Notes/ExplanationThis initial packet is intentionally narrow and was designed to introduce a variety of core issues that students will need to learn as they prepare for the season. Many aspects of the files can be used to construct balanced mini-debates. Future iterations of this affirmative and negative will be much broader. If you would like students to debate this case in early practice rounds, the 1NC can also include the Court Politics DA, the Tax Reform Politics DA, and/or the Federalism DA.

1AC

1AC — Inequality AdvantageContention One: Inequality

First, there are massive opportunity gaps in the K-12 education system. Millions of students are denied access to an excellent education. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“Disrupting Education Federalism,” Washington University Law Review (92 Wash. U. L. Rev. 959), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)IntroductionThe United States continues to tolerate a longstanding educational opportunity gap. Today, it relegates at least ten million students in low-income neighborhoods and millions more minority students to poorly performing teachers, substandard facilities, and other inferior educational opportunities . n1 This occurs in part because the U nited States invests more money in high-income districts than in low-income districts, a sharp contrast to other developed nations. n2 Scholars and court decisions also have documented the sizeable intrastate disparities in educational opportunity. n3 In addition, interstate inequalities in educational opportunity represent the largest component of disparities in educational opportunity. n4 The harmful nature of interstate disparities falls hardest on disadvantaged schoolchildren who have the most educational needs, n5 and states do not [*962]

possess the resources and capacity to address the full scope of these disparities . n6 Furthermore, research confirms that as the gap in wealth has grown between low-income and high- income families, the achievement gap between children in low- income and high-income families also has widened . n7

Although equal educational opportunity remains a central goal of the U.S. education

system, it has never been realized . n8 Indeed, the United States relies heavily on schools to overcome the influence of a child's circumstances , such as family income and structure, on life opportunities despite evidence that schools are not effectively serving this function. n9 Fulfilling the goal of equal educational opportunity will become increasingly important to the nation's interests given research that reveals that the United States will need more highly skilled workers to fill jobs that meet the economy's demands. This research also indicates that the achievement gap

must be closed to ensure that students from rapidly growing minority communities possess the educational skills necessary to contribute to the economy. n10

Second, current education policies exacerbate racial and economic inequality because they rely on devolution and choice.Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. The Failings of Choice, Competition, and Market-Based Education ReformsIn this milieu, the original purpose of the ESEA and Brown (and of the appropriate federal role in education) has become lost. Rather than utilizing federal policy and funding to combat the true roots of educational disparity—poverty and racial discrimination—the federal role has shifted under the market model to conceal these roots . The belief has become that "effective teaching" and a business-model of public education is all [*377] that is needed to overcome generational poverty and persistent racial discrimination. n143 Yet, it has become abundantly clear that the market strivings of federal education policy have forsaken the original promise of social equality embodied by Brown and the ESEA.

Our history demonstrates that school choice policies tend to develop as a tool to undermine Brown desegregation efforts as part of a larger effort to maintain racial inequality. While often utilizing race-neutral language such as "parental choice" and "individual freedom," modern choice policy " has the potential to perpetuate racial hierarchies " as parents make private decisions to self-segregate their children. n144 The equity rationale of Brown and the original vision of the ESEA are simply incompatible with the market rationale of current education policy:

[It] is apparent that two distinctly different ideologies motivated the Brown decision and NCLB. For Brown a separate education could never be equal, and affirmative racial integration was necessary to provide every child with a quality education. Conversely, under NCLB the ideologies of high-stakes accountability and a market-driven approach [assume] that a separate education can be equal. n145

The modeling of education policy around principles of consumer choice, competition, and market-accountability have increased educational disparities along class and race lines. n146 Since

the adoption of NCLB and RTT, our public schools have become increasingly segregated by race . n147 There is little reason to believe that rates of school segregation will decrease because of the passage of the ESSA, especially in light of its continued

expansion of charter schools, deregulation, and parental choice. The choice provisions of the ESSA (and formerly of NCLB and RTT) are fueling the re-segregation of our public schools primarily because the current market-model of education policy incorrectly assumes parents (that [*378] is, namely consumers) to be rational actors. A core principle of the market-model is that choice will foster competition amongst public schools, which then will force individual schools to improve the quality of education provided to students. n148 However, it has become increasingly clear that parents tend to choose schools "with a racial profile matching their own." n149 Indeed, there is evidence that the current school-choice provisions have so upset the racial balance of certain public schools as to run afoul of Brown Court desegregation orders. n150Parents selecting a school for their children are also influenced by "non-racial" factors not adequately captured by the market model of competition — including geography, inadequate resources, lack of motivation, and inadequate information regarding other options. n151 The application of market principles to public education has failed not only due to an incorrect assumption of rational acting by consumers, but because of significant informational asymmetries between schools and parents. n152The allure of choice as a salve for racial and social inequality in education is understandable, yet misguided. Martha Minow has written extensively on the "seductive" nature of choice, noting that choice can "imply that freedom and equality exist even when they are absent." n153 Professor Minow observes "that by subordinating racial and other kinds of integration to school choice, contemporary schooling policies ... expressly elevate private preferences" which tend to "reinforce or even worsen racial separation in American schools ." n154 Professor John A. Powell summarizes the failings of school choice as follows: [*379]

The reality of choice is that it is a racialized system that reproduces the inequity it is supposed to address. Effective responses to persistent segregation and concentrated poverty cannot be furnished by purely individualistic solutions such as letting students choose their school one by one . The Supreme Court considered this approach after Brown and rejected it as inadequate. n155

The larger problem with the market-model of public education is that it serves to normalize continued educational inequality . The existing framework purports to provide students with an equal opportunity to pursue an education from competitive options. The occurrence of educational failures within such a "neutral" market of consumer preferences can then be interpreted as owing to poor choices or personal deficit under this perspective, thereby rationalizing the persistence of racial and social educational disparities. n156 Diane Ravitch concluded as follows:

The testing, accountability and choice strategies offer the illusion of change while changing nothing. They mask the

inequity and injustice that are now so apparent in our social order. They do nothing to alter the status quo. They preserve the status quo. They are the status quo. n157

School choice and accountability reforms, as noted, have had relatively little impact on student performance. n158 The primary determinants of student success, rather, have been racial bias, family background, and socioeconomic status. n159 The focus on

"neoliberal solutions like NCLB, [*380] with its emphasis on efficiency and individualism,

divert attention away from the social issues that need to be solved if we are to really improve education outcomes ." n160 As a

result, current education policy "both directly and indirectly exacerbates racial, ethnic and economic inequality in society." n161 Our current approach to public education has grossly departed from the ideals and principles of racial and class equality that shaped the federal education role during the post-Brown and ESEA era. The substantive dimension of education federalism has thus wrongly shifted from ensuring racial equality in a democratic society to ensuring consumer choice in a competitive marketplace.

The recent enactment of the ESSA creates the possibility of further exacerbating race and class-based educational inequalities. While retaining the core principles of NCLB, the ESSA diminishes federal oversight of school performance while further expanding both consumer choice and deregulated teacher preparation programs. As Marian Wright Edelman observes, such a "gutting [of] a strong federal role in [an] education policy designed to protect [African- American and Latino] children ... jeopardizes their opportunity for a fair and adequate education." n162 Civil rights groups, including

the Southern Poverty Law Center and the New York chapter of the NAACP, fear that decreased "federal oversight of education will be much too weak to ensure [equal] education for Black and Latino students" in many states. n163 The prominent education and urban planning researcher Gary Orfield further opines that with the ESSA "we're going to get something that's much worse [than NCLB] - a lot of federal money going out for almost no leverage for any national purpose." n164 Education advocate Kalmann Hettlemann similarly views the ESSA as "a massive retreat from our national interest and commitment to equal educational opportunity, especially for poor and minority children." n165

[*381] The education federalism forged by the original ESEA and Brown envisioned federal regulation of public education to the extent necessary to promote social equality and racial

integration. n166 Such robust federal oversight was necessary in light of the historical practice of states to undermine educational opportunity for poor and minority children. n167 The devolution of the federal role in public education following the ESSA - coupled with its continued emphasis on standardized testing, choice, and market competition - threatens to increase race-and class-based disparities in education .

Third, public school funding remains unfair and inequitable — the latest study proves. ELC 17 — Education Law Center, a non-profit organization in New Jersey that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice in the United States, 2017 (“School Funding Remains Unfair For Most Students Across The Nation,” Press Release Announcing Release of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, January 25th, Available Online at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxtYmwryVI00LWdhZjRXTTM5WUk/view, Accessed 06-14-2017)Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card (NRC), released by Education Law Center (ELC)

today, finds that public school funding in most states continues to be unfair and inequitable , depriving millions of U.S. students of the opportunity for success in school .

The sixth edition of the NRC uses data from the 2014 Census fiscal survey, the most recent available. The NRC goes beyond raw per-pupil calculations to evaluate whether states are making sufficient investments in public education and distributing funding relative to need, as measured by student poverty. To capture

the variation across states, the NRC uses four interrelated "fairness measures" – Funding Level, Funding Distribution, Effort and Coverage – that allow for state-by-state comparisons while controlling for regional cost differences.

The NRC released today shows almost no improvement since the end of the Great Recession in those states that do not provide additional funding to districts with high student poverty. There is also no change in the vast differences in levels of funding for K-12 education across the states , even after adjusting for cost. The states with the highest funding levels , New York and New Jersey,

spend more than two and one-half times that of the lowest , Utah and Idaho.Key findings include:* Funding levels show large disparities , ranging from a high of $18,165 per pupil in New York, to a low of $5,838 in Idaho.

* Many states with low funding levels, such as California, Idaho, Nevada, North

Carolina, and Texas, are also low “effort” states, that is, they invest a low percentage of their economic capacity to support their public education systems.

* Fourteen states, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New York, and Illinois, have “regressive” school funding. These states provide less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of need as measured by student poverty.

* Students in certain regions of the country face a “double disadvantage” because their states have low funding levels and do not increase funding for concentrated student poverty. These “flat” funding states include Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the Southeast, and Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest.* Only a handful of states – Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey – have “progressive” school funding. These states have sufficiently high funding levels and significantly boost funding in their high poverty districts.

* States with unfair school funding perform poorly on key indicators of resources essential for educational opportunity. In these states, access to early childhood education is limited; wages for teachers are not competitive with those of comparable professions; and teacher-to-pupil ratios in schools are unreasonably high.The sixth edition of the NRC released today underscores the persistence of unfair school funding as a major obstacle to improving quality and outcomes in the nation’s public schools. Most states finance public education purely on political considerations from year-to-year, and not on assessments of the actual cost of delivering rigorous academic standards to all students. Most states also continue to use outmoded methods of funding public education that fail to allocate additional funding to address concentrated poverty and other risk factors , including English language proficiency and disabilities. These antiquated methods are the cause of persistent funding disparities between low wealth, high poverty and high wealth, low poverty districts, even in states with high funding levels, such as Connecticut and New York.

“School finance reform is long overdue,” said Bruce Baker, the Rutgers University

Graduate School of Education Professor who developed the report's methodology. “States must develop, and then fund, school finance formulas that identify the costs of providing essential education resources to students, accounting for diverse student needs and taking into account local fiscal capacity.”

“Lawmakers in states with deeply regressive and flat funding, like

Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Arizona, urgently need to overhaul their finance systems to give students a meaningful opportunity to succeed in school,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director. “Even states with higher funding levels, such as Ohio and Maine, need to do more to ensure fair funding for each and every student.”

“President Trump is flatly wrong when he says our schools are flush with cash,” Mr. Sciarra added. “In fact, for students in many states and

entire regions, their schools are woefully underfunded, depriving them of the qualified teachers, support staff, reasonable class sizes and other interventions they must have to succeed in school. It's time to put fair school funding at the top of the nation's education reform agenda."

Fourth, the current system makes it impossible to provide all students with an equal opportunity for an excellent education. Ogletree and Robinson 16 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“The K-12 Funding Crisis,” Education Week, May 17th, Available Online at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-funding-crisis.html?print=1, Accessed 06-07-2017)Current discussions about K-12 education often highlight the reforms that seek to improve the quality of schooling. Some of these measures—the common-core standards, teacher evaluation, and, most recently, the Every Student Succeeds Act—undoubtedly have the potential to improve educational opportunities for students. However, what is often missing from education reform conversations is how these reforms can create sustainable changes to the education system. We believe

the system's very foundations are broken, and school funding is one of the most pressing issues in need of repair.

Most states have failed to create school funding systems that provide the necessary foundation for all children to receive equal access to an excellent education. The nation's children deserve no less,

particularly in view of evidence that money spent wisely on education matters. In a 2012 review of studies that looked at the effect of funding on student outcomes, education scholar Bruce D. Baker found that ongoing improvements that enhance the amount and distribution of funding can increase student achievement.

School funding took a substantial blow after the Great Recession began in 2007, even as federal funding from the economic-stimulus package in 2009 softened the impact. Despite the improving U.S. economy, school funding has been slow to recover, and schools still feel the recession's effects nine years later. The Center on

Budget and Policy Priorities found in a recent report that although 35 of the

46 states surveyed increased their general state aid per student in 2016,

25 are still providing less general state funding than they were in 2008. And at least seven of those states have cut 10 percent or more from their general state funding per student since the recession.And as a result of the recent drop in oil, coal, and gas revenues, Alaska, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, among other states, have had to make deep cuts in their K-12 school budgets and must now find new funding streams.

Whether in tough or strong economic times, families and education funding advocates lack a way to insist on the equitable financing needed for excellent schools. This absence arises in part from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 San Antonio Independent School

District v. Rodriguez decision , which affirmed that the U.S. Constitution neither explicitly

nor implicitly provided a remedy for closing the funding gaps across school districts. This decision closed the federal courthouse door to future decisions that could address K-12 spending gaps and, ultimately, the gaps in educational opportunities and resources among children across districts.

The decision thus remanded the design and implementation of more-effective school funding systems to the laboratory of the states. The Supreme Court's decision also noted the need for changes to school funding and expressed concern about the long and heavy reliance on local property taxes.Despite subsequent decades of state-level litigation on school finance, most changes to finance systems have failed to provide equal access to a high-quality education for all children. Most states continue to build education systems funded by property taxes that vary greatly depending on a child's ZIP code , rather than a child's needs and the desired educational outcomes.

Significant school finance reforms can , in fact, lead to improved educational and social outcomes for children .

A 2015 report from the N ational Bureau of Economic Research, which followed

children born between 1955 and 1985 through their adult lives in 2011, found that disadvantaged students completed an additional 0.46 years of schooling when districts had a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for the 12 years the children attended public school. In adulthood, their earnings increased by almost 10 percent, and their likelihood of living in poverty was reduced by roughly 6 percentage points, while children in districts without such spending increases did not experience similar benefits.

The study also found that increasing spending by 25 percent per student throughout the course of a K-12 education could erase the attainment gaps between students from low-income and nonpoor families.

Fifth, disparities in educational opportunity cement overall socioeconomic inequality. Robinson 13 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2013 (“The High Cost of Education Federalism,” Wake

Forest Law Review (48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 287), Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Although the nation's current approach to education federalism

undoubtedly generates some benefits, it also tolerates substantial inequitable disparities in educational opportunity both within and between states. n7 The reality of local control of education for many communities means the ability to control inadequate resources that provide many students substandard educational opportunities. n8 The [*289] opportunity divide in American education continues to relegate far too many poor and minority schoolchildren to substandard educational opportunities . n9 These communities are left behind in the competition for educational excellence. n10 In addition, high-poverty schools , particularly those within urban school districts, regularly yield the worst academic outcomes. n11

[*290] These disparities in educational opportunity hinder schools from fulfilling some of their essential national and institutional goals. Schools serve indispensable public functions within a democratic society : they prepare students to engage in the nation's political system in an intelligent and effective manner and transmit the fundamental societal values that a democratic government requires. n12 The nation also relies on its public schools as the principal institutional guarantor of equal opportunity within American society by serving as a mechanism to ensure that children are not hindered in attaining their dreams by their life circumstances. n13 Americans depend on schools to address the societal challenges created by social and economic inequality rather than creating the extensive social welfare networks that many industrialized countries have implemented. n14 The disparities in educational opportunity that relegate many poor and minority students to substandard schooling have hindered the ability of schools to serve these functions. Indeed, rather than solve these challenges, low graduation rates and substandard schools cost the United States

billions of dollars each year in lost tax and income revenues, higher health care costs, food stamps, and welfare and housing assistance, to name a few of the costs. n15

Sixth, closing the opportunity gap in education is vital to reduce inequality. Johnson 16 — Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute

for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, 2016 (“Can Schools Level the Intergenerational Playing Field? Lessons from Equal Educational Opportunity Policies,” Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy, Edited and Published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Available Online at https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Community-Development/EconMobilityPapers/EconMobility_Book_508.pdf?la=en , Accessed 06-19-2017, p. 321)Summary Discussion and ConclusionsThe key contributions of this study are three-fold. First, the paper provides a more detailed descriptive portrait of intergenerational economic mobility in the U nited States.

Second, the paper attempts to explain why black-white mobility differences narrowed significantly for successive cohorts born between 19 55 and 19 79, with a focus on the role of three major equal educational opportunity policies pursued over this period: school desegregation, school finance reforms, and roll-out and expansions of Head Start, improving the understanding of the intergenerational mobility process in the United States and illuminating the central role schools play in the transmission of economic success from one generation to the next.

Third, the paper emphasizes differences in early education and school quality —in particular, Head Start and school spending — as important components of the persistence in income across generations.

Indeed, schools —and policies that influence their optimal functioning— are transformative agents that either provide or deprive children of the opportunity to reach their full potential. These equal educational opportunity policies were instrumental in the making of a growing black middle class . The evidence shows that the footprints of paths toward upward mobility are preceded by access to high quality schools beginning in early childhood through 12th grade. These school reforms expanded on-ramps to poor and minority children to get on that path.

Evidence on the long-term productivity of education spending demonstrates that equal education policy initiatives can play a pivotal role in reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Seventh, racial and economic inequality is a form of structural violence that condemns entire populations to preventable suffering and death. Bezruchka 14 — Stephen Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Health Services and Global Health at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University and an M.D. from Stanford University, 2014 (“Inequality Kills,” Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, Edited by David Cay Johnston, Published by The New Press, ISBN 9781595589446, p. 194-195)

Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the U nited States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the

noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist

changing. Inequality is the central element , the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health.

The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship , meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible , with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts.

Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met , concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence . There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.

Finally, the structural violence of inequality outweighs other impacts. There is an ethical obligation to address it.Ansell 17 — David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (Chicago), holds an M.D. from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University College of Medicine, 2017 (“American Roulette,” The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, Published by the University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226428291, p. kindle 307-363)There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious : punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of interpersonal violence that we tend to hear about in the news . Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional.

But the deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some

groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups , including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods . This unequal advantage and violence is built into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives .

This kind of violence is called structural violence , because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to-day life.8 It is the cumulative impact of laws and social and economic policies and practices that render some Americans less able to access resources and opportunities than others . This inequity of advantage is not a result of the individual’s personal abilities but is built into the systems that govern society. Often it is a product of racism , gender , and income inequality . The diseases and premature mortality that Windora and many of my patients experienced were, in the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, “biological reflections of social fault lines.”9 As a result of these fault lines, a disproportional burden of illness, suffering, and premature mortality falls on certain neighborhoods, like Windora’s. Structural violence can overwhelm an individual’s ability to live a free , unfettered, healthy life .As I ran to evaluate Windora, I knew that her stroke was caused in part by lifelong exposure to suffering, racism, and economic deprivation. Worse, the poverty of West Humboldt Park that contributed to her illness is directly and inextricably related to the massive concentration of wealth and power in other neighborhoods just miles away in Chicago’s Gold Coast and suburbs. That concentration of wealth could not have occurred without laws, policies, and practices that favored some at the expense of others. Those laws, policies, and practices could not have been passed or enforced if access to political and economic power had not been concentrated in the hands of a few. Yet these political and economic structures have become so firmly entrenched (in habits, social relations, economic arrangements, institutional practices, law, and policy) that they have become part of the matrix of American society. The rules that govern day-to-day life were written to benefit a small elite at the expense of people like Windora and her family. These rules and structures are powerful destructive forces. The same structures that render life predictable, secure, comfortable, and pleasant for many destroy the lives of others like Windora through suffering , poverty , ill health , and violence . These structures are neither natural nor neutral. The results of structural violence can be very specific. In Windora’s case, stroke precursors like chronic stress, poverty, and uncontrolled hypertension run rampant in neighborhoods like hers. Windora’s illness was caused by neither her cultural traits nor the failure of her will. Her stroke was caused in part by inequity. She is one of the lucky ones, though, because even while structural violence ravages her neighborhood, it also abets the concentration of expensive stroke- intervention services in certain wealthy teaching hospitals like mine. If I can get to her in time, we can still help her. Income Inequality and Life Inequality Of course, Windora is not the only person struggling on account of structural violence. Countless neighborhoods nationwide are suffering from it, and people are dying needlessly young as a result. The magnitude of this excess mortality is mind-boggling. In 2009 my friend Dr. Steve Whitman asked a simple question, “How many extra black people died in Chicago each year, just because they do not have the same health outcomes as white Chicagoans?” When the Chicago Sun-Times got wind of his results, it ran them on the front page in bold white letters on a black background: “HEALTH CARE GAP KILLS

3200 Black Chicagoans and the Gap is Growing.” The paper styled the headline to look like the declaration of war that it should have been. In fact, we did find ourselves at war not long ago, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed. That was September 11 , 2001. That tragedy propelled the country to war. Yet when it comes to the premature deaths of urban Americans, no disaster area has been declared . No federal troops have been called up. No acts of Congress have been passed. Yet this disaster is even worse : those

3,200 black people were in Chicago alone, in just one year. Nationwide each year, more than 60,000 black people die prematurely because of inequality.10

While blacks suffer the most from this, it is not just an issue of racism, though racism has been a unique and powerful transmitter of violence in America for over four hundred years.11 Beyond racism, poverty and income inequality perpetuated by exploitative market capitalism are singular agents of transmission of disease and early death. As a result, there is a new and alarming pattern of declining life expectancy among white Americans as well. Deaths from drug overdoses in young white Americans ages 25 to 34 have exploded to levels not seen since the AIDS epidemic. This generation is the first since the Vietnam War era to experience higher death rates than the prior generation.12 White Americans ages 45 to 54 have experienced skyrocketing premature death rates as well, something not seen in any other developed nation.13 White men in some Appalachian towns live on average twenty years less than white men a half-day’s drive away in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Men in McDowell County, West Virginia, can look forward to a life expectancy only slightly better than that of Haitians.14But those statistics reflect averages, and every death from structural violence is a person . When these illnesses and deaths are occurring one at a time in neighborhoods that society has decided not to care about —neighborhoods populated by poor, black, or brown people — they seem easy to overlook , especially if you are among the fortunate few who are doing incredibly well. The tide of prosperity in America has lifted some boats while others have swamped. Paul Farmer, the physician-anthropologist who founded Partners in Health, an international human rights agency, reflects on the juxtaposition of “unprecedented bounty and untold penury”: “It stands to reason that as beneficiaries of growing inequality , we do not like to be reminded of misery of squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anesthesia.”15

That people suffer and die prematurely because of inequality is wrong . It is wrong from an ethical perspective . It is wrong from a fairness perspective . And it is wrong because we have the means to fix it.

1AC — PlanThe United States federal government should establish and enforce a constitutional right to education guaranteeing that all children in the United States receive equal access to an excellent elementary and secondary public education and should increase funding to a level necessary to accomplish this goal.

1AC — SolvencyContention Two: Solvency

First, requiring equal access to an excellent education is vital to close opportunity and achievement gapsRobinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 205-206) I contend that the United States should strategically restructure and strengthen the federal role in education to establish the necessary foundation for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education . This restructuring and strengthening of the federal role in education would require shifting some power away from the state and local governments and toward the federal government. The U nited States would then need to adopt a new understanding of education federalism that embrace s the federal government as the guarantor of equal opportunity , because it is the only government with the capacity and sufficient incentive to lead a national effort to achieve this widely supported, yet persistently elusive, goal. Although this would not require federalizing the nation's education system as at least one scholar has recommended, it would require acceptance of a larger federal role in education to hold the states accountable for ensuring that all students receive equal access to an excellent education.7

I define equal access to an excellent education as the opportunity for all students to attend a high-quality school that enables them to effectively pursue their life goals, to become engaged citizens, and to develop their abilities to their full potential.8 Equal access to an excellent education enables all students to receive “a real and meaningful opportunity to achieve rigorous college- and career-ready standards.” 9 If the United States pursues equal access to an excellent education as the primary goal for its education system, it will break the traditional link between low-income and minority status and inferior educational opportunities . This goal recognizes that educational opportunities should be tailored to meet the individual needs of students that may vary dramatically

depending on a variety of factors, including family structure and stability, students' health and nutrition, and neighborhood climate. This goal also embraces closing the opportunity gap as an essential prerequisite for closing the achievement gap. Furthermore, embracing racially and economically diverse schools is essential for achieving this goal given compelling research regarding the harms of racial and class isolation, the benefits of diversity, and evidence of diverse schools providing important educational benefits that cannot be duplicated by alternative reforms. 10 An excellent education for all schoolchildren should be the nation's ultimate [end page 205]

education goal , because all families ultimately want a first-rate education for their children and because the United States would benefit economically, socially, and politically from providing such an education.

Second, comprehensive federal action is needed for successful reform. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education,” Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 185), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. Overturning RodriguezTo be most effective, a comprehensive federal agenda requires the assistance of all three branches of government . The executive branch enjoys the fewest obstacles to reform because it could use its existing authority to accomplish incremental shifts to education federalism through modest reforms that employ its existing authority and resources. n295 Nevertheless, given the full scope of the shift to education

federalism that I recommend, reforms instituted without any significant involvement of Congress or the Court would lack the comprehensive nature that ensuring equal access to an excellent education for all schoolchildren will ultimately demand. Legislation consistent with this agenda would send a n even more powerful message that the agenda represents the will of the people and thus may encourage greater state and local buy-in . n296 However, the eight-year delay in reenacting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which eventually led to the reduction of the federal role in education in the Every Student Succeeds Act, n297 and the great difficulties that Congress is experiencing in passing legislation n298 suggest that legislative reform consistent with my proposal is unlikely in the near term. [*231] Fortunately, the Court possesses the authority to unleash a powerful tool that could help to reduce the opportunity and achievement gaps that lead

universities and colleges to rely on affirmative action in admissions. It could overturn

Rodriguez , which held that the Constitution does not protect education as a fundamental right. n299

For over forty years, Rodriguez has served as a roadblock to access to federal courts for those who hope to address the entrenched disparities in funding and resources that relegate many disadvantaged and minority students to inferior educational opportunities in the United States. n300 Because the Court held that education was not a fundamental right, Rodriguez applied rational basis review to the funding gaps between districts within Texas. n301 The Court determined that Texas easily met this standard because its funding approach advanced local control of education, the Court lacked the expertise to second-guess the Texas system, and a ruling for the plaintiffs would greatly upset the balance of federalism. n302 The Court nonetheless noted the need for reform of school funding and challenged the states to undertake this reform. n303 Although many states have implemented funding reform since Rodriguez and state litigation has resulted in some important victories, these state efforts have fallen far short of the reforms required to provide all children equal access to an excellent education. n304 In light of the continuing disparities in educational opportunity, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that Rodriguez was wrongly decided and should be overturned to provide a consistent and powerful federal remedy to address these disparities . n305 [*232] However, disagreement exists over the scope of the right that the Court should recognize. The Court left the existence of a fundamental right to some minimum education an open question in Rodriguez n306 and subsequently acknowledged that the question remains open. n307 If Rodriguez is overturned, some scholars envision the Court addressing only extreme forms of educational inequality by providing a federal right to a minimally adequate education. n308 Leading education scholar Professor Derek Black, on the other hand, has argued that such an education today would require that students receive the state-defined minimum of education and that this definition does not have to equal "a minimalist education." n309Given the likelihood that the Court will insist that affirmative action eventually end, the Court should take some responsibility for addressing the conditions that lead institutions to rely on affirmative action by overturning the decision that insulated opportunity gaps from federal accountability. The Court could choose from a variety of constitutional provisions to recognize a right to education. n310 For [*233] instance, the Court could hold that the Fourteenth Amendment 's requirement that states not deny equal protection of the laws n311 serves as a prohibition of the inequitable state disparities in educational opportunity or guarantees students an education that enables them to effectively employ their First Amendment rights and to be competent voters. n312 Recognizing and enforcing a federal right to education would provide greater authority and consistent impact than the state education clauses that vary widely in their protection — or lack thereof — of the right to education. n313

The federal courts have been and will remain an important and powerful avenue for enforcing education rights for all students throughout the United States in ways that do not make the content of a right dependent on the happenstance of geography or state law. n314 A federal constitutional right also

would enable the federal courts to address the substantial interstate disparities in funding that currently account for seventy-eight percent of per-pupil spending gaps . n315 This tremendous interstate disparity , which has reached a [*234]

"historic high" for spending differences, n316 reveals the failure of state courts to close spending gaps on their own. n317

If the Court chooses to overturn Rodriguez in a manner that would help to

close opportunity gaps, it should incorporate four essential principles into a constitutional right to education. First, the Court must embrace a robust fundamental right to education that moves beyond guaranteeing a rudimentary floor of educational opportunity. A minimal right would not make a meaningful impact on opportunity or achievement gaps. Instead, the Court should consider recognizing a right to education that requires states to provide an education-based justification for the quality of education provided and any disparities in educational opportunity . Such a standard would enable states to offer disparate opportunities to students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-income children, but would force states to end the superior opportunities that are provided to wealthier children absent an educational justification for such disparities. Defining a fundamental right to education in this way would help to level the playing field within public schools and insist that states design education systems based on research and students' needs rather than power, politics, and privilege.

Second, the Court should include safeguards that reduce the likelihood that states level down their educational opportunities

n318 or seek to avoid the Court's requirements . n319 One safeguard could be an instruction to states that guaranteeing a federal right to education should avoid reducing the quality and nature of existing educational opportunities and instead should seek ways to expand the delivery of a high-quality education to those who are currently denied it. The Court also can reduce the likelihood of decreasing the quality of educational opportunities within a state by providing clear requirements on the nature of the education right. In this regard, the Court can learn from decades of school finance litigation that has worked to give meaning to the right to education embodied in state constitutions, n320 while recognizing [*235] that this litigation has had significant shortcomings and has not ultimately resulted in equal access to an excellent education for all children. n321Third, the Court must acknowledge that a constitutional right to education would shift education federalism in ways that would increase federal influence over education and reduce some aspects of state control over education. The Court must wrestle with its own prior pronouncements heralding the importance of local control of education. n322 Such a shift in an

area of traditional state control must be justified with an explanation for why this shift is both appropriate and warranted. n323When the Court provides this explanation, it should remind the states that Rodriguez urged state reform of school finance systems in light of the persistent and heavy reliance on property taxes and the disparities in educational opportunity. n324 The limited nature and impact of subsequent reforms remains apparent in light of the Equity and Excellence Commission's finding in 2013 that "students, families and communities are burdened by the broken system of education funding in America." n325 The Commission further noted that over forty years of reforms "have not addressed the fundamental sources of inequities and so have not generated the educational gains desired." n326 Scholars also have recognized the limited success of decades of funding litigation to remedy longstanding inequitable disparities in educational opportunity. n327 School funding data and research also confirm a host of shortcomings in state funding systems despite the Court's invitation to reform funding in ways that increase equal educational opportunities. n328In addition to the shortcomings noted above, most states have not designed their funding systems to accomplish their education goals. n329 Instead,

politics oftentimes drives the distribution of funding as state [*236]

politicians assess how much funding is available for a given school year and then bargain over how that amount should be divided among the students in the state. n330 When the Court acknowledges

that its decision will result in a shift in education federalism, it also should acknowledge that the laboratory of the states has failed to develop the reforms needed to ensure an equitable and excellent education for every child.Fourth, the Court must acknowledge that recognizing a constitutional right to education would only begin the process of closing opportunity and achievement gaps. The reform of funding systems and the redistribution of educational opportunity will take a significant amount of time. The Court will need to encourage lower courts to retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing this right, just as state courts typically retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing a state right to education. n331In this regard, the Court must avoid the errors of its desegregation cases, which initially insisted on effective desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, n332 but then eventually emphasized the return to local control of schools rather than the effectiveness of desegregation orders. For example, in Milliken v. Bradley, n333 the Court overturned an interdistrict desegregation plan for the metropolitan Detroit area in part because the plan's inclusion of districts surrounding Detroit would cause a reduction in local control. n334 The Court took this action in spite of the Sixth Circuit's finding that crossing district boundaries was particularly appropriate given the state's discrimination that maintained racial segregation across school district boundaries and that failing to include the surrounding districts would "nullify" Brown v. Board of Education. n335 As I have explored in prior work, the Court's desegregation decisions in Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, n336 Freeman v. Pitts, n337 and Missouri v. Jenkins n338 [*237] also reified local control of the schools by focusing on releasing districts from court supervision rather than on effective and lasting school desegregation. n339 Scholars have documented how these cases signaled that the Court had determined that desegregation had gone on long enough and it was time for school boards to regain control even if desegregation was never ultimately accomplished. n340If a federal right to education is going to serve as a mechanism to close educational opportunity gaps and to reduce the need for selective institutions to rely on consideration of an applicant's race to achieve diversity's benefits, the Court must learn from how its desegregation decisions undeniably contributed to the racial isolation that pervades so many school districts today. n341 The Court's impatience with the slow nature of desegregation reveals a shallow understanding of the depth of the social ill that the Court declared unconstitutional in Brown and an unwillingness to insist upon ongoing federal court investment in the effective dismantling of segregation. Overturning Rodriguez will require the Court to confront longstanding and deeply entrenched inequalities within public education. The federal courts will be called upon to oversee reforms that topple the settled expectations of more privileged sectors of society, just as the Court confronted the expectations of racism and white privilege that supported racial segregation. Thus, the reforms required by the Court cannot give a wink and a nod to those who benefit from the status quo while simultaneously claiming to demand reform.The Court must eschew any approval of unwarranted delay, as

occurred in Brown II's command to desegregate with "all deliberate speed," n342 or any invitation to incomplete or ineffective results, as the Court sanctioned in

Dowell, Freeman, and Jenkins. n343 Instead, the Court must insist that states implement the reforms that will ensure [*238] equal access to an

excellent education. It must make clear that states will not be released from court oversight until they have done so. Consistent Supreme Court insistence on an excellent and equitable education for all children will provide lower federal courts the support that they will need both to confront state legislatures that resist changing the status quo and to prevent evasive actions similar to those invited by the Court's ambiguous pronouncements in Brown II. n344

In sum, a federal right to education that embraces these principles provides the most promising path toward closing opportunity and achievement gaps such that selective postsecondary institutions may not be required to

consider race to achieve diversity's benefits. n345 Unless the Court overturns Rodriguez, the Court will remain complicit with the deeply entrenched educational opportunity gaps and should not blame postsecondary institutions that must build diverse institutions despite those gaps.Foonote n345: Additionally, Congress could take a variety of actions to support the Court's recognition of a constitutional right to education. Congress could embrace the Court's requirements as conditions on funding in the E lementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 or on any education funding, authorize grants to support reform, extend funding for the DOE to enforce new conditions, and monitor DOE enforcement of the conditions . See Robinson, supra note 141, (manuscript at 34-49) (proposing congressional mechanisms that could lead states to offer equal access to an excellent education); Robinson, supra note 18, at 1006-12 (describing how Congress can still expand the federal role in education despite the limits NFIB v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012), placed on congressional spending). The executive branch could issue an executive order on the importance of compliance with the Court's decision recognizing a federal right to education, establish a commission to study and recommend effective responses, enforce any statutory conditions on education funding , and modify education regulations and guidance consistent with the Court 's pronouncements. These efforts would provide critical support for the Court's decision to recognize a constitutional right to education by overturning Rodriguez. See San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 35 (1973).

Third, restoring the positive federal role in education is necessary to rectify racial and class oppression and promote integration. Only federal action can achieve educational equality. Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. A Positively Federalist View for Future Reauthorizations of the ESEA

A positive conception of federalism is particularly justified when attempting to divine the appropriate federal role in public education. As discussed previously, the primary constitutional basis for federal involvement in public education is premised on the government's responsibility to take positive action to remedy racial and class inequalities. n186 The Brown constitutional doctrine and the "War on Poverty" driven by the ESEA forged an understanding of education federalism rooted in positive social justice . It is particularly appropriate today that we restore this fundamental understanding of education federalism, given evidence of increasing racial disparities in public education and the noted failures of modern education federalism policy.

The federal guarantee of equal public education is critical ly important to the functioning of our democracy . As a public good, education helps our society develop those "fundamental values necessary to the transmission of our democratic society." n187 The provision of an equitable public education , devoid of identity- based disparities , is critical to provide children with " the knowledge needed to understand and participate effectively in the democratic process and to cultivate among children respect for and the ability to interact with others as beings of inherently equal moral worth ." n188 Indeed, both classic and contemporary constitutional scholars

argue that equal public education should be regarded as " a fundamental duty , or positive fundamental right because education is a basic human need and a constituent part of all democratic rights ." n189 The need, then, for a robust application of positive education federalism principles in this context cannot be stronger. [*385] The purpose of this Article is not to provide specific curricular recommendations to guide the future of public education. n190 Rather, this Article has attempted to define a new vision of positive education federalism - one that is rooted in a historical understanding of the constitutional obligation of the federal government to shape education policy goals in a manner that responds to unrelenting racial and class disparities. A few core principles regarding the substantive dimension of positive education federalism can be gleaned from this discussion:1. First Principle: Providing an equal public education is a federal responsibility that cannot be transferred to or assumed by private market forces.

The overarching conclusion of this Article is that ESSA, NCLB, and RTT unconstitutionally transfer federal responsibility for positively eliminating racial and class inequality in public education to private market forces under the auspices of competitive federalism. n191 This reading of the federal role in public education is ahistorical and undermines the core principles of equality informing Brown-era education federalism . n192

2. Second Principle: Positive federal action is justifiable in public education when necessary to rectify historical patterns of racial and class oppression.

It follows from the first principle that positive federal intervention in public education is justified when employed to directly respond to our unbroken history of racial and class disparities in educational outcomes. The original vision of the ESEA and Brown anticipated future positive efforts by the federal government to wield its block grant powers to actively dismantle old systems of oppression. n193 The current statutory framework has abandoned this vision of equality in its misguided pursuit to harness the market forces of consumer choice, accountability, and competition to limit the federal role in education . n194 [*386] 3. Third Principle: Our education federalism must acknowledge that racial discrimination and class oppression are the true roots of current educational disparities .Third, it is of the utmost importance that our education federalism fully acknowledge the historical and continuing causes of education disparities: racial discrimination and poverty. n195 The race and class-based roots of educational inequality are well-known and well-documented, and our education federalism can no longer hide behind the veil of ignorance provided by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT. n196 Far from acknowledging the reality of educational disparities, our current competitive federalist framework for education actively attempts to conceal these roots, with the specious promise that the free market principles of choice, accountability, and competition will eventually equalize education. n197 Modeling our education federalism around such race and class "neutral" market principles have led to a deepening of the crisis while allowing society to ignore the ways in which privilege shapes outcomes. n198

4. Fourth Principle: Our education federalism must strive to promote racial and class integration.

Finally, any equality-based vision of education federalism must promote the social integration of our public schools. The current competitive conception of education policy has failed those "faces at the bottom of [the] well" n199 and led to a rampant racial re-segregation of our schools . n200 This failure evinces a lack of faith and duty in fulfilling the original integrationist goals of Brown and the ESEA. Therefore, a positive theory of education federalism must promote federal efforts to integrate our public schools.

These core principles, on a theory of positive education federalism, can be used to inform future reauthorizations of the ESEA. While this Article does not attempt to advance specific changes in statutory law, it has attempted to redefine the substantive dimension of our education federalism in a manner that restores our faith in Brown, the ESEA, and the promise of racial and class equality. [*387] ConclusionThe neoliberal vision of education federalism embodied by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT has improperly shifted the federal government's role in public education from one of promoting desegregation and social equality to one of promoting market efficiency through the artifices of competition, choice, and accountability. This deflection of moral responsibility for class and racial inequality is tied to a larger process of post-racialism and "post-oppression," whereby seemingly "neutral" market solutions are seen as sufficient to promote equality in a liberal democracy. There is, after all, a comforting allure to believing that social inequality is non-systemic, and thus avoiding the cognitive dissonance (and structural upheaval) that comes from confronting our continuing legacy of racial and class privilege.

Allowing the "invisible hand" of the market to sort educational outcomes under the guise of "competition," "choice," and "accountability," however, has led to a deepening of the crisis confronting our public schools . The federal role in public education has been reduced to incentivizing reform centered around market principles, rather than promoting desegregation and the equality envisioned by Brown and the original ESEA. "Our

federalism" demands more than this. The substantive dimension of education federalism , as constitutionalized by Brown and framed by the original ESEA, must be restored in our public education policy. The adoption of a positive conception of the federal role in public education to frame future policy discussions can put us once again on the path towards achieving equality of educational outcome for all students.

Fourth, increased funding is vital to improve schools — the best research confirms. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 1-2)Executive Summary

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education . It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and

covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to

education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:Does Money Matter?Yes . On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes . The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do Schooling Resources That Cost Money Matter?Yes . Schooling resources that cost money , including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher-quality teacher workforce), are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger

than in others, and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do State School Finance Reforms Matter?Yes . Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising. [end page 1]While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:• Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.

• When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.

• Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded .

In short, money matters , resources that cost money matter , and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes . Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance .

Finally, claims that “money doesn’t matter” are unethical and wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 15-19)Summing Up The EvidenceThis brings me to a summary of the evidence on whether money matters in education. Despite the relative consistency of empirical findings over time regarding (a) whether per-pupil spending itself is related to student outcomes; (b) whether spending-related resources, such as teacher wages and class sizes, are related to student outcomes; and (c) whether improving the adequacy and equity of school funding can have positive effects on student outcomes, a persistent cloud of doubt hangs over political deliberations on school funding. Here, I review briefly the sources of that doubt, relative to what we do know with some confidence as well as what we still have yet to figure out about money and student outcomes.Main sources of doubtThe primary source of doubt to this day remains the above-mentioned Eric

Hanushek finding in 1986 that “there appears to be no strong or systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance.”117 This single quote, now divorced entirely from the soundly refuted analyses on which it was based, remains a mantra for those wishing to deny that increased funding for schools is a viable option for improving school quality. Add to this statement the occasional uninformative and inflammatory anecdote regarding urban district spending and student outcomes in places

like Kansas City or New Jersey, or the frequently re-created graphs showing spending and achievement over the past few decades, and one has a rhetorical war against an otherwise overwhelming body of empirical evidence.118

While research evidence regarding the importance of funding and specific schooling resources for improving student outcomes has become clearer with time, Hanushek and a [end page 15] handful of peers have become even more entrenched in their views , as reflected in recent public testimony. Rhetoric among detractors has continued to drift from the cloud of

doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality, and that school finance reforms that infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling. Notably, Hanushek asserts (now and then) that it’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but rather that additional money doesn’t matter on top of the already high levels of spending that currently exist across all U.S. schools.To summarize, the current dogma of Hanushek includes the following core tenets:1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent.3. Differences in the amount of money some schools have than others are inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.According the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad. In his own words, they are “conventional wisdom” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis,” “substantial econometric evidence” and “considerable prior research.” For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York state, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”119

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily referenced to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 1980s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , 120 including by research produced in the last 12 years. Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State of New York), Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Hanushek again backs his claims with the same short list of dated self-citation.121 In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,122 Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”123

This time, he anchored that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the failure of input-based schooling policies, 124 choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much money is available. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York state school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.”125As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point—without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Further, “how money is spent” is constrained by whether sufficient money is there to begin with. While common sense dictates that how money is spent clearly matters, thus making this part of the statement widely agreeable, this does not preclude the relevance of how much money is available to spend.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them, aren’t an important policy concern either. Specifically, Hanushek proclaims:

“It also underscores how calculations of equity gaps in spending, of costs needed to achieve equity, or of costs needed to obtain some level of student performance are vacuous, lacking any scientific basis” (p. 4).126

Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be

vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education—toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance-based pay and dismissal of “bad teachers,” is easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume that creative personnel policies yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies [end page 16] with comparable

efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in

popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high-productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short-lived) success in 2002 and 2003 of the low-payroll Oakland Athletics baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game . That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. The public’s interest in providing equitable and adequate funding for education is likely greater than ensuring equitable and adequate baseball payrolls. Put more bluntly,

the education of present and future generations should not be an unfair game.

From judges to scholars , critics of Hanushek have characterized his evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ,” 127 and “ weak and factually tenuous .” 128 Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes are the “long-term trend” or “time trend” argument and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.129 Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the long-term trend claim.Again, from recent testimony in New York state, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the long-term trend assertion:

“The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil-teacher ratios fell by one-third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5”130

This claim, like many of Hanushek’s, is made with language of astounding certainty—the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per-pupil spending going up over time, pupil-to-teacher ratios going down and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and via the failure to adjust appropriately for the changing costs and related obligations of the public education system and for the changing demography of the tested population.131 Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection.132 Jackson, Johnson and Persico (2015) provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions.133As explained by Baker and Welner (2011),134 Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high-poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”135

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of a even more recent New York school funding challenge.136 This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012), marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)137 find the following:

“The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”138

Further, the same report reveals that New Jersey has seen particularly strong growth in reducing the number of the lowest-performing students (those scoring at the “below basic” level), especially for eighth-grade math. To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more

rigorous, thoughtful analyses. The most recent rigorous and relevant academic research is addressed in the remainder of this brief. There are others who opine in the public square139 and courtroom140 that school finance reform—specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high-need student populations—is neither the most effective nor the most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.No rigorous empirical study of which I am aware validates that increased funding for schools in general, or targeted to [end page 17] specific populations, has led to any substantive, measured reduction in student outcomes or other “harm.” Arguably, if this were the case, it would open new doors to school finance litigation against states that choose to increase funding to schools. Twenty years ago, economist Richard Murnane summarized the issue exceptionally well when he stated:

“In my view, it is simply indefensible to use the results of quantitative studies of the relationship between school resources and student achievement as a basis for concluding that additional funds cannot help public school districts. Equally disturbing is the claim that the removal of funds … typically does no harm” (p. 457).141

Murnane’s quote is as relevant today as it was then. The sources of doubt on the “Does money matter?” question are not credible .While there remains much to debate, discuss and empirically evaluate regarding the returns to each additional dollar spent in schools—and the strategies for improving educational efficiency, equity and adequacy—we must finally be willing to cast aside the most inane arguments and sources of evidence on either side of the debate. Specifically, the following five contentions no longer have a legitimate place in the debate over state school finance policy and whether and how money matters in K-12 education:1. Vote counts of correlational studies between spending and outcomes, without regard for rigor of the analyses and quality of the data on which they depend; 2. The long-term trend argument and supporting graphs that show long-term spending going up and NAEP scores staying flat ; 3. International comparisons asserting , and perhaps illustrating via scatterplot,

that the United States spends more than other developed countries but achieves less on international assessments; 4. Anecdotal assertions that states such as New Jersey and cities such as Kansas City provide proof positive that massive infusions of funding have proven ineffective at improving student outcomes; and5. The assertion that how money is spent is much more important than how much is available .

Vote count tallies without regard for study quality and rigor are of relative little use for understanding whether money matters in schooling and are of no use for discerning how. The long-term trend argument is perhaps the most reiterated of all arguments that money doesn’t matter,

but it is built largely on deceptive, oversimplified and largely wrong characterizations (accompanied by distorted visuals) of the long- term trends in student outcomes and school spending. Facile international comparisons are equally deceitful , in that they (a)

fail to account for differences in student populations served and

the related scope of educational and related services provided; and (b) fail to appropriately equate educational spending across nations, including the failure to account for the range of services and operating costs covered under “educational expense” in the United States versus other countries (for example, public employee health and pension benefits). And anecdotal assertions of failures resulting from massive infusions of funding are rebutted herein and elsewhere.142Finally, while the assertion that “how money is spent is important” is certainly valid, one cannot reasonably make the leap to assert that how money is spent is necessarily more important than how much money is available. Yes, how money is spent matters, but if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. It is unhelpful at best for public policy, and harmful to the children subjected to those policies, to pretend without any compelling evidence that somewhere out there exists a far cheaper way to achieve the same or better outcomes (and thus we can cut our way down that more efficient path). As so eloquently noted by a three-judge panel in Kansas when faced with this question:

“Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes , then for most, it is most likely gone . We all know that the struggle for an income very often—too often— overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

“If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.”143

What do we know?Based on the studies reviewed in this brief, there are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources and student outcomes.First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters . [end page 18] Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size reductions and

increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, these effects are larger in some cases and for some populations. On balance, though, there are ways to spend money that have a solid track record of success. Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be.Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and

equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the adequacy and equity of outcomes. That is, if the money isn’t there, schools and districts simply don’t have a “leverage option” that can support strategies that might improve student outcomes. If the money is there, they can use it productively; if it’s not, they can’t. But, even if they have the money, there’s no guarantee that they will use it productively. Evidence from Massachusetts, in particular, suggests that appropriate combinations of more funding with more accountability may be most promising.

Case Backlines

They Say: “Right To Education Fails”Courts will enforce — there’s an overwhelming consensus that money matters. Ogletree and Robinson 17 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2017 (“Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy,” Education Next, Volume 17, Number 2, Spring, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/inequitable-schools-demand-federal-remedy-forum-san-antonio-rodriguez/, Accessed 06-09-2017)Enforcing the RightOnce the court recognizes a federal constitutional right to education, families, advocates, and attorneys must begin the hard work of challenging state systems of education as unlawful under the U.S. Constitution. Federal courts should insist that states design their education systems to accomplish the aims of the right to education— be they ending inequitable disparities in educational opportunity, preparing students to be competent voters and civic participants, or ensuring that students are equal citizens. State-level funding litigation has often revealed that education systems are based upon the bargains struck by politicians that are divorced from a rigorous analysis of the aims of education and the best means to achieve them. In designing remedies, the federal courts could draw critical lessons from successful state cases such as Abbott v. Burke (New Jersey) and Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. Both cases provide examples of state courts that have insisted that states design funding systems to accomplish specified aims.Cases alleging a federal constitutional right to education need not center on the illegality of funding disparities. Such cases can cause courts to lose their focus on the underlying disparities in educational opportunity that prevent children from becoming engaged citizens and productive members of society. When cases do implicate funding disparities, the federal courts can build upon the consensus that has emerged from the overwhelming majority of state courts that have concluded, after a

review of the relevant social science research, that money does matter for the quality of educational opportunity. Recent research by C. Kirabo Jackson

and colleagues confirms that spending increases can improve both educational and adult outcomes for low-income children (see “Boosting Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings,” research, Fall 2015). Therefore, although the Rodriguez court noted that it was unable to address complex policy questions such as this, the Supreme Court would not be stymied by this question in future cases.

They Say: “Funding Not Key – General”Prefer our evidence — best empirical analysis. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 2)The growing political consensus that money doesn’t matter stands in sharp contrast to the substantial body of empirical research that has accumulated over time , but which gets virtually no attention

in our public discourse.12 This policy brief reviews that literature. Specifically, I review three major bodies of evidence , each of which pertains to a specific element of the broad topic of whether money matters in determining the quality of education. These three literatures are organized by the following guiding questions: [end page 2]

1. Does money matter? Are differences in aggregate school funding associated with differences in short- and long-term measured outcomes?2. Do school resources that cost money matter? Are differences in access to specific schooling programs or resources—where “resources” mean the various things that money buys, such as smaller classes, higher salaries and instructional materials—associated with differences in short- and long-term measured outcomes?3. Do school finance reforms matter? Do substantive and sustained reforms to state school finance systems, including raising the level of funding or redistributing money more equitably, lead to improvements in the level or distribution of student outcomes?I discuss only domestic studies , primarily those that focus on short-term and intermediate-term outcomes , such as achievement (e.g., test scores) and attainment (e.g., graduation). Furthermore,

preference is given to studies that appear in peer-reviewed academic journals and books (see endnote 13 for the full selection criteria).13 I

also discuss the sources of information that have been frequently used to cast doubt on whether money is related to educational outcomes. Finally, I summarize what we know from the preponderance of evidence, as derived from rigorous empirical analysis, as well as what we do not yet know. And in an appendix to this brief, I discuss, in general terms, methodological issues around the study of whether money matters in education.

No tradeoff between “more funding” and “smart spending” — the plan does both. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)We Should Avoid False Choices and Invest in Kids’ OpportunitiesIncreased funding, to be useful, must of course be spent in smart ways. Money by itself isn’t a panacea. But it’s important to get the facts right: money matters, and it matters quite a bit.

It is incredibly counterproductive to pit increased funding and smart spending against each other (though Mehlhorn’s piece acknowledges “that money spent properly can be helpful in improving achievement,” it balks at the idea that schools need additional funding), especially when schools serving the most disadvantaged students tend to get the fewest resources. Giving schools more money and making sure they spend that money wisely are complementary , not competing, goals .

They Say: “Funding Not Key – Hanushek”The consensus of the best research disproves Hanushek. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 11-12)JJP also address the question of how money is spent, and, in a response to Hanushek, explain that they too concur that how money is spent is important. An important feature of the JJP study is that it does explore the resultant shifts in specific schooling resources in response to shifts in funding . For the most part, increased spending led to increases in typical schooling resources, including higher educator salaries, smaller classes, and longer school days and years. JJP explain:

“We find that when a district increases per-pupil school spending by $100 due to reforms, spending on instruction increases by about $70, spending on support services increases by roughly $40, spending on capital increases by about $10, while there are reductions in other kinds of school spending, on average.“We find that a 10 percent increase in school spending is associated with about 1.4 more school days, a 4 percent increase in base teacher salaries, and a 5.7 percent reduction in student-teacher ratios. Because classsize reduction has been shown to have larger effects for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, this provides another possible explanation for our overall results.“While there may be other mechanisms through which increased school spending improves student outcomes, these results suggest that the positive effects are driven, at least in part, by some combination of reductions in class size, having more adults per student in schools, increases in instructional time, and increases in teacher salaries that may help to attract and retain a more highly qualified teaching workforce.”

In other words, oft-maligned traditional investments in schooling resources occurred as a result of court-imposed school finance reforms , and those changes in resources were likely responsible for the resultant long-term gains in student outcomes . Such findings are particularly consistent with recent summaries and updated analyses of data on class size reduction .

Several state-specific longitudinal studies of school finance reforms support the JJP findings. Figlio (2004) explains that the influence of state school finance reforms on student outcomes is perhaps better measured within states over time, explaining that national studies of the type attempted by Card and Payne confront problems that include (a) the enormous diversity in the nature of state aid reform plans; and (b) the paucity of national student performance data.80 Accordingly, more recent peer-reviewed studies of state school finance reforms have applied longitudinal analyses within specific states. And several such studies provide compelling evidence of the potential positive effects of school finance reforms.

Studies of Michigan school finance reforms of the 1990s have shown positive effects on student performance in both the previously lowest-spending districts81 and previously lower-performing districts.82 For instance, Roy (2011) found that Michigan’s school finance reforms of the 1990s led to a significant increase among previously low-spending districts . Roy , whose analyses measure both

whether the policy resulted in changes in funding and who was affected, found that Michigan’s school finance plan “was quite successful in reducing interdistrict spending disparities. There was also a significant positive effect on student performance in the lowest-spending districts as measured in state tests” (abstract).83

Similarly, Papke (2001), also evaluating Michigan school finance reforms of the 1990s, found that “ increases in spending have nontrivial, statistically significant effects on math test pass rates, and the effects are largest for schools [end page 11] with initially poor performance” (p. 821).84Most recently, Hyman (2013) also found positive effects of these Michigan school finance reforms, but the paper raised some concerns regarding the distribution of those effects. Hyman found that much of the increase was targeted to schools serving fewer low-income children. However, the study did find that students exposed to “$1,000, or 12%, more spending per year during grades four through seven experienced a 3.9 percentage point increase in the probability of enrolling in college, and a 2.5 percentage point increase in the probability of earning a degree” (p. 1).85A similar peer-reviewed article by Deke (2003) evaluated “leveling up” of funding for very low-spending districts in Kansas, following a 1992 lower court threat to overturn the funding formula (without formal ruling to that effect). The article found that a 20 percent increase in spending was associated with a 5 percent increase in the likelihood of students going on to postsecondary ed ucation (p. 275).86Elsewhere, three studies of Massachusetts school finance reforms from the 1990s find similar results . The first, a non-peer-reviewed report by Downes, Zabel and Ansel (2009) explored, in combination, the influence

on student outcomes of accountability reforms and changes to school spending. They found that “some of the research findings show how education reform has been successful in raising the achievement of students in the previously low-spending districts” (p. 5).87 The second study, an NBER working paper by Guryan (2001), focused more specifically on the redistribution of

spending resulting from changes to the state school finance formula. Guryan found that “ increases in per-pupil spending led to significant increases in math, reading, science, and social studies test scores for 4th- and 8th-grade students. The magnitudes imply that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending leads to about a third to a half of a standard-deviation increase in average test scores. It is noted that the state aid driving the estimates is targeted to under-funded school districts, which may have atypical returns to additional expenditures” (p. 1).88 The most recent of the three, published in

2014 in the Journal of Education Finance, found that “ changes in

the state education aid following the education reform resulted in significantly higher student performance ” (p. 297).89

Finally, Downes (2004) conducted earlier studies of Vermont school finance reforms of the late 1990s (Act 60), noting:

“All of the evidence cited in this paper supports the conclusion that Act 60 has dramatically reduced dispersion in education spending and has done this by weakening the link between spending and property wealth. Further, the regressions presented in this paper offer some evidence that student performance has become more equal in the post-Act 60 period. And no results support the conclusion that Act 60 has contributed to increased dispersion in performance” (p. 312).90,91

On balance, it is safe to say that a sizeable and growing body of rigorous empirical literature validates that state school finance reforms can have substantive, positive effects on student outcomes, including reductions in outcome disparities and increases in overall outcome levels . It is also safe to say that the analyses provided by Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) and others92 who have tried to prove that court-ordered school funding reforms result in few or no measurable improvements offer little credible evidence , due to significant methodological omissions. In other words, not only does money matter , but reforms that determine how money is distributed matter too .

Hanushek is totally discredited. Baker 15 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2015 (“Education’s Merchant of Doubt: One man’s deceitful mission to undermine fair and adequate school funding,” School Finance 101—a scholarly education blog, August 13th, Available Online at https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/educations-merchant-of-doubt-the-plight-of-state-school-finance-systems/, Accessed 07-04-2017)Back in 2012, I opined: “It is hard to imagine a time in the history of American public education when there has been such a widespread political effort to argue that improving the quality of schools has little or nothing to do with the amount of money spent on public education. That is, that money simply doesn’t matter.”[1] It seemed as though at some point, discourse might begin to turn the corner on this question. That it might become more publicly acceptable and even acceptable in some political circles to acknowledge the relevance of money for improving the quality of schooling, and creating more equitable and adequate schools for achieving modern outcome goals.But that rhetoric persists as strong as ever both in political circles and in the pseudo-academic policy research which informs that rhetoric . Further, even as the economy has begun to rebound state school finance systems have continued to lag, perhaps in part due to the persistent rhetoric regarding the irrelevance of school funding, and preferences for not merely revenue neutral, but revenue negative reforms.In reference to a legal challenge brought against New York State, by small city school districts, New York’s Governor Cuomo opined:

“We spend more than any other state in the country,”“It ain’t about the money. It’s about how you spend it – and the results.” [2]

In conversations regarding Federal education spending priorities, Virginia Congressman Dave Brat proclaimed:

“Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.” [sic][3]

And so it is: we need only provide sufficient collection of rocks to ensure educational adequacy. That is, setting aside the modern-day competitive wage required to recruit and retain philosophy instructors of the quality of Socrates and provide them 1:1 student/teacher ratios.In recently published analysis, I found that during the recession, state school finance systems took a substantial hit, both in terms of total state and local revenue and in terms of equity between districts serving lower and higher poverty student populations:

The recent recession yielded an unprecedented decline in public school funding fairness. Thirty-six states had a three year average reduction in current spending fairness between 2008-09 and 2010-11 and 32 states had a three year average reduction in state and local revenue fairness over that same time period. Over the entire 19-year period, only 15 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. In years prior to 2008 (starting in 1993) only 11 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. [4]

A more recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that through 2014-15, most state school finance systems had not yet begun to substantively rebound:

At least 30 states are providing less funding per student for the 2014-15 school year than they did before the recession hit. Fourteen of these states have cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent. (These figures, like all the comparisons in this paper, are in inflation-adjusted dollars and focus on the primary form of state aid to local schools.)Most states are providing more funding per student in the new school year than they did a year ago, but funding has generally not increased enough to make up for cuts in past years. For example, Alabama is increasing school funding by $16 per pupil this year. But that is far less than is needed to offset the state’s $1,144 per-pupil cut over the previous six years. [5]

In short, the decline of state school finance systems continues and the rhetoric opposing substantive school finance reform shows little sign of easing. Districts serving the neediest student populations continue to take the hardest hit. Yet, concurrently, many states are substantively raising outcome standards for students[6] and increasing the consequences on schools and teachers for not achieving those outcome standards. Some positive signs include recent structural reforms, possibly involving new revenue in California and Pennsylvania, in each case focusing on districts serving high poverty student populations. But other states which cut substantially during the economic downturn, even under the pressure of prior and ongoing judicial review and oversight, have continued to cut (Kansas) or largely freeze state aid (New York).From the cloud of doubt to a rock of certaintyIn my 2012 report Does Money Matter in Education? I explained how one man’s mission to create a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the relationship between school quality and available funding has distorted public policy discourse over school finance reform .

One might characterize Eric Hanushek as education’s own “ merchant of doubt .” I explained the evolution of Eric Hanushek’s frequently reiterated assertions of “no systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance,” [7] originating in the 1980s, to more recent, bolder claims that substantial funding cuts cause no harm.While compelling evidence has continued to accumulate regarding the importance of funding for improving school quality, Hanushek in various outlets and public testimony has continued to drift from the cloud of doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality and that school finance reforms which infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling.[8]To summarize, the current Hanushekian dogma includes the following core principles:

1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely (read “will not and cannot”) to lead to improved student outcomes;2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent;3. Therefore, some schools and districts having more or less than others is inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.

According to the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad, in in his own words they are “conventional wisdom,” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth,” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis” and “substantial econometric evidence,” and “considerable prior research.”For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York State, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”[9]

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily cited to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 19 80s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , [10] not to mention,

research that has occurred in the last 12 years.[11] Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State) Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Backed again (in footnote 6 of his report) by the same short list of dated self-citation.[12] In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,[13] Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”[14]

This time, anchoring that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the Failure of input based schooling policies,[15] choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees, and all (or, a veritable shit-ton of) research says that there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much there is. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York State school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent. This finding is particularly true at the upper levels of current U.S. spending.[16]

As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point – without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Put bluntly, if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. Thus, the two issues – how much you have and how you spend it – are inextricably linked.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them,

aren’t an important policy concern either. They are, by his proclamation “vacuous” and “lacking any scientific basis.”[17]Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education – toward equitable outcome

goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance based pay, and dismissal of “bad teachers”, are easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume creative personnel policies to yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies with comparable efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book

and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short lived) success of the low payroll in 2002 and 2003 Oakland A’s baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book – The art of winning an unfair game. That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. Put bluntly, public schooling should not be an unfair game.The Eroding Soil under the RockFrom judges to scholars, critics of evidence (other than myself) used by Hanushek to support the above claims have characterized that evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ” [18] and “ weak and factually tenuous .” [19]

Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes, are the “long term trend” or “time trend” argument, and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth, the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.[20] Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the “long term trend” claim.Again from recent testimony in New York State, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the “long term trend” assertion:

The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil‐teacher ratios fell by one‐third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17‐year‐olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5[21]

This claim like many others is made with language of astounding certainty – the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per pupil spending going up over time, pupil to teacher ratios going down, and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and failures to adjust appropriately for changing costs and related obligations of the public education system, and changing demography of the tested population.[22] Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection .[23] Jackson and colleagues provide additional examples of how such facile

analyses lead to fallacious conclusions (ironically using cigarette smoking data).[24]Hanushek extends his use of the long term trend argument in his recent critique of findings from Jackson and colleagues that court ordered infusions of funding to select schools and districts led to long term gains in educational attainment, income and poverty reduction for those subjected to increased funding. Hanushek asserts:

If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases?

Thus, if the massive average spending increases reported by Hanushek as the actual long term trend did not lead to elimination or reversal of gaps, Jackson, Johnson and Persico’s findings must be wrong? Right?Of course, this assertion is complete and utter nonsense, because Jackson and colleagues don’t assert, and Hanushek’s own national average long term trend data do not show that all low income children, lower performing subgroups and/or those in low wealth communities were subjected to dramatic funding increases. In fact, if Hanushek’s average spending increases were driven as much by increases in wealthy (low poverty/minority) districts as they were by increases in poorer districts, then gaps would likely remain constant, all else equal. That is, the average level of funding, and changes in average level say nothing of gaps or distributions in funding or changes in gaps or distributions. Put bluntly, the average level of funding, and the distribution of funding are two different things. Conflating the two is intentionally deceitful.As explained by Baker and Welner (2011)[25] Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey ’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”[26]

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of the even more recent New York school funding challenge. [27] This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012) marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)

[28] find the following: “The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers , all of which outpaced the U nited States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”[29]

The same report by Hanushek shows impressive reductions in the share of students scoring “below basic” in New Jersey, especially for 8th grade math (Figure 4).To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more rigorous, thoughtful analyses.There are others who opine in the public square[30] and courtroom[31] that school finance reform – specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high need student populations – is neither the most effective nor most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.Nonetheless, the “facile” and “factually tenuous” illustrations above

must be put to rest , and the divisive, manipulative (intellectually insulting) and damaging rhetoric of education’s merchant of doubt cast aside once and for all.

Hanushek’s methodology is wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,

former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 9-10)Do School Finance Reforms Matter?A particularly relevant question for informing the current “Does money matter?” debate is whether increased and sustained funding provided through state school finance reforms can improve the level or distribution of student outcomes, including both long-term outcomes and short-term shifts in academic achievement. In other words, does the manner in which states distribute money matter? And how can we tell? Findings regarding these specific questions might, most directly, inform state legislative debates over tax policy and education spending.Most funding for public education comes from state and local sources and is under the jurisdiction of state school finance systems. Therefore, states have the greatest control over whether local public schools have access to sufficient levels of resources, and whether those resources are distributed equitably across children and settings. Furthermore, constitutional protections for children’s access to adequate and equitable public schooling exist in state constitutions, not in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, as indicated at the outset of this brief, it is at the state level where the most raucous rhetoric is occurring around these questions of whether money matters in education. State legislatures and governors can make or break public schooling, and they have.69Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and I published an extensive review on this specific topic, which appears in the November 2011 issue of Teachers College Record. Among other things, we address the research complexities of answering questions about the efficacy of state school finance reforms. Those complexities can often be reduced to asking the right questions about (a) whether substantive reforms were actually implemented; (b) when they were implemented and how long they were sustained; and (c) who was most affected by the reforms.As with other bodies of literature on the effectiveness of schooling resources, the research on state school finance reforms is a mixed bag in terms of analytic rigor . Secondhand references to dreadful failures following massive infusions of new funding can often be traced to methodologically inept, anecdotal tales of desegregation litigation in Kansas City, Mo., or to the court-ordered financing of urban districts in New Jersey.70In 2009, Eric Hanushek and a consulting defense attorney for states facing school funding challenges, Alfred Lindseth of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan,

produced a book in which one chapter is dedicated to trying to prove that court-ordered school funding reforms in New Jersey, Wyoming,

Kentucky and Massachusetts resulted in few or no measurable improvements.71 These conclusions , however, are based on little more than a series of graphs of student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1992 and 2007 . The authors show little change in these states’ scores and conclude that the reforms didn’t work. The authors assume that, during this period, each of the four states infused substantial additional funds into public education in response to judicial orders, and that these funds were targeted at low-income and minority students.72’73 They also necessarily assume that in all other states that serve as a comparison group, similar changes did not occur . Yet they validate neither assertion .

In contrast, Welner and I review several studies applying more rigorous and appropriate methods for evaluating the influence of state school finance reforms. Among these [end page 9] analyses is

one national study by Card and Payne (2002) that evaluates whether changes in spending inequality generally lead to changes in outcome inequality.74 The authors measure both the extent and the timing

of changes in each. These analyses , while imperfect, rise to a level far above those conducted by Hanushek and Lindseth. Card and Payne found “evidence that equalization of spending levels leads to a narrowing of test score outcomes across family background groups” (p. 49).75

They Say: “Funding Not Key – Mehlhorn”Prefer our evidence — Mehlhorn is wrong. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)Dmitri Mehlhorn, co-founder of StudentsFirst, wrote an article a few weeks ago about school funding titled, “How Money is Spent Matters.” That statement is obviously true; who could disagree with it?Unfortunately, the article’s actual argument – that “America’s schools are not underfunded” – is completely false. This post corrects the record. Funding for public primary and secondary education in the United States is, in fact, inadequate and inequitable, and rectifying this problem should be a top priority for anyone who cares about improving our schools.We’re Far From School Funding EquityBut what is adequate and equitable school funding? Researchers Bruce Baker and Danielle Farie and civil rights lawyer David Sciarra, who produce a National Report Card on school funding fairness, discuss this question at length in their 2015 report. One of the most important principles they note is that, because “[v]arying levels of funding are required to provide equal educational opportunities to children with different needs[,] finance systems should provide more funding to districts serving larger shares of students in poverty.”School funding in the United States doesn’t come close to meeting this criterion; as Baker, Farie, and Sciarra show, fourteen states have regressive school funding systems, meaning they allocate less money to schools serving disadvantaged students than they do to schools serving more affluent student populations. Nineteen other states have roughly equivalent funding between the two types of schools. Only four states – Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Delaware – score high enough across all of the researchers’ criteria (funding level; funding distribution; effort, or funding as a share of the state’s economy; and coverage, or “the share of school-age children enrolled in public schools and the degree to which there is economic disparity between households in the public versus private education system”) to have their funding systems deemed “fair.”This analysis likely represents an upper bound on the degree of school funding equity in the United States. While California appears to have roughly equivalent funding for low- and high-income schools in the report, for example, there are major funding discrepancies between some of the state’s “basic aid” districts, which serve affluent students, and districts that serve lower-income populations. Within-district variations in spending also go undetected in the report’s metrics, as may situations in which funding that is supposed to follow high-need students doesn’t reach them.Inequitable school funding is a widely acknowledged problem, so much so that people associated with StudentsFirst – the very

organization Mehlhorn co-founded – recognize that addressing it is imperative. Yet Mehlhorn ’s article doesn’t mention the distribution of school funding at all, except when making misleading statements about charter school spending.Charter School Research Supports Calls for More School FundingAs Baker, Ken Libby, and Kathryn Wiley found in a careful 2012 analysis of charter school and traditional public school spending:

Comparative spending between the two sectors is mixed, with many high profile charter network schools outspending similar district schools in New York City and Texas, but other charter network schools spending less than similar district schools, particularly in Ohio.

Mehlhorn’s counterclaim that charter schools spend significantly less money than traditional public schools likely stems from a 2011 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, but it, like more cursory and flawed studies, may fail to appropriately categorize spending that should be assigned to each type of school. Transportation funding and spending on food services and special education, for example, can be misclassified in such analyses.In addition, students in traditional public schools perform just about as well on average as students in charters; as Harvard professor Tom Loveless has explained, the differences in student test score results between the two sectors “are extremely small, so tiny, in fact, that they lack real world significance.” Mehlhorn’s inaccurate claims to the contrary rely on a completely invalid “months of learning”

conversion performed in a recent study of urban charter schools; the study actually shows a tiny difference between the charter and traditional public school sectors (less than .06 standard deviations, or a good deal less than one additional question answered correctly on most tests).In other words, there’s only one real conclusion that can be drawn about the research on overall levels of charter school funding and average student test scores: arguments touting charter schools as a low-cost solution to boost student achievement are either uninformed or deliberately misleading (especially because the student populations charters serve are typically unrepresentative subsets of the surrounding traditional public school populations, and because many studies don’t distinguish school effects from peer effects).There is, of course, important variation in the charter sector; some studies indicate that students in some charter school networks do very well. As Baker, Libby, and Wiley note, however, many of these networks spend substantially more per pupil (sometimes well over 30 percent more) than comparable public schools. Similarly, the test score gains in New Orleans charters that Mehlhorn applauds came with a substantial price tag, a fact that his article conveniently omits. The following excerpt from an interview with researcher Doug Harris is instructive on this point:

At the beginning New Orleans was spending about $8,000 more per pupil relative to similar districts. In other words, spending didn’t quite double, but it came pretty close to doubling in the initial years. And then it converged back to the normal, or close to normal rate. Now they’re spending about $1,000 more per pupil than similar districts, whereas before the storm they were spending close to the same as those comparison districts.

Harris doesn’t believe the test score gains in New Orleans were entirely a product of increased funding – he finds that explanation unlikely and thinks “every element of the reform package, including the change in spending, probably contributed in some fashion” – but acknowledges that it’s possible that increased funding played the primary role. In addition, while Harris thinks there are important lessons to be learned from school reform there, he doubts “you’d see the same effects in other places because the conditions [in New Orleans] were distinctive.”Either way, to the extent that best practices in certain successful charter schools drive their results, these practices can likely be replicated in traditional public schools that receive more adequate funding, as research by Roland Fryer suggests. Especially because rapid charter school expansion has often led to harmful side-effects (in New Orleans, the large-scale firing of Black teachers and inattention to community preferences are poignant examples), our efforts are best focused not on promoting charters, but on adequately and equitably funding all schools, thus enabling them to implement best practices that may include but are not limited to better teacher training and support, more competitive teacher pay (to facilitate recruitment and retention), reduced class sizes, extended learning time, expanded tutoring availability, and enhanced extracurricular opportunities.School Funding Research Confirms How Much Money MattersThere’s also a very strong research basis to support increased school funding – a research basis at least as strong as, if not stronger than , that behind practically any other education policy proposal. Mehlhorn ’s article elevates shaky empirical work from 25 years ago by Eric Hanushek (and work from nearly 50 years ago by James Coleman) to argue that money isn’t particularly important while downplaying the much larger body of more recent and careful research that comes to the opposite conclusion.

In 2012, Baker reviewed dozens of newer, higher-quality studies pertaining to this topic (Mehlhorn’s article mentions Baker’s review, but doesn’t link to it and paints an inaccurate picture of its findings). As Baker’s review shows:

[T]here are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources, and student outcomes:First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes…

Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size

reductions and increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes…Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be…Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving adequacy and equity of outcomes.

A new high-quality study by C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Persico

comes to the same conclusion. Mehlhorn’s article also mentions this study, but

misinterprets the results; it mistakenly compares the invalid “months of learning” statistic from the charter school research discussed above (which actually represents data on student test scores) with Jackson et al.’s data on completed years of schooling.In reality, Jackson et al.’s results are much more striking than most results in education research; the researchers argue in EducationNext that, “for low-income children, a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school is associated with roughly 0.5 additional years of completed education, 9.6 percent higher wages, and a 6.1-percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty.” While they concede in a follow-up piece that increased school funding won’t “eliminate all differences in outcomes by socioeconomic status,” they contend “that a 22.7 percent spending increase is large enough to eliminate the average outcome differences between the poor (those with family incomes below twice the poverty line) and the non-poor (those with family incomes above twice the poverty line).”The researchers’ claims here are overstated – they’re extrapolations beyond the actual results that, while less misleading than the “months of learning” statistic, are still misguided attempts to help a broader audience understand research findings – but it’s important to note that the magnitudes are very large relative to the results in most education studies.

It’s also worth noting that even Hanushek , who is one of the only researchers who continues to question the importance of school finance reforms, has never said that money never matters

(Mehlhorn’s article gets that point right) and has admitted that schools serving more disadvantaged students should receive more funding .We Can Afford to Spend More on Public SchoolsSome skeptics of increased funding, Mehlhorn included, attempt to compare education spending in America with education spending in other countries. Mehlhorn writes:

The best, though, imperfect way, to understand how well America is spending money on education is look at how much other nations – most-notably highly-touted Finland and South Korea — spend on their schools.

His article then proceeds to pull numbers from an OECD report to argue that Americans spend more on education than people in other countries, which, according to Mehlhorn, makes it “clear that money isn’t the main problem in American public education.”The problem, however, is that the numbers in Mehlhorn ’s piece are cherry- picked; they don’t actually speak to his argument about public K-12 education spending. As the OECD report notes, the figures Mehlhorn cites include public and private spending on primary, secondary, and tertiary education – that is, college – including but not limited to spending on transportation, meals, school health services, college dormitories, and “private spending on books and other school materials or private tutoring.”

In general, the OECD data shouldn’t be used for cross-country comparisons; it doesn’t count spending the same way in each country and likely makes US spending appear larger relative to spending in other countries than it actually is. To the extent that the data can be illustrative, however, the appropriate approach would exclude college costs and private spending and focus on K-12 public school spending as a share of the economy (as opposed to using raw numbers; spending as a share of GDP provides a better indication of how much a country spends relative to what it can afford). Doing so (see Table B4.1 here) indicates that public spending on primary and secondary education in the United States, relative to GDP, is lower than spending as a share of the economy in Finland, the same as such spending in Korea, and slightly below the OECD average . Again, the data is flawed, but it likely provides a high-end estimate of United States education spending relative to such spending elsewhere.Mehlhorn’s article also paints an incomplete picture of historical levels of education funding in the U nited States. The fact that K-12 spending has risen in inflation-adjusted dollar value terms over the past 45 years doesn’t tell us anything about whether school spending levels are sufficient , and real spending on practically everything has increased in dollar terms since the 1970s; in fact, real spending should

increase as our economy grows. A more appropriate (though still imperfect; one flaw is that

it’s not adjusted for changing demographics) look at K-12 public education spending in the United States reveals that we are spending approximately the same amount relative to the size of our economy that we were several decades ago.

What’s more, K-12 education funding has declined significantly even in real dollar terms in recent years ; during the 2014-2015 school year, 35 states were still providing less total state and local per pupil funding than they had been providing before the Great Recession. Title I funding for low-income schools and special education funding have also fallen since 2010.

Finally, it’s important to remember that even if aggregate funding levels were higher, aggregate numbers don’t speak to the distribution of funding. We’ve yet to target and sustain increased funding in schools that serve our neediest students . Especially when it comes to low-income areas, America definitely can – and should – invest more in K-12 public education .

Mehlhorn is wrong — prefer JJP. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)2) David Dayen recently wrote an excellent piece about why citations of raw numbers for government spending – of the type that appear in Mehlhorn’s piece –

are misleading. I highly recommend it. Mehlhorn is also mistaken about historical trends in real (inflation-adjusted) spending outside of education; as a quick look at the data for some of the categories he mentions (like certain

technologies or defense) confirms, spending on (which is different than prices of things in)

these categories has also grown over time (though by different amounts than education spending and not on a per capita basis for defense, which it would have been fine to point out).One fair point Mehlhorn does make is that inflation-adjusted spending levels have value. I used spending as a share of GDP above to note that the US spends less on education relative to what we can afford than many other countries and that our education spending relative to what we can afford hasn’t changed much over time. Those facts in and of themselves don’t necessarily mean that our spending levels are insufficient; they just show that our investment in education is consistent with historical and international norms. But while it’s fine for Mehlhorn to note that per-pupil spending in the US is up significantly in real terms since the 1970s, that also doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether spending levels are sufficient. We may have been spending way too little in the 19 70s, and we still may be spending way too little now.

In any case, Mehlhorn’s note that education spending has increased more than test scores doesn’t say anything , by itself, about the efficacy of that spending . Student test scores are influenced more by outside-of-school factors than by school-based factors and it’s impossible to know how effective an intervention was without knowing what would have happened in the absence of the intervention. Maybe test scores would have fallen if spending had remained flat. We don’t know. What we do know is that studies that attempt to identify a counterfactual, like Jackson et al.’s, indicate that increased school funding makes an important difference .

They Say: “Funding Not Key – Greene”Greene isn’t credible. Martin 5 — Doug Martin, Education Blogger at Schools Matter, holds a Ph.D. in Literary Prosody, Research, and 19th Century American Literature from Oklahoma State University, 2005 (“Who is Jay P. Greene, and Why is He Going to Arkansas?,” Schools Matter—an education blog, July 28th, Available Online at http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2005/07/who-is-jay-p-greene-and-why-is-he.html, Accessed 06-25-2017)Today's Arkansas Times has a great piece of reporting by Doug Smith. Smith reports that Jay P. Greene, lead education propagandist for the Manhattan Institute , the conservative think tank, has been pegged to head University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's new Department of Ed ucation Reform. It seems that Greene's previous self-published "research" to pump school privatization through vouchers will now have an actual university to sponsor the junk studies and "working papers" that have been widely cited in the Washington Times, the New York Sun,

the National Review Online, and other non-academic, non-peer reviewed outlets—all of them fair and balanced, of course.This is all interesting enough, but what make it really interesting is, as Smith points

out, the money for financing (20,000,000 dollars) the new department (and its endowed chair) comes from Arkansas's other favorite son, Sam Walton and the Walton Family Foundation. Now we are talking serious money, enough to lure Greene from his Manhattan Institute digs (located somewhere outside Orlando, Florida, by the way).

They Say: “Funding Not Key” – Prefer JJPIncreased funding makes a huge difference — prefer JJP. Darling-Hammond 15 — Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, former President of the American Educational Research Association, former Senior Social Scientist and Director of the RAND Education and Human Resources Program at the RAND Corporation, holds an Ed.D. in Urban Education from Temple University, 2015 (“Society Benefits When We Spend More on Education,” Room for Debate—a New York Times scholarly blog, March 26th, Available Online at https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/26/is-improving-schools-all-about-money/society-benefits-when-we-spend-more-on-education, Accessed 06-07-2017)The promise of equal opportunity, most especially in education, is at the heart of the American dream: If you study and work hard, the promise goes, you can achieve your aspirations.

Yet our schools are among the most unequally funded in the industrialized world, with some states spending more than double what others spend per pupil, and some districts within each state spending double or triple what others can allocate.

Worse still, many states spend less in school districts that serve low-income students and new immigrants who need more support to succeed. While some students attend spacious, well-outfitted schools with extensive libraries, science labs, computers and small classes, others attend crumbling, overcrowded buildings where they lack access to basic textbooks and trained teachers.

More than 40 states have experienced school funding lawsuits about these unjust conditions, and in each case, defense attorneys bring in experts who argue that money doesn’t make a difference. Yet money that is properly spent on the right educational resources for students who need them the most — especially on well-qualified educators and keeping classes at reasonable sizes — can make a huge difference .

A recent study of school funding reforms over the last 40 years or

so shows just how much of a difference money can make: For low- income students who spent all 12 years of school in districts that increased their spending by 20 percent as a result of court- ordered reforms, graduation rates rose by 23 percentage points and adult poverty rates fell by 20 percentage points . The students’ family incomes were about 52 percent higher than they would have been without the greater education investment. The effects were large enough in many cases to entirely eliminate the gap in adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in non-poor families.When young people are gainfully employed rather than in prison or on welfare, when they are earning higher wages and paying greater taxes that support the retirement, health care and social needs of other

citizens, everyone wins. Money , invested well in education , makes an enormous difference to the welfare of everyone in our society .

They Say: “Funding Not Key” – Prefer BakerPrefer Baker, not Hanushek. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)1) Mehlhorn devotes a lot of space to attacking Bruce Baker for editorializing. Baker certainly does have strong opinions, but I actually

think it’s nice that he’s transparent about his perspective – all researchers have biases, and it’s in many ways preferable to know about them upfront. Baker’s work is strong and consistent with other recent research . The research Mehlhorn relies on – from Eric Hanushek, a member of the Right-wing Hoover Institution (note that Mehlhorn does not once mention Hanushek’s affiliation and biases) – is typically much older and a clear outlier (as I explained above).

They Say: “JJP Wrong – Hanushek”Hanushek’s critique of JJP is wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 10-11)Additional compelling studies have been published since my review in 2011. In 2014 and 2015, Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson and Claudia Persico

(JJP) released a series of NBER working papers and articles summarizing their analyses of a uniquely constructed national data set in which they evaluate the long-term effects of selective, substantial infusions of funding to local public school districts,

which occurred primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, on high school graduation rates and eventual adult income. Virtues of the JJP analysis include that the analysis provides clearer linkages than many prior studies between the mere presence of “school finance reform,” the extent to which school finance reform substantively changed the distribution of spending and other resources across schools and children, and the outcome effects of those changes. The authors also go beyond the usual short-run connections between changes

in the level and distribution of funding, and changes in the level and distribution of test scores, to evaluate changes in the level and distribution of educational attainment, high school completion, adult wages, adult family income and the incidence of adult poverty.To do so, the authors use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on “roughly 15,000 PSID sample members born between 1955 and 1985, who have been followed into adulthood through 2011.” The authors’ analysis rests on the assumption that these individuals, and specific individuals among them, were differentially affected by the infusions of resources resulting from school finance reforms that occurred during their years in K-12 schooling. One methodological shortcoming of this long-term analysis is the imperfect connection between the treatment and the population that received that treatment.76 The authors matched childhood address data to school district boundaries to identify whether a child attended a district likely subject to additional funding as a result of court-mandated school finance reform. While imperfect, this approach creates a tighter link between the treatment and the treated than exists in many prior national, longitudinal and even state-specific school finance analyses.77Regarding the effects of school finance reforms on long-term outcomes, the authors summarize their findings as follows:

“Thus, the estimated effect of a 22 percent increase in per-pupil spending throughout all 12 school-age years for low-income children is large enough to eliminate the education gap between children from low-income and nonpoor families. In relation to current spending levels (the average for 2012 was $12,600 per pupil), this would correspond to increasing per-pupil spending permanently by roughly $2,863 per student.“Specifically, increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-age years increases the probability of high school graduation by 7 percentage points for all students, by roughly 10 percentage points for low-income children, and by 2.5 percentage points for nonpoor children.“For children from low-income families, increasing perpupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-age years boosts adult hourly wages by $2.07 in 2000 dollars, or 13 percent.”78

The findings of this study have been met with some criticism.

Specifically, Eric Hanushek has asserted that these findings of strong, positive longitudinal effects of school finance reforms on student

outcomes, running between 1972 and 2011, are entirely inconsistent with his characterization of long-term trends in school spending and national average test scores. According to Hanushek, if the effects JJP describe are real, then the massive infusions of funding to public education over time would have mitigated achievement gaps and substantially driven up national averages. Hanushek explains:

“Their analysis covers schooling experiences for the period 1970-2010. Thus, it is useful to connect these estimates to actual funding patterns over the period. Between 1970 and 1990, real expenditure per pupil increased not by 10 percent but by over 84 percent. By 2000, this comparison with 1970 topped 100 percent, and it reached almost 150 percent by 2010. No amount of adjustment for special education, LEP, or what have you will make these extraordinary increases in school funding go away.“If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases? And, even with small effects on the non-poor, shouldn’t we have seen fairly dramatic improvements in overall educational and labor market outcomes? In reality, in the face of dramatic past increases in school funding, the gaps in attainment, high school graduation, and family poverty have remained significant, largely resisting any major improvement. And, the stagnating labor market performance for broad swaths of the population has captured considerable recent public and scholarly attention.”

Perhaps the most illogical assertion of Hanushek is that applying the effect of funding increases estimated by JJP to the actual long-term growth in national average per-pupil [end page 10]

spending would lead to the elimination or reversal of achievement gaps. As such, since gaps have not been eliminated or reversed, JJP’s estimates must be wrong. Neither JJP’s nor Hanushek’s national average spending data indicate that all spending increases from 1970 to 2010 were targeted to all high- poverty districts nationwide. If Hanushek’s average spending increases were driven as much by increases in wealthy (low

poverty/minority) districts as they were by increases in poorer districts, then gaps would likely remain constant, all else being equal.79

The identification of substantial gains in lifelong outcomes for children in districts that did experience increased funding indicates that greater gains perhaps could have been achieved for children in lower-wealth, higher-poverty communities, if funding increases had been more systematically targeted to those communities, nationwide, throughout the time period.

Thus, the critical reviewer must ask whether the data, methods and analytic approach applied by JJP are sufficiently more rigorous , and thus provide more compelling evidence, than the long-term trend exposition of Hanushek. The simple answer to that is yes .

A secondary critique offered by Hanushek is that the funding increases evaluated by JJP occurred largely in the 1970s and early 1980s, when overall spending was much lower, thus making marginal gains potentially more important than now, when

spending has reached and stabilized at inefficiently high levels across the board. Notably, however, JJP’s analyses span a longer period than merely the early 1970s and also span multiple contexts of higher and lower spending over the period. While subsequent replications of

JJP’s findings and further exploration of their data will provide additional insights, the current studies provide compelling evidence that school finance reforms can be leveraged to equalize educational and long-term economic opportunity.

Hanushek’s critique of JJP doesn’t disprove their results. JJP 15 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2015 (“Money Does Matter After All,” Education Next, July 17th, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/money-matter/, Accessed 07-04-2017)We would like to thank Eric Hanushek for his comments and interest in our work. We appreciate the opportunity to offer a brief response. Hanushek provides an accurate description of our study and is correct that the methodological details matter. His critique, however, is not an objection to any of our method ological choices; he instead disputes our results. He states “while these [questions about measurement and how spending reactions to court decision is measured…] are important methodological issues, it is more useful to focus on the substance of their findings.” We take this as clear evidence that Hanushek finds our method ology sound . When the methods are sound, the results must be taken seriously. We appreciate that Hanushek has done so in this

case. His single, important critique of our key results is the “time trend” argument . Following the summary of our findings below, we present the “time trend”

argument and highlight its flaws. We then discuss how we overcome the problems of the previous studies on which Hanushek bases his opinions. Finally, we discuss how our results differ from previous literature because (a) existing studies suffered from biases, and (b)

the spending increases analyzed in our analysis were spent on more productive inputs than the spending increases examined in other studies.Overview of our findings:In most states, prior to the 1970s, most resources spent on K–12 schooling were raised at the local level, through local property taxes (Howell and Miller 1997; Hoxby 1996). Because the local property tax base is typically higher in areas with higher home values, and there are persistently high levels of residential segregation by socioeconomic status, heavy reliance on local financing contributed to affluent districts’ ability to spend more per student. In response to large within-state differences in per-pupil spending across wealthy/high-income and poor districts, state supreme courts overturned school finance systems in 28 states between 1971 and 2010, and many states implemented legislative reforms that spawned important changes in public education funding. The goal of these school finance reforms (SFRs) was to increase spending levels in low-spending districts, and in many cases to reduce the differences in per-

pupil school-spending levels across districts. By design, some districts experienced increases in per-pupil spending while others may have experienced decreases (Murray, Evans, and Schwab 1998; Card and Payne 2002; Hoxby 2001). Our key finding is that increased per-pupil spending, induced by court-ordered SFRs, increased high school graduation rates, educational attainment, earnings, and family incomes for

children who attended school after these reforms were implemented in affected districts. We find larger effects for low-income children, such that these reforms narrowed adult socioeconomic attainment differences between those raised in low- vs. high-income families.

Hanushek’s “time trend” argument is illogical. JJP 15 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2015 (“Money Does Matter After All,” Education Next, July 17th, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/money-matter/, Accessed 07-04-2017)The Problem with Hanushek’s “Time Trend” Critique:Now that the reader should have a clear sense of our paper and its implications, we now describe the Hanushek “time trend” argument. Hanushek points out that school spending in the United States has increased substantially between 1970 and present day. As such, he argues that, if our results are correct and school spending really does improve student outcomes (with larger effects for low-income children), outcomes should have improved over time and achievement gaps by income should have been eliminated over this time period. He then argues that any improvements between 1970 and today have been small so that it is unlikely that our conclusion that school spending improves student outcomes is correct.While this “time trend” argument is intuitive, it is flawed for two reasons. The first reason is that it relies on the same flawed understanding of our results outlined above (i.e., that eliminating differences across two broad income groups implies eliminating all differences by socioeconomic status). The second problem with this “time trend” argument is that it is a facile argument based on fuzzy (albeit intuitive) logic. We highlight the problems of his logic below.To see the problems of Hanushek’s logic, consider the following true statistics: between 1960 and 2000 the rate of cigarette smoking for females decreased by more than 30 percent while the rate of deaths by lung cancer increased by more than 50 percent over the same time period.[1] An analysis of these time trends might lead one to infer that smoking reduces lung cancer. However, most informed readers can point out numerous flaws in looking at this time trend evidence and concluding that “if smoking causes lung cancer, then there should have been a large corresponding reduction in cancer rates so that there can be no link between smoking and lung cancer.” However, this is exactly the facile logic

invoked by Hanushek regarding the effect of school spending on student achievement.While there are several problems with this simplistic argument, to avoid going too deeply into the weeds we focus on the most important flaw in this “time trend” argument. Simply put, the “time series” argument will hold only if nothing else has changed between 1970 and present day. It is important to bear in mind that these spending increases occurred against the backdrop of countervailing influences, such as the rise in single-parent families, more highly concentrated poverty, deterioration of neighborhood conditions for low-income families, the exodus of the middle class to the suburbs, mass incarceration, the crack epidemic, changes in migration patterns, and others. Consider just one countervailing factor: the significant rise in segregation by income between neighborhoods over the past four decades. This increased residential segregation was driven mostly by families with school-age children (Owens 2015), a simple reflection that quality of local schooling options is a key driver of segregation. This significant increase in residential sorting by income among families with school-age children would have likely led to far greater disparities in school resources by community socioeconomic status had SFRs not been an effective leveling tool.In short, 1970 and 2010 is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison, so there is no reason to expect that the correlation between aggregate spending and aggregate outcomes over such a long time span will yield anything resembling a “causal” relationship. In fact, the observation that using simple correlations over time is unlikely to yield the true “causal” relationship is exactly what motivated us to follow a different methodological approach. Our method ological approach allows for an “apples-to-apples” comparison and allows us to disentangle the effects of school spending from that of all these other countervailing forces. Though Hanushek has chosen not to discuss the methodological advances in our work , they are important , and methods matter .How We Overcome These Problems to Facilitate “Apples-to-Apples” Comparisons:We make several decisions in order to facilitate more of an apples-to-apples comparison. First, we use fine-grained data on individual students, rather than comparing the entire United States in 1970 to the entire United States in 2010. With these finer-grained data we are able to account for a variety of other factors that may have changed over time such as family structure, childhood poverty, and neighborhood factors. Using these finer grained data, our main approach is to compare the outcomes of individuals with similar background characteristics born in the same school district but who attended public schools during different years (when per-pupil spending levels may have been different) — i.e., an apples-to-apples comparison. However, this is not all that we do to ensure that our results yield real causal relationships.In our paper, we point out that even if one can carefully account for several observable factors (as we do), correlating all actual changes in school spending with changes in student outcomes is unlikely to yield causal relationships. We point out that some spending changes are unrelated to other factors that may obscure the real effect on outcomes (i.e., clean spending changes), while other kinds of spending changes would clearly yield erroneous results (i.e., confounded spending changes). We point out that many of the spending changes analyzed in previous studies may have been of the confounded variety. To give an example of such confounded spending changes, consider the following example. The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act allocates additional funding to school districts with a high percentage of low-income students, who are more likely to have poor educational outcomes for reasons unrelated to school spending. As such, school districts serving declining neighborhoods are also those that are most likely to receive additional per-pupil spending over time. Such compensatory policies generate a negative relationship between changes in school spending and student outcomes that obscure the true relationship between school spending and student outcomes. We avoid this kind of problem by focusing only on clean spending changes. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between external “shocks” to school spending and long-run adult outcomes. The “shocks” we use are the sudden unanticipated

increases in school spending experienced by predominantly low-spending districts soon after passage of court-mandated SFR.As discussed above, by design, very soon after a court-ordered SFR in a state, some districts experienced sudden unanticipated increases in per-pupil spending (i.e., shocks) while others may have experienced decreases. Our analytic approach compares the outcomes of individuals who attended school before these spending shocks to those of similar individuals from the school district after these spending shocks. The validity of our design relies on the idea that districts that experienced sudden increases in school spending right after the passage of a court-ordered SFR were not already improving in other ways in exactly those same years. For this reason, we spend much time in our work showing that the timing of these spending shocks has nothing to do with underlying neighborhood changes or changes in family characteristics, so that changes in outcomes due to these shocks are likely to reflect a causal relationship. We encourage interested readers to consult the full paper for further detail.Reconciling our results with the Older Literature:Even though we outline the faulty assumptions in Hanushek’s “time trend” argument, in the interest of good social science it is helpful for us to try to reconcile our findings with the simple time-series evidence. As we explain above, our results do not imply that a 22.7 percent increase will eliminate all differences by parental socioeconomic status. However, they do suggest the much more realistic prediction that one might observe some convergence across groups over time as school spending has increased. Indeed this has been the case. For example, Krueger (1998) uses data from the NAEP and documents test score increases over time, with large improvements for disadvantaged children from poor urban areas; the Current Population Survey shows declining dropout rates since 1975 for those from the lowest income quartile (Digest of Education Statistics, NCES 2012). Murnane (2013) finds that high school completion rates have been increasing since 1970 with larger increases for black and Hispanic students; Baum, Ma and Pavea (2013) find that postsecondary enrollment rates have been increasing since the 1980s, particularly for those from poor families. Contrary to Hanushek’s assertions, outcomes have improved. Importantly, these improvements are consistent with increase in school spending playing a key role.Finally, Hanushek proposes three reasons why our estimates (if true) may not track the national time trends very well. His ideas are not

novel — we considered, tested, and addressed them ourselves in the paper and herein. First, he says there may be diminishing marginal returns to schools spending. Indeed we find that this is the case in our study. Areas with the lowest initial spending levels were also those for which increased spending had the most pronounced positive effect. The second reason he cites is that spending induced by the courts might have large effects while spending not related to judicial rulings have small effects. Indeed we find evidence of this also. Specifically, spending increases associated with court-mandated reform are much more strongly related to improvement in measured school inputs (e.g., student-to-teacher ratios, length of the school year) than ordinary spending increases. There are a few explanations for this that we explore in our study. Finally, he proposes that our estimates are wrong. We propose an alternative: the time series evidence Hanushek relies on does not reflect a causal relationship. Indeed in our larger study, we show that simple correlations are obscured by a variety of other factors that also influence student outcomes. We also present numerous pieces of analysis in our larger study that support a causal interpretation of our results.To be clear, we do not think that our study is the final word on the question of whether increasing school spending will improve student outcomes in all contexts. As Hanushek himself concedes “none of this discussion suggests that money never matters. Or that money cannot matter.” Here we will make a similar concession; none of what we show suggests that money always matters. We show that money did matter and that it mattered quite a lot. What our study does is dispels the notion that school spending does not matter, so that one must look only at how it is spent. We find that money does matter and how it is spent matters.

Contrary to Hanushek’s claims, our findings do not let policymakers off the hook. Our findings suggest that it is extremely important that money is allocated effectively and also that it is allocated equitably so that all schools have the resources necessary to help all children succeed .

They Say: “Baker Wrong – Mehlhorn” Mehlhorn’s critique of Baker is wrong. * Important Note: Mehlhorn deleted the Medium posts quoted below after this critique was published. Spielberg took screenshots that are included in his PDF. They were OCR’d so that they could be included as text in this card. The posts that were deleted are https://medium.com/@DmitriMehlhorn/money-is-not-the-problem-facing-american-schools-3c321c9db042#.gk6i4gpqu and https://medium.com/@DmitriMehlhorn/that-time-i-trusted-bruce-baker-of-rutgers-university-e597ddd9bc47#.zbck9olz3. Spielberg 16 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2016 (“Errors in school funding pieces that demand transparent correction,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, May 1st, Available Online at https://34justice.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/five-corrections-mehlhorn2.pdf, Accessed 07-04-2017)5) The Bruce Baker/Eric Hanushek debate on school funding research :

This is where Mehlhorn really goes off the rails ; his attack on Baker, especially given all of the errors and misleading writing in his own work, is inexcusable . First, he writes the following:

Twitter, of all things, provided me with news to the contrary in August of 2014. Mark Weber, a sincere reform skeptic and public school teacher in New Jersey, goes by the Twitter handle “Jersey Jazzman,” and is a part-time doctoral student at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Weber pointed me to publications written by one of his professors, a fellow named Bruce Baker. Although I had never previously heard of Baker, Weber was not the only person who recommended him. Ben Spielberg, who graduated from my undergraduate alma mater, told me flatly that Baker’s “research is legitimate.” Spielberg, Weber, and other reform skeptics cited Baker often, and indeed Baker was described by AEI’s Rick Hess as the 40th-most cited education scholar in America. Even better, it seemed that Baker was willing to engage folks I knew to be smart and careful, such as Ulrich Boser at the Center for American Progress and Rebecca Sibilia at EdBuild.

Sounds like he didn’t know much about Baker before I told him Baker’s research was legitimate, right? Wrong. For reference, the Twitter conversation with me that Mehlhorn linked happened on July 31, 2015. Mehlhorn tells a story in which he is initially wowed by Baker’s research. He writes:

Baker’s papers blew me away. They totally reversed the narrative. For instance, Baker pointed me to a 2012 piece he wrote called “Does Money Matter in Education,” which concluded that school spending is important and impactful for students. This conclusions was the opposite of the consensus in academia when I had been a student in the 1990s. How had the prior research been so wrong? What had happened in the previous 15 years? Well, Baker cited Northwestern University’s Larry Hedges, who re-reviewed Hanushek’s 1986 survey of evidence using “quality control measures” to exclude some studies and change some interpretations. According to Baker, this settled the matter: “by the early 2000s, the cloud of uncertainty conjured by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted in the aftermath of the various, more rigorous studies that followed.”I was surprised, but frankly relieved. As I wrote in response to Baker at the time, “Thank heavens. Someone who actually talks evidence. Talk soon.” Shortly thereafter, I read another piece from Baker regarding implementation of high-stakes testing, and frankly his analysis was solid. I assumed that this level of analysis was typical of Baker’s work, and was further relieved that a high-profile reform skeptic was taking the time to do careful research. As I wrote to him, “Bruce, your facts & analysis R best I’ve seen on UR side. Wish AFT/NEA pushed you, not smears.” I circulated Baker’s work to elevate that approach.

The quotes above came on August 9, 2014 and August 11, 2014. But then, according to Mehlhorn, he digs deeper and realizes Baker is not to be trusted:

But wait, something smells fishy The first clues that something was fishy came as I dove deeper into Baker’s body of work. The highly respected Ulrich Boser had written a report on waste and inefficiency in school spending, and Baker had written a rebuttal. Baker’s rebuttal was, as I wrote to him, “More strident, Something was starting to smell fishy less compelling than UR usual.” I was being delicate; Baker’s rebuttal was full of personal insults and exclamation points. Disappointing for an alleged scholar. Then, I read a Baker critique of Mathematica policy research regarding the effectiveness of KIPP charter schools. Baker’s critique was terrible, a long list of hand-waving attacks that seemed to call into question the very possibility of actual empirical research in education. As I wrote to him, the methodology of his approach seemed like that of climate denialists, whose attacks often are a “kritik” of the very idea of research.

Things got worse still when I started to read Baker’s work about teachers’ unions, a subject about which I had substantial personal exposure from visiting state legislators in places where unions were active. As I wrote to Baker in response to a blog of his on the subject, his thumb appeared to be on the scale of the internal workings of his models. His methodology on unions was so sloppy it seemed deliberate.

His “less compelling than UR usual” comment comes on August 12, 2014, three days after he apparently first encountered Baker (Mehlhorn seemingly reads very quickly, which may explain his penchant for missing important details ). The comment on the Mathematica critique came on August 17, 2014. In between that comment and the comment Mehlhorn made about teachers unions on October 9, 2014, he and I had what I believe to be our first ever interaction – on September 8, 2014. Baker was not mentioned during that conversation, as far as I can tell. Finally, the Jackson et al. study came out and Mehlhorn went on a fact-finding mission. He had an epiphany:

In 2015, Rucker Johnson and others published an NBER analysis of the impacts of school spending. The NBER report was broadly sympathetic to Baker’s 2012 claims that money can matter, so I read the report with interest. Wait a minute... the 2015 NBER report, entirely focused on the question of “does money matter in education,” did not once mention the Bruce Baker publication from 3 years earlier with the title “Does Money Matter in Education?” That seemed odd. Even more odd, the NBER paper referred to studies from 1995 and 1996 that showed school spending doesn’t lead to better results. Wait, what? Wasn’t that the period of time that Baker reviewed, when he wrote that the “cloud of uncertainty” created by Hanushek in 1986 had lifted based on subsequent work? Why didn’t Baker mention those 1995 and 1996 studies by other scholars? With my antennae finally up, I dug into Baker’s 2012 claims more fully. As it turns out. Baker omitted so much context from his report that his conclusion borders on outright mendacity. For instance, Baker chooses not to mention that Hanushek wrote several peer-reviewed rebuttals to Hedges’ work, including that they engaged in “statistical manipulations ... to overturn prevailing conclusions,” and that they “misinterpret the implications of their analysis [and,] through a series of analytical choices, systematically bias their results toward the conclusions they are seeking.” Baker wrote a conclusion that “uncertainty” created by Hanushek “lifted” after 1986, without even deigning to mention that Hanushek didn’t agree? Baker’s presentation of this conclusion was so skewed that later scholars on the exact same subject didn’t even mention Baker’s paper?

Judging from a comment on it, the article Mehlhorn mentioned came out on or before July 8, 2015, more than three weeks ahead of the conversation he and I had in which I asserted that Baker's research was legitimate. By his own admission and given his extremely fast reviews of other research, Mehlhorn clearly didn't trust Baker at this point - it is absurd of him to imply, as he does in the piece, that he was an unsuspecting victim of my encouragement to read Baker's work.What about Mehlhorn's critiques of Baker, which also appeared in his first "rebuttal" to my piece (see below)?

The conclusions of Professor Bruce Baker: Even more than Jackson and his team., Ben relies heavily on articles published by Bruce Baker of Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education. This reliance is common among reform skeptics, as Baker reaches the most anti-reform conclusions to be found within mainstream academia. Particularly cited by Ben is Baker’s 2012 editorial published by the Albert Shanker Institute in which he writes that “by the early 2000s, the cloud of uncertainty conjured by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted in the aftermath of the various, more rigorous studies that followed. ” Baker justifies this claim largely by citing Northwestern University’s Larry Hedges, who re-reviewed Hanushek’s studies “quality control measures.” Reading Baker’s paper by itself, it is understandable why Ben finds a clear academic consensus that money matters. The problem is that Baker omits so much that his conclusion borders on outright mendacity. For instance, Baker chooses not to mention that Hanushek wrote several peer-reviewed rebuttals to Hedges’ work. One of Hanushek’s responses could have been written with Ben in mind: “Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald commit the larger error of asking the wrong question. This problem tends to get lost in their statistical manipulations and their zeal to overturn prevailing conclusions about the effectiveness of pure resource policies in promoting student achievement.” A later paper from Hanushek goes into great detail about how Hedges and company “misinterpret the implications of their analysis [and,] through a series of analytical choices, systematically bias their results toward the conclusions they are seeking.” While Hanushek’s rebuttal is devastating, the more important point is that Baker simply pretends it does not exist - he paints a story of academic consensus that is entirely false. In assessing Baker, it is worth noting that serious education researchers tend to not even mention Baker. Jackson and his team, for instance, write an entire paper that “money matters”, and don’t once mention Baker’s 2012 editorial. Rather, they refer to studies from 1995 and 1996 (which Baker ignores) that school spending doesn’t lead to better results.

The reason Baker gets so little play in serious education academia is because he writes editorials, not studies. His analyses are designed to achieve his intended results, and he does this by making subjective and one-sided decisions about what to include and what to ignore. [This is a point Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle hit upon four years ago.] This is expected for expert witnesses at trials, but it is disturbing for someone who pretends to be an academic, and is not transparent that he gets paid for reports by parties with a direct financial stake in his outcomes. This problem was underscored in a 2011 tape-recorded conversation in which Baker said he would play with data, manipulate the questions he asked, and “pull things in and out” of his models “to tell the most compelling story” in exchange for a substantial research grant. This telephone conversation, including Baker’s own partially exculpatory comments, appears in full at about the 3-minute mark of this video clip. [Baker offers a rather lengthy explanation and defense of what happened.] None of this automatically invalidates Baker’s conclusions, but most of his research suffers the same kinds of glaring deficiencies I just mentioned regarding his 2012 Shanker Institute paper. Some day, someone may decide to write a point-by-point review of Baker’s editorials, but for now the main point is to take his sweeping anti-reform conclusions with a heaping of salt.

Well, for starters, after Mehlhorn wrote that first rebuttal, I noted the following:1) Mehlhorn devotes a lot of space to attacking Bruce Baker for editorializing. Baker certainly does have strong opinions, but I actually think it’s nice that he’s transparent about his perspective - all researchers have biases, and it’s in many ways preferable to know about them upfront. Baker’s work is strong and consistent with other recent research. The research Mehlhorn relies on - from Eric Hanushek, a member of the Right-wing Hoover Institution (note that Mehlhorn does not once mention Hanushek’s affiliation and biases) - is typically much older and a clear outlier (as I explained above).

In his anti-Baker follow-up, however, Mehlhorn still mentioned that Hanushek was at Stanford but once again conveniently forgot to mention his affiliation with the Hoover Institution (since Mehlhorn is, like me, a Stanford alum, he

should know that there is a huge difference between "Stanford" and "Hoover"). Mehlhorn also

fails to mention that Hanushek's conclusions have been criticized by many other well-respected researchers over the years; here is one example from 2001 and another from 2002 (though as the second link notes, there isn't nearly as much of a chasm between Hanushek's academic research and other research on the subject as Hanushek's policy advocacy - against increased investments in schools - makes it seem).Note also that Hanushek accepts large payments to testify against increases in school funding even when he hasn’t analyzed relevant state-level data .

Mehlhorn must not have read Baker's paper as closely as he said he did,

either; his assertion that Baker ignores Hanushek's rebuttals to Hedges (who wrote his paper with Rob Greenwald and Richard Laine when they were all at the

University of Chicago) is false . Baker mentions them in a footnote , as shown below:

16 Greenwald and colleagues explain: “studies in the universe Hanushek (1989) constructed were assessed for quality. Of the 38 studies, 9 were discarded due to weaknesses identified in the decision rules for inclusion described below. While the remaining 29 studies were retained, many equations and coefficients failed to satisfy the decision rules we employed. Thus, while more than three quarters of the studies were retained, the number of coefficients from Hanushek’s universe was reduced by two thirds.” (p. 363)Greenwald and colleagues further explain that: “Hanushek’s synthesis method, vote counting, consists of categorizing, by significance and direction, the relationships between school resource inputs and student outcomes (including but not limited to achievement). Unfortunately, vote-counting is known to be a rather insensitive procedure for summarizing results. It is now rarely used in areas of empirical research where sophisticated synthesis of research is expected.” (p. 362)Hanushek (1997) provides his rebuttal to some of these arguments, and Hanushek returns to his “uncertainty position: ‘The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.” (p. 141)Hanushek, E.A. (1997) Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance: An update. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19 (2) 141-164See also:

Hanushek, Eric A. ’’Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Response to Hedges, Laine and Greenwald.” Educational Researcher, May 1994,23, pp. 5-8.

Here are the other studies Baker cites before stating that "the cloud of uncertainty created by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted:"

18 Wenglinsky, H. (1997) How Money Matters: The effect of school district spending on academic achievement.Sociology of Education 70 (3) 221-23719 Taylor. C. (1998) Does Money Matter? An Empirical Study Introducing Resource Costs and Student Needs intoEducational Production Function Analysis. In U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Developments in School Finance, 1997.20 Baker, B.D. (2001) Can flexible non-linear modeling tell us anything new about educational productivity?Economics of Education Review 20 (1) 81-92.Figlio, D. N. (1999). Functional form and the estimated effects of school resources. Economics of Education Review, 18 (2), 242-252.Dewey, J., Husted, T., Kenny, L. (2000) The ineffectiveness of school inputs: a product of misspecification. Economics of education Review 19 (1) 27-45

Oh, and by the way, those studies from 1995 and 1996 that Baker ostensibly ignored? He didn't . Here's the section, on pages 3 and 4, where he references the 1996 study that Jackson et al. cited:

In short, while family background certainly matters most, schools matter as well. Furthermore, there exist substantive differences in school quality that explain a substantial portion of the variation in student outcomes. Subsequent studies using alternative data sources to explored the relationship between schooling quality and various outcomes, including the economic rate of return to schooling - e.g., future earnings. For example, David Card and Alan Krueger (1992) studied the relationship between school quality measures, including pupil to teacher ratios and relative teacher pay, on the rate of return to education for men bom between 1920 and 1949. Card and Krueger found that men educated in states with higher-quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling. Rates of return were also higher for individuals from states with better-educated teachers.12Similarly, Julian Betts (1996) provided an extensive review of the literature that attempts to link measures of schooling quality and adult earnings, including Card and Krueger’s study. Betts explains that, while the overall results of such studies were mixed, they were generally positive. More specifically, he pointed to more positive results for studies evaluating the association between district-level spending and earnings, as opposed to those attempting to identify a link between school-level resources and earnings, for which results are murkier.

This summary highlights a different aspect of Betts' paper than Jackson et al. chose to, which may be why Mehlhorn missed it, but it is accurate. Back in 1996, Betts found both that "[t]he studies that measure spending by state averages almost always find a positive association between educational expenditures and average earnings" and that "when researchers have attempted to identify the specific components of total educational spending that most influence earnings, most studies found either no link or a positive link that is not robust to changes in specification or subsample." Baker highlighted the former - money matters - while Jackson et al. highlighted the latter - at the time, the literature wasn't clear about money mattered and how it could be used productively.Mehlhorn also asserts that Jackson et al. didn't cite Baker's work in their paper "because he writes editorials , not studies . His analyses are designed to achieve his intended results, and he does this by making subjective and one-sided decisions about what to include and what to ignore."The more likely explanation seemed to me to be that Baker's review was a review , not original academic research, and that Jackson et al. were citing only research that their findings called into question . I spoke with Jackson and he confirmed this intuition; he respects Baker's work and has no issues with Baker's review (which Baker recently updated).

Finally, Mehlhorn tries to impugn Baker 's integrity by citing the work of James O'Keefe, a notoriously dishonest "conservative activist" known for "deliberately misrepresenting" info rmation about the individuals he targets and releasing "selectively edited videotape" (O'Keefe also enjoys breaking the law while pursuing his entrapment schemes). Feel

free to read the emails yourself: Baker clearly did not agree to anything unethical.

I believe Mehlhorn should both issue a correction and apologize to Baker for inaccurately maligning his character.

FYI: here is Baker’s response to the O’Keefe “sting.” Baker 11 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2011 (“Dealing with the Devil? Policy Research in a Partisan World,” School Finance 101—a scholarly education blog, November 22nd, Available Online at https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/dealing-with-the-devil-policy-research-in-a-partisan-world/, Accessed 07-04-2017)This note is in response to James O’Keefe’s attempt to discredit me on his Project Veritas web site (though I think his point was intended to larger than this). I was lucky (?) enough to be part of one of his investigative set ups earlier this fall. I wrote and held on to this post and all related e-mails.His scheme was uncovered in this Huffington Post piece to which he refers in his most recent report:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2011/10/17/james-okeefe-economic-policy-institute_n_1015845.htmlThe story:Back in September, I was contacted by this fictional Peter Harmon who characterized himself as working for the Ohio Education Association, but never made it absolutely clear that he was working for the state teachers’ union of Ohio. In my case, unlike the EPI case, Harmon didn’t (I don’t recall) indicate being a hedge fund guy or being backed by one, but rather that he had “funders.” He dropped me a phone message and an email which were pretty innocuous, so I agreed to talk by phone. That’s where I pick up in this string of e-mails:===================================EMAIL #2 – PHONE CALL SET UPFrom: peter.harmon@ohioedassoc.orgSent: Monday, September 19, 2011 10:14 PMTo: bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu;gse.rutgers.edu/bruce_baker@ohioedassoc.orgSubject: MeetingDr. Baker,Thank you for getting back to me. We are eager to talk with you about this project. Would 3pm tomorrow work alright for you?Sincerely,Peter Harmon614-468-3941===================================Then there was the strange phone call (which I’m quite sure in retrospect was recorded) where first, “Peter Harmon” wanted me to do a study showing that the collective bargaining legislation in Ohio would hurt children, to which I suggested that a) evaluating collective bargaining legislation is outside the realm of my expertise and b) that even if I agreed that it might, I’d have no clear, defensible way to analyze and argue that point.From there I suggested things that I can and often do analyze and argue, in each case pointing out that the ability to make such an argument is contingent upon data to support that argument. For example, evaluating the competitiveness of teacher wages over time, or evaluating the distribution of state aid cuts. These are two issues on which I have already actually evaluated Ohio data. I pointed out that there are 3 basic types of products we might be talking about – a) critiques of policy reports or arguments by others (for a few thousand dollars), b) policy briefs/research brief reports (typically about ten thousand dollars) or c) full scale research report (thirty to fifty thousand dollars, with clarification that projects of this magnitude would have to go through RU and/or be done over the Summer). I attempted repeatedly to shift his focus to answerable questions and topics within my expertise, and to topics or issues where I felt I could be helpful to him, on the assumption that he was advocating for the state teachers’ union.It got strange when Peter Harmon laid down his requirement that if they were going to fund a study, they didn’t want it coming out finding the opposite of what they wanted. I did explain that if he had a topic he was interested in, that I would be willing to explore the data to see if the data actually support his position on the issue and that I would do so before agreeing to write a report for him. The phone call ended with no clear agreement on anything, including no agreement on even what the topic of interest was. In fact, my main point was repeatedly that he needed to figure out what the heck he even wanted to study, though I tried to keep it friendly and supportive. No reason to argue on a first phone call.It was a strange and disturbing conversation, but I played along until I could get off the phone with the guy. Note that the playing along in a conversation like this also involves trying to figure out what the

heck is up with the caller – whether he/she has a particular axe to grind – or other issues that would make any working relationship, well, not work out.Sadly, as twisted as this phone call was, I’ve had similarly twisted conversations with real representatives of legitimate organizations. However, with most legitimate organizations, you can later identify the less sleazy contact person. My approach has generally been to humor them while on the phone… perhaps probe as to see how twisted they really are… and when the phone conversation ends….let it pass. Move on.Then came the follow up:===================================EMAIL #3 – HARMON FOLLOW-UPFrom: peter.harmon@ohioedassoc.org [mailto:peter.harmon@ohioedassoc.org]Sent: Friday, September 23, 2011 10:01 AMTo: bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu; gse.rutgers.edu/bruce_baker@ohioedassoc.orgSubject: Next MeetingDr. Baker,I have good news, my colleagues are very interested in moving forward.We are confident we can cover the expense of this potential study.We have a few ideas we would like to run by you for this project.When would be a good time to call you next?Regards,Peter Harmon614-468-3941===================================So now, Harmon is basically suggesting that he can generate the $30 to $50k figure which I had given him for a bigger study, a figure I had basically given him to encourage him to think about doing something else – like contracting a few short policy briefs or critiques. But, he still has no idea what he supposedly wants me to write about. Quite honestly that’s really strange. So my response is simple – it’s essentially a get your act together and don’t both me again until you do. In other words, here are a few examples of the work I do and am proud of. Figure out your damn question and let me know when you do.===================================EMAIL #4 – BAKER REPLYFrom: Bruce Baker [bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu]Sent: Friday, September 23, 2011 10:06 AMTo: ‘peter.harmon@ohioedassoc.org’Subject: RE: Next MeetingRather busy for next week or so. Would prefer if you could at least send an outline of potential topics & research questions of interest, so I can mull them over.For examples of reviews/critiques of policy reports, see:http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-middle-classhttp://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-spend-smartFor an example of a policy brief/research report, see:http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/NYC-charter-disparitieshttp://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/private-schooling-USThanks.Bruce Baker===================================Here’s Harmon’s attempt at figuring out his question:===================================EMAIL #5 – HARMON REPLYDr. Baker,Thanks for getting back to us.Once of the topics we want to pursue is research regarding spending.Specifically and increase in spending having a good effect on children. If you need to limit the scope of your research to a specific county, district or other local geographic area. that’s OK.I will take a closer look at the examples you sent on your last email to get a better idea of what you would like from our end. But,I hope this more specific goal better illustrates what we are looking for.Let me know when would be good time to call, so I can clarify whatever questions you have about this.Peter Harmon614-468-3941===================================So, Peter Harmon wants me to explain, or more strangely to show that increasing spending is good for children. Okay. Anyone even modestly informed would know that’s an odd way to frame the question or issue. But clearly, given my body of work, I have argued on many occasions in writing and in court that having more funding available to schools can improve school quality, which is something I would certainly argue is good for children. Would I somehow use data on a specific district or county to do this? No…. uh… not sure? I’d probably start with an extensive review of what we already know from existing research on money and school quality.At this point, I’m ready to drop the whole discussion, but receive an e-mail notice of a new Economic Policy Institute paper on public employee wages in Ohio. So, to save Mr. Harmon money paying for a new

study on this topic, I a) send him a link to that study, and b) explain that I’m already working on a paper related to his issues of concern.=================================== EMAIL #6 – BAKER REPLYFrom: Bruce Baker [bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu]Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 10:44 AMTo: ‘peter.harmon@ohioedassoc.org’Subject: FYIFrom one of my Rutgers colleagues:http://w3.epi-data.org/temp2011/Briefing_Paper_329.pdfWorking on some related projects myself, which may be of use to you in near future. Will be back in touch as schedule frees up.Bruce===================================And so it ended. And as I suspected by this point, it appears that this whole thing was a sham… and an attempt at a sting. Interestingly, this appears to be when Harmon moved on to go after EPI.Quite honestly, O’Keefe’s concept for the investigation isn’t entirely unreasonable except that he and his colleagues didn’t seem to fully understand the fundamental difference between research projects per se, and policy analyses – between writing summaries and opinions based on data that already exist and research that’s already been done – versus exploring uncharted territory – where the data do not yet exist and where the answers cannot yet be known.At this point, I think a few clarifications are in order about doing policy research, or more specifically writing policy briefs in a highly political context.First, why would I ever vet the data on an issue before signing on to do work for someone? Well, this is actually common, or should be in certain cases. For example, let’s say the funder wants me to show that “teachers in Ohio are underpaid.” I don’t know that to be true. I’m not going to take his money to study an issue where he has a forgone conclusion and a political interest in that conclusion but where the data simply don’t support that conclusion. It is relatively straight forward for me to check to see if the data support the conclusion before I agree to write anything about it. This is an easy one to check. There are a standard set of databases to use, including statewide personnel data, census data and Bureau of Labor Statistics data and there are standard credible methods for comparing teacher wages. If the argument holds up applying the most conservative (most deferential analysis to the “other side” of an argument) analysis, then it’s worth discussing how to present it or whether to move forward.A different type of example which I’ve learned by experience is that it’s always worth taking a look at the data before engaging as an expert witness on a school funding related case. I often get asked to serve as an expert witness to testify about inequities or inadequacies of funding under state school finance systems. Sometimes, attorneys have already decided what their argument is based only on the complaints of their clients. It would be utterly foolish of me to sign on to represent those clients and accept payment from them without first checking the data to see if they actually have a case.Then there’s the issue of doing work for partisan clients to begin with. That’s a different question than doing work for sleazy clients. But sometimes, if it’s a legitimate organization, there may be a sleazy contact person, but further checking reveals that the organization as a whole is credible – and not sleazy. But back to the point…Quite honestly, the toughest kind of policy analysis to do is for partisan clients – clients with an axe to grind or a strong interest in viewing an issue in one particular way. That is usually the case in litigation and increasingly the case when it comes to writing policy briefs on contentious topics. What this means is that the analyses have to be “bullet-proof.” There are a few key elements to making an analysis “bullet proof.”First, the analysis must be conservative in its estimates and one must avoid at all cost overstating any claims favored by the client. In fact, the analysis needs to be deferential, perhaps even excessively, to the opposing view.Second, the analysis must use standard, credible methods that are well known, well understood and well documented by others. Examples in my field would include comparable wage analysis, or wage models which typically include a clearly defined set of variables.Third, the analysis must rely on publicly accessible data, with preference for “official” data sources, such as state and federal government agencies. This is because the analyses should be easy for any reader to replicate by reading through my methods and downloading or requesting the data.So here are my final thoughts on this issue…If this kind of stuff causes anyone to place greater scrutiny on my work of that of any others writing policy briefs on contentious topics that’s fine. It’s not only fine, but desirable. I am fully confident that my work stands on its own. Unlike some, I don’t simply take a large commission to offer my opinion without ever having looked at any data. For example, Eric Hanushek of Stanford University took $50,000 from the State of Colorado to testify that more money wouldn’t help kids and that Colorado’s school funding system is just fine, without ever having looked at any data on Colorado’s school funding system. See:http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/school-funding/what-hanushek-shows-up-again.html?searched=hanushek&advsearch=oneword&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1By contrast, I did indeed accept a payment of $15,000 for writing a nearly 100 page report filled with data and detailed analyses of Colorado’s school funding system raising serious questions about the equity and adequacy of that system (available on request). In fact, I had already come to the conclusions about

the problems with Colorado’s school funding system long before I was engaged by the attorneys for the plaintiff districts (as one will find in many of my blog posts referring to Colorado).My rule #1 is always to check the data first and to base my opinions on the data. So I welcome the scrutiny on my work and I especially welcome it directly. If you have a criticism of my work, write to me. The more scrutiny on my work the better.=========Note #1: for an example of the types of policy briefs and/or analyses to which I am referring here, see: NY Aid Policy Brief_Fall2011_DRAFT6In my view, this is a solid, rigorous and very defensible analysis. It is a policy brief. It uses numerous sources of publicly available data. And, it was written on behalf of an organization which has self-interested concerns with the NY school finance formula.Note #2: Indeed there were some poor word choices on my part in the phone conversation. “Play with data” is how I tend to refer to digging in and vetting the data to see what’s there. This blog is dedicated to what I would refer to as playing with data. Looking stuff up. Downloading large data files (IPUMS, NCES). Running statistical models. My friends and colleagues, as well as my students know full well that I take great joy in working with data and that I consider it play. But I’ll admit that it sure doesn’t sound too good when taken out of that context.Note #3: A few people have asked about the portion of the conversation where I suggest that if I find results that do not support the funders’ views, I will not charge them for the work. Some have suggested that this is an example of burying an undesirable result, which would in my view be unethical. So, what’s the point of not charging them? Actually, it’s so that the result won’t get buried. If I do a bunch of preliminary data analyses only to find that the data do not support a funder’s claims/preferences, I’d rather not write up the report for the funder and charge him/her, because they then own the report and its findings, and have the control to bury it if they so choose. Now, I typically don’t permit gag-order type clauses in my consulting contracts anyway, but, it’s much easier just to avoid the eventual pissing match over the findings and any pressure to recast them, which I will not do. If I keep the results of my preliminary work for myself, then I have complete latitude to do with them as I see fit, regardless of the funder’s preferences. It’s my out clause. My freedom to convey the findings of any/all work I do.I’ve come to this approach having had my results buried in the past on at least two occasions, one in particular where the funder clearly did not want the results published under their name due in part to pending litigation in which they were a defendant. Much to my dismay, the project coordinators (agency that subcontracted me) capitulated to the funder. I was, and remain to this day, deeply offended by the project coordinator’s choice under pressure by the funder, to edit the report and exclude vital content. Yeah… I got paid for the work. But the work got buried, even though the work was highly relevant. I’m unwilling to go down that road again.

They Say: “Schools Not Key – General”The best evidence proves that better schools can significantly reduce intergenerational inequality. Johnson 16 — Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, 2016 (“Can Schools Level the Intergenerational Playing Field? Lessons from Equal Educational Opportunity Policies,” Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy, Edited and Published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Available Online at https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Community-Development/EconMobilityPapers/EconMobility_Book_508.pdf?la=en , Accessed 06-19-2017, p. 291-294)Recent research has shown that intergenerational mobility is much lower in the United States than previously assumed (Chetty et

al. 2014; Mazumder 2005; Solon 1992), is significantly less than many other advanced developed countries (Jäntti et al. 2006), and black children experience significantly lower rates of upward mobility conditional on their parents’ positions in the family income distribution (Bhattacharya and Mazumder 2011; Hertz 2005). Moreover, there is a high degree of persistence in economic status across generations in the United States, particularly in the lower and upper tails of the income distribution. What are the main transmission mechanisms of intergenerational mobility, and where does one look for the early developmental origins of inequality in life outcomes? Various dimensions of inequality in adulthood are rooted in childhood conditions, wherein schools play a pivotal role in either reinforcing or mitigating the intergenerational reproduction of socioeconomic advantage (Card and Krueger 1992).

Residential segregation by race and class that leads to unequal access to quality schools is often cited as a culprit in perpetuating inequality in attainment outcomes. However, the role of school quality factors in contributing to the intergenerational persistence of economic status, and in being a source of racial differences in rates of intergenerational mobility, have received little attention in the literature. [end page 291] The nature and amount of public investment in children has changed substantially during the post-World War II era. The major thrust of policies aimed at equality of opportunity over this period has been intended to ensure educational access to quality resources K–12 and beyond, and more recently greater investments in pre-school years. Over the past five decades, three major government interventions have had substantial impacts on the provision of school resources and have narrowed black-white differences in access to dimensions of school quality:1. court-mandated school desegregation2. state legislation and legal action aimed to change the distribution and level of school funding

3. the expansion of targeted early childhood pre-school programs for disadvantaged children through Head StartThis paper draws on recent research on the long-run impacts of school desegregation (Johnson 2015), effects of school finance reform- induced increases in school spending (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2015), and evidence on the long-run effects of Head Start (Johnson and Jackson 2015),

and combines them with a focus on these three major school reforms’ impacts on intergenerational mobility. It focuses on how school quality factors contribute to the intergenerational persistence of economic status and are a source of racial differences in rates of intergenerational mobility. The collective evidence from the roll-out of desegregation implementation, school finance reforms, and expansions of early childhood education programs is strong in providing a testbed for the study of the efficacy of the first-generation suite of equal education policy reforms. This paper explores the mechanisms that tie childhood school-level factors to aggregate mobility rates.Court-ordered school desegregation has been described as the most controversial and ambitious social experiment of the past 60 years. Despite the magnitude of these changes, no large-scale data collection effort was undertaken to investigate school desegregation program effects, particularly on longer-run outcomes. Before the study by Johnson (2015), there were no quasi-experimental studies of the impacts of desegregation that had followed students over a long horizon beyond their early 20s. While many prior studies have examined effects of school resources on test scores and more proximate student achievement outcomes, less evidence is available on how school spending influences intergenerational mobility (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2015, a notable exception). Similarly, controversy about whether Head Start produces lasting benefits in practice has surrounded the program since its inception. [end page 292] In parallel literature, there is an impressive body of evidence on the measurement of intergenerational mobility and the extent of mobility for different countries and over time (Bjorklund and Jäntti 1997; Solon 1992). However, little is known about the precise mechanisms underlying the persistence of economic status across generations; identifying what factors inhibit or facilitate upward mobility for those born into humble beginnings has remained illusive. Identifying the major factors and pathways that lead to economic (im)mobility is important for the optimal design of education policies and implementation of effective childhood interventions to promote greater equality of opportunity. There is currently a paucity of direct evidence from the United States on the effects of school quality on intergenerational income mobility.This paper extends two branches of literature on economic mobility:1. the relationship between school resources/quality and socioeconomic success2. racial inequality in adult socioeconomic attainment outcomes that are rooted in childhood conditionsAt the nexus of these two literatures, this paper examines the role of school quality as the key propeller of upward mobility. An important contribution of this work is that it uncovers sources and identifies mechanisms underlying generational mobility, integrating the analysis of the linkages between educational investment opportunities across the continuum of developmental stages of childhood—including pre-school program participation and K–12 school resources—

to investigate their long-run consequences on the extent of intergenerational mobility.

The persistent residential segregation of poor and minority populations coupled with the heavy reliance on local property taxes to fund K–12 schools, often leads to disparities in school

resources. In light of this, this paper investigates the extent to which patterns of segregation influence whether schools weaken or reinforce the role of family background in determining children’s outcomes and compares the intergenerational mobility rates across communities and time periods with differing access to educational opportunities and school quality, separately by race.

In this way, this analysis considers a narrower slice of the broader question of how where you live influences life chances and economic success.This investigation requires not only a convincing research design to address concerns about endogeneity bias but also requires high quality income data spanning multiple years of adulthood for two generations of the same set of families. This study combines high-quality intergenerational income data with compelling research designs to identify the causal effects of school desegregation, school spending, and Head Start, respectively. [end page 293]

The study analyzes the economic status trajectories of children born between 1945 and 1979 followed through 2013 using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its supplements on early childhood education, where the data have been geocoded

to the census block level. This intergenerational microdata set is linked with administrative data on school district per-pupil spending, Head Start per capita spending, and comprehensive case inventories on the timing and type of court-ordered school desegregation and school finance reforms spanning the period 1965–2010. Thus, this analysis uses the longest-running U.S. nationally representative longitudinal data spanning four decades linked with multiple data sources containing detailed neighborhood attributes and school quality resources that prevailed at the time these children were growing up.

A sharp increase in generational income mobility among African Americans among successive birth cohorts born between 1955 and 1979 shows its relatedness to dimensions of access to school quality. The study explains black-white differences in upward mobility and its subsequent convergence among successive cohorts born between 1955 and 1979 with a focus on the role of school quality. The study analyzes the effects of the court-ordered desegregation plans of public schools, implemented in the 1960s,

’70s, and ’80s, and subsequent court-ordered school finance reforms

that accelerated during the 1980s and ’90s on the extent of intergenerational mobility. The wide variation in the timing of implementation of desegregation plans and school funding formula changes is exploited to identify their effects. Using policy-induced changes in school spending (school resource inputs) across cohorts within the

same district and across different districts from the same cohort is used to estimate the impact of school spending on socioeconomic status attainments.

Consistent evidence demonstrates that low-income and minority students experienced both larger reform-induced increases in school spending (access to school resource inputs) and larger resultant impacts of a given change in spending on long-term outcomes . African Americans who grew up following school desegregation implementation, and poor children following court-ordered school finance reforms , were more likely to occupy a higher position in the income distribution than their parents , and distances moved across the distribution were greater , relative to those experienced for prior birth cohorts who were 18 or older at the time of their schools desegregation implementation or imposition of school finance reforms. The results highlight the role of childhood school quality in contributing to (and subsequently narrowing) racial differences in intergenerational mobility.

“Other policies also important” doesn’t answer our advantage. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)Pitting education funding against social insurance and safety net spending, as former Tennessee education commissioner Kevin Huffman did in a recent article, is

also absurd . While it’s true that adequate income support and health care matter most for low-income students and that school-based reforms cannot, contrary to Huffman’s assertion, “be the lynchpin of social mobility in America, ” schools are still very important . Those truly committed to an equal opportunity agenda should stop taking potshots at its components and start getting to work on raising the revenues necessary to implement it.As David Kirp wrote recently about pre-K programs: “Money doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, but it helps…In education, as in much of life, you get what you pay for.”In America right now, we unfortunately don’t pay for the education system our students deserve. Until we do, we won’t get it.

They Say: “Schools Not Key – Finland”Finland proves our argument. Saunders 17 — Doug Saunders, International Affairs Columnist at The Globe and Mail—a Canadian newspaper, 2017 (“Finland’s social climbers: How they’re fighting inequality with education, and winning,” The Globe and Mail, January 5th, Available Online at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/how-finland-is-fighting-inequality-with-education-andwinning/article29716845/, Accessed 07-04-2017)The Finnish obsession is not with education per se, but with making sure that

kids like Lara all get the maximum possible school experience . That obsession has produced results: The odds of someone like her, born below the poverty line, becoming a middle-class adult are better in Finland than in almost any other country . More important, those odds are measurably better than they were 20 years ago . And it’s almost all because of the way the Finns changed their schools.

Now, a school system originally re-engineered to fill the gap between the rural poor and better-off urbanites is also addressing the wealth gap between established Finns and a growing population of poor immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers – making Finland’s challenges increasingly similar to those of Canada.This is a rare example of a country where national policy has been used to build a better pathway out of poverty and into a productive life. In recent years, that policy, while still successful, has begun to feel the pressures of a more diverse population and a fast-changing economy.So, in both their successes and their controversies, it’s worth looking inside Finland’s schools to see what lessons the world’s most successful education reform has for the rest of us.

They Say: “Status Quo Solves – ESSA”ESSA fails — won’t narrow opportunity and achievement gaps. Ogletree and Robinson 16 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“The K-12 Funding Crisis,” Education Week, May 17th, Available Online at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-funding-crisis.html?print=1, Accessed 06-07-2017)Notwithstanding generally mediocre state records on narrowing disparities in educational opportunity and achievement, the E very

Student Succeeds Act relies on states as the engines for educational improvement. Under the new federal law, states will only be required to intervene in the bottom 5 percent of low-performing schools, in schools where student subgroups are struggling, and in high schools where the graduation rate is 67 percent or less.

If the problems with our education system were limited to these schools, the requirements might be promising.

But the authors Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessman, in their 2013 book

Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School, reveal that the shortcomings of U.S. education are far more widespread than the lowest- performing schools and students. Children from all income levels show lackluster academic performance on international assessments when compared with their international peers .Given the refusal by most states to devote funding to disadvantaged students for the resources needed to compete with their more advantaged peers, history suggests that the ESSA approach is unlikely to decrease gaps in educational opportunity and achievement significantly.

ESSA fails — too narrow. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“No Quick Fix for Equity and Excellence: The Virtues of Incremental Shifts in Education Federalism,” Stanford Law & Policy Review (27 Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev 201), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Some may wonder if the newly-enacted Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) n15 - the

latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 - will provide the push states seem to need to reform funding systems. However, the ESSA does not appear to be a promising avenue to incentivize

such reforms. n16 The ESSA repeals the federal accountability system in the No Child Left Behind Act and instead allows states to design their own accountability systems to identify and improve struggling schools. n17 ESSA requires states to increase learning in the five percent of schools that perform the worst on state assessments, schools with high dropout rates, and schools in which a subgroup consistently performs poorly. n18 While states may adopt some targeted interventions, the ESSA's focus on such a small subset of schools is unlikely to drive states to overhaul entire funding systems that either [*204] consistently favor low-need, high-wealth districts or that do not adequately adjust funding levels to address the greater needs of some students. n19 Thus, the ESSA's narrow focus on low-performing schools provides inadequate incentives to encourage states to reform their funding approaches and to boost overall student achievement.

They Say: “No Inequality D-Rule”Frankfurt is wrong and doesn’t apply. Hirschman 16 — Daniel Hirschman, Lecturer in Economic Sociology at the University of Michigan, holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan, 2016 (“Enough Is Not Enough: On Harry Frankfurt’s ‘On Inequality’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 5th, Available Online at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enough-is-not-enough-on-harry-frankfurts-on-inequality/, Accessed 06-19-2017)Frankfurt’s book is a philosophical treatise on how complete economic equality fails as a moral compass. I can imagine a world in which such an argument would be an important intervention. I do not believe we live in that world. Who exactly is Frankfurt arguing against? As a sociologist who studies the history of debates over income inequality, I admit to significant confusion. Frankfurt never really cites examples of the argument he is criticizing; he seemingly takes for granted that proponents of radical equality are everywhere. Perhaps they are, in some corner of American philosophy. In the public debate over economic inequality, I have not seen any. Even communists argue “to each according to his need,” which is not exactly a call for complete equality: it is, instead, rooted in the concern for having “enough” that Frankfurt thinks should be paramount.Instead, as Frankfurt admits, that public debate focuses on inequality because of its pernicious effects. We care about inequality not because we believe that everyone should have the exact same economic resources but because contemporary inequality has grown to a level that is recognized to have terrible consequences. Research by academics across the social sciences has shown how increased inequality — and especially the growing affluence of the very rich, documented by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and colleagues — produces harmful effects for our politics, our health, and our economy itself. The political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argue that the opinions of economic elites have far more influence on policy outcomes than the opinions of average Americans. In turn, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that this outsized policy influence helps create inequality, as economic elites use their control of policy to weaken unions and lower taxes. Beyond politics, the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document, in their book The Spirit Level, how unequal societies fare worse across various measures of population health including life expectancy , obesity, and more . And a new literature in economics has begun to find evidence that more equal economies experience faster economic growth, contrary to conventional wisdom about a tradeoff between equality and efficiency.Frankfurt agrees that there are compelling reasons to care about real-world inequality, but he argues that we should not hold the principle of economic equality sacred. Instead, we should focus on fighting inequality to the extent that such inequalities produce negative effects . To my eye, that seems to be an accurate characterization of political debates on the left . So what’s the problem?Frankfurt does attempt to motivate his argument around one negative consequence of holding

economic equality as an independent moral imperative. He claims that valuing economic equality (rather than the elimination of poverty) leads to a form of “alienation.” By this he means not alienation in the Marxist sense, but rather a jealous materialism where individuals care more about what others have than whether they have

enough and thus contribute to “the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time.” On reading these lines, I admit to experiencing a bit of moral disorientation myself. From the vantage point of 2015, the current mobilization for economic justice seems to be a very healthy political response to the worsening inequality of the past 30 years and the attendant negative consequences. Frankfurt looks at calls for economic equality and somehow sees a reinforcement of crass materialism. I don’t get it.Perhaps Frankfurt’s case could have been strengthened if he’d included any examples of actual egalitarian discourse. His discussions of economic egalitarianism largely take the form of attacking a doctrine, not presenting any examples of its deployment in political debates. I suppose that’s to be expected from a philosopher, but it makes understanding and substantiating a claim about the supposed alienating effects of egalitarian discourse very difficult. Put another way: Frankfurt makes an empirical claim that egalitarian doctrines produce alienation, but offers no evidence for that claim .The one example provided of contemporary political discourse is an unsourced quote from President Obama calling inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” Frankfurt then chides him for overemphasizing inequality instead of poverty: “It seems to me, however, that our most fundamental challenge is not the fact that the incomes of Americans are widely unequal. It is, rather, the fact that too many of our people are poor.” Frankfurt misreads the president, and this example suggests

how he misreads the entire contemporary debate on inequality . President Obama’s quote comes from a speech titled “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility” in which he identifies mobility combined with inequality as the “defining challenge.” The tone of the speech is very much in line with Frankfurt’s idea of emphasizing having enough. President Obama frames the challenge of mobility around the problem of middle class families no longer feeling like they are getting by: “Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles — to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement.” In other words, we have defined enough in a way that many people can no longer meet it, because the gaps between the haves and have-nots have grown, and fewer and fewer people can achieve the status of “haves.” Obama’s quote is not an example of valuing equality for its own sake, but a measured response rooted in an understanding of the negative consequences that have flowed from increases in inequality and declines in mobility.Frankfurt’s On Inequality ultimately disappoints. If you happen upon a philosophical debate about the merits of complete economic equality — perhaps conducted during those long empty hours on your desert island — Frankfurt’s book will prove invaluable. Alas, for the rest of us, an argument against equality tells us next to nothing about inequality.

They Say: “No Inequality-Based Mortality Gap”Yes, mortality gap — strong statistical evidence.Pickett and Wilkinson 15 — Kate E. Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, former Research Career Scientist at the National Institute for Health, and Richard G. Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, 2015(“Income Inequality and Health: A Causal Review,” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 128, March, Available Online at https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/education/curriculum-tools/population-health/pickett.html, Accessed 06-20-2017)Discussion and ConclusionsThe body of evidence on income inequality and health points strongly to a causal connection. The major criteria of temporality , biological plausibility , consistency , and lack of alternative explanations are well supported . Of the small minority of studies that find no association , most can be explained by income inequality being measured at an inappropriate scale, the inclusion of mediating variables as controls, the use of subjective rather than objective measures of health, or followup periods that are too short .Suicides seem to stand as an important exception to the general pattern: they tend to be more common in more equal societies, despite the evidence that depression is more common in more unequal societies.39,132 A possible explanation is that social gradients in suicides are not always consistent internationally.133 Another possibility is that there may be some truth in the view that violence can be directed either outwards or inwards against oneself. If suicide is, like homicide, often a response to adversity, we think it likely that greater equality increases a tendency to blame oneself rather than others for what goes wrong.Epidemiological causal criteria are not exhaustive. A good test of the validity of a scientific theory is its ability to make successful, testable predictions. The theory that more equal societies are healthier

arose from one international study17 and has now been tested in many different contexts . The search for a mechanism led to the discovery that social relationships (social cohesion, trust, involvement in community life, and low levels of

violence) are better in more equal societies, suggesting that inequality and health are linked through psychosocial processes related to social differentiation and relative deprivation.61 That inequality does have powerful psychosocial effects is now amply confirmed.We suggest that the most parsimonious explanation for the effects of income inequality is that larger income differences increase social distances, accentuating social class or status differences. This would explain why income inequality is most closely related to health when measured across whole societies coterminous with social class hierarchies.13,134 Rather than income inequality being a new and independent determinant of health, it is likely to act by strengthening the many causal processes (known and unknown)

through which social class imprints itself on people throughout life. This would suggest why, not only health, but a wide range of other outcomes with social gradients are also related to inequality. It also suggests that if class and status are to become a less powerful influence both on individual lives and on whole societies, it will be necessary to reduce the material differences that so often constitute the cultural markers of social differentiation.

As whole populations are exposed to societal income inequality, estimates of the population attributable risk will be high even if ,

for some outcomes, the causal effect on some outcomes is modest. Kondo

and colleagues67 estimated that upwards of 1.5 million deaths (9.6 percent of total

adult mortality for the 15-60 age group) could be averted in 30 OECD countries if each country reduced its Gini coefficient below 0.30 . If individual income is also related to health partly through psychosocial mechanisms involving relative deprivation, then multilevel models that control out its effects may substantially underestimate the effects of inequality.135 It has been estimated that if the United Kingdom reduced its inequality to the average in other OECD countries, the expenditure savings on physical and mental illness, violence, and imprisonment alone would amount to £39 billion per year.136

School Choice CP Answers

2AC — School Choice CP1. Racialized Inequality DA — choice increases segregation and racial inequality.James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)A. Race and the School-Choice MarketChoice rhetoric contemplates the sphere for reformed education as a market. The commodification of education in this way has prompted no shortage of critiques identifying the ways in which the conditions for a properly functioning education market are difficult—if not impossible—to dictate. Problems with an education market, however, go beyond the mere absence of ideal market

conditions. Rather, the problems extend to the ways in which race and racism warp the market , undermining the possibility that an education market could ever genuinely optimize educational outcomes for marginalized students and families in that market.

As an initial matter, the choices of poor, working class, and minority students and their families in the education market are severely limited . Community bias against these groups , for example, is often reflected in local policies like zoning for multi-family housing that can limit access to particular schools —charter and voucher schools included. Input and influence of marginalized communities regarding charter school policies (including school offerings,

the number of schools, location, and themes) is subject to the same limitations that undermine these groups in any political process.

Information asymmetry and unequal bargaining power also undermine the market for parents of color. Marginalized minority parents, in particular, often do not have ready access to the data and information that would enable them to make good schooling decisions . Moreover, minority parents are often on unequal footing when they engage with school systems, given the pervasiveness of cultural-deficit theories that demean and devalue minority parental participation in their children’s education.

The idea of the “rational parent” as an actor in the education marketplace, who is able to choose the best educational option for his or her child, is a myth — even if one assumes genuinely broadened options, better info rmation, and increased bargaining power. Although parents assert that they care most about academics, studies suggest that

even after controlling for educational programming and performance, parents use heuristics—namely race — when making school choices . In one study, for example, an increase of more than two percent in the African-American student population correlated with a parental perception that school quality had declined, even when objective evidence contradicted

that perception. Allowing parents to self-segregate within schools in this way is a “successful,” but undesirable, optimization of parental preferences. Moreover, a market in which parents select schools based mostly on racial composition , instead of objective measures of academic excellence, is not really an education market, but rather a racialized social market playing out in the sphere of public education. The education market, legitimate or illegitimate, is not an arena in which rational decisions about education take place.

2. Blame-Shifting DA — choice gives the state an excuse to neglect public schools. Makes all aff impacts worse. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)2. Private Responsibility for Public EducationIn addition to problematically fostering competition in a context that should be collaborative, school choice also privatizes responsibility for public education. “Privatize” does not necessarily mean that school choice results in the enrollment of students at private schools, although private school enrollment is one aspect of the opt-out revolution in public education. Rather, here, the term “privatize” means the relegation of care, concern, and investment in public education to the private sphere—to individual parents and caregivers, rather than to the public. There is not a natural line of demarcation for decisions that should not be made privately because they impact the public; rather, society has to draw those lines independently. Given, however, the interdependent nature of education, and the extent to which access to quality education has largely been shaped by the economic and racial composition of classrooms, public education is one area in which those lines must be drawn more carefully, and with less opportunity for privatization than in other spheres of American life.Like the expansion of the voucher program in Louisiana, lawmakers often present school-choice policies as the product of a proactive legislative response to state educational problems. When a state,

however, adopts school- choice policies to address problems that are widespread and structural in nature— like social, racial, and economic isolation in school districts— the state abrogates communal responsibility for those problems . Although these additional “choices” result in perverse outcomes for marginalized parents and caregivers, having already made sufficient choices available, the state can now claim it is no longer responsible for addressing the achievement gap through school or housing integration. This phenomenon has led to the privatization of individual schooling decisions that are public in their effect. It has also eliminated public debate of the merits and consequences of these ostensibly private decisions, and immunized these choices from attack or characterization as illegitimate, even as those choices marginalize some in the education system.

As responsibility shifts, so does blame . Having exercised the choices they were given, parents and caregivers of color are now made to exclusively bear a burden they cannot carry alone;

individual parents, after all, cannot address structural causes of the achievement gap . When asked to give up on genuine equality in favor of the fiction of self-reliance, however, participants in the school system ultimately play into a sort of amnesia about the history of public education and the institutional structures that impede its potential. One must not forget segregation of public schools, the imperative of integration, and vulnerability of students—as manifested in food insecurity, low socioeconomic status, or inadequate healthcare—that the school system and the broader society must manage. Ignoring these realties and instead buying into school choice will only leave the vulnerable among us more vulnerable when market options and school choices fail to magically close the achievement gap , or result in more fraud and failing schools.

This outcome is particularly troubling because others in society already devalue the decisions and preferences of poor and minority people. Given that undervaluing, responsibility for failure in education can then be easily laid at the feet of those who chose . This rhetorical move is familiar in gender equality policy debates, where any number of gender disparities (e.g., the disproportionate presence of women in lower-paying jobs and the financial insecurity which acting as primary caregiver creates) is justified as the result of women’s choices. One can similarly expect choice in education policy to play the same role—once students and parents choose, policymakers can ignore the structural problems that drive the achievement gap but that cannot be traced to any single individual choice.

3. Reject Neg Ev — Forster and Wolf are biased and wrong. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 14-15)VII. Usefulness of the Reports for Guidance of Policy and PracticeThe reports reviewed here have garnered attention in the broader policy

discussion, although often primarily with pro-voucher advocates ,54

reflecting the echo-chamber nature of the discussion reflected in these

reports. Neither report has been independently peer reviewed, and they suffer from the problems noted above, which undercut their credibility.

Both reports make a number of methodological choices that shape their results. They focus on randomized controlled trials for defensible reasons, but

without acknowledging the limitations of RCTs, even though those limitations are widely known.55 The sets of RCT studies selected for use are also problematic , with the Friedman Foundation report using a process that is not as

systematic as it indicates, and in fact is shown to have been erroneous,

while the University of Arkansas report’s selection criteria left it with a highly skewed set of studies , and no insights from the longest-running and more comprehensive national voucher programs. At the same time, the University of Arkansas report makes no effort to account for publication bias in its selection process, which may exaggerate its findings.

The reports also take very different approaches to other voucher “impacts.” The University of Arkansas meta-analysis focuses only on academic achievement , and not on issues such as the impact on segregation , which is known to

be a detrimental factor in countries that have embraced vouchers.56 The Friedman Foundation report does attempt to address some of those other factors, but in its treatment of

academic achievement (the focus of this review) it conflates learning gains with non-cognitive outcomes such as college attendance , without apparently

recognizing that these are distinct issues that are possibly susceptible to different influences besides the offer or use of a voucher.

Overall, the reports present findings that are not particularly helpful for advancing our understanding on the impacts of vouchers on student achievement. Together they tend to present

[end page 14] a mixed set of findings , with benefits appearing for one group in one context, but not for the same group in another city, or even in another subject. The results from the global meta- analysis are shaped largely by one city in one country, and the report is not designed to tell us why vouchers would have a greater impact there. Indeed, we don’t know why voucher impacts — positive or negative —

appear in one case, but not in another. Thus, the theoretical underpinnings motivating vouchers, as set out by Milton Friedman and subsequent theorists, do not appear to be very strong when applied to the real world, even when tested by voucher advocates.The Arkansas report concludes with recommendations for more RCTs, without offering any guidance about how researchers might overcome the limitations of randomization to take into account peer effects, or improve upon generalizability. But the report also encourages consideration of “the cost-benefit tradeoffs associated with voucher programs” — by which the authors mean to suggest that vouchers are “cost effective, since they tend to generate achievement outcomes that are as good or better than traditional public schools, but at a fraction of the cost.”57 Instead of focusing only on saving money when educating disadvantaged students, a better approach would be to consider vouchers in terms of their potential for enhancing student learning relative to the effects of other interventions ’ ability to do so. For example, instead of looking at school vouchers alone, we should be considering the effect sizes of school vouchers compared to, say, housing vouchers, integrated classrooms, or smaller class sizes. In fact, perhaps the largest meta-analysis on education interventions has done just that, looking at the effect sizes of various influences on student learning , and finding little support for school choice programs. Drawing on over 800 meta-analyses encompassing over 50,000 studies of different influences in

academic achievement,58 that meta-study ranked the school choice option 59 107th out of 138 factors , beneath class size, professional development for teachers and peer tutoring…but above summer vacation and television.

4. Permute: do both — guarantee equal access to excellent public education and provide choice. Avoids disads to choice alone.

5. No “Innovation” Net-Benefit — corporate reforms don’t solve the case. Michie 11 — Gregory Michie, Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago, 2011 (“The trouble with ‘innovation’ in schools,” The Washington Post, May 24th, Available Online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-trouble-with-innovation-in-schools/2011/05/23/AFEgw79G_blog.html, Accessed 06-20-2017)An irony in all this is that one of the favored words of the business-minded reformers who continue to push a results-driven, corporate model of school change is “innovation.” Of all the buzzwords that zip through

current conversations about school improvement, it may be the most repeated. It peppers the language of Race to the Top, and charter school cheerleading, and teacher recruitment pitches. If you’re not talking about innovating, you’re probably not getting heard.But the word, like so many others in education, has been hijacked . The “new reformers” have appropriated it as a descriptor for policy proposals and practices they advocate, and as an antonym for almost anything else. Charter schools? Innovative. Regular public schools? Definitely not. Competing for education funding? Innovative. Assuring that adequate monies go to schools that most need them? Passé. Evaluating teachers based on test scores? Innovative. Collective bargaining? Old school.Corporate reformers have come to own the word so completely that they’re able to promote even the most wrongheaded ideas and still be portrayed by many media outlets as innovators. Bill Gates says we should crowd more students into the classrooms of the “top 25 percent of teachers” in order to save money. Does any school-based educator believe that that’s a good idea? The film Waiting for Superman, a favorite of the innovation crowd, puts forth an image of student learning that is as ill-conceived as it is crude: the empty-vessel head of a cartoon student is opened up and a pile of information is poured in. It’s all about efficiency -- more head-filling, less fact-spilling. But hey, that’s innovation!Since many of the practices, values, and terminology (”Are you tracking me?”) of the new reformers have been borrowed from the business world, it’s also important to remember that what corporate CEOs celebrate as innovative isn’t necessarily fair or just . Bob Herbert’s final column for The New York Times in March lamented the growing wealth gap in the U.S., and highlighted the fact that General Electric, which racked up $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, paid zero federal taxes. With so many families struggling to make ends meet, how can this be? According to The Times’ own reporting, G.E. implements “an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting (italics mine) that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”I’m all for fresh ideas, but just because a notion is novel or different doesn’t mean it’s good for teachers and kids . The trouble with

many of the current “innovations” in education is that they do nothing to challenge the broader policy framework that prizes higher test scores above all else — in fact, they often embrace it. So teacher and student creativity will continue to be squashed at every turn. And the poorer the kids in a given classroom or school, the more likely that is to be true.That, for me, is the most troubling aspect of where we appear to be headed. The Obama administratin’s plan for reauthorizing NCLB would allow most schools to escape the pressure cooker of annual yearly progress-chasing that has marked the past decade, and that’s a good thing. But for the 10 percent of schools at the bottom of the test-score pile — mostly schools of the urban poor — the heat would be turned up even higher: more testing, more “data-driven” instruction, and more sanctions, while creativity, divergent thinking, and the arts continue to get left behind.I think about the seventh and eighth graders I taught in Chicago — kids like Ramon, who daydreamed in poetic verse but had a hard time sitting still, or Josefina, a recent immigrant who struggled with English but found her voice when a video camera was in her hands. What place is there for kids like them in the schools we’ve made? How will they discover their gifts, pursue their dreams? And if they become alienated by their schooling experiences — which seems likely — where will they turn?It depends on who you ask, I suppose. Michelle Rhee, former D.C. schools chancellor and one of the rock-star “innovators” in education, famously told Time magazine in 2008:

“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely. People say, ’Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning.’ I’m like, ’You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

On the other hand, Sir Ken Robinson, professor emeritus at the University of Warwick and author of Out of Our Minds, argues in two widely circulated talks from the TED conference that schools too often end up stifling kids’ creative spirits. “Creativity is as important in education as literacy,” Robinson says, “and we should treat it with the same status.”We should — but with the continued reliance on annual testing in the administration’s Blueprint for Reform, it may not happen anytime soon. That means too many kids in our poorest neighborhoods will continue, even if their test scores rise, to receive what can

only be called an impoverished education. And no matter what the new reformers say, there’s nothing innovative about that .

6. No “Coercion” Net-Benefit — choice undermines freedom and agency. Weigh consequences.James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)B. Beyond PaternalismIn the abstract , choice can be an integral feature of law or policy that promotes equal rights and opportunities. Accordingly, defenders of school choice may ultimately argue that limiting school choice, particularly for minority parents and caregivers unsatisfied with their local schools, is pernicious paternalism. After all, some choice is better than no choice at all. My response is threefold.First, limiting choice is not grounded in attempts to protect parents and children from their irrational choices. To the contrary, opting out, even to enroll in comparable schools that fail to improve academic outcomes, might be characterized as a rational response to the negative and racialized school experiences that families of color as well as poor and working-class families experience. And until system-wide problems in the American educational system are addressed, caregivers and families have few options other than exercising the limited “choice” they have been afforded to either take advantage of school choice or exit the public school system altogether. Accordingly, I advocate for limitations on school choice to prevent the disastrous social consequences—the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families—that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same. Although outside the scope of this Article, this thought exercise applies with equal force to school choice that extends beyond charter schools and voucher

programs, including homeschooling, private school education, and even housing decisions made by the wealthy.Second, as I have argued, students of color and their families may, indeed, be “ opti ng out ,” but those decisions do not reflect genuine choice or agency. Rather, opting out is a response of parents with no reasonable alternatives who are sensitized to the way their actions, or failures to act, will be devalued on account of their race and class. In such a context, genuine choice is not exercised at all . As such, advocating for limits on school choice for those students and their families does not really undermine their exercise of choice—which was minimal or nonexistent to begin with . Placing limitations on choice for everyone in the school system, however, may materially improve education for all when those families that used their choice and privilege to leave the system are required to return.

Third, the actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the racialized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students . States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency , initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.

7. Market Approach Fails — can’t solve systemic social inequalities. Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)IntroductionThe accepted narrative of the American public education system is one of decline, educational "crisis," n1 and systemic failure. Our public schools increasingly are segregated by race and class in the

post-Brown era, n2 while fundamental social inequalities persist among schools in regards to educational quality, financing, and outcomes. Long viewed as essential to the economic and democratic development of America's

citizenry, our unequal system of universal public education has forsaken the "faces at the bottom of [the] well" in an era of deregulation and decreased social welfare funding. n3 [*352] The federal government previously responded to the failure of Brown's promise of equal educational opportunity by introducing legislation - the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) n4 and the Race to the Top Act of 2009 (RTT) n5 - that promoted educational reform informed by the classic market principles of consumer choice, competition, and accountability. Under this schema, the failure of America's public schools could be traced to an overregulation of education that has promoted bureaucratic stasis, ineffective teaching, and unaccountability at the cost of the individual liberty of parents and children to attend the school of their choice. The role of the federal government, then, was to utilize its fiscal block grant-in-aid powers to cultivate the private and market-based properties of public education.The well-documented failures of the NCLB and RTT to promote student

achievement, much less equality in education, led Congress to pass the Every Student

Succeeds Act in December of 2015 (ESSA). n6 The bi-partisan ESSA has been hailed by both liberal and conservative education reformers for not only superseding the much-reviled NCLB and RTT framework, but also for shifting control over certain aspects of public education policy to state and local actors.The new education act nonetheless largely leaves untouched the substantive framework of NCLB and RTT. The ESSA retains the core focus of the past education framework in its continued emphasis on promoting student achievement through consumer choice, accountability, high-stakes testing, and inter-school competition. If anything, the ESSA has broadened the market-based approach of federal education policy by shifting the responsibility for employing corporate measures of accountability to states (themselves serving as "laboratories of experimentation" subject to market demands).And yet the crisis of America's system of public education is less a manifestation of under-incentivized schools, inadequate school choice, and poor teaching, than it is a reflection of unrelenting poverty and persistent racial discrimination . The modeling of education policy and law around the oft-criticized market assumptions of consumer choice, competition, and accountability have led to a deepening of the crisis confronting public schools. Since the adoption of market-based education legislation [*353]

such as NCLB and RTT in the last ten years, our public schools have been re-segregating at an accelerated rate and the achievement gaps between the rich and poor, and white and non-white have deepened. n7

The market model of public education preserved through the new ESSA legislation does not provide answers to our current educational dilemma, but the model merely deflects the responsibility of providing an equitable public education from the public sphere of federal and state government to the private sphere. There are no easy answers to the public school crisis, and simply incorporating misplaced assumptions of competition, rational choice, and market accountability into public educational policy will not resolve the situation. We need to acknowledge that our school failures are not due

to the absence of market incentives and processes in education, but are caused by systemic social inequalities - including poverty , racial discrimination and segregation , unequal school financing , and inadequate teacher compensation .

1AR — Racialized Inequality DAChoice perpetuates inequality — neg ev relies on flawed neoliberal reasoning. Brathwaite 17 — Jessica Brathwaite, Research Associate at the Community College Research Center at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University, holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University, 2017 (“Neoliberal Education Reform and the Perpetuation of Inequality,” Critical Sociology, Volume 43, Issue 3, May, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via SAGE Journals, p. 8-10)Neoliberal Education Reform and InequalityThis research adapts a critical perspective on the impact of neoliberal policy. I argue that neoliberal policy is not likely to reduce inequality because individuals have varying levels of power and capital . In addition, I argue that neoliberal policy does not include a direct mechanism for reducing inequality, and that the indirect methods are not likely to be effective.Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2009) argues that ‘choice is based on the fallacy that racial groups have the same power in the American polity’ (p. 36).

Neoliberalism assumes that everyone is a rational actor who makes the best decision for their self. This assumes that all people have equal knowledge [end page 8] to make the best decision and equal power to execute their choice. Bonilla Silva further argues that

‘because Whites have more power, their unfettered, so-called individual choices help reproduce a form of White supremacy in neighborhoods, schools, and in society in general’ (p. 36). White and wealthy parents have more political and economic power, and can achieve better results for their children.

Neoliberalism ignores structural inequalities in access and opportunity , and shifts responsibility for high-quality education from the state to the individual. Neoliberal policy creates an illusion of meritocracy , where all students are perceived to have equal access to a high-quality education. Given this perceived equality of opportunity, poor outcomes are attributed to individual decisionmaking and not the state or any existing racial or socioeconomic inequalities . Good outcomes are attributed to individual merit and hard work. The lifelong learning movement is another educational example of such policy. This movement advocates constant occupational training as a personal responsibility to remain employable. This movement shifts the responsibility of training employees from employers to the individual (Olssen, 2006). This type of policy also creates an illusion of meritocracy, where the most prepared individual is most employable. Individuals have unequal access to professional and workforce development, but the spread of lifelong learning policies will create a system where those with the most access to personal development excel, thus reproducing existing inequalities. In New York City, advantaged parents are more successful at advocating for their child, and at gaining admission to the best schools (Ravitch, 2013). Upperclass students also tend to live in neighborhoods with good schools and many K-8 schools privilege local residents in their admissions. A system of school choice can result in advantaged groups receiving the same advantages that they have had historically, rather than an equal

playing field where all families have equal access to good schools.Increased choice may work best for middle-class students. Middle-class parents tend to be more aggressive and knowledgeable when dealing with the school system. These parents tend to have more flexible hours and more time to visit schools, and they can also afford to travel long distances to take their children to school (Apple, 2001). This leads to a concentration of more advantaged students in the best-performing schools and the reproduction of inequality. Despite universal access to the best public high schools, middle-class students are still more likely to attend high-performing schools (Mead and Green, 2012). Choice policy that does not directly address racial and socioeconomic inequality can result in a perpetuation of inequality , where all students have access to better schools but advantaged groups are more able to secure spots in the best schools.Scholars have argued that reforms using accountability and choice systems are an attempt by the middle class to alter the rules of competition in education, in order to provide an advantage for their children in the face of rising economic uncertainty (Henig, 1994; Darling-Hammond, 2000). Giroux and Schmidt (2004) argue that education is now a private good used to gain an advantage rather than a public benefit to be consumed by all. Constantly raising the bar and increasing exclusion from educational opportunity is a mechanism by which low income and minority students are continually denied access to the potential for social mobility that is afforded by increasing one’s educational attainment (Bourdieu, 1973).While the rules surrounding school choice reflect an increase in required knowledge that benefits advantaged students, neoliberal reforms result in a decreased level of skills for disadvantaged students. Bowles and Gintis (2002) argue that schools do more than educate students, that they teach students how to think and how to see the world (also see Hill Collins, 2009: 33). Schools implicitly impart educational skills and ideas that reproduce social inequalities. Under neoliberal reforms, the prevalence of testing reshapes the curriculum in low-performing schools to focus primarily on basic skills, while students in better-performing schools are exposed to a wider variety of knowledge and critical thinking skills (Giroux, 2012). [end page 9] In addition to creating citizens with unequal levels of knowledge, neoliberal policies have the harshest impact on the most disadvantaged schools. Blum (2015) argues that poorly resourced districts will experience more accountability pressure and have fewer resources to actually implement the data and measurement requirements that exist under neoliberal reforms. He argues that the marketization of schools creates winners and losers, and the losing schools are more likely to be in low-resourced areas with concentrated poverty and segregation, which is exacerbated by the choice system.

Market logic privileges those with higher levels of knowledge, material resources, and power (Apple, 2006). Lisa Delpit (1995) argues that in order to eliminate achievement gaps and social inequalities as they relate to education, we must address the ‘ larger power differentials that exist in our society between schools and communities, between teachers and parents, between poor and well-to-do, between whites and people of color’ (p. 133). Neoliberal policies indirectly address the greater social inequalities that exist, and I argue that they are more likely to perpetuate these inequalities as they rely on decisions and knowledge that are most abundant among those in power.

Choice won’t decrease inequality. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99

Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)4. Brown, Pierce, and Citizenship: Liberty Before EqualityBecause school choice privatizes public education reform while also promoting individualism and independence, vulnerable groups that might form coalitions to address structural problems in the education system are Balkanized , encouraged by school choice and choice rhetoric to undermine each other in an attempt to maximize individual preferences. In pursuit of maximized preferences, liberty is problematically prioritized over equality.One might argue that choice programs advance two fundamental goals of public education—liberty and equality. The former might be said to spring from Pierce and its progeny, while the latter emanates from the equal protection principles that Brown advances. Pursuit of liberty through choice in the school system, however, is overvalued. Even assuming it improves academic outcomes for a small fraction of the population, that fraction enjoys the achievement at the expense of many. Moreover, notions of superior parental knowledge about children and their care inform the purported ideal of parental liberty. Notions of parental expertise, however, are arguable exaggerated when one considers the expertise necessary to understand the subjects and methods of preparation most likely to prepare children for a future in the new information society.Alternately, one might argue that parental liberty interests spring from parents’ personal stake in the success of their children. Even so, that interest does not necessarily trump state interests in properly educating children, as reflected by arguments against unchecked parental liberty to transfer to children the values of white supremacy, sexism, or violence. Similarly, (although not as obvious) opting out of public school education also perpetuates hierarchy and oppression that must be considered when limits on parental liberty are deliberated.It is true that some interpret Pierce to protect the privacy and autonomy of the family through recognition of a parental right to control a child’s secular and religious upbringing. As scholars have argued, however, requiring families to “throw in [their] lot with [their] less fortunate neighbors,” does not necessarily compromise family autonomy or intimacy. Rather, the ability to exercise choice , as less vulnerable and more privileged parents in the school system do, is actually about exercising privilege — privilege ultimately un-divorced from “power and inequality or from the history that has created those inequities of power.” To exercise that privilege is more about protecting an impulse to give children “the best” at the expense of others, rather than about protecting family intimacy.In addition to being more about privilege and less about protecting family intimacy and autonomy, choice does not advance equality or dignity in education because genuine choice is neither broadly available nor does it address inequality in the school system . The latter proposition, of course, depends on how we understand equality to operate in public education. Although the language in Brown striking down segregated schools as inherently unequal draws attention to unequal academic outcomes, a broader understanding of Brown reveals it is also about anti-subordination and inclusion in community. If genuine equality means inclusion in the communities that public schools create, then the solution is not to maximize choice, such that those with more options can exit the school system and exclude those who are left behind, but to minimize choice and refocus efforts on building the inclusive community that public schools should represent. If our goal is equality, then choice must be minimized.

1AR — Blame-Shifting DAChoice-driven blame-shifting abdicates public responsibility for schools. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)C. When Subordination Is Presented as a Democratic ValueChoice policies also undermine democracy . Public schools are about the public—a community invested in educational learning outcomes for children of that

community. School- choice policies and rhetoric , however, promote competition, individualism, and subordination . Not only are these values inherently incompatible with a successful public school system, but their promotion also allows the state to abdicate responsibility for public education , while shifting blame for widespread structural problems to individuals.

Although these choice values are promoted in furtherance of democracy, they actually

undermine equality in a democratic project by rendering minority students and their families socially and politically vulnerable to racial subordination through the public school system.

1AR — Reject Neg EvThe Forster study is methodologically flawed. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 8-10)The Friedman ReportThe Friedman Foundation vote-counting analysis includes what is

essentially the same set of studies it has drawn upon in previous editions of its report, while adding six additional studies for various reasons. The review includes 18 studies, although only 16 focus on academic achievement. Notably, one prominent school choice advocate , or his students , produced 10 of those studies. While the Friedman Foundation contends that it conducted systematic searches “to help ensure the review was comprehensive,”26 five studies have been added since the previous edition of the Friedman Foundation report, having come to the author’s attention informally, either through his own ongoing work in the school choice research field or as a result of others in the field bringing these studies to his attention. (It is difficult to work in this field and not be aware of new studies as they come out!)27Yet despite the claim that it is difficult to be unaware of relevant studies, the author had somehow missed a published, peer-reviewed 2006 study (that happened to show no effects [end page 8] for vouchers) in the three previous versions of the Friedman Foundation report.28 Moreover, the author’s reliance on “ others in the field bringing these studies to his attention ” raises concerns about potential bias in the set of selected studies, since voucher advocacy research tends to operate in ideologically defined echo chambers .29

The Friedman Foundation uses a simple, and questionable , approach to classifying studies for its vote-counting analysis. Studies are classified into one of three categories, depending on if they show evidence of “no visible effect,” “any negative effect,” or “any positive effect” (with this last category being sub-divided between positive effects for “all” or “some students”).Of the six studies added to this edition of the Friedman Foundation report, one — showing no effects from vouchers — had been previously missed by the author. In what appears to be an attempt to stuff the ballot box in this vote-counting analysis, another — a 2004

rebuttal — was added to the analysis as an additional vote for positive

voucher effects, even though it was not counted as such in previous editions of the Friedman Foundation reports, and, in a n apparent case of double-counting, involves the same authors looking at the same program as they had in another study which was also listed as a “positive effect.”Two recent studies finding large negative effects of vouchers in Louisiana were included in the new Friedman Foundation report. Another new study that was included focused on college attainment (not on achievement effects). The sixth study concluded that

the NYC voucher experiment had little effect across the distribution of student achievement, with the possible exception of small negative effects in math in a small region near the top of the distribution of students who sought vouchers, which fade out over time…. Overall, the distributional findings are most consistent with our … hypothesis, that vouchers (at least of this magnitude) have no positive or negative effect for the vast majority of students to whom they were offered.30

Nevertheless, the Friedman Foundation classifies this report as demonstrating “positive effects” if it has any single positive estimate, even when a “study typically includes multiple analytical models — sometimes many of them, occasionally even more than 100.”31 (While a single negative estimate could also place a study in the “negative effect” category, there are no such instances of this in the Friedman Foundation report.) The Friedman Foundation claims this approach is a way to avoid accusations of “cherry-picking,” although, as used in the report, the approach gives the appearance of exactly that.The Friedman Foundation report also uses a questionable approach to classifying studies as showing positive impacts for “some” or “all” students. For instance, the Friedman Foundation classifies the results of the DC voucher evaluation as having positive effects for “all students.” The evaluation indeed found “marginally statistically significant positive overall impact of the program on reading achievement after at least four years. No significant impacts were observed in math.”32 Yet the evaluators’ analysis of the impact on subgroups found statistically significant impacts in reading only for half the sub-groups studied, and [end page 9] not for students who left lower-performing schools for the voucher program, started at a lower level, or for male students. Still, the Friedman Foundation approach categorizes such a study as a vote for “positive impacts” for “all students.”The Friedman Foundation review uses the same vote-counting approach to make the same arguments it has used in previous editions of its report, and expends considerable effort to dismiss findings that do not support the Friedman Foundation’s pro- voucher agenda, without giving equal scrutiny to studies whose findings align with the Foundation’s announced objective . For instance, in the section devoted to discussion of academic outcomes in voucher programs from 18 RCT studies, almost three-quarters of the space is devoted to either (a) explaining why one study “must be regarded as discredited”33 because it classifies students as African-American if either parent is African American (since this simple issue can change the findings from “no impact” to “positive impact”); (b) justifying why a study of NYC vouchers should be counted as showing positive impacts, even though the authors concluded otherwise (see above); and (c) speculating as to reasons for the “anomalous” but large negative impacts noted in both studies of vouchers in Louisiana34 — even though the author’s previous speculations as to factors shaping education outcomes have proven to be spectacularly wrong.35

So is the Wolf study. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 10-13)The Arkansas ReportAs a “global” meta-analysis, the University of Arkansas report offers a much more sophisticated and ambitious approach to estimating the impacts of vouchers on academic achievement than does the Friedman Foundation vote-counting of US studies. Still, the meta-analysis brings its own set of limitations , problems , and errors .With a few exceptions, the University of Arkansas report is relatively transparent in its methods of identifying and analyzing studies. This is a crucial concern, since methodological decisions can affect the outcomes,36 and the strength of any meta-analysis is based on the selection process used to include or exclude studies, and the quality of those studies. Here, the meta-analysis is used to draw data from the different studies to generate more precise (and potentially more statistically powerful) estimates of the average impact of voucher programs.Despite the transparency, and the laudable goal of moving the discussion beyond US programs, there are a number of questions, concerns, and potentially problematic methodological decisions that may bias the findings of the meta- analysis. For instance, the report acknowledges that “the conclusion one draws about the efficacy of vouchers is heavily influenced by the body of studies one reviews.”37 Yet, although the report discusses at length

the process for identifying studies, the review then “utilized subject matter experts in the field and snowballing techniques to find additional relevant studies.”38 Yet we don’t know who these experts are. Since it might be expected that they may be drawn from ideologically defined networks (indeed, only colleagues affiliated with the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas are listed in the acknowledgements), it would have been [end page 10] useful to note how many, and which, of the studies ultimately chosen for inclusion in the meta-analysis came from such sources. In fact, the authors write that their search led to four non-US studies being “uncovered,” but this included one study led by one of the co-authors of the meta-analysis.39 In fact, nine of the 19 studies ultimately used in the meta-analysis, from an initial set of over 9,000 considered , were conducted either by one of the co-authors of the meta- analysis, their co-authors from another voucher study, or colleagues at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas .In assembling the larger set from which to identify studies for the meta-analysis, the authors conducted searches of online databases — a sensible and relatively transparent approach explained in the report. But the authors included only studies published in English, and searched for terms like “voucher” and “opportunity scholarship.” Such approaches could be problematic, as the word “voucher” is often used in some other countries more in the sense of a “coupon.” While the authors included “education” or “school” to make sure their search would return primarily those studies focused on Freidman-style vouchers, there is still a prior but untested assumption that such programs and researchers in other countries use the term “voucher” to describe the sort of programs of interest. Similarly, the alternative search term — “opportunity scholarship” — was a phrase suggested by pollster and wordsmith Frank Luntz in his advice to Republican members of the US Congress because it polled much better (66%) with American parents than did the term “voucher” (23%).40 Thus, it is far from clear whether the report’s search strategy really returned a globally representative set of studies.In addition to excluding any study not available in English, the report also excluded any unpublished studies available in theses or dissertation databases, under the logic that they “expect that any experimental evaluation of a school voucher program that is the subject of an original thesis or dissertation will be sufficiently important that it also will be released as a study report or journal publication.”41 Yet a well-known challenge for meta-analyses is to avoid or account for publication bias, and it is very possible that even a rigorous, high-quality treatment of vouchers will be less likely to be published if it produces null results. This unfortunate decision might be expected to bias the University of Arkansas meta-analysis to make estimated effects appear more pronounced by excluding studies finding null results.As with the Friedman Foundation report, the University of Arkansas meta- analysis focuses only on RCT studies . While a defensible decision — albeit not the

only choice — for a meta-analysis, it is important to remember that such a narrow approach excludes a rich array of quasi-experimental and other studies that can also shed light on the voucher question. Even if other studies did not meet University of Arkansas’s criteria, they should have been considered at least in the preliminary discussion in order to inform the analysis in terms of theoretical, policy and contextual considerations, especially since many of these extant studies focus on larger and more developed voucher programs.42 And because they are often larger in scale and can offer insights into

school and home-background factors not accounted for in most RCTs, such studies sometimes offer a broader and more illuminating light on school choice issues.43 Indeed, the exclusive focus on RCTs means not only eliminating studies employing different approaches, but excluding the learned lessons of whole countries [end page 11] tries like Sweden and Chile that have a longer history with more comprehensive voucher programs than, say, the small-scale, targeted programs in Charlotte or Dayton included in the Arkansas report.The fact that the University of Arkansas report imposed criteria that narrowed the pool of over 9,000 studies to just 19 for the

meta-analysis, 15 of which were in the US, along with two pairs of studies on India and Bogota,

Colombia (repeatedly mislabeled as “Columbia” in the report) suggests a shrunken vision of the globe . Thus, this is a “global” meta-analysis in the same sense that the championship for American baseball is the “World Series.”Even then, there is concern that drawing on international data in this regard involves equating some rather disparate programs and contexts. While the report notes that all the programs share some basic factors, and that all the studies are RCTs, there are still important distinctions neglected by such an exercise. Just as “vouchers” can mean different things in different countries, even the basic idea of “public” and “private” schools can be very different across contexts. The US distinction between public and private school sectors is hardly universal. The US private school sector enjoys substantial autonomy relative to public schools, even though the public sector is relatively decentralized, and funding of the private sector is almost always from private sources (despite the efforts of voucher advocates). But “private” and “independent” schools in other nations are often more regulated than US public schools, and many nations provide substantial funding to the private sector, including religious schools. The University of Arkansas report does not appear to acknowledge such considerations, and instead appears to be based on a rather US-centric set of assumptions.Similarly, the programs included in the analysis are hard to compare to each other. Programs (and schools) are likely more similar within countries, and more different across national boundaries. As the authors note, the differences between public and private schools in Colombia might be much greater than what is seen in the US, and explain the fact that one city — Bogota — skews the overall results for the meta-analysis. Moreover, many low-fee private schools in India are often simple store-front, mom-and-pop operations that are very difficult to equate to, say, a private religious school in New York; so vouchers within such disparate contexts might be expected to have very different impacts and introduce quite distinct dynamics. Likewise, specific policies differ: programs may be open to students based on family income; others have residency requirements; some, such as Colombia, have minimum academic standards — thus the programs are created with different objectives in mind, including equity, achievement, competition, and institutional support. Indeed, the cases bring very different historical, demographic, policy and institutional contexts that might be expected to shape voucher programs, their uptake, use, and effects, but these considerations are brushed aside. In fact, without consideration of such policy differences, the report makes the unsubstantiated claim that “most publicly-funded vouchers must be accepted as the full cost of educating the child.”44 That is simply not true, for example, with the large and long-standing Chilean voucher program.Despite the dramatically varied contextual and program issues , the meta-analysis treats the programs examined in the 19 studies as “functionally equivalent,” and combines and analyzes [end page 12] the data from these studies, presenting estimates for math compared to reading/ English public to private funding, longevity, and geography (US v India/Bogota).45 The meta-analysis does not consider other important issues, such as religious v. non-religious schools, urbanicity, the relative amount of the voucher in different countries (other than a vague proxy of public v private funding) or relative to funding for public schools in cities with vouchers, etc.46 Perhaps most importantly, after presenting us with distinctly different outcomes by subject, geography, and funding, the University of Arkansas meta-analysis is ill-equipped to offer insights into which factors might explain more or less effective voucher programs. Instead, it presents us with inconsistent and haphazard outcomes — for some unexplained reason, vouchers “work” in some programs, for some students,

in some subjects, but hurt similar students in others — that call into question the validity and usefulness of the theoretical foundation for vouchers.

Wolf’s study is not credible. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 7-8)

I review here the Arkansas report’s treatment of previous reviews, which serves as the justification for its subsequent meta-analysis. Then in the next section, I review the aspects of the reports that are intended as their primary contribution: the vote-counting analysis in the Friedman Foundation report, and the meta-analysis in the Arkansas report.Unlike its subsequent meta-analysis, the University of Arkansas’s intended “ systematic review of the systematic reviews of voucher effectiveness” does not appear to be as comprehensive, systematic, or careful as it claims. Presumably to establish the need for its comprehensive, “global” meta-analysis, the Arkansas report examines 10 reviews of voucher achievement effects in the US published from 2008-2015, and then engages in some basic analyses of which studies were covered, or — according to the report — should have been covered by these reviews. It is unclear why the report includes only reviews of US voucher programs in justifying a global meta-analysis, especially when other international reviews are already available19 (although the “global” meta-analysis only covers three nations, with the vast majority of the studies coming from the US). While the authors describe in great detail the process for selecting individual voucher studies in their subsequent meta-analysis (see below), the process for selecting reviews of voucher studies is unclear . The “systematic review” neglects to include, for instance, the Friedman Foundation’s 2009 review of voucher studies, and criticizes reviews published over the past three years for their “omission” of recent voucher studies that were only published within the last year.The Arkansas review of reviews also misrepresents the studies by suggesting that these ten reviews were presented as meta-analyses (only one was). In another instance, a review from Coulson of the Cato Institute is

not a review of voucher studies per se, but of public-private school comparisons.20 Studies of school vouchers address a different question than do studies of the relative effects of public and private schools.21 The former examines non-representative subsets of schools from the different sectors, while the latter looks at public and private school effectiveness. Nonetheless, the Arkansas researchers persist in this erroneous conflation of empirical findings .Similarly, the University of Arkansas review of reviews includes one analysis of the use of voucher research that was explicitly not an analysis of vouchers per se.22 In that study the authors clearly noted that their analysis centered on public-v-private studies, and then an [end page 7] evolution of policy debates around vouchers, explicitly focusing on studies voucher advocates had highlighted and often misrepresented in addressing the public-private question — not all extant voucher studies. Thus, the University of Arkansas’s assertion that “[e]very study that was released during that period should have been included in the review” makes no sense,23 since it was clear that not all of these “reviews” were intended as comprehensive treatments of extant voucher studies. Even then, the University of Arkansas report faults authors for not including studies that they in fact clearly cited. This undercuts the integrity of University of Arkansas’s attempts to quantify the comprehensiveness of previous voucher reviews . Likewise, the University of Arkansas report faults reviews such as that from Usher & Kober24 for not including

studies from an arbitrary time period suggested by University of Arkansas authors, even though the authors of reviews clearly focused on a different time period.

Such fundamental errors undermine the credibility of the University of Arkansas analysis . By ascribing a failure of these analyses to do something that they did not claim to do, the University of Arkansas report distracts attention from the actual findings of those studies, which showed limitations of vouchers and research advocating vouchers, as well as the “ political motivations of voucher evaluators .” 25

Be skeptical of University of Arkansas scholars — they’re ideologues funded by Walmart. Glass 14 — Gene Glass, Regents' Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center and Research Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Lecturer in the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San Jose State University, coined the term “meta-analysis” and illustrated its first use in his presidential address to the American Educational Research Association in 1976, holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014 (“The Strangest Academic Department in the World,” Diane Ravitch’s blog, May 12th, Available Online at https://dianeravitch.net/2014/05/12/gene-glass-the-strangest-academic-department-in-the-world/, Accessed 06-20-2017)The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville has an academic department in its College of Education & Health Professions that is one of the strangest I have ever seen. It is called the Department of Education Reform, and the strangeness starts right off on the department’s webpage: edre/uark.edu There one sees that the department is the “newest department in the College of Education and Health Professions, established on July 1, 2005. The creation of the Department of Education Reform was made possible through a $10 million private gift and an additional $10 million from the University’s Matching

Gift Program.” One is never told — anywhere — that the gift was from a foundation set up by the Walton family of Wal*Mart fame . Of

course, the Walton family has sunk more than $330 million into one in every four start-up charter schools in the past 15 years. This is pretty dark money since few know how deep into education reform the Waltons are. And the University of Arkansas is not advertising on their web site that an entire department was created by one very ideologically dedicated donor .This lack of acknowledgement of the ties between the department and the Waltons goes even further than the unwillingness to advertise who is paying the department’s bills . The January 2014 issue of the Educational Researcher — house organ

of the American Educational Research Association — carried the report of a study that alleged to document a very impressive benefit to children’s critical thinking abilities as the result of a half-hour lecture in an art museum . Pretty impressive stuff , for sure, if it’s true. The article was

written by Daniel H. Bowen, Jay P. Greene, & Brian Kisida. (Learning to Think Critically: A Visual Art Experiment) Now it is never disclosed in the article that the art museum in question is Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the creation of Alice Walton , grande dame of the

Walton family, or that the authors are essentially paid by the very same Waltons . Now the authors should have disclosed such information in their research report, and the editors of the journal bear some responsibility themselves to keep things transparent.One thing among several that is truly odd about the Department of Education Reform is that when you click on the link to the department (http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/) you are taken immediately to http://www.uaedreform.org/, which appears to be a website external to the University. Huh? What gives? The University doesn’t want to be associated with the department? Or the department doesn’t want to be associated with the University of Arkansas?Once you are at the internal/external website (www.uaedreform.org) for the Department of Education Reform, you can’t get back to the University of Arkansas or its College of Education. Even clicking on the University’s logos at the top of the department’s homepage leaves you right there at http://www.uaedreform.org. So the department is really in the University of Arkansas, but it seems to act like it would rather not be associated with it.Among the activities of the department supported by the Walton money is the endowment of six professorships. Well, there are only six professors in the entire department, and only one of those is not sitting in an endowed chair . I know of no other department in which 5 out of 6 faculty occupy an endowed cha[i]r of some sort or other. Well and good. Professors work hard and they deserve support and many have labored for decades without such reward. However, the five endowed professors of the Department of Education Reform appear to be a tad different from most endowed professors. In fact, only one of them strikes me personally as having the kind of record that would deserve an endowed professorship at any of the top 100 colleges of education in the country.

Among those surprising recipients of endowed professorships are four others. Robert Maranto has a doctorate from the Univ. of Maryland in 1989 and

had only risen to the rank of Associate Professor at Villanova when he was hired by the department in 2008 to fill the Chair in Leadership.

Gary Ritter earned a doctorate from Penn in 2000, and less than a decade later is awarded an endowed professorship by the department.

Likewise for Patrick Wolf who made it to Associate Professor at Georgetown before being named 21st Century Chair in School Choice in the department. And the department chair, Jay Greene , never made tenure at a university before logging five years at the notoriously right-wing Manhattan Institute and then jumping into the 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.Question: Who is making these decisions? How does this department relate to the College of Education & Health Professions? Does a university committee vet these appointments to endowed chairs? What role do outsiders play in hiring decisions? The department administers the University’s PhD in Education Policy. The department uses the University’s imprimatur in much of what it does. Does the University

have any sayso in what the department does? And the bigger question: Is everything for sale today in American higher education?

FYI: Lubienski is about Forster and Wolf. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 3-4)I. IntroductionThe degree to which students benefit from vouchers to attend private schools has been de- bated for years, with many studies suggesting little to modest benefits, at best, but also no measurable harm.1 While school choice advocates have insisted that there is a “hidden consensus” in the “highest quality,” randomized studies indicating significant, if inconsistent benefits for students using vouchers,2 a few recent studies using randomization to examine relative gains for voucher students have found evidence of large negative impacts for those students.3 This raises the question as to whether there is indeed a change in the “hidden consensus” on the impact of vouchers, or whether it even exists. Using two different approaches, a pair of new reports reviews the evidence, and contends that there is overall empirical sup- port for the efficacy of vouchers.• The first study, from the pro-voucher advocacy organization, the Friedman Foun- dation for Educational Choice, offers the latest of its series of reviews on the topic, finding the weight of these studies

provides substantial evidence on the efficacy of vouchers in a number of areas. The report, A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice,4 by Greg Forster, is the fourth edition of these summaries, and essentially employs a vote-counting exercise of studies that match criteria set by the author. While the report weighs in on a number of outcomes from voucher programs, including the competitive and fiscal impacts on public schools, the effects on civic values, and on racial segregation, these issues have not been seen as central to questions of voucher efficacy, and are not always illuminated by randomized studies. Instead, the foremost and long-standing focus of the Friedman Foundation has been on the immediate or “first-order” academic effects on students awarded vouchers through a lottery.5 Since most policy and scholarly interest has been on these first-order impacts (and that is also the exclusive scope of the other report examined here), this review focuses on the Friedman Foundation report’s treatment of the evidence on the achievement effects.• The other study, The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review, is from M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and Patrick Wolf, scholars at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.6 The third author in particular has long been associated with questions of achievement in voucher programs, having found — sometimes controversially — positive impacts from such programs, although his most recent evaluation found negative impacts that were large and significant [end page 3] in Louisiana’s voucher program.7 This meta-analysis goes beyond the simple vote-counting efforts of previous syntheses, such as those by the Friedman Foundation. The Arkansas report also seeks to move the debate beyond the focus on US programs, and incorporate a global view.Together, these reports are notable in their efforts to focus on rigorous research, although the ways in which they approach that task raises questions about the degree to which the authors lead the reader to certain conclusions regarding the voucher debate: The Friedman Foundation report demonstrates narrow attention to certain studies in the US that shine a positive light on vouchers. The Arkansas report similarly seeks to elevate a narrower view of empirical evidence on vouchers, while at the same time expanding the geographic basis for that approach to the globe — although in this case that means only examining two other countries. Addressing the questions of what evidence to consider and what to exclude in examining voucher efficacy is a

crucial concern in understanding the real and potential impact of vouchers.

1AR — No Coercion Net-BenefitCounterplan doesn’t provide genuine choice. Case turns coercion. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)II. School Choice as Racial SubordinationDespite the absence of positive outcomes, particularly for students of color, the appeal of school-choice programs continues to broaden, as reflected in the expanding size and scope of voucher programs, charter schools, and parental trigger laws. Given the unexamined “benefits” of school choice, this Part presents less-explored critiques of the legal, moral, and pedagogical legitimacy of choice and choice rhetoric in education reform as advanced through charter schools and voucher programs. To be clear, choice in the abstract is not problematic. Quite the contrary, genuine choice—which entails realistic options and the preparation and opportunity to pursue those options—

can be integral to self-actualization, dignity , and equality. What this Article seeks to critique , however, is the application of choice themes in public education, where race and identity will warp and ultimately impede a properly functioning education market where choices are presumably exercised .

In addition to the problematic impact of race on the education market, choice also masks racial subordination in public education in the form of unreasonable educational alternatives, education policy problematically informed by cultural-deficit models, and negative-racialized schooling experiences . Moreover, school choice forces parents and caregivers of color to bear the burden of reform , thus shifting responsibility from the state to individuals when choice fails to improve educational outcomes . Ultimately, the rhetoric of individualism, independence, and liberty that permeates school choice distracts stakeholders from addressing larger societal issues . Race, class, and identity will necessarily impede genuine choice in the education system and undermine the democratic values of citizenship and equality that should inform public-education policy .

The counterplan undermines democratic freedom.Blakely 17 — Jason Blakely, Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Pepperdine University, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley, 2017 (“How School Choice Turns Education Into a Commodity,” The Atlantic, April 17th, Available Online at https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/is-school-choice-really-a-form-of-freedom/523089/, Accessed 06-19-2017)The first point to consider when weighing whether or not to marketize the public school system is that markets always have winners and losers. In the private sector, the role of competition is often positive. For example, Friendster, the early reigning king of social networks, failed to create a format that people found as useful and attractive as Facebook. The result was that it eventually vanished.

When businesses like Friendster fail, no significant public damage is done. Indeed, it is arguably a salutary form of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which is a feature of market innovation. But should all goods in a society be subjected to the forces of creative destruction? What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not “compete” in a marketized environment?In Detroit (where DeVos played a big role in introducing school choice) two decades of this marketization has led to extreme defunding and closing of public schools; the funneling of taxpayer money toward for-profit charter ventures; economically disadvantaged parents with worse options than when the neoliberal social experiment began; and finally, no significant increase in student performance. Indeed, some zones of Detroit are now educational deserts where parents and children have to travel exorbitant miles and hours for their children to attend school.On the whole, neoliberalization is hardest on the poor. Market choice does, however, favor those who already have the education, wealth, and wherewithal to plan, coordinate, and execute moving their children to the optimal educational setting. This means the big beneficiaries of school of choice are often the rich . For instance, when Nevada recently passed an aggressive school-of-choice system the result was that the vast majority of those able to take advantage of it came from the richest areas of Reno and Las Vegas. As money is pulled from failing schools and funneled into succeeding ones, wealth can actually be redistributed by the state up the socioeconomic ladder.

Market competition in the context of schools thus opens the possibility for a vicious cycle in which weak and low-performing communities are punished for their failings and wealthy communities receive greater and greater funding advantages . Americans should ask themselves a basic question of justice when it comes to the education system: Should it be organized around a model in which the more you win the more you get, and the more you lose the less you are given? Markets are by their nature non-egalitarian. For

this reason, neoliberalization has been one of the biggest factors contributing to the growing inequalities and diminishment of the middle and lower classes.A common neoliberal response to this is simply to say that economic inequality is the cost paid for individual liberty and personal responsibility. But the problem is that this discourse of individualism followed to its logical conclusion eliminates any public goods whatsoever. For example, if student funds are portable based on consumption choices, why shouldn’t the growing number of childless taxpayers be able to move their funding outside the education system entirely toward goods they actually consume, like dog parks or public golf courses?This is the logical conclusion of Margaret Thatcher’s famous neoliberal pronouncement that “there is no such thing as society” but only “individual men and women.” The problem with this way of thinking is that education is not simply another commodity to buy and sell on a market. It is a shared good. Free societies need educated members to intelligently and critically deliberate over public life, select representatives, and help guide policy decisions. Market freedom is thus in tension with the freedom of democratic participation.Many people recognize this fact and for that reason favor coordinating action and sharing costs through the government when it comes to goods like education, defense, public parks, transportation, public health, and the environment. Yet forming a shared collective action through government or a labor organization is the one kind of individual freedom that neoliberal philosophy does not tolerate. As the preeminent historian of neoliberalism, David Harvey, puts it, “neoliberals have to put strong limits on democratic governance … while individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not

supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions.”

Neoliberalism is thereby fundamentally opposed to any democratic, individual choices that seek to constrain markets—be it teachers unions or simply majority decisions about how to fund and shape public schools. Indeed, historically speaking, neoliberal attempts to marketize public goods are often unpopular and so have required non-majoritarian institutions like the courts, the World Bank, or even strong men and authoritarians (like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet) to enact policies against the will of the majority. Authoritarianism and market freedoms can and often do go together. There is a basic tension between neoliberal market choice and democratic freedom to shape one’s community in ways that do not conform to market logic.Of course, thoughtful advocates of school choice might argue that while perhaps there are reasons to be skeptical of neoliberal theory, there are many schools of choice that in practice are phenomenal sites for educational innovation. Such advocates might point to cases of successful charter schools in poorer communities—for example, the Knowledge Is Power Program (or “KIPP”) charter schools across the country. Although KIPP is nonprofit, it is still engaged in the project of neoliberalizing public goods by introducing consumer choice as a form of subjecting the school system to a kind of market discipline.KIPP is not without its critics, but there is also undeniable merit in efforts to experiment with education on a more local level (some of these carried out by intelligent well-meaning teachers and administrators at charter schools). Rejecting neoliberal policies like school choice does not mean that people such as DeVos and charter-school employees who are attracted to experimentation and less centralization of curriculum don’t have a point. America’s public schools—like all institutions—are in constant need of reform, rejuvenation, and innovation.But debates about “freedom” and educational reform might be more constructive if participants center their questions around democratic freedoms —the freedom of every citizen to access education and the freedom of various communities to shape what that education looks like . Arguments over democratic freedom might contest how much of curriculum decision-making can be taken rightfully by the federal government versus devolution onto localities. Likewise, disagreements over democratic freedom could involve constructive debates over whether and how to fund private religious schools.Educational policy in democratic societies should be subject to spirited and even intense debate and disagreement. Yet attempts to reduce freedom to markets and consumer choice remains in serious tension with democratic liberties and ideals of self-government . Future debates might be no less vigorous while also seeking alternatives to a simplistic equivalency between markets and “choice.”

1AR — Market Approach FailsChoice sanitizes structural inequalities and undermines effective solutions. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)Choice rhetoric problematically idealizes competition, privacy, independence, and individualism , while overshadowing interdependence and vulnerability in public education, and outsources conversations that belong in the public sphere to families and individuals. Yet choice rhetoric has endured , due to its sanitizing effect on inequality and vulnerability. Given enough options, the argument goes, if the result of one’s selection is problematic, it was only his or her fault. Having provided myriad options, the state is absolved of responsibility for underperformance in any one school district .

Indeed, the turn to school choice as the primary method of public school reform has

only accelerated a legal and political trend of ignoring the structural factors that undermine successful public education and maintain ing an achievement gap in the public school system .

In the meantime, very little has been said about racial and economic isolation. Such isolation motivates people such as Kelley Williams-Bolar to “choose” to illegally use her father’s residential address to enroll her African-American daughters in a safer, higher performing neighborhood school than the one to which her Ohio city assigned them.Given the role of choice as a foundation of American liberal thought, its dominance in public school reform is no surprise, nor is its presentation as the answer for poor, working class, and minority students novel. What policymakers have insufficiently explored, however, is the particularly racialized constraints under which people of color exercise choice in the education system. Encouraged by pundits and policymakers to demand choice, and ever mindful of the cultural-deficit models that will place blame for failure squarely at their feet if they do not leave the traditional public school system, minority students increasingly enroll in the programs. But as students and parents demand more options, school-choice policies undermine the coalitions that stakeholders could otherwise form to address the real obstacles to academic achievement—segregation by race and class, food and housing insecurity, and inadequate school financing . Ultimately, choice does not provide the promised liberation .

Competition fails in education. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)1. Competition

The market model of education on which school choice is based encourages schools to ensure their success in the market by successfully competing for parent–consumers. Competition in education, however, produces neither growth nor accountability. Successful schools are notoriously difficult to grow or replicate , as public schools do not operate with the economies of scale that generate expansion in the private sector. Schools are unique social systems that cannot merely be imitated to achieve success; “[s]chooling is a retail, not wholesale business.” Moreover, in an attempt to dominate the market in which they are increasingly asked to compete, schools resort to a multitude of problematic behaviors, including: cream-skimming the best students for enrollment, “teaching to the test” at the expense of substantive education in an effort to produce high test scores, and investing in facilities and appearance instead of in quality instruction . In addition,

traditional public schools lose money when students enroll in charter schools, encouraging tactics that not only compromise the integrity of the schools but that also lead to layoffs and school closings in already destabilized neighborhoods.

States CP/Federalism DA Answers

A2: States CPFederal action is necessary to provide leadership and effective redistribution — history proves. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 221-223) The Federal Government as the Final Guarantor of Equal Access to an Excellent EducationBy enacting federal legislation, programs, and initiatives that embrace

the elements discussed above, the federal government would reestablish itself as the final guarantor of equal access to an excellent education . Historically, ensuring equal educational opportunity was one of the principle rationales for federal involvement in education by assisting vulnerable groups when the states have failed to act in the national interest. Yet, an increasing focus on standards and accountability has shifted federal attention away from issues of educational equity , while federal reforms have unsuccessfully attempted to ensure a quality education for all schoolchildren.74 Although the federal government consistently should aim to

maintain excellence, it also needs to reassert itself as the final guarantor of equal educational opportunity. In making this recommendation, I join with other

scholars, such as Michael Rebell and Goodwin Liu, whose proposals call on the federal government to guarantee some form of equal educational opportunity.75

History suggests that the federal government is likely to be the only level of government to engage in the leadership and substantial redistribution of resources that equal access to an excellent education will require . Local politics often hinders substantial efforts to redistribute resources. Thus, it is not [end page 221]

surprising that it took federal legislation to initiate numerous past reform efforts that addressed disparities in educational opportunity, such as those that assist disadvantaged students, girls and women, and disabled

children. The federal government possesses an unparalleled ability to mobilize national, state, and local reform when the nation is confronted with an educational crisis.76 Therefore, my call for a stronger federal role in education builds on the historical federal role in advancing educational equity and the superior ability of the federal government to accomplish a redistribution of educational opportunity.

By focusing its attention on the policy-making areas identified above, the federal government would shoulder the primary burden for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education and draw on its strengths in education policy making. Federal leadership would incentivize the states to engage in a collaborative partnership with the federal government to achieve this goal . At

the same time, states , facing compelling incentives to join the national effort, would retain substantial control over education in choosing among a wide array of reforms.

Some may argue that the states should bear the primary burden for

ensuring equal access to an excellent education because education remains primarily a state function. I reject this dualist understanding of education and highlight here

the long history that reveals that the states will not rectify opportunity and achievement gaps on their own . Embracing federal leadership on these issues builds on the growing consensus reflected in NCLB and other federal education legislation: the federal government should exercise a substantial role in education law and policy.77

Others may contend that the federal government should rein in its growing role in education. In some ways, this criticism points to the failures of past initiatives as evidence that the federal government's role in education should be curtailed. Most recently, some

scholars condemn the shortcomings and implementation of NCLB and RTTT. Undeniably, the federal government has undertaken a variety of unsuccessful education reforms.78 Yet, an established track record in education over the last fifty years has given the U nited States

ample evidence to identify the strengths and weaknesses of federal education policy making. My theory embraces a variety of federal policy-making strengths and builds on the federal government's superior and more consistent reform record on issues of educational equity in the face of inconsistent and overwhelmingly ineffective state reform.79 [end page 222] Today, although the federal government invests in education, this investment is quite limited relative to state and local investments. Increasing federal demands for its limited contribution have enabled the federal government to avoid shouldering a substantial portion of the costs and burdens associated with accomplishing the nation's education goals while still enjoying the ability to set the education agenda and demand results. 80 Having the federal government as the final guarantor of equal access to an excellent education would strengthen the relationship between growing federal influence in education and greater federal responsibility for accomplishing national objectives. This transformation would greatly improve on the nation's current cooperative federalism approach to education.

State-level policies can’t remedy unfair interstate disparities in educational opportunity — federal action is vital. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“No Quick Fix for Equity and Excellence: The Virtues of Incremental Shifts in Education Federalism,” Stanford Law & Policy Review (27 Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev 201), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Disparities in educational opportunity along lines of class, race and neighborhood remain an enduring characteristic of schools and districts throughout the United States. n2 These disparities are shaped in substantial part by the funding mechanisms that govern schools. n3 As the recent report of the U.S. Department of Education's

Equity and Excellence Commission noted, "students, families and communities are burdened by the broken system of education funding in America." n4 Although some progress has been made, despite almost half a century of state school finance litigation, n5 most states generally have not taken consistent and sustained action to adopt and maintain funding systems that promote equal access to an excellent education. n6 Furthermore, the education reforms that have been undertaken have not demanded sufficient changes to end the longstanding inequities in how the states fund schools. n7

The United States should not expect these longstanding disparities and challenges to end without a new commitment and approach to eliminating them. Even though we have learned some important lessons from how states

have implemented their education clauses, the laboratory of the states has failed to protect the national interest in an excellent and equitable education system for all children. Given this inconsistent and lackluster state commitment to the education finance systems that the United States needs, the United States must look for new avenues to secure this important national interest. Federal options for addressing spending disparities are particularly crucial because the greatest [*203] variation in per pupil spending occurs between states , rather than within states. n8 Currently, this variation in funding between states accounts for seventy-eight percent of per pupil spending differences and this variation represents a "historic high" and highlights the inadequacy of state reforms alone to equalize resources . n9

Furthermore, research demonstrates that on international assessments, the achievement of U.S. students at all income

levels, including those from upper income families, lags behind their international peers. n10

Resolving interstate disparities is necessary to solve the advantage — the counterplan is not sufficient. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 203-204) The Rodriguez plaintiffs, Mexican American schoolchildren who resided in districts with a low property tax base, challenged the Texas school finance system in federal court because they sought educational opportunities that equaled those of their more affluent and white peers in a nearby neighborhood. Although state school finance litigation and reform has resulted in some reform of school finance systems, the educational opportunity gap that the Rodriguez plaintiffs sought to remedy in the early 1970s remains one of the persistent challenges that plague the American education system. Today, it relegates at least ten million students in low-income neighborhoods and millions more minority students to poorly performing teachers, substandard facilities, and other inferior educational opportunities.1Why have the disparities that the Rodriguez plaintiffs attempted to remedy continued to burden the public school system in the United States? Although these disparities have broad roots, they

persist in part because the United States invests more money in high-income districts than in low-income districts, a sharp contrast to other developed nations. 2 Scholars and court decisions also have documented the sizeable intrastate disparities in educational opportunity. In addition, interstate inequalities represent the largest component of disparities in educational opportunity. The harmful nature of [end page 203]

interstate disparities falls hardest on disadvantaged schoolchildren who have the most educational needs, and states do not possess the resources and capacity to address the full scope of these disparities.3

Only increased federal funding can effectively redistribute resources between states. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 220)

Federal Financial Assistance to Close Opportunity and Achievement GapsFederal financial assistance will be essential for expanding the capacity of states to participate in a comprehensive national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education. The federal financial contribution should include both incentives and assistance to address opportunity and achievement gaps . Financial incentives would draw attention to this critical issue and motivate states to implement reforms , just as incentives motivated reform

through RTTT. Financial assistance also would expand the potential reform options beyond what states could implement with their own state resources and would supply political cover for politicians who support reform.69

The federal government should generously increase its contribution to education costs while continuing to share these costs with the state governments. Additional financial support for education would leverage the federal government's superior ability to redistribute resources among the states . Past experience reveals that federal resources can be an effective means for influencing state and local education policy. Generous federal financial assistance would fund a larger percentage of the costs of reforms than it did with past education reforms, which typically failed to deliver the substantial funds anticipated when the laws were enacted. The level of generosity of federal funding should be based on the disparate capacities of states to close opportunity and achievement gaps. Additionally, a blend of federal and state funding would encourage greater efficiency than full federal funding because it should encourage both governments to contain costs.70

Empirical evidence disproves state solvency.Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 209-210)The Inconsistencies in the Benefits of Education FederalismAlthough education federalism undoubtedly reaps some of the benefits

that it is designed to accomplish, the current approach does not consistently yield the benefits that it is supposed to secure. For instance, education federalism has been praised for its ability to allow the state and local governments to serve as "laboratories" of reform. However,

research reveals that in the area of school finance reform, most

reforms have been fairly limited in scope and that the reliance on property taxes to fund schools remains the prevailing approach to local school funding. 26 This approach has continued despite the Supreme Court's 1973 call for school finance reform in Rodriguez: "The need is apparent for reform in tax systems which may well have relied too long and too heavily on the local property tax. And certainly innovative thinking as to public education, its methods, and its funding is necessary to assure both a higher level of quality and greater uniformity of opportunity."27Even when plaintiffs have prevailed in litigation that sought to

reform school finance systems, most states typically have maintained the same fundamental and unequal structure for school finance .

Additionally, in a substantial [end page 209] majority of the states, funding inequities between wealthy and poor districts and schools persist.28 In 2012, only fifteen states provided more funding to districts with high concentrations of poverty than those with low concentrations of poverty, despite consistent research that low-income students require more resources for a successful education than do their more affluent peers. The 2013 Equity and Excellence Commission report notes that substantial reform is needed because, apart from a few exceptions, states fail to link their school finance systems to the costs that they would need to invest to educate all children in compliance with state standards.29 Given decades of reforms that have not made consistent and substantial inroads on these challenges, the states are not serving as effective laboratories for school finance reform.

Federal action is key to effective redistribution. Kleven 10 — Thomas Kleven, Professor of Law at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, holds an L.L.B. from Yale University, 2010 (“Federalizing Public Education,” Villanova Law Review (55 Vill. L. Rev. 369), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)While some have praised NCLB as contributing at least potentially to improving educational opportunity, n62 others have criticized it as ill-designed and unlikely to be effective. n63 Principal criticisms are that it provides insufficient funding to enable states and localities to meet its goal; n64 that it fails to establish meaningful standards for evaluating student performance; n65 that it encourages states, in order to avoid sanctions, to set inadequate standards and to induce poorly performing students to drop [*400] out of school; n66 that it promotes rote learning to enable students to pass standardized tests at the expense of teaching them to reason and think critically; n67 and that it is a Trojan Horse designed to undermine public education and foster privatization. n68 However, even if successful, NCLB will leave much of the inequality of the existing system in place. At a minimum, full federal funding seems essential to providing a comparable education for all students. Even if all students meet adequate minimum performance standards, funding inequalities will likely persist and result in superior educational opportunities for those living in more well-off states and localities.

Moreover, that federal intervention has historically been needed over the past forty-five years or so to induce states to redress unequal opportunity in various aspects of education , suggests

that the political process at the federal level may in general be better suited than at the state level to bring about more nearly comparable opportunity . Comparable opportunity requires that the well-off subsidize the education of the less well-off, [*401] and that those whose children do not have costly special needs subsidize the education of children who do. The federal government seems the appropriate level to undertake redistributive measures for two reasons: first, the progressivity of the federal tax system , as against the regressivity of the sales and property taxes on which states and localities heavily rely; n69

and, second, the ability of the well-off and of business interests to thwart redistribution more persuasively by threatening to leave a state than to depart the country. n70 In addition, lack of comparable educational opportunity primarily prejudices disadvantaged people who also lack comparable political power due to poverty or historical discrimination or being relatively few in number. Reforms of the magnitude required to approach comparable educational opportunity will likely require a massive reform movement instigated by coalitions among the disadvantaged and less powerful. n71 [*402] Such coalitions seem more likely to be effective at the federal level where greater numbers can be brought to bear and more attention shone on the needed changes.

A2: Federalism DANo Spillover Beyond Education — the plan is a narrow expansion of federal power. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“Disrupting Education Federalism,” Washington University Law Review (92 Wash. U. L. Rev. 959), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)In offering a theory for how education federalism should be restructured to strengthen the federal role over education, and thus reduce reliance on states to ensure equal access to an excellent education, I build upon Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken's argument that federalism theory should eschew advancing a single theory for all occasions because "both in theory and practice ... there are many federalisms, not one ." n39 She astutely

contends that scholars developing and critiquing federalism theory should consider the appropriate balance of institutional arrangements for a specific context . n40 Therefore, my theory for how [*968]

education federalism should be restructured does not attempt to propose a federalism theory for other policymaking arenas such as environment al law or healthcare policy . Instead, it solely proposes a shift in the balance of federal, state, and local authority in order to strengthen the federal role in ensuring equal access to an excellent education while preserving the aspects of state and local autonomy over education that do not undermine equal access to an excellent education.

No Link and Turn — the plan improves state and local control of education. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 223-224) Reconstructing Education Federalism Would Empower State and Local Control, Accountability, and Innovation In this chapter, I offer ways to reduce harmful aspects of state and local control of education while simultaneously empowering beneficial and collaborative aspects. States admittedly would lose some control over education because they would be accountable to the federal government for ending long-standing

disparities in educational opportunity. At the same time, other aspects of state and local control of education would remain. States would retain authority to control education policy making through education governance, the nature and content of a school finance system, state assessments [end page 223] and graduation standards, and a wide variety of teaching and curricular decisions. Localities would continue to administer education, manage the daily operation of schools, hire teachers and staff, build and maintain schools, and transport students. 83

Maintaining these functions under state and local authority fosters continuance of most of the existing levels of state and local control , accountability, and innovation for education .

Most importantly, placing primary responsibility on the federal government for leading a national effort to close the opportunity and achievement gaps would foster new types of state and local control over education . Currently, substantial disparities exist in each state's capacity to offer high-quality educational opportunities. With the federal government in the lead role, state and local governments would both have a greater and more equal capacity to offer all children an excellent education . 84 This enhanced capacity would empower states and localities to engage in innovative reforms previously hindered by capacity limitations; they would decide how they want to achieve equal access to an excellent education and thus continue to function as laboratories of reform —but with new federal research , technical expertise , and financial assistance to support the identification and implementation of appropriate reforms.

Link Not Unique — federal control of education now. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 206)My proposal for disrupting education federalism is particularly timely. First, the United States is undergoing an unprecedented expansion of the federal role in education and an accompanying shift in its approach to education federalism . The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as

the stimulus bill , authorized an unprecedented $100 billion to invest in education funding, tuition tax credits, and college grants. President Barack Obama trumpeted this as "the largest investment in education in our nation's history." The stimulus

bill included $4.35 billion for the Race to the Top (RTTT) program, which represented far more discretionary funding than all of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's predecessors. Although RTTT has its shortcomings, it has sparked significant education reform, including greater state support for the Common Core State Standards, charter schools, and revisions to state laws regarding the use of student testing data to evaluate teachers. In a number of states and districts, the two years following the creation of RTTT sparked more reform than those locations had seen in the preceding twenty years.11 The stimulus bill built on the expansion of the federal role in education established in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. NCLB represents the most expansive federal education reform law in the history of the U nited States. For example, the law's far-reaching provisions require annual testing in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in grades 10 through 12 and periodically in science. NCLB also instituted public reporting of results of student assessments on the content of state standards; launched disaggregation of this data for a variety of student characteristics, including race and ethnicity; created accountability interventions for Title I schools; and set minimum requirements for highly-qualified teachers.12

No Innovation Impact — the plan preserves state innovation within federal limits. Ogletree and Robinson 17 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2017 (“Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy,” Education Next, Volume 17, Number 2, Spring, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/inequitable-schools-demand-federal-remedy-forum-san-antonio-rodriguez/, Accessed 06-09-2017)When enforcing a constitutional right to education, federal courts should establish clear guidance about what that right requires, while also allowing for flexibility in how states implement it. State funding and governance mechanisms vary.

Therefore, federal courts should eschew simple one-size-fits-all remedies such as mandating equal per-pupil funding. States should be able to continue to serve as laboratories of experimentation and innovation that decide how best to provide the right to education. However, these laboratories should operate within federal limits that protect the national interest in a well-educated populace. This approach would provide federal accountability while retaining the beneficial aspects of state and local control.

No “Federalizing Education” Link — the plan retains the benefits of state control. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need

for Equal Access to an Excellent Education,” Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 185), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Despite federalism -based concerns over this increase in federal influence over education as too great a reduction in state and local control, my approach would retain a number of features that recognize [*230] federalism's potential benefits . My proposal retains most of the existing forms of state and local control of education. It does not embrace a national schoolhouse or federalize our education system . Instead, it insists that states equitably distribute educational opportunities and provide all children an excellent education. In addition, my theory for disrupting education federalism would empower new forms of state and local control for those communities who have lacked the influence to demand an excellent and equitable education for their children. n294 This theory admittedly and intentionally ends a state's ability to distribute resources in an inequitable and irrational manner that harms both disadvantaged children and the nation's interest in an educated citizenry and workforce .

However, states would retain primary control of education as each state would select the best path for it to ensure equal access to an excellent education.

Education Federalism Bad — it cements inequality. Ogletree and Robinson 17 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2017 (“Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy,” Education Next, Volume 17, Number 2, Spring, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/inequitable-schools-demand-federal-remedy-forum-san-antonio-rodriguez/, Accessed 06-09-2017)Ultimately, what we are calling for is a long-overdue restructuring of education federalism to establish an effective partnership of the federal, state, and local governments to advance equal access to an excellent education. Education federalism has served as a consistent roadblock to federal efforts to remove barriers to equal educational opportunities for low-income and minority students. The oft-praised benefits of state and local control — experimentation, innovation, and competition for excellence—have failed to eliminate the substandard schools that many children attend. Instead, trumpeting the importance of state and local control has too often served as a vehicle for those privileged by the current education system to maintain their

advantage and avoid accountability for effectively educating all children.