Bruce Baker in Connecticut

Professor Bruce Baker, on Twitter as SchlFinance101, speaking today at Trinity College in Hartford with a focus on Connecticut school finance

...who notes that he has a masters in ed psychology from UConn
"money translates primarily to human resources"
"running a good school takes good people and enough of them...and you've got to pay well...helping kids meet goals"
"it's a human resource-intensive process, for which we have not found" a substitution
even in charter schools, it's about smaller classes, longer days
private schools: the Harkness table, 12 around an oak table; spend double per pupil compared to public schools in their same area
during bad times, school spending stagnates or even declines, but it does not rebound (at least in recent cycles) during good cycles

Core principles (agreed to by most national reports, save EdWeek, where their "Quality Counts" report relates to nothing else):

• proper funding is a necessary condition for educational success: competitive educational outcomes require adequate resources, and improving educational outcomes requires additional resources. Serving higher needs populations requires greater amounts of resources. 
• Cost of a given level of quality varies by context: equal opportunity requires progressive distribution of resources, targeted at students and schools that need them most. "It costs more to achieve more."
• adequacy and fairness are "largely the result of legislative choices." Good school finance policy can improve student outcomes. "It's very much if the states choose to spend on education or not." Bad policy can hinder outcomes. Twist when there is municipal fiscal dependance; some cities not putting forth the fiscal effort that they could. States like Colorado and Arizona "have dropped their schools under the bus."

equal dollar efforts

BUT adjust for "real resources" over geographic area (rural sparsity, higher cost of salaries)

equal opportunity to achieve a given outcome level (whatever it is); consider that children under certain circumstances require more resources than do others to achieve common outcomes

equal opportunity to acheive adequate outcomes: setting a bar

"minimum adequacy of real resources"

providing special education services, ELL support providing the resources to provide equal opportunity

"ought to be setting up a system that disrupts the relationship, at least probablistically, between where you come from" and your educational outcomes

"we ought to be able to provide the additional services to let your kid achieve as well as any other kid down the line"

transiency, the language issues

Money matters myths (read the book!) 

turns out there were detrimental effects on longer term outcomes during the recession

"have more data available" and can really tease out changes over time

schoolfinancedata.org

nominal and adjusted per pupil spending; the "adjusted" is for LABOR costs, which is the largest cost for school districts (and the most meaningful adjustment)

Most meaningful adjustment is for labor costs, and on that, we are where we were, just about, in 1993. But how much more are we expecting schools to do? pic.twitter.com/Wle1Y1MpKU

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) July 10, 2019

We aren't really any different than where we were in 1993

wages as compared to college-educated nonteacher wages; may make up some ground during recessions, but don't retain that

That’s this chart pic.twitter.com/WggU45PfFC

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) July 10, 2019

high average spending states (like CT) but compared...the average may be doing fine, "but this case is about the rest of them" as a judge in Kansas once said

tracking funding against census poverty; the gaps are huge (and don't ever say we're "shoveling money" into these communities)

statisically it has been borne out: majority Black has slightly greater, while Latinx second cities is the strongest predictor of being one of the "screwed" cities
children per housing units compared to per pupil funding

in CT, went from progressive spending on schools to regressive spending
CT has a regressive overall tax system; "there's room to tax" on the higher end of these rolls
"Massachusetts and Connecticut are much more regressive" than states like New Jersey

Here are some longer term "effort" trends for NJ and CT: pic.twitter.com/NGA56RxCt3

— Bruce Baker (@SchlFinance101) July 9, 2019

Colorado and Arizona "race to the bottom"

need a funding formula that is tied about adequacy goals with "more aggressive need based targeting"
"we changed the outcome goals"
"higher outcomes cost more to achieve"

averages always conceal the disparities, and we have a concern ourselves with the disparities
ideally, looking at those disparities at the level of the student
"you shouldn't be only getting to the lower level because of where you came from"

salaries, infrastructure, public two year and four year colleges
how to better understand the full cost of providing community and four year colleges
"can we get it to 14?"
cites Sara Goldrick-Rab's "Paying the Price"

Milliken problem (in that the boundaries of school districts are something SCOTUS has found the federal government not able to push beyond for equity or desegregation
increased number of seccessions to reenforce segregation; edbuild.org tracking the resegregation efforts across the country

slides and video going up on Center for Hartford Engagement and Research at Trinity College