My first reaction is, “Heck, if this is such a great solution, why would you limit it to education?” Give the Feds control over everything from unemployment insurance to road maintenance. Have a cabinet-level Department of Trash Pick-Up. (After all, not everybody gets exactly the same type of municipal trash service…or any at all.) Have them take over emergency response services, too, since rural districts don’t have the same type of fancy equipment that many metro areas do. It’s just money.
Why completely skip over the state level to the federal level? The state is the dominant actor in education policy and oversight for k-12 education. It’s entirely possible to pursue this type of funding fix at state level.
That a big concern when considering funding in aggregate for most of the thread’s comparisons. Big chunks of federal k-12 education spending are specifically tied to low income students. Another big chunk is tied to providing special education programs. Federal money frequently has additional strings tied to it as a result of mostly targeting the provision of those kinds of wraparound services. A poorer district with a nice structure of those extra services. It’s still a poorer district that can struggle with basic things like crumbling facilities and high student to teacher ratios.
since education has always been local (state/city/county), why would they give that up–conservatives would go crazy with limited fed gov’t. Not to mention that with money comes conditions or control? who wants to give up authority over schools?
I think andros hit an important point, which is that in education sometimes “equality” takes the perverse form of holding down rather than lifting up - that is, it becomes more about preventing rich students from getting ahead than it is about bringing poor students up to speed. I’ve heard of gifted students being deliberately held back by teachers to make the classroom “equal” and have no doubt the same dynamic would happen with federal funding nationwide of education.
This is why we can’t have nice things. We Americans are so frigging paranoid and distrustful of government.
Let’s get rid of pennies. No, they’d just use it as an excuse to raise prices.
Let’s have UHC. No, poor people would go to the doctor for recreation.
We can’t decide if America is the greatest country on earth, or one that can’t manage to accomplish what other countries have been doing for years.
Local funding of schools is insane. You have some school districts with state of the art computer labs, sports stadiums fit for a college, theaters, intelligent white boards, teaching assistants, etc. And others that struggle to have funds for chalk.
We are a highly mobile society, yet we don’t have a national curriculum . Good luck moving from one state to another and having your children picking up their studies where they left off.
Not to mention the insanity of saddling college graduates with massive amounts of student debt.
It’s scary when I visit graduate programs and see that a majority of the students are foreign. At some point, Chinese and Indian students will just stay in their own countries and we’ll be left with a bunch of semi-literate Americans trying to fill their shoes.
I applaud this post. And as recently as 15 years ago, before the U.S.A. had become such a blatant kleptocracy and cesspool of ignorance, I’d be a strong advocate that the rich states should help fund education in the poor states.
But which are the rich states? Which are the poor states? Start with a list of the 51* states ranked by GDP per capita, and ignore states with less than 1.5 million people. The top 12 states are:
D.C., Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, California, New Jersey, Washington, Maryland, Illinois, Texas, Minnesota, Nebraska.
The bottom 12 states are: Mississippi, Idaho, W. Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Florida, New Mexico, Tennessee, Missouri.
Notice anything? Almost without exception the poor states are the states which would use their education dollars to preach creationism, to teach that global warming is a lie, to preach that white men need to arm themselves with assault rifles for when teh Feds come knocking. Unless good education standards were imposed on such states, which would be quite impossible today, I’d worry that throwing money there might just fan the flames of ignorance and hatreds.
We can hope that soon the forces of rational thought will regain control of the once-great Land of Liberty. But until then, to use the diction of some Trumpists, I’d not be too happy about stealing at gunpoint from the democratic states to feed the liars and haters.
Right–schools are not “funded by counties,” as the OP states, except to a certain degree where the county itself is the school district.
Anyway, the study makes a glaring omission by assuming that districts are either of the New York State type or the Florida type, whereas many districts–large or small–are themselves comprised of neighborhoods which range widely in income level, so district-level data can only tell you so much.
If Local Control Is So Good why not have each county have its own post office and get rid of the national standing army and leave it to the states as the founding fathers intended.
If local is more efficient, why is Walmart putting small stores out of busines? If local is more efficient how can other countis with National UHC do it for half the cost of the US?
Moreover, someone genuinely concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse is going to be opposed to poorly-overseen charter school programs, and super-opposed to vouchers for private schools. Favoring these latter two policies while opposing federal education funding suggests a different reason for the opposition.
Actually, school funding is so insane that the SAME SCHOOL can have a sports stadium fit for a college, cutting edge technology, and still struggle to have funds for teaching assistants and chalk. This is largely because all of those things are funded out of separate funding streams with separate restrictions and priorities.
The Federal government can’t take over the educational systems of the states. Absent Constitutional mandate or a judicial decision, this is one of those things that would fall under Article X- “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
So what they do is grants-in-aid and block grants with strings- i.e. “You get $XX funding if you do P, D and Q things”. That’s a way to exert a level of control without it being a mandate from Washington; states and districts are free to refuse the money if they don’t want to do those things.
I’m with the others- most of what we see could be ameliorated at a state level through a combination of more equitable basic funding schemes and local ability to fund above and beyond.
For example, if you levied a statewide property tax, some might pay more, some might pay less, but what you’d end up with is an equal per-student payout. Districts could then use bonds to pay for capital improvements like they currently do. And for exceptionally poor districts, maybe there could be some state aid there for capital projects.
But if a more wealthy district, like say… Highland Park here in the Dallas area, wants to equip their schools with the latest iPads every year, they’re also welcome to tax their own constitutents extra to do so.
You’d still have a certain amount of inequity, but it would be on the order of basic education versus perks, rather than inadequate vs. perks. Which is the best that I think anyone could reasonably expect.
Right–it’s not like the federal government is sending checks directly to local school districts. Federal monies go to the state, which is responsible for assuring compliance with federal guidelines.
Or at least that’s how it works in California. (Things vary a lot from state to state.) Educational funding in CA has become extremely convoluted, due in no small part to the fact that education policy so often serves as merely a political football for opportunists in the public sphere, and that people think any given school can just snap its fingers and suddenly have high-performing students.
A country is not its government. America is the greatest country in the world but the government is not even in the top 5.
For the most part a national curriculum is not necessary because most schools teach basically the same stuff. I moved states twice and districts three times and never had an issue with picking up studies from one place to the next.
You shouldn’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.