I was pleased to read this morning that the Texas Legislature is now finally reconsidering the error of adopting into law the 65% requirement pitched by pundits a few years back as a revenue neutral “solution” for increasing education spending.
Of course, it was in Texas that the actual agenda of those pundits was revealed in a memo exposed in the Austin American Statesman.
Doug Elmer of the University of Kansas and I wrote about the 65 cent solution in the January 2009 issue of Educational Policy (The Politics of Off-the-Shelf School Finance Reform).
What makes the 65 cent solution so interesting, in retrospect, is that it was a “reform” that in some states become legislation, but was never based on any evidence whatsoever that allocating 65 cents of every “education dollar” improves outcomes. In fact, Doug Elmer and I discuss the best empirical research on this topic which suggests otherwise.
Further, setting aside those good empirical studies of the relationship between instructional budget shares and student outcomes, the basic argument for the 65 cent solution was utterly absurd. The 65 cent solution was based on the argument that public school systems are inefficient and wasteful and should be told how to use their money. So… the 65 cent target was selected as roughly (slightly higher than) the average percent of current expenditures allocated to instruction (based on NCES expenditure data). So… the idea is that school districts are inneficient and wasteful in general, therefore we should ask them all to spend roughly like the average public school district? Good thinkin’… eh?
Bruce Baker is an Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. From 1997 to 2008 he was a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. He is lead author with Preston Green (Penn State University) and Craig Richards (Teachers College, Columbia University) of Financing Education Systems, a graduate level textbook on school finance policy published by Merrill/Prentice-Hall. Professor Baker has written a multitude of peer reviewed research articles on state school finance policy, teacher labor markets, school leadership labor markets and higher education finance and policy. His recent work has focused on measuring cost variations associated with schooling contexts and student population characteristics, including ways to better design state school finance policies and local district allocation formulas (including Weighted Student Funding) for better meeting the needs of students.
Baker, along with Preston Green of Penn State University are co-authors of the chapter on Conceptions of Equity in the recently released Handbook of Research Education Finance and Policy, and co-authors of the chapter on the Politics of Education Finance in the Handbook of Education Politics and Policy and co-authors of the chapter on School Finance in the Handbook of Education Policy of the American Educational Research Association.
Professor Baker has also consulted for state legislatures, boards of education and other organizations on education policy and school finance issues and has testified in state school finance litigation in Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. He is a member of the Think Tank Review Panel, a group of academic researchers who conduct technical reviews of publicly released think tank reports on education policy issues.
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