Hi everyone!
I hope you have all had a successful last two weeks of classes and did well on your midterms!!
Today I am going to again be discussing the issues that exist in funding public high schools and school districts in the US, but will be more heavily focusing on the solutions, and attempted solutions. I will be looking at different attempts at education reform in the United States and abroad and I will analyze what has and has not worked. I will not attempt to come to a solution, as this would be impossible, but would like all of you, my readers, to get a better understanding of where this issue stands today in terms of the courts and in terms of finding a solution. I hope you find this helpful in deciding where you stand on this issue, and on educational reform as a whole.
Before getting into the solutions that have been proven to work, I am going to start with the biggest misconception about school reform and about solving the issues surrounding funding public high schools (Carmel, 2018). Most people assume that the issue that exists right now is that schools are not receiving equal funding. They assume that my funding schools equally, all children would get a proper and fair education. Many states have thought this to be true and have tried to implement this as a solution. This does not work. (Carmel, 2018)
Many of the children that attend the underfunded schools live in underfunded areas, which I provide research on in my previous articles. These children typically live in high risk environments and require extra attention from the school due to trauma or unstable homes. In these cases, equal funding will not create an equal education (Carmel, 2018). These schools need more funding and the policy that is created needs to focus on providing an equal education for each student not equal funding for each student. This is where the solution needs to begin. Once we can get more people to understand this crucial difference, real change can start being made (Carmel, 2018).
Okay, now that I have covered that point, let’s take a look at what some of the research says would be the best solution to implement.
Most experts and most studies reveal that removing the income based funding policy which occurs at the local level for most districts would be the first step in creating more equitable education for students in the United States. This system is directly linked with the unequal access for students in low income areas. (Azzam, 2005) By removing this policy, politicians at the state and federal level will be forced to focus more heavily on the policy surrounding state and federal funding. This is true because the vast majority of funding comes from this income based local funding approach, and with that removed there will be more pressure on federal and state officials (Azzam, 2005).
This brings me directly into the next part of the solution. Once there is a general understanding that an equitable education does not mean an equally funded education, and once we remove the policies that exist surrounding local funding (it being based off of income), the next step would be to begin developing federal and state policies that distribute sufficient funds to each district so student are provided an equitable education (Weiner, 2015).
This would involve states working with local governments and getting funding from the federal government in order to conduct need assessments of each district and of the students in each specific school. It would require research into what schools are receiving what amount of funding and would require a better understanding of how states are currently distributing their educational funds to the different districts that lie within their borders (Azzam, 2005; Carmel, 2018).
While this would be a lot of research and would definitely require significant funding from the federal and state level, it would decrease our poverty levels, as children would be able to gain an equitable education regardless of income level, allowing them to break the cycle of poverty, and it would help us to close the racial achievement gap that exists in our nation.
These positive possibilities have been proven in several studies and would have a dramatic effect on our nation and the culture within it (Carmel, 2018).
Works Cited
Azzam, Amy M. Azzam M. “Special Report / The Funding Gap.” The Funding Gap – Educational Leadership, Feb. 2005,
www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb05/vol62/num05/-The-Funding-Gap.aspx.
Carmel Martin, Ulrich Boser. “A Quality Approach to School Funding.” Center for American Progress, 13 Nov. 2018,
www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2018/11/13/460397/quality-approach-school-funding/.
Weiner, Shoshana. “Public Education Funding: Is There a Solution?” Tufts University , Tufts , 2015.
I thought this was a very insightful blog and properly discussed potential avenues to help improve our public schooling system. I agree that equal funding does not equal education, and that outside factors are what often lead to disparities in education despite certain, possibly sufficient, levels of funding. However, I wonder what impact removing the local funding for public schools would have on the quality and effectiveness of education. The idea that public schools are funded by the local community is inherent to what makes a public school public. I think that removing the local funding for public school may disrupt the institutions of public schooling as a whole. It is important to note that this outstanding institution does not exist without its flaws, however, I believe that the way in which public schools are funded is critical to how they operate as public schools, and altering this system may result in catastrophic reverberations to schooling in America as a whole.
I’m also a huge proponent of the redesigning of how public schools are funded, and I agree that more emphasis should be placed on the federal funding of public schools. Local funding worked back in the 1800s when “local funding” entailed everyone pitching in a few dollars to pay for a private tutor to teach all of the kids in the village. Now, it just means that people in wealthier districts can afford to hire people with more resources to teach the students which leads to those students going on to study more and more than students who are given bare bones education such as those in underfunded schools. However, things would need to be thought of deeply. Every teacher I have ever spoken to hates the Common Core curricula that’s in place on a federal level, and federal mandates on curriculum in public schools would surely follow the public schools receiving more funding from the federal government. As we saw with the almost catastrophic 1776 Commission that the Trump administration passed, federally mandated curriculum can be horrible depending on who sets it. This change, though, needs to happen since having schools be locally funded just leads to massive disparities.