"I must confess to you that it takes a lot of chutzpa to travel 2,000 miles from a state that's falling on its face and offer advice in a place such as Michigan," Guthrie admitted. Then he posed this question: "How is it that we can link school finance with the operation of schools in a manner that will give Michigan the kind of schools that almost inevitably it will need for the next century?"
While it is difficult to predict what schools should be like or need to be in the future, he said, there are a few things that can be said with confidence:
The appropriate link between school finance and school operation, Guthrie said, is to have arrangements and incentives that enable schools continually to adapt to new circumstances and reassess how they are doing. A school finance system should induce all professional educators to search for ways in which to do better, and for means by which to assess how well they are doing now.
To facilitate education change, finance reforms must occur in tandem with governance changes. Desirable conditions, such as incentives for professional educator performance, parent engagement and citizen commitment, and performance and fiscal accountability are impossible to induce through state taxation and revenue distribution arrangements alone.
Governance and finance changes must balance three principal and conflicting interests - equity, efficiency, and liberty. How can Michigan do this? "All you have to do is to look to California and just mirror the opposite, and you're bound to be in better shape," Guthrie quipped. He cautioned against repeating mistakes made elsewhere:
California has a state system of school finance, and local boards have no taxing discretion. They can't add to what is spent, whether they want to or not. There is no resilience left in the system, and California has fallen from the 5th highest per-pupil spending state in the nation to the 41st. A local school district can't buffer a recession by generating any resources for itself, so whatever happens to the state in an economic sense happens to every school district.
Centralizing finance in this manner has turned state policymaking almost completely over to special interest groups. All of the decisions are made in the state capitol and there is little, if any, time or resources for teachers, parents, or other citizens to participate in influencing those decisions. Only the voices of special interests are heard.
As the state sinks further into mediocrity, local school districts have little ability to operate against the tide. Professional educators typically want more and more state funding, which they see as a stable source of revenue. Yet the higher the proportion of state contributed school revenues, the lower the per-pupil expenditures.
In a recession, income taxes and sales taxes will take a downward turn, but property taxes will remain remarkably stable.
If you force education into a competitive political arena with every other social sector service, it often does not emerge very well, Guthrie said. By relying to some degree and with some balance upon locally generated resources, education has an opportunity to buffer itself from other state exigencies and to have a resource base of its own.
Citizens dislike property taxes, which is understandable. Nevertheless, an appropriately administered property tax is a very resilient source of income. In a recession, income taxes and sales taxes will take a downward turn, but property taxes will remain remarkably stable. Only at the last moment of financial stress will people default or become delinquent on their property taxes.
Another caveat are the beliefs that considerable savings can be made by consolidating school districts into even larger units and that consolidation provides better education for youngsters than small districts. One is hard pressed to find evidence that either one of those beliefs is true. By creating larger and larger districts, you lose accountability by making the system remote and you lose the engagement of parents and citizens in the process.
What are some of the fundamental elements a school finance system must embody? Guthrie offered five: stability, measurable goals, school-based management, public school choice, and state-operated assessment linked to goals.
Without a system of resources that continually has the capacity to be adequate, to be distributed equitably, and to be stable, there can be no progress. There will only be incentives to improve if local school districts, teachers, and parents have some certainty about what's on the horizon. One possibility for the Legislature to consider is forward funding guarantees - that at least over a two-year period, school resources will not fall below a certain level.
It is crucial that the state adopt a system of school-based management. The individual school must become the principal unit of management, not the district.
Once we have established that the system must be adequate and equitably distributed, and have some kind of stable resources, it is crucial that state government adopt a set of goals for Michigan schools. These can be expressed as some core of knowledge or performance, or skills or activities that state government wants every youngster in Michigan to know. They have to be measurable, or there is no reason to have them. The system should specify the major directions in which schools and students in Michigan are expected "to travel." There should be minimal core with a lot of discretion for local school districts and schools and for students to add to it on the periphery.
It is crucial that the state adopt a system of school-based management. The individual school must become the principal unit of management, not the district. There is a role for school districts, but parents and students do not identify with school districts; they identify with schools.
The fourth component is to permit parents to choose from among public schools. This is easier to arrange in the more densely populated areas, but it is complicated. The best example of a public school choice system in the United States is Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A fifth component is a state-operated system of assessment, linked to the state goals and performance objectives. This system ought to enable us to generalize the performance of each individual school building so that we know what is happening at a school; it is insufficient to measure by district. Each school should prepare an annual performance report, one component of which would be its scores on statewide testing. Other components should include student information, the qualifications of the teachers, and how the school is spending its money. Although states should not prescribe the activities of professional educators, they should prescribe the expected outcomes. With one possible exception, Guthrie believes that how those outcomes are achieved should be left to the discretion of professional educators.
The exception to the state's role in prescriptions for educators is in the areas of preservice preparation of teachers, inservice preparation, and incentives for professional activity. Too often in school districts, all of the inservice training resources erode so quickly that there is no real ability to continually tailor a system of training for existing or newly hired teachers. Guthrie suggests setting aside two to three percent of a school's budget for the continued professional development of teachers.
In the new school finance plan for Michigan, Guthrie proposed paying substantial attention to providing local schools with the resources and the discretion to use them, and for accountability, using a set of outcome standards, not dictating processes.
URL: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/go/94-wguth.htm