April 7th Summary

Notes about school finance, as a result from the introductory debate about Governor Sanford’s refusal to accept the state’s share of the federal stimulus unless he could use the money to help pay down state debt:

• Where do the states get their revenue? The answer is through property (both on the home and auto), sales, excise, gasoline, and income tax.
• Different states have various forms of tax collection. (FYI: Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Alaska, Nevada, Wyoming, and Washington state all do not collect a state income tax.)
• Until 2006, public education in South Carolina was financed through property tax. School operations often made up a majority of the property tax collected.
• High property values often lead to lower property taxes = more money for schools, Low property values can either lead to lower property taxes = less money for schools or to higher property taxes = more money for schools. This contributes to severe disparities in funding between schools in close proximity to one another (the difference between Horry and Dillon counties, for example).
• While using sales tax to fund public education can alleviate these disparities, it is not without drawbacks. One major problem with using the sales tax to fund schools is that in tough economic times, like the current one, people will spend less money which leads towards the state receiving less revenue to spread throughout the state.
• The South Carolina Education Lottery and bonds are non-tax revenue sources for public education.
• Usually, either the state or a local government (like York County or the city of Rock Hill) will use public bonds to finance public projects like schools, parks, and more.
• LIFE and the HOPE scholarships for undergraduate students and technical education are both covered under the South Carolina Education Lottery. Two arguments against the lottery are that it can lead to a gambling addiction or those who purchase the lottery tickets are poor and are less likely to go to college.
• San Antonio v. Rodriquez (1973) argued that inequalities in education often lead to violation of fourteenth amendment rights for students. Rodriquez ends up losing since there is no mention about education in the United States constitution.
• Abbeville et al. v. South Carolina (2005) arose from a dispute about equity v. adequacy in nine school districts along the Interstate 95 corridor.

Some notes about the history of American education:

• What began as a private academy for black students led to what are now historically black colleges. The Morrill Land Grant Act provided federal lands that were sold to the states to establish agricultural schools around the country, like Penn State, Clemson, North Carolina A&T, Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech to name a few.
• No Child Left Behind represents possibly the greatest federal involvement in education in history.

Some notes about Tyack and Cuban:

• The general sense since the 1970s is that public schools are in a perpetual state of crisis. Contributing to this are the increase in focus on the individual rather than the community and the shift in need from manual labor skills to technical-based work.
• More administrations often made political decisions about public education that were political rather than beneficial to the students.
• Administrative Progressives - Progress - Science / Factories. Adminstrative Progressives consisted of Ph.D. education scholars who felt that proper management of schools made better schools. Much of what is discussed as the “grammar of schooling” can be traced back to these administrative progressives.
• Students as democratically productive citizens were the result of progressive education.
• Chapter 2 dealt with the cyclical nature of educational reform. Is educational reform cyclical? Our international competition with Germany in the 1890’s, the Soviets in the 1950’s, the Japanese in the 1980’s, and now the Chinese and Indians is indicative of the “everything old is new again” mentality of cyclical progress. Questioning the purpose of high schools also provides insight about educational reform being cyclical. The two poles in this debate are high school’s role as academic (college prep) and vocational (technical/work force prep).
• Policy talk often goes back and forth, which makes it cyclical while the institutions end up being the ones affected by it. Ideas filter down and are adapted by institutions a little at a time (“tinkering”). The primary counter-example to this is desegregation, in which policy talk combined with an outside force (government) and worked to make fast, dramatic changes.
• Schools are often subject to change as a result of policy being cyclical.

For next class: Bring two questions regarding Tyack and Cuban to stimulate discussion about the readings.

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by: Brian Kingbird and Brian Martin