TABLE II.-INTRASTATE DISPARITIES IN PER PUPIL EXPENDITURES 1969-70 For New Jersey data are for FY 69 since FY 70 data were not yet available. For Montana and Nebraska data are high and low of average for districts grouped by size. For North Dakota data are average of expenditures of all districts within a county. Data are not fully comparable between States since they are based entirely on what the individual State included in their expenditure per pupil analysis. Source: State Reports and Verbal contacts with State Officials. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity. While as was the case with the interstate comparisons there are numerons methodological difficulties, the main thrust of the table is clear: school expenditures vary markedly within individual states, and indeed vary far more within states than they do among state averages. While the extreme instances of relationships of the highest expenditure district spending 20 times the lowest expenditure district per pupil as in Texas are exceedingly anomolous situations usually reflecting very small school districts at the high end, disparities of two to one are characteristic in most states and variations of three, four and five to one not at all unusual. What these figures say, in short, is that states spend far more on the education of some of their students than they do on others. Are those differences contrasts in the quality of education or just in its cost? Expenditures and the Quality of Education Cost differentials account for some of the differences in expenditure; different salary levels for teachers of equal quality may explain away another portion of the disparity. Yet after all the discounts are made, one is left with the belief that disparities of these magnitudes must imply substantial differences in the quality of education received by students within each state. Two tables of statistics may shed some slight light on this question. Table III shows disparities between central cities and their "best" surrounding suburban systems in terms not only of dollars but of pupil teacher ratios. While it may be difficult to prove statistically that marginally smaller classes improve education, try asking any student whether he learns more in smaller or larger classes. In any event, the differences in this table are not marginal-they average about one third, and demonstrate, we submit, a linkage between expenditures and quality. TABLE III.-COMPARISON OF PUPIL/TEACHER RATIO IN SELECTED CENTRAL CITIES AND SUBURBS, 1967 1 1 Taken from: The Urban Education Task Force Report (Wilson C. Riles, Chairman), New York, N.Y.: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1970. Source: Gerald Kahn and Warren A. Hughes, "Statistics of Local Public School Systens," 1967, National Center for Educational Statistics, U.S. Office of Education. Table IV makes the same point another way. Drawn from an evidentiary affidavit in the most recently successful school finance case, it shows the variation indicators of school quality among the range of types of school districts in the San Antonio area of Texas. What is clear is that the district spending $595 per pupil compared with the districts spending $394 and $356 per pupil pay higher salaries, have more teachers with advanced training, have less uncertified teachers, have more counselors proportional to its number of students, and have more professional personnel of all kinds relative to the number of students. While any one of these factors in itself, it may be argued, does not mean higher quality education, it seems to us that a reasonable inference from the consistency in these five quality variables is that the higher expenditure school districts are also offering higher quality education. TABLE IV. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DISTRICT WEALTH AND EDUCATIONAL QUALITY-TEXAS SCHOOL DISTRICTS CATEGORIZED BY EQUALIZED PROPERTY VALUATION AND SELECTED INDICATORS OF EDUCATIONAL QUALITY 4U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, "Answers to Interrogatories," civil action No. 68-175-SA. 5 Ibid. • Ibid. Note: Table from evidentiary affidavit of Joel S. Berke in "Rodriguez v. San Antonio School District. "" This paper will not address to any substantial extent the disparities in expenditures among schools within a given school district. Data in that area is rare and untrustworthy. However, one intensive study conducted of three large school districts in New York State, and several other studies in other areas, suggest that while disparities do exist, they are relatively mild in expenditure terms, seldom reaching more than one third greater expenditures in the highest spending schools viz a viz the lowest expenditure schools, although there are significant differences in the training and seniority of staff in different schools. Disparities and Need While disparities may in themselves raise questions about the equity of school finance, we believe they are relatively unimportant in and of themselves. Disparities become inequities in our eyes only when they are related to some concepts of educational and fiscal need. To the authors of this paper, an equitable system would be one in which greater educational resources would be allocated to those students who come to school with the greatest learning problems and the greatest social disadvantage. Equal educational opportunity, in other words, means to us an allocation of educational services that is intended to make it possible, at least insofar as schools are capable of so doing, for pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds to compete equally for higher educational and job opportunities with those who come from more advantaged walks of life. Our reading of the current allocation of educational services suggests that this is not the prevailing pattern, and that indeed the prevailing pattern is one which may best be described as one in which "them as has, gits." Furthermore, not only do we maintain that the distribution of educational services denies equal educational opportunity; we maintain that the costs of those services take a greater toll from those less able to pay than it does from those who are better off. For purposes of this paper we will confine our analysis to the comparative fiscal capacity among jurisdictions rather than among individuals, but we believe analysis would show that the same pattern holds for individuals as well as for jurisdiction. The Special Fiscal Problems of Large Central Cities The mismatch bewteen educational resources and educational and fiscal need for those resources may be seen most clearly in the large central cities of the nation, particularly those in the northeast and midwest. This is not to say that other areas, some suburban and some rural, do not exhibit some of the same problems facing central cities. What does seem clear, however, is that the problems are sharpest and most easily seen in the older metropolises of the nation. There is a rather substantial literature that documents the relationship between low income and ethnic minority status on the one hand and educational disadvantage on the other. In terms both of non-white population and proportion of low income families, large central cities lead their surrounding areas by substantial proportions. In the thirty-seven largest mertopolitan areas, central cities average better than 20% black population, while the outlying areas have approximately 5%. The percentage of non-white students in the schools is considerably higher than that in the general population in the cities due to the high proportion of white students in non-public schools and because of larger proportions of nonwhite families with children in core cities. The results may be seen in Table V. While Chicago, for example, had a 28% non-white population, it had a 52% non-white public school population; Washington, with a 66% general population proportion non-white had an 88% non-white school enrollment. Concentrations of low income families, children from which tend to have lower school achievement levels, also constitute a higher proportion of central city populations than in suburban populations. While the variety among suburbs is marked, the general tendencies come through loud and clear. Particularly in the largest metropolitan areas of the northeast and midwest, considerably higher proportions of families earn under $3,000 in central cities than in the rest of the metropolitan area. In short, students who are apt to present special learning problems, and whose education presumably requires higher resource inputs in terms of teaching and counseling time and special programs to compensate for environmental disabilities are present in city populations far more than in their environs. Cities also have higher costs for providing education that relate to the prices they must pay for the things schools must purchase. Land acquisition costs, insurance rates, vandalism expenses, and non-professional personnel cost all reflect higher costs of living in central cities. But bulking largest in school budgets are costs for instructional personnel, and here a combination of factors has pushed central city costs well above those in suburbs. Several studies are currently in progress which will document this pheonomenon, but its elements may be stated although the tables are not yet available for release. Teacher unions have increased urban salaries faster than in outlying regions, particularly by shortening the time required to reach maximum pay rates. Thus although starting salaries may be comparable, cities have higher average teacher costs because there are fewer steps in the upward scale. A second pheonomenon, that of the upward pressure exhibited because of greater public employee unionism in non-educational services, also has its impact. Sanitationmen, firemen, police, civil service employees all bid up public pay scales in cities in a familiar round of "look how much the are getting." In suburban areas, this militant competition is far less prevalent because of lower service levels and less union organization. Higher costs in the school system are but a part of the overall financial problem of the central cities. Perhaps their greatest problem in raising educational revenues derives from the far higher costs they must bear for general public services than much less densely populated areas. The roll of urban public needs need not be called. Let some simple overall statistics summarize. While central cities in the largest metropolitan areas average $600 per capita in total local public expenditures for all services, regions outside the central cities in those metropolitan areas average only $419 per person. (Table VI) Thus the tax dollar in the city must support a far heavier burden for non-education services in cities with education dollars far harder to raise than in suburbs. The result is that while roughly 30% of city expenditures are educational, suburbs could devote more than 50% of their budgets to their schools. (Table VII) The implications of this seem to us to be at least two. Most obviously, the pressure for general public services makes it more difficult for cities to meet their pressing educational needs than it is for the suburbs. TABLE V. NONWHITE POPULATION CONTRASTED WITH NONWHITE SCHOOL ENROLLMENT FOR 15 LARGEST CITIES, 1960 AND 1965 1 Nonwhite figures based on 1960 ratio of Negroes to total nonwhite population applied to 1965 Negro population. Source: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, Division of Statistical Analysis, Reference, Estimates and Projections Branch; and Seymour Sacks, Educational Finance in Large Cities, forthcoming (Education in Large Cities Series), Syracuse University Press, 1970. U.S. Bureau of the Census: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1968, 89th ed. (Washington, D.C. 1968). From: Alan K, Campbell and Donna E. Shalala, The States and the Urban Crisis, Englewood Cliffs: Prentiss Hall, 1970, p. 10. |