans. This isn’t a “culture war” debate over censorship, but an inevitable, even healthy argument that boils down to which books, for which reason, at what age, and in what venue.
Calling each of these decisions a “ban” blurs categorical distinctions that deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a difference between a school switching one book out for another in its curriculum, a librarian removing a book because it’s outdated or age-inappropriate, a major company like Target or Amazon de-platforming a book, and the federal government black-bagging dissidents found with samizdat materials. The latter two may in fact be bans—they limit everyone’s access to a text—but anyone who wants to can easily go down the street and buy for themselves plenty of books not in school libraries.
In reality, politicians and activists on both left and right engage in restricting access to books. If anything, the left engages in broader censorship. The pressure on Target to pull Irreversible Damage from its shelves and Amazon to remove of When Harry Became Sally came from the left, and such actions restricted more people’s access to these books than the decision to pull Gender Queer from a handful of school libraries. But even in these cases, it’s neither illegal to own a copy nor impossible to obtain one. Neither were “banned.”
In reality, even free societies are constantly engaged in little acts of censorship. Barnes and Noble places certain genres in the back and covers certain glossy magazines with opaque boards. Theaters restrict access to violent movies. Local ordinances determine what shops can go where.
Consider a far smaller venue: my own former classroom, where I regularly included Frederick Douglass’s autobiography in the course of the year. However, its brutal descriptions of beatings, rapes, and murders proved too visceral for twelve-year-olds to handle. I replaced it with A Raisin in the Sun, allowing my class to both cover America’s history of oppression and read a play. Did I ban Douglass’s autobiography? No one would reasonably suggest so.
And yet that is precisely what a district in Tennessee did with Maus; it merely took it off the curriculum. Perhaps the most controversial and even unjustifiable book “ban” from last year, it is really the quintessential example. A handful of major media outlets compared its removal from a curriculum to Nazi book burnings and holocaust denial. But the problem isn’t that they “banned” the book. They didn’t. Rather, they took it off for a questionable reason—vulgarity—with no recommended replacement such as The Diary of Anne Frank.
There are countless reasons to include or exclude a book in a library and on a curriculum: difficulty, genre, age appropriateness, thematic variety, aesthetic value, and historical significance, among others. Tastes change. Societal values change. And so curricula will change. The books our students read in school shape their character, form their worldview, and more broadly inculcates our national values. What our students read is no flippant affair.
Calling such changes “bans” stymies this essential discussion. A choice between The Diary of Anne Frank or Maus raises interesting questions. Are graphic novels equal in literary merit to traditional texts? What effect on literacy development would each genre have? How and when do we expose our children to the horrors in human history? Can we have these arguments civilly still?
It’s a debate that goes back millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates and his interlocutors argued over what passages of Homer to include and avoid in the education of children. They knew that what children read forms their minds and characters. The heroes they lionize or villains they condemn will shape the kind of individuals they themselves will strive to be. Valorize Achilles and we may find our students rash and blindly ambitious.
The average high school English curriculum covers anywhere from six to twelve books in a year, and the typical school library houses 10–15 thousand books. The inclusion and exclusion of this or that book is unavoidable. It’s basic curation and curricular construction. And we must have some limiting principles. No one would want a school shooter’s manifesto to provide the anchor text of a ninth grade English unit nor copies of Maxim to furnish the library in a kindergarten classroom.
Perhaps the more controversial question is “who decides?” The ALA doesn’t decry teachers or school boards banning books, but rather parental “censorship groups.” No one questions a librarian chucking an antiquated board book from the ‘60s. They bristle at parents dictating that the librarian do so.
Surely, some of these parent groups’ demands have been outlandish. Most recently, several organizations criticized a manga series, Assassination Classroom. The book is sophomoric—think Captain Underpants for high schoolers—but hardly nefarious or vulgar. Conversely, many complaints are understandable. An NBC article claimed that LGBT themes outraged parents but made no mention of what actually caused offense: graphic depictions of oral sex and masturbation.
But again, this is arguing over a book’s merit, not who decides. In short, parents should have some say in their child’s education. Most schools are public institutions, after all. If parents want to protest a book with sexually explicit images at a school board, I welcome it. That’s what a democratic, representative political process looks like. The school board and teachers are then welcome to acquiesce to or reject their demands. Were parents protesting over insufficient funding or school safety, I think the press would treat these parental groups differently.
How well do our public high schools prepare students—especially low-income students—for future success? A working paper from analysts at Brown and Harvard addresses that question, focusing on a number of consequential middle- and longer-term outcomes.
The analysts use student-level data from the Massachusetts Department of Education, including rich information on demographics, enrollment, test scores, and student intentions (via surveys). Their dataset allows them to control for factors that prior value-added studies have not been able to, such as parents’ level of education and students’ plans after high school. They focus on students who entered ninth grade for the first time during the 2002–03 and 2003–04 school years, which gives them enough time to look at longer-term outcomes, such as college attendance, graduation from two- or four-year colleges, and earnings at roughly age thirty. They also look at short-term outcomes, including test scores, attendance, and whether a student is on track to graduate.
Because of interest in how schooling impacts low-income students, the public high schools in the sample (all 106 of them, including nine charter schools and twenty-seven vocational/technical schools), have enrollments consisting of at least 25 percent low-income students, determined through eligibility for free and reduced-priced lunch in eighth grade. The analysis uses the first public high school a student attended to measure impacts; thus the results include treatment and intent-to-treat outcomes (in light of students who may switch schools after initial identification). Their school value-added model calculates a school’s effect on a given long-term outcome controlling for student prior achievement, demographic characteristics, and the survey data, including parents’ education. Analysts are comparing results from the low-income schools to those of the average school in the total sample.
Similar students who attend schools at the 80th percentile of the value-added distribution (that is, schools good at boosting student achievement) are 6 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college and earn 13 percent, or $3,600, more annually at age thirty compared to peers who attend schools performing at the 20th percentile. Given the many factors that influence students’ later-life outcomes, these school effects are considered quite large.
Next, the analysts look at whether a school’s impact on short-term measures—including tenth grade test scores, attendance, and the advancement of academic progress and college aspirations—predicts its impact on longer-term measures. The answer, mostly, is yes. For instance, schools that advance four-year college graduation rates more tend to be those that improve students’ test scores and college aspirations. And schools that improve two- and four-year college-going also boost students’ earnings. But since short-term measures, like attendance and tenth grade test scores, remain significant predictors of earnings, this suggests that high schools influence earnings above and beyond their impacts on postsecondary educational attainment. They also find that the impact of peers—quantified via a composite measure based on previous research—largely operates through the short-term measures.
What’s more, the schools that improve outcomes the most are not simply those that serve relatively few economically disadvantaged students. When they plot each school’s effect on longer-run outcomes against the share of students from low-income families in the school, they find that some schools that serve high proportions of economically disadvantaged students have substantial positive impacts on their later life outcomes.
Finally, since nearly a quarter of students in the study attend vocational/technical schools, analysts break out their outcomes separately. Compared to non-CTE high schools, they find a unique advantage stemming from some CTE schools; specifically, they significantly raise long-term earnings, even as they have below-average effects on four-year graduation rates. Put another way, the report says the “impact of CTE schools on later earnings does not run through educational attainments.” That bodes well for students in more effective CTE schools who choose to head directly into the workforce and/or delay college enrollment.
All of this is good news. Poverty is not destiny for our young people, as high schools can help make a meaningful difference. Those that improve students’ test scores and college aspirations more than we’d expect also improve longer-run outcomes more than we’d expected, so yes, test scores really do matter. High schools can also offer different pathways for improving different life outcomes for different types of students, but one thing must be the same: a high level of quality.
SOURCE: Preeya P. Mbekeani, John Papay, Ann Mantil, and Richard J. Murnane, “Understanding High Schools’ Effects on Longer-Term Outcomes,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (February 2023).
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