A Trojan Horse whinnies

The oddly-named “100% Solution,” also known as “weighted student funding” made a leap onto the education stage with heavily-orchestrated buzz this week. It started with a New York Times op-ed, then a feature treatment by the Fordham Foundation, and, moving right along, a slew of education-celebrity endorsements.

What these proponents want, in a nutshell, is to create a new education finance system, supposedly to create greater equity. According to the plan, school funds, based on need, follow the student to whatever public school s/he attends, rather than have funding go to buildings, programs and staff positions.

The name takes off from George Will’s largely-discredited “65% solution” that would require a minimum amount of funds dedicated to instruction.

The 100% Solution has more force lined up behind it, but it’s not clear what real change in funding equity it produces. Title I funding already supplements per-student dollars based on need defined by income. Special-education funding is determined by student need and goes with the child. State and city budget formulas weigh need and equity, although there are a lot of politics in those soups.

What is clear is that that the designers of this campaign want to challenge teacher assigments and seniority. From their document:
“The funds must be provided to schools in the form of spendable dollars, not as teaching or staff positions. Further, once money is distributed to schools based on the educational needs of students, local school leaders must be free to determine how best to meet those needs.”

In other words, paying the negotiated salaries of the teachers in the school, at whatever step they are on, should be scrapped in favor of giving principals a pot of dough and letting them hire teachers they can afford. But doesn’t this give principals an incentive to “buy” cheap teachers in order to divert more funds to (his) pet programs or people? And how does that promote equity?

It’s hard to get your arms around this proposal. But even aside from the merits, which are hard to decipher, the signatories catch you up–a real who’s who of conservatives in education. Then there’s this little phrase at the end of the summary:
“Some signers of this proposal would extend the solutions and principles discussed here beyond public schools. They favor a system in which public dollars follow children on a weighted basis to all schools, including those operated under private auspices….”

So is this vouchers redux–via a Trojan horse?

After a few years navigating the city schools, what most parents and kids really want are good, comprehensive neighborhood schools, rooted in the community and supported by the community. Traipsing all over town for magnet programs, or lying about your address, or filling a list of 12 high school choices with schools two boroughs away that you don’t know anything about just doesn’t strike them as “choice.” How is equity created in this proposal? Principals take what teachers and students they feel like taking.

Rod Paige’s NYT op-ed used the image of a kid traveling around with a “backpack” of funding. The picture isn’t pretty: some skinny little kid with a huge backpack, lost on the subway or wandering around unfamiliar neighborhoods, while scheming principals weigh his backpack against what he’s likely to cost. No. schools are community institutions, not market elements. They get better when the community feels invested in them and the teachers feel committed to them. Creating equity by individualizing funding, as this program proposes, doesn’t build schools and isn’t likely to create equity.

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