A common topic of news and commentary reporting on public education focuses on how schools are funded. The latest news item in Ohio is the fact that public schools could lose funding due to a new requirement to report their enrollment again in February to be averaged with the count already required for October. School districts claim this second count can irrevocably harm school districts that have enrollment drops between October and February, thereby implying that academic quality will decrease as a result.
This implication, of course, assumes that relative funding determines the relative quality of academics. While it is true that some minimum amount of funding is necessary to ensure quality education, there is not a specific corollary between increased funding and academic performance. In fact, many of the highest funded school districts in Ohio are also the worst off academically. Further, at least in Ohio, public schools have more funding now than ever before. This reality implies that the problem with poor academic quality lies not with funding, but with something else.
Of course, identifying that something else is a complex task, however it should be possible to identify what is not the problem, and if funding is not the problem, then eliminate funding as one of the items of concern when looking at academic quality. The process by which funding can be eliminated as a likely cause of poor academic quality is really simple math. The amount of money actually needed to operate a school district- including the facility, faculty, staff, materials, technology, electricity, and other real concerns- is easily calculable and specifically finite. Once that amount of money is determined, the simple equation is whether the amount required is equal to the amount collected. School districts that do not have enough money obviously affect academic quality. School districts that have enough or more than enough can eliminate funding as a factor.
Once eliminated, the real issues affecting academic quality come to light. Academic quality is really an issue of teachers ready and able to teach, students ready and able to learn, and an administration ready and able to support that task. These issues are ones that have less to do with money and more to do with people and the community that supports the school. These issues are determined by parents who are involved in that school, citizens who vote responsibly for school boards and hold them accountable, school boards that scrutinize the performance of staff and faculty alike, and business and civic leaders who make supporting schools one of their priorities.
In other words, the money is not the problem, the people are, and no amount of money can possibly overcome the failure created when people do not fulfill the requirements cited by the issues previously mentioned. As long as those issues continue to remain unresolved, school districts will continue to provide substandard academics regardless of how much money that district has. Of course, such issues are far harder to resolve than resolving funding issues, but the fact remains that failure to resolve them results in failure to resolve academic failure.
DLH
