Where Has the Money Gone?
In this belt-tightening era, how money for public education is spent has become a centerpiece of highly rhetorical debate. It will become increasingly contentious because public school enrollments are increasing for the first time in two decades, causing education budgets to rise further. Meanwhile, highly publicized claims that there is little relationship between spending increases and student achievement have created a hostile environment for educators seeking new funds.
Economic pressures and rhetoric that "money doesn't matter" will require educators to have clearer explanations of the purposes for which money has been spent and the specific outcomes expenditures are designed to enhance. Academic achievement of regular students is only one of many intended outcomes of today's public schools. Since the 1960s, different student populations bringing new challenges, new federal and state legislative mandates, and court rulings have created a host of new responsibilities. In many cases, these mandates have required reallocation of existing resources or created funds which come with strict stipulations regarding their use. Schools must prepare handicapped children for more independent living (special education), fulfill welfare needs (the school-lunch program), promote racial integration (desegregation), teach English to immigrant children, and provide education even to the most unruly, unmotivated students. To evaluate the productivity of school spending and hold schools responsible, we must be able to link expenditures to programs. If, for example, schools have funneled much of the new money to diagnose, monitor, instruct, and provide services to special-education students, it makes no sense to judge the effectiveness of this spending by whether Scholastic Assessment Test scores improved for the college-bound.
Unfortunately, school-finance reports almost never detail expenditures by "program," so meaningful assessment of school spending and productivity is next to impossible. Instead, districts, states, and the federal government almost always report school expenditure by function (instruction, support services, etc.) or by "object" (salaries, supplies, etc.). To show how it might be done differently, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report last week that details the programmatic uses of education money from 1967 to 1991, and how the growth of expenditures for different purposes compared during that period. (See story, page 1.) With support from the Metropolitan Life Foundation, we examined detailed expenditure records from nine districts, chosen to mirror national experience. The nine included districts that were urban, suburban, and rural; large, middle-sized, and small; from affluent, middle-class, and poor communities; with high, average, and low percentages of...
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