DeVos, in odd twist, copies Brown’s school-funding plan
President Trump’s paradoxically pious education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has begun channeling California Gov. Jerry Brown, the former seminarian. She’s nudging local educators to boost funding for poor students and widen school options, oddly leaning left politically.
DeVos’ missionary zeal doesn’t quite match Brown’s, who has shifted $41 billion to California school districts over the past four years, focused on pupils hampered by poverty or limited English under his progressive reform.
Yet, ironically, the Trump administration aims to copy Brown’s radical change in how states fund schools: Fill the backpacks of poor children with shiny and portable doubloons, then nudge their parents to shop in a market of diverse schools. Policy innovators coast to coast call it “weighted-pupil funding.”
Equity advocates battled mightily over the past half century to equalize school spending per pupil across rich and poor communities, upending state finance schemes built on grossly unequal property values and tax revenues. DeVos now embraces Brown’s further step of allocating more for each impoverished student who must leap higher to clear state achievement standards.
Brown has pulled off the largest reallocation of public resources ever attempted by a state since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. School spending has jumped 29 percent in Los Angeles, for example, in recent years, while dollars going to affluent communities remain largely unchanged.
The rub is that Brown’s bonanza often fails to reach poor kids, according to a flurry of successful lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The governor’s program operates like a dump truck, rather than a backpack. Fresh dollops of dollars are dropped on local school boards, then Brown fails to ask which schools and students truly benefit.
Teachers unions warmly embrace Brown’s blank check for school boards, putting billions of new dollars on the bargaining table, allowing higher salaries
and fending off efforts to slow soaring pension costs — rather than reaching classrooms.
“The theory behind Brown’s program is a good one; it’s equity based,” said Sylvia Torres-Guillen, ACLU director of education equity. “But we’re seeing a shell game being played, where the money is not reaching highneeds students.” She moved against one school board after it purchased a bullet-tracking gizmo that police claimed would cut gang violence.
The DeVos plan will combat Brown’s see-no-evil tack, requiring educators to send dollars directly to poor achievers. “It pushes Gov. Brown’s reform down to the school level, and you have to prove the money is reaching the kids,” said Lisa Snell at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian lobby in Los Angeles that eagerly supports the DeVos initiative.
Discernible gains in learning are emerging — at least rising math scores in high schools — in California districts enjoying the biggest cash infusions, economists Rucker Johnson and Sean Tanner reported this month. My own team finds steeper learning curves in L.A. schools drawing Brown’s progressively weighted dollars, powered by smaller classes, lighter teaching loads and access to college-prep courses.
But stubborn achievement gaps between poor and better-off students have yet to budge, nearing the fifth year of Brown’s ambitious effort. Voters should ask the candidates running to replace him how they will address this issue.
Critics worry that DeVos simply wants to spread taxpayer dollars to charter and religious schools, animated by her own Christian fervor. She’s also beset by policy whiplash: Days after announcing her bold reform, the White House proposed slashing $3.6 billion in education spending.
Still, DeVos’ effort to recast school funding has won bipartisan support in Congress ever since Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a moderate, endorsed the idea. It blends that Democratic drive to lift poor children with Republican yearning for neighborhood control of schools.
Several school districts already weight funding toward poor kids, including Long Beach and San Francisco. But bureaucrats and union leaders often undercut these experiments, quietly subverting the power of school principals to control their own budgets and hire strong teachers. Labor chiefs have endorsed site-led public schools in Boston and L.A. — mimicking charter schools — where principals exercise control and teachers remain union members.
Their eerily similar fix differs when it comes to DeVos’ faith in market magic, versus Brown’s worship of union interests. Neither camp talks of whether principals actually deploy their discretionary riches to select inspiring teachers or inventively engage their students. At least the DeVos plan requires careful study of whether struggling pupils feel the benefits of new dollars, and through what changes, inside schools.
“It’s a positive step,” Torres-Guillen says. “But if we want true success for our students, we can’t afford just baby steps.”