Funding for education (and the public purpose of private schools)

As budget battles are waged across the state and the country, one of the dimensions in which I am always interested is education funding - both what and how people are talking about it.

Last week CNN ran an op-ed on why cutting funding for Head Start is a bad idea, written by Kathleen McCartney, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Around the same time, the Oakland Tribune published a story about the impact of last-in, first-out layoff policies. Both of these articles bring up subtle aspects of how the fight over educational funding threatens to undermine the very mechanisms that show the greatest promise for public education.

Did you know that $18 billion has been cut from public education in California in the last three years, and Gov. Brown's budget proposes to cut another $2.6 billion? If you did, it should not be a surprise to find out the Associate Press reports the last three years of California budget cuts have impacted poorer schools more than affluent ones, according to research done at UCLA.

This op-ed piece on the Huffington Post sums it up; on a state and national level, we simply aren't putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to providing the funding to give our children all that they deserve. Slavery may be over, but the control of funding creates inescapable equity traps for millions of powerless children. And yet, I'm surprised that the politicians don't discuss this issue in an equity frame. If we're going to make tough choices, the conversation should NOT be "what do we cut to make this budget work," but "how do we find the funding necessary"?

Our own backyard provides countless other instances of how the discussion of the budget obscures the underlying equity issues. For example, the California National Organization for Women provides this breakdown of how Gov. Brown's proposed budget would impact educational funding in the state. Did anyone else choke when you read that one way the state would save money is by a "Reduction of penalities to schools for exceeding K-3 Class Size Reduction Program limits"? This is mind-boggling; first we mandate certain class sizes based on the understanding that class size and student:teacher ratio have a direct impact on the classroom environment and the quality of children's learning experiences, and then we don't enforce those mandates, and then we claim that by not enforcing these mandates we are saving money? No we aren't; we're simply choosing to not spend money that would address one of many systematic inequities that are pervasive in our underfunded system of public education.

This year's NAIS annual conference was titled "Advancing Our Public Purpose", and one important thread of conversation throughout the conference was about the role of independent schools in public life. There are many dimensions to this work, which range from providing alternative educational models for society to consider (the "lab school" concept), to engaging in community service and direct action in the surrounding community, to preparing students who are able to participate in society as reasoned citizens. Most recently, this movement has evolved to include actively identifying and working to solve equity issues in public schools, communities, and institutions. I would classify understanding the ongoing fight over funding public education as one of these topics, and strongly believe it is our responsibility to advocate about, and not just to bemoan, the state of spending on public education. In an ideal future, public funding for education is an unquestioned priority, and the best research-based practices are incorporated into public education, making independent education unnecessary. But without an active, vocal movement to support that funding, we'll have keep laughing sadly at bumper stickers like the one at the top of this post, when we should be outraged.

You can hear Pat Bassett, Head of NAIS, talk more about the public purpose of private schools at this edutalk broadcast. It gets good at about the 15 minute mark, and then again at the 25 minute mark.