More money for schools doesn't end the problems
- Joanne Jacobs, San Francisco Chronicle,
Sunday, September 12, 2004

Broken windows will be replaced. Toilets will flush once more. Air conditioners will cool classrooms. New textbooks will be ordered. Just don't expect higher test scores.

To settle a lawsuit that depicted some of the state's public schools as hellholes, California will spend about $800 million more over several years to repair 2,400 low-performing schools with more than a million students; an extra $139 million will buy new books and materials. Monitors will make sure the rest rooms are free of vermin and stocked with toilet paper.

The settlement, announced last month, affects schools ranked academically in the bottom 30 percent statewide. The Williams suit, filed by the ACLU in 2000 in the name of a San Francisco middle school student, charged that low- income children are denied their constitutional right to an equal education when they're stuck in decaying schools without books, trained teachers and toilet paper in the rest rooms.

No child should have to attend a school in which "the rat ate my homework" is a credible excuse. But the problems of low-performing schools aren't likely to be solved with a couple of extra books per student and a new paint job.

The settlement doesn't guarantee that needy students will be taught by competent or even credentialed teachers. At many schools, it will be like buying nicer chairs for the Titanic.

Hard-luck public schools already get state and federal "categorical" funds to pay for extras. Often the money is spent on faddish programs, technology that nobody knows how to use and textbooks that students can't read.

Many of the Los Angeles Unified schools included in the Williams case already receive extra money as a result of a district-only funding equity lawsuit, the Rodriguez case. That money was supposed to enable high-poverty schools to hire more experienced teachers, but veteran teachers are reluctant to take bang-your-head-on-the-wall jobs. So schools spend the Rodriguez money on extra supplies and special programs.

Without a core of high-quality teachers, poor-quality schools stay poor.

A long-standing education debate asks: Does money matter? After all, spending for K-12 education has almost tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars in the past 40 years. We're not getting a lot more brains for the bucks.

In a 1996 Education Week article, researchers Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy concluded money matters only if it's spent intelligently. They discuss a "natural experiment" that started in 1989, when 16 high-poverty, low- scoring elementary schools in Austin, Texas, were awarded $300,000, above normal school spending each year for five years to settle a desegregation suit. After five years, little had changed at 14 of the 16 schools. Two schools, Zavala and Ortega, improved dramatically in achievement and attendance.

Murnane and Levy asked why. In the schools where more money made no difference, principals hired more teachers to lower class size but didn't change the curriculum or teaching methods. At Zavala and Ortega, smaller classes were just part of a series of changes. Both principals committed to raising student achievement.

First, they admitted to parents that scores were abysmally low. Murnane and Levy describe what happened at Zavala: "At Zavala Elementary that program began in an evening PTA meeting when Alejandro Melton, the newly appointed principal, asked a parent to read aloud the scores of Zavala's students on the statewide tests. Before this recitation, Zavala's teachers and parents had been locked in mutual misunderstanding. The parents had seen report cards with A's and B's and assumed their children were doing well. The Zavala teachers had thought Zavala parents had little interest in education and so saw no sense in raising issues that would meet with parental indifference or worse. In the short run, the evening produced intense parental anger and a few student transfers. In the longer run, it led to strong parental support to raise student achievement."

Zavala began using the district's gifted-and-talented reading and math curriculum for all students, which required teachers to adopt new teaching strategies. All special-needs children were put in the smaller mainstream classes, saving money for other needs. Offering health care at the school helped raise attendance. Finally, the school pushed to get parents involved, including asking parents to sit on hiring and budget committees.

More money made these changes possible. But more money didn't change 14 of the 16 Austin schools.

The problem is that bad schools tend to be demoralized. The principal and teachers have given up; the parents and students expect very little. The broken windows described by Williams' students are perfect examples of the "broken windows" theory: If one window is broken, all the windows will be broken.

People figure that nobody cares. I've seen immaculate schools that operate on spartan budgets: Some are parochial schools, but others are public schools that don't tolerate disorder.

On an after-school visit to a San Jose middle school in a low-income neighborhood, the principal invited me on his rest room tour. Every afternoon, he checked for graffiti and other problems that might have been left by departing students. He made sure the rest rooms were clean when students arrived each morning. He knew it matters.

In its second year as a charter school, Downtown College Prep couldn't afford a full-time custodian. One afternoon, the principal discovered excrement had been smeared on the walls of the boys' rest room. He cleaned it himself. "It's my job to deal with all the crap our students hand out, literally and figuratively," he told teachers.

At a San Jose elementary school, a father saw an obscenity scrawled on the entrance wall. A woman in the office told him the district would send a cleaning crew. The next day, it was still there. The dad, who worked in construction, grabbed cleaning materials from his truck and started to remove the graffiti. A staffer ran out to stop him. It was a union job, she explained. No volunteers allowed. If he didn't leave, she said, he'd be arrested. The father left. For two weeks, his children walked past the obscenity to enter their school. It was a four-letter word starting with "f." "It wasn't even spelled right," the father said.

Joanne Jacobs is writing a book about Downtown College Prep. She blogs on education at JoanneJacobs.com.