Chicago Tribune Series on Education Funding

Yesterday, I spotlighted a series of Editorials in the Chicago Tribune on the issue of school funding. I noted yesterday that the editors noted the real problems with school funding, that is the inequities between rich and poor districts, not only in terms of money, but in all that money buys, facilities, teachers, texts and technology.

Today, the Editors continue their series, offering up a more detailed description of the funding problem, but not offering anything particularly new or though-provoking. After discussing the minimum amount of funding per student needed to provide an adequate education, the Tribune throws this out:

Wait a minute. How can we say Illinois comes up short when it spends an average in federal, state and local money of $10,000 per student?

There are two answers:

-Spending varies wildly between school districts, depending on local wealth. That skews the average. Lake County's Rondout School District 72, for example, spends about $14,000 on each student's instruction per year. Steger School District 194, in southern Cook County and northern Will County, spends only $3,800 per student.

-The estimate of $6,405 to provide a minimum education excludes the substantial extra money needed for special education, low income and non-English-speaking students. It costs much more to educate those students, and we have more of them these days in Illinois. Often the schools that have modest local wealth have the greatest number of such students.

Here we have the big obstacle to understanding school funding issues--per pupil spending is just an average. It is a very blunt instrument to describe what is being spent on education and a poor average at that.

While spending by a state could top $10,000 per student, in reality the spending per student in real life could vary by massive amounts, as noted by the Tribune. But how is that per pupil expenditure figure calculated, by dividing all or part of a school's budget by the number of students in the district in question. Simply math to cover an exceedingly complex funding problem.

Here is where the Tribune does a wonderful job because it goes on to discuss all the things that go into increasing the cost of education for some students, whether they are poor, disabled or non-English speakers--all factors that increase spending. Special education in particular soaks up a growing share of education budgets, from 13 percent in 1997 to 20 percent today. This is not an insignificant jump as total education spending in the state has alos increased significantly. But here is something interesting:

School enrollment in Illinois rose 6 percent in the last decade, but the number of special education students shot up 25 percent. More kids are being diagnosed with autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, asthma and developmental delays.

Okay, while I am no doctor, I understand that autism, ADHD and other developmental delays can affect a child's ability to learn, but asthma???!!! Since when is asthma a condition requiring the expenditure of special education dollars. Also, how many of these increased diagnoses are very mild forms of the aforementioned conditions and how much is related to an increased desire to have a child diagnosed with a condition in order to receive more education attention?

But for all the detail provided by the Tribune, I am very disheartened by the lack of any suggestions for change. Despite a promise in their first editorial not to simply call for "more money for education," that seems to be exactly what the editors are doing. True, it appears that the editors are looking to focus the money expenditures in certain ways, but make no mistake, they are asking for more money.

Also absent, so far, is any discussion into whether, or how to alter the manner in which funds are distributed or spent in a given school district.

Link to my original post and to the first Editorial.