1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
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Email Event
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Since the late 1980s, state court judges across the country have derived authority from the "education clauses" of their state constitutions, deemed state funding for K–12 schools inadequate, and required states to channel vast new sums into education. The underlying assumption is that more resources will lead to better outcomes. Indeed, increased funding has led to additional programs and personnel and to new and improved facilities--but has it led to commensurate gains in student achievement? If not, what would it take for these investments to deliver? Stanford University's Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth, a senior partner in the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, will discuss these and related questions, drawing from their recent volume, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009). Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, will offer a response. AEI's director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess will moderate.
| 3:45 | Registration | |
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| 4:00 | Presenters: | Eric A. Hanushek, Hoover Institution |
| Alfred A. Lindseth, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan | ||
| Discussant: | Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers | |
| Moderator: | Frederick M. Hess, AEI | |
| 5:30 | Adjournment |
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-5843
E-mail: jsquire@aei.org
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-4870
E-mail: VRodman@aei.org
WASHINGTON, JUNE 29, 2009--At a recent AEI event, conservative scholar Eric Hanushek and school litigation lawyer Al Lindseth were joined by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, to discuss school funding and whether and how it can deliver improved student achievement. Drawing from their recent volume Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), Hanushek and Lindseth asserted that more money has not resulted in the hoped-for results.
Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution, argued that the additional dollars funneled into K–12 schools have served only to fund more of the same, rather than reform our current schooling structure. "There is ample evidence that the quadrupling of funding between 1960 and today has been unmatched by anything like that in terms of performance," he argued.
Lindseth, a partner at the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, concurred. Drawing from their research on court-ordered increases in school funding in Wyoming, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, he concluded, "The results are disappointing. Clearly we need to do something better with our money."
Acknowledging that she shares some of Hanushek and Lindseth's skepticism of school funding, Weingarten said that she differs with them "at the margins, as opposed to . . . the big picture." She emphasized the need for more money, the importance of spending it wisely, and the importance of including teachers in the development of sound standards and accountability systems. "Teachers have to be involved in both what the standards are and equally, if not more important, how to make them happen," she said. "You want [teachers] engaged every single day, thinking about what works, what doesn't work, how we're going to make it happen."
Hanushek added that state legislatures "should not think of funding as separate from policy . . . You can't do these policies piecemeal. They interlock." He called for accountability metrics that hold individuals accountable for performance: "You can't reward people for success without knowing how success is measured." The discussion quickly turned to address how additional school funding is allocated, the best way to compensate teachers, and the controversial idea of paying teachers based on their performance in the classroom.
"We do think that the use of performance-based pay over the years will have a positive impact on the teaching force," Lindseth said. "And that it will cause good teachers, effective teachers, to stay in the profession instead of leaving for some more lucrative job . . . and may also cause less effective teachers to leave the profession." Weingarten took issue with performance-based pay, however, commenting that the first step is to provide teachers "a decent middle class salary. . . . Performance pay, as the antidote, doesn't work if one wants to build the capacity of your entire teaching force." She explained that experience and advanced degrees that are used as benchmarks in current salary schedules correlate with effectiveness. "The salary schedule . . . was proxy for fairness," she explained. "It was rooted in what in that time made sense."
Hanushek added that designs for pay for performance should be established at the state and local level but that states and localities had yet to come up with any viable possibilities. "Up to now," he concluded, "the finance system has been used to pay for things, but all the incentives that financing and money can provide have been left on the side. We think that's an important weapon that can be used . . . that we're not making good use of." Ultimately, he stated, effective reforms "don't cost money. They cost leadership and commitment."
--JULIET SQUIRE
Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His research spans such diverse areas of education policy as the impact on achievement of teacher quality, high stakes accountability, and class-size reduction. He recently coauthored, with Alfred A. Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009). Mr. Hanushek is chairman of the executive committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He also serves as chair of the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education along with being a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and the American Education Research Association. He was awarded the Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in 2004. In addition, Mr. Hanushek is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1965 to 1974.
Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI and an executive editor of Education Next. His many books include When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008), No Remedy Left Behind (AEI Press, 2007), Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2006), Tough Love for Schools (AEI Press, 2006), Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Spinning Wheels (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). His work has appeared in both popular and scholarly outlets, including Social Science Quarterly, the Harvard Educational Review, Education Week, Phi Delta Kappan, the Washington Post, and National Review. Mr. Hess serves on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education, as a research associate with the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance, and as a member of the research advisory board for the National Center for Educational Accountability. He is a former high school social studies teacher and has taught at Harvard and Georgetown universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia.
Alfred A. Lindseth is a senior partner at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. A member of Sutherland’s Litigation Practice Group, he has earned a national reputation representing and advising state and local school authorities in the resolution of complex disputes involving their obligations under state and federal constitutions. He is the coauthor, with Eric A. Hanushek, of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009) and, for the past twenty-five years, has worked closely with lawyers from the offices of the state attorney general in states as diverse as Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and North Dakota in important school finance and educational adequacy cases, bringing them to successful conclusions through litigation, negotiations, legislative action, or a combination of strategies. Mr. Lindseth is a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and a former instructor at and spokesman for the U.S. Army Ranger School.
Randi Weingarten is the newly elected president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents more than 1.4 million teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other health care professionals; and local, state, and federal employees. Previously, Ms. Weingarten was president of the United Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2, since 1998, representing 110,000 nonsupervisory educators in the New York City public school system, as well as home child care providers and other workers in health, law, and education. Ms. Weingarten also led New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization for the city’s one-hundred-plus public-sector unions for ten years. In that position, which she left after being elected AFT president, she coordinated labor negotiations and bargained for benefits on behalf of the unions’ 365,000 members. Last year, she partnered with Green Dot Schools, which operates unionized charter schools in California, to start a high school in the South Bronx in September 2008. From 1991 to 1997, Ms. Weingarten was a history teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.
