I recently wrote about how ‘per-student cost’ is misused in discussions about school funding. But it does have a place in decisions about school funding, if used properly.
Imagine that you go to a car dealer, and he shows you a car, with the features that he thinks you need, at a price that he thinks you should pay. And imagine further that he doesn’t allow you to leave the lot without buying the car.
That’s pretty much how school funding works now, right?
In reality, you say: This is what I can put down, and this is how much I can spend each month, so show me what I can get for that.
And that’s how school funding should work — by using per-student spending as a prescriptive input, rather than as a descriptive output. Which is to say, the voters of a school district ought to be able to set some limits on what they’re willing to spend on a typical student, and require the district to get by on that:
Look, $8000 is more than enough to educate a student, if you focus on what’s important. Multiply that by the number of students in the district, and that’s your budget. If you think it’s too little, resign and let someone else handle it.
Apart from the fact that it guarantees a steep and immediate drop in property taxes for any school district that adopts it, without any loss in quality of education¹, the beauty of this approach is that it allows taxpayers to focus on what is pretty much the only number about which most of them will have any intuition.
It puts taxpayers in control, which is where they should be. They get to say what they’re willing to pay, rather than being handed a bill and being told to pay it under threat of having their homes taken from them.
Does this seem unreasonable? Unworkable? If so, consider that this is exactly how charter schools operate. The state tells them how much they’ll get for each student, and they figure out how to make do with that amount. That requires actual budgeting, as opposed to what school districts do now, which is more like composing ransom notes.
The eminent educational philosopher Tyler Durden noted that the key to bringing educational costs under control without sacrificing quality is developing ‘the ability to let what does not matter truly slide’. This can never happen as long as schools are allowed to let their desires limit their resources, instead of the other way around.
¹ Since Claremont, the average per-student cost in NH has risen by more than $10,000 per student, adjusted for inflation. Every district is now spending more than even the richest districts were spending before. But student achievement hasn’t improved at all. Not even a little. We used to get exactly the same results for $5000 that we now get for $15,000. So the simplest way for voters to choose a per-student cost is to look at what it was in 1995, and tie that to the Consumer Price Index.
