Pennies for Thoughts

With great reform comes great price tags. It seems that at the center of any reform conversation is the question of where the money is going to come from to fund the project. An obvious way to generate funds is through taxes, but even the slightest increase can be met with huge disapproval. In San Antonio, a 1/8th cent tax to fund the city’s full-day preschool programs in an effort to even the playing field for low-income and minority students is being met with significant opposition. According to the New York Times, the tax would cost the average family less than $8/year. With the importance of preschool and the devastating effects of the achievement gap before Kindergarten being demonstrated consistently across studies, is a couple of dollars too much to ask? Perhaps, especially since a June report from the US Census Bureau indicated that per pupil spending is up 1.1% from the previous year, once again stimulating the debate over whether spending more money leads to gains in the classroom. DC Public Schools, which consistently spend the most per student, is often the subject of great scrutiny because their test scores put them well below the national average despite their spending. Baltimore City ranks third highest among the 50 largest school districts in the country in per pupil spending, up at $14,711/student in the 2009-2010 school year and that’s only going to go up.  Less than three weeks ago, Mayor Rawlings-Blake signed the Bottle Tax into law, which will go into affect next year to improve school facilities. Because taxpayers are often very aware of how much money is going to schools due to new ballot measures and extensive media coverage, they are often quick to judge the quality of schools, increasing the pressure of reform efforts to show immediate effects.

Perhaps taxpayers and politicians could be better swayed with a cyclical argument (that admittedly, is not particularly new and rather cyclical itself.) Janet English discusses an economic model that suggests that a good teacher can dramatically impact the economy. High school graduates, she argues, earn 133% of what high school drop-outs make, and if a teacher could help a student reach their potential and earn as little as 1% more per year, that would equate to about $40,000 over the course of a lifetime per student.

 The question is, can we find the efforts to fund that given a few dollars here and there will amount to thousands of dollars at the end? And is it the lack of resources or the improper allocation of them that are causing are schools to fail? While 1/8 of a cent seems like such a trifle to provide an intervention that has shown to be so successful, since failed efforts have been so widely publicized and critiqued, it makes sense that the public is so resistant to these changes. Regardless, stronger and more sound studies of reform efforts will help us make sense/cents of it.