Baker and DiCarlo's New Book Calls for a Unified Strategy to Combine Funding Reform and School Integration

 JvonKorff on Education has been urging that Minnesota must fix its broken school funding system to provide enough funding to provide students of color, lower income students and English language learners with an adequate education that meets all state standards, as the constitution requires.  There can be no legitimate dispute that Minnesota's current public system is failing too many students of color, lower income students and English language learners. In Segregation and School Funding: How States Reinforce Inequality and What to Do About It, Bruce Baker and Matthew Di Carlo, two leading school finance scholars have urged that states like Minnesota must combine school finance reform and school integration -- economic and racial -- as one unified strategy.  Their book is a welcome wake up call to those who mistakenly advocate for simplistic single-factor fixes to Minnesota's system of public education.  This post and a few following posts will summarize the wisdom delivered in Baker and Di Carlo's "Segregation and School Funding," but that summary will be no substitute for reading this important contribution.   Take my advice, and get yourself a copy.  

The single factor approach to fixing Minnesota's public education identifies just one thing to solve a complex problem:  Integration, school choice, adequate funding, charter schools, or vouchers.   For over two decades advocates have urged that Minnesota's constitution requires full and adequate funding, enough funding to afford each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards under the Skeen decision.   But the legislature has never attempted to implement that decision.  Indeed, since 2004, the state of Minnesota has not even attempted to determine what it would cost to deliver an adequate education the students Minnesota schools now leave behind. 

For well over two decades others have argued that school integration is the solution, but those integration cases provided no permanent long lasting solution.   Decades ago, Minnesota advanced one of the country's first aggressive charter school reforms, combined with open enrollment, asserting that school choice and school experimentation. While school choice has provided a solution for individual students, generally, at scale, charters have not provided a better education to those students.   

The endnote of Baker and Di Carlo's book exclaims: 

More than seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education promised equal educational opportunities for students of color, US public schools remain stubbornly segregated, with large gaps in the adequacy of funding by race and income.  In Segregation and School Funding, Baker and Di Carlo reveal the cycle that keeps resource starved schools at a perpetual disadvantage and shows how to break it. 

Baker and Di Carlo argue for a multi-faceted multi-factor solution that marries school integration with full funding based on "full-dollar cost funding " of education students with greater needs.   I commend that book to you as providing an understandable window on school funding and integration issues. 

Three Fundamental Causes. Inadequate funding is only one of the three major causes of Minnesota's failure to address the educational needs .  The first, of course, is Minnesota's persistent failure to deliver enough funding to cover the cost of delivering an adequate education to schools serving students of color, lower income students and English language learners.  The second is racial and poverty concentration.   Because Minnesota's legislature has never attempted to deliver funds necessary to cover the full cost of delivering an adequate education to those students, for school districts with very high percentages of underfunded students, those funding shortfalls mount up and create a cycle of inadequacies. 

A third is a lack of accountability for utilizing best practices.  Minnesota has operated under a radical local control paradigm, in which school districts are free to ignore best practices, to keep on doing what they've been doing, despite mounting evidence that these strategies are not working for the students with greatest needs.  The danger of funding with lack of accountability has been starkly illustrated by the recent Minnesota fraud scandals.  There is no evidence at all, that Minnesota school districts are characterized by fraud: in fact, when fraud is discovered, it is widely recognized as a great aberration. But there is evidence that Minnesota districts and charters are not subjected to adequate supervision for efficient use of best practices.   

Baker and Di Carlo's book focuses primarily on major metropolitan areas such as Baltimore, Kansas City, and Oakland, but their recommendations apply to Minnesota school districts as well. In fact, in an analysis using Minnesota education data, Baker and colleagues examined whether Minnesota's funding is sufficient to meet the needs of students who historically have faced educational barriers  Their analysis of Minnesota's school finance system was summarized in an article published in Minneapolis School Voices. 

The analysis, sponsored by the Shanker foundation,  assessed whether each Minnesota district had enough funding to deliver national average outcomes to all students. This average-outcomes test is a lower standard that the Minnesota constitutional standard --enough funding to afford each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards.   Even though Minnesota’s overall K-12 funding ranks above the national average, the Shanker foundation data found that Minnesota's statewide total funding masks deep and persistent inequities in how the money is distributed. While most school districts have enough funding to meet average academic outcomes, districts with higher concentrations of students who need extra academic support do not have adequate funding to serve those students effectively. (Minneapolis Schools Voices):

“The least adequately funded districts in Minnesota include both Minneapolis Public Schools and St. Paul Public Schools, which is consistent with national patterns of below adequate funding in large, diverse, urban school districts. But the list also includes many districts outside of the Twin Cities, like Worthington, St. Cloud, Chisholm and Mabel-Canton — and suburban districts, including Columbia Heights and Brooklyn Center.” 

This finding matters because the students who need the most – including those qualifying for free and reduced-price meals, students experiencing unstable housing, students of color, and English learners – are significantly more likely than their peers to be enrolled in districts where funding is below adequate. 

For example, the study showed:

• About 17.4 % of Minnesota students are enrolled in districts with below-adequate funding — yet students identified as needing the most from public education are two to four times more likely than other students to be in those districts.

• English Learners and students experiencing poverty face particularly stark disparities in funding adequacy compared to their peers. 

Segregated Schools exacerbate inadequate funding: Baker and Di Carlo's work describe how segregation and inadequate funding feed on each other.  There are many reasons why segregated schools may result in impaired educational results.  Baker and Di Carlo point out that states general fail to provide districts with enough funding for students with greater needs.  

Equal opportunity is not just about how much districts spend.  It is, rather, about how much they spend relative to what they need.   Due in large part to racial and economic segregation, districts vary widely in terms of how much they need to spend to get their students’ performance up to where it should be.  …This imbalance of costs and fiscal capacity, driven by segregation, is a the core of school funding inequity.  Modern school finance systems are supposed to close those gaps.   Baker at 19-20

In following posts, Jvonkorff on Education explore Baker and Di Carlo's insights further.   In the meantime, the book is readable and persuasive.   Get on the net and buy yourself a copy.