For an eloquent cry of moral reason on the subject of public education, we keep handy an opinion that Judge Michael Wolff wrote when serving on the Missouri Supreme Court. Judge Wolff – who is now dean of the Saint Louis University School of Law – dissented from a majority opinion, in part, because that opinion was too complacent with structural inequalities in how the state funds public education.
The way the state funds public education, Wolff wrote, reinforces appalling disparities. “These disparities – where the lowest-spending districts have only one-third of the money of the highest-spending districts – persist despite the fact that the entire scheme of funding public education is dictated by state law under the authority of the state constitution,” Wolff wrote. “For instance, the property tax wealth per pupil in the wealthiest districts is 15 to 20 times that of the property tax wealth per pupil in the poorest districts.”
Education is administered at the state level in our federal system, but the problem is a national one. Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has decried the “uniquely American local system of school finance – one that dooms millions of poor children to the least-qualified teachers and most run-down facilities in the country. No other wealthy nation tolerates the funding disparities between rich and poor districts that the U.S. does.”
Because districts are compelled to teach a “common core” and take standardized tests, despite large disparities in resources, the way states administer public education becomes an official ritual of blaming victims. “The least we can do,” Wolff wrote, “is to avoid adding to their humiliation by saying that poor districts are losing because they are bad districts … they do not try hard enough to support local schools, the neighborhoods are less supportive and the parents … well, you see my point. This system – statewide in design but local in its effects – is rigged.”
Wolff was writing in 2009, during the era of unaccredited school districts – the new rationale by which some poor districts are judged to be “bad” districts – but before a state law was passed that added a new dimension of disparities. Now poor districts that have been judged “bad” (unaccredited) must pay tuition and (in select instances) transportation costs for their students to transfer to better-funded, better-functioning districts. Thanks to the effects of this law, one “bad” (unaccredited) district – the Normandy School District – faces bankruptcy before the end of this term, and several other poor districts will soon follow, if the state Legislature does not fix the mess it created.
We commend those state legislators who are now racing to address this crisis, but consider what a frustrating humiliating predicament they have placed themselves in. In a state with so many problems when it comes to education, the Legislature is racing to find $5 million that will do nothing but temporarily stabilize a district that is heading for collapse eventually, unless much more difficult and substantial changes are made to how the state administers – and funds – public school districts.
A detailed Post-Dispatch report revealed an even more humiliating facet of the current school transfer crisis. Except for the St. Louis Public Schools, every accredited district accepting these transfer students is billing these students’ home districts. However, except for the Ferguson-Florissant School District, these districts are not even spending the money on instructing their new students. The administrators interviewed by the Post give reasonable explanations for why they are not spending the money – basically, they can’t count on the continued funding or the continued influx of students. The question remains, then: How can they justify accepting the money from impoverished school districts knowing they are not going to spend it to educate the students from those districts?
We believe it is essential that the Legislature immediately find the money to keep Normandy schools open until the end of term. The Legislature also needs to remedy the school transfer law that created this crisis – putting a cap on tuition the unaccredited districts pay and mandating that accredited districts spend that tuition on instruction would be a good start. Once the crisis is averted, every decision-maker in the state should revisit the questions raised by Judge Wolff in his 2009 opinion in Committee for Education Equality v. State of Missouri: How can we rest content with a system of funding public education that is structurally unequal?
