Framing The Issue of Educational Reform

Mainstream media have framed discussions about educational reform as referenda on the qualifications and salaries of public school teachers. Of course, everyone knows this is misleading and off the mark, but it serves to obfuscate the real issues and to polarize the debate, ensuring that nothing gets done.

As Bill Gates found for himself when he undertook to study the question, it's what Gates Foundation scholar Marguerite Roza calls a "wicked problem." He's speaking about the issue today in a public forum.

It begins with the convoluted way in which public education is financed. School districts are funded locally through the property tax system, which seems eminently reasonable and logical. However, then the states get involved in parcelling money back to localities. For this, the states are entitled to set all manner of regulations touching things like class sizes, teacher compensation, teacher educational requirements and tenure systems. Whatever costs this crazy quilt of regulations imposes on localities, the local taxpayers absorb, without any direct influence or control. The final layer are Federal regulations affecting everything from school lunches to requirements for innumerable special interest programs. For all these additional regulations that impose costs on local taxpayers, the Federal government only contributes about 9% of an overall school district's funding.

By now, the system has drifted far away from the basic service of delivering a quality education to students on a local level, with transparency and accountability to the local taxpayers who still supply the bulk of school district funding.

Another fundamental issue is financial transparency. We argue incessantly about details of US GAAP financial disclosures for corporations, delving into minutiae and trying to standardize internationally. In public sector education, for reporting at the school district level, there is no transparency at all. Gates Notes has some interesting research on this topic.

According to Gates Foundation staffer Marguerite Rozas, it's impossible to determine at any level how much is spent actually educating students in mathematics for example, or how much is spent to achieve outcomes in the subject. At best, Rozas reports, there are categories like "Instruction," which cover more than fifty percent of a school district's budget, but it's not possible to drill down from this mega-category into anything useful. At best, we can come up meaningless national averages, like the United States spends $10,000 per student, which we then compare to equally meaningless numbers from other countries. We then talk about funding gaps.

Rozas points out that districts have no way to compare what is spent for mathematics in different schools in a district, which might give clues as to effective or ineffective resource allocation within a district. In local districts, there is often a disconnect between teachers and administrators, who are rarely former teachers. These administrators come from a variety of backgrounds, and they enter the field by getting a postgraduate degree in educational administration. Administrators should be culled more from the ranks of successful teachers who have been soldiers before they become generals.

Congratulations to the Gates Foundation for taking on these issues. If Bill Gates needs help figuring out how money is raised and spent for public education, then we definitely have reporting and transparency problems.