It's well-documented that school funding, generally speaking, is too opaque. District budgets mask differences in teacher pay from school to school, just as they often fail to show differences in how other centrally-controlled resources are deployed in schools. These accounting shortcuts (or cover-ups) mask deep inequities in funding between schools, often at the expense of those with poor and at-risk students.
Greater transparency and clarity in district- and school-level budgets would help, so I whole-heartedly agree with the New York Times editorial board that Secretary Duncan should push for this in return for the $13 billion in Title I stimulus funding:
Arne Duncan, the education secretary, will need to make sure that states and localities clearly understand what he means when he asks them to report per-pupil expenditures school by school.To the extent possible, the new reporting standard should take into account extra programs that are sometimes parceled out to affluent schools but not to poor ones ??? from administrative budgets that are billed to, say, the school district's headquarters.
Most important, the local districts should not be allowed to persist with sloppy bookkeeping that masks teacher salary differences in high poverty versus low poverty schools. Those differences are often indicative of the fact that poor children are being taught by less-qualified, less-experienced teachers.
I wouldn't go so far as to equate a teacher's salary with his or her effectiveness, but I do think funding should be rebalanced among schools to the benefit of those whose teacher-salary budgets are shortchanged. If those schools could use the additional dollars flexibly, they might hire more teachers to reduce class sizes; use teacher aides to help in larger classes; or invest in their curricula, facilities, and anything else that would make the school more attractive for better teachers.
Perhaps most importantly, if Duncan succeeds in making plain the real funding gaps between schools, the outcry could lead to worthwhile reforms to fund schools and students equitably ??? reforms like weighted student funding . It would be terrific if the stimulus could be a federal nudge in that direction.
