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The cost of poor schools is high too

By Joan Vennochi
Thursday, April 29, 2004

MASSACHUSETTS is shortchanging schoolchildren across this state, and the initial official response appears to be alarm over the cost of fixing the problem. What about the cost of not fixing it?

Suffolk Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford details systemic funding flaws in public education in a 357-page report released this week. The judge found that Massachusetts is still not doing enough to help its poorest schools. She also recommended that the state spend more money on special education and preschool in a report that goes to the Supreme Judicial Court for review.

The findings confirm what most people intuitively know. The judge documented that wealthier communities spend more money on schools than poorer communities. More money translates into smaller class sizes, better school facilities, and a higher overall quality of education.

Money cannot buy brains or values, but it can buy what is needed to cultivate both. Parents know it. That's why more parents who can afford it are spending two and three times what even the best public school system spends per student to send their children to private schools -- where these high private school tuitions translate into even smaller class size, better-equipped facilities, and a higher overall quality of education.

What threatens public education across the country is the willingness of average citizens to hear the findings about public schools in America in 2004 and just not care -- or care only that it might cost them more money they don't want to spend to educate other people's children.

Judge Botsford's report comes in response to Hancock v. Driscoll, a lawsuit filed on behalf of students in 19 Massachusetts school districts. It follows up on a suit challenging the status quo more than 10 years ago. The earlier case led to the Education Reform Act of 1993, which prompted systemwide change. Even so, students from poor communities, urban and suburban, still do not have access to the same quality of education as students in wealthy communities, according to this report, which validates the efforts of all those people behind this suit.

This is not a Bay State phenomenon. At least 40 other states have or are facing similar education funding suits. Politicians, from mayors to governors to the president of the United States, periodically declare education their highest priority. They announce programs, sometimes even implement them, and are ultimately diverted by more pressing concerns -- bringing conventions to town, fighting gay marriage, or occupying a foreign country.

In Massachusetts, some lawmakers are talking about diverting money from richer to poorer school districts, a proposal that was advocated last year by Governor Mitt Romney but rejected by the Legislature. This new report should persuade the state's political leaders to put aside their partisan differences and forget about pride of authorship in the interests of all the Massachusetts schoolchildren whose education is on the line. It probably won't have that result. At the local, state, or national level, public education is just one more political bartering chip, something to fight over for votes on election day.

A fair reallocation of the state's resources is clearly an important part of solving this problem of unequal funding. Addressing management issues in public school systems is also part of the solution. None of that is easy to accomplish. But the hardest part of reforming public education is getting the public to care about it. People say they do. But too many have come to see public schools as someone else's problem.

Quality public education is the foundation of the strongest democracy this country can build. But instead of seeing the big picture -- well-educated young people who are ready and able to move America forward -- people see tax bills. Instead of seeing an older generation passing along excellent public education as the finest legacy it can hand down to this nation's children, people see a drain on their personal finances. Instead of investment in the future, people see current cost they cannot afford.

Lucky for us, the country's founders were not so shortsighted. Sadly for future generations, their vision has been undervalued.

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