Opinion
Education Funding Opinion

Rebuilding America’s Schools

By William D. Eggers & Tiffany Dovey — September 25, 2007 4 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Built in the 1920s, Washington’s James F. Oyster Bilingual Elementary School was on its last legs by the early 1990s. The school’s strong academic record stood in contrast to a structural crisis—leaking roofs, building-code violations and accompanying shutdowns, lack of computer hookups, and limited space. Yet the District of Columbia didn’t have the $11 million required to build a new school, nor did it have the borrowing power.

The city had to make a hard decision: shut down the decrepit building and relocate students, or find another way to bring the school up to code.

School districts around the country may soon find themselves in a similar predicament. What is to be done when facilities are falling apart and there isn’t enough money to modernize them?

Like Oyster Elementary, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s schools were constructed before 1970, with nearly half of them built to accommodate the baby boom generation. With the boomers now on the verge of retirement and a technological revolution having altered educational infrastructure needs, we are overdue for an upgrade.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2005 report card on the condition of America’s infrastructure, schools earned a solid D—hardly a grade worth bragging about. Estimates for the cost of modernizing our schools range from $127 billion to $320 billion.

The outlook for individual states varies. In Arkansas, a joint task force found that bringing the state’s schools up to code would cost $3 billion and up. In New Jersey, the cost is more than $6 billion. The costs are upward of $9 billion for retrofitting New York’s schools.

The difficulty of finding funds is compounded by demographics, especially the aging population and the rapid increase of Medicaid costs in state budgets. Taxpayers are growing weary of rising property taxes (up an average of 21 percent between 2000 and 2004), rejecting 60 percent of recent referendums in Massachusetts, half in Wisconsin, and 25 percent in New Jersey. In May, Pennsylvania voters overwhelmingly rejected an income-tax increase to finance schools.

Back to the saga of Oyster Elementary. The District of Columbia school system, under significant pressure from parents, but lacking money and borrowing power, decided that shutting Oyster wasn’t an option, so officials got creative. What the city lacked in financial assets, it made up for in physical assets: The school sat on 1.67 acres of prime real estate within walking distance of the National Zoo.

The city converted its underutilized physical assets into a financial asset by dividing the property, half for a new school and half for a new apartment building—designed and built by the private sector. In return for the sale of the land, Washington got its first new public school in 20 years—a state-of-the-art facility with double the space—without spending a single public dollar.

The Oyster story points to an important and growing strategy for meeting school infrastructure needs: partnering with the private sector. Public-private partnerships can be structured in a number of ways to meet the public sector’s infrastructure objectives while addressing the investment needs of business. Private firms typically finance, design, construct, and operate a public school under a contract with the government for a given time period, usually 20 to 30 years. Businesses usually provide noncore services, such as school transport, food services, and cleaning, while the government provides teaching. At the end of the contract, the government owns the building.

Common public-private-partnership models include the sale of development rights on unused property, and sale-leaseback or lease-leaseback arrangements. In these solutions, school districts sell or lease surplus land to a developer who builds a school and leases it back to the district. In 1996, the Houston Independent School District used a lease-leaseback arrangement with a private developer to obtain two new schools, $20 million under budget and a year earlier than originally planned. A public-private-partnership effort in the United Kingdom, the Building Schools for the Future project, entails more than $4 billion in annual investment to bring schools up to 21st-century standards.

Besides solving the financial problem, benefits of increased private-sector participation in public-infrastructure development include faster construction, innovative design, and more time for school administrators to focus on core educational goals, rather than facilities management.

Administrators pursuing such solutions need a clear picture of their schools’ physical conditions, educational suitability, and enrollment projections. By comparing the costs and benefits of innovative public-private-partnership models being used both in the United States and abroad with more traditional approaches, they will be able to make more informed decisions about which model is most suitable for their own infrastructure needs.

School leaders owe it to younger generations to understand the magnitude of their districts’ own infrastructure deficits and the different financing and delivery models available for addressing them. The sooner this happens, the more options they’ll have.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the September 26, 2007 edition of Education Week as Rebuilding America’s Schools

Events

Student Well-Being Webinar After-School Learning Top Priority: Academics or Fun?
Join our expert panel to discuss how after-school programs and schools can work together to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss.
Budget & Finance Webinar Leverage New Funding Sources with Data-Informed Practices
Address the whole child using data-informed practices, gain valuable insights, and learn strategies that can benefit your district.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Classroom Technology Webinar
ChatGPT & Education: 8 Ways AI Improves Student Outcomes
Revolutionize student success! Don't miss our expert-led webinar demonstrating practical ways AI tools will elevate learning experiences.
Content provided by Inzata

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Education Funding Congress Prepares to Raise the Debt Ceiling. But K-12 Funding Is Still in Jeopardy
Federal spending limits in exchange for raising the debt ceiling could lead to cuts for key K-12 funding like Title I and IDEA.
3 min read
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Calif., speaks with reporters on the debt limit as he walks, Tuesday, May 30, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks with reporters on the debt limit in Washington on May 30, 2023.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP
Education Funding Which Districts Are Most at Risk If America Breaches the Debt Ceiling?
Thousands of districts depend on the federal government for more than 10 percent of their revenue.
A man standing on the edge of a one dollar bill that is folded downward to look like a funding cliff.
iStock/Getty Images Plus
Education Funding 'So Catastrophic': How a Debt Ceiling Breach Would Hurt Schools
If federal funding stops flowing to schools before July 1, schools' ability to pay billions of dollars in expenses would be at risk.
8 min read
Photo of piggy bank submerged in water.
E+ / Getty
Education Funding How Much Do School Support Staff Make in Each State? (Spoiler: It's Not a Living Wage)
In some states, education support personnel make below $30,000, new data show.
3 min read
Brian Hess, head custodian at the Washburn Elementary School in Auburn, Maine, strips the cafeteria floors in preparation for waxing on Aug. 17, 2021.
Brian Hess, head custodian at Washburn Elementary School in Auburn, Maine, strips the cafeteria floors in preparation for waxing on Aug. 17, 2021.
Andree Kehn/Sun Journal via AP