The Genesis of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses

While just released this month, our book Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses had its beginnings more than a decade ago in Kansas City. My co-author, Al Lindseth, and I appeared together in a federal court case about funding. As a result of an earlier federal judgment, the State of Missouri had been funding KC at a level sufficient to make it the highest spending district of any large city. Our collaboration there and in a series of subsequent court cases was focused on bringing scientific evidence to bear on educational funding cases. Of course at that time, we had little idea of writing a book. We were instead focused on the immediate issues.
Al subsequently became the lead attorney for the State of New York’s defense of the funding “adequacy” case in New York City, and I again testified as an expert witness on funding and achievement issues. The monumental nature of the case got both of us (independently) thinking about the role of the courts in educational policy making. Testimony in this case, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, lasted eight months. The trial court ruled that the children of New York City were not being provided a constitutionally appropriate education. After subsequent testimony on a remedy, the court ordered an increase of $5.82 billion per year in operating expenses plus an additional sum for capital expenditures. This sum was later reduced by the state’s highest court, but the principle of court-mandated expenditures remained.
We were each appalled by this ruling. Independent of any feelings about the level of performance of students in New York, we felt that this was a very bad way to make education policy. The court really did not have the relevant expertise. Nor was it in a good position to make appropriations decisions. The courts original ruling would have meant an average increase of over $1,000 to the tax bill of all New York State households.
More importantly, past evidence suggested that this increase in spending would be unlikely to lead to improved student performance unless accompanied by more fundamental reforms. But the New York court was not prepared to consider or order any basic reforms. Instead it stopped with consideration just of spending.
When we discussed writing a joint book on school finance, our focus was largely on the courts. We thought it would be useful to make the case that the courts were not good educational policy makers. The initial design was that we would combine our perspectives on legal and policy issues in a general treatment of educational finance decisions.
Schoolhouses does indeed include our thinking on the role of the courts. But it ended up going considerably beyond that. We added a discussion of why improving schools is so important for our nation. More than that, however, we moved to the task of describing what might be better. After all, neither the courts nor the state legislatures have solved the achievement problem even though they have pushed spending much higher.
The system of performance-based funding is the end result of our diagnosis of the problems with current school funding. The current system is not structured to provide incentives for increased student achievement. In fact, it is just the opposite, where a variety of state policies reward failure and punish success. We took the design problem seriously. We describe a set of alternative policy arrangements that show promise for solving the funding-achievement puzzle (i.e., for setting a system where increased funds are matched with increased student outcomes).