Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_5 rev1 page v contents Introduction xiii Eric A. Hanushek 1. Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York: The March of Folly 1 Sol Stern 2. The Legal Backdrop to Adequacy 33 Alfred A. Lindseth 3. High-Poverty, High-Performance Schools, Districts, and States 79 Herbert J. Walberg 4. High-Spending, Low-Performing School Districts 103 Williamson M. Evers and Paul Clopton 5. Thorough and Efficient Private and Public Schools 195 Paul E. Peterson 6. How Can Anyone Say What’s Adequate If Nobody Knows How Money Is Spent Now? 235 Marguerite Roza and Paul T. Hill 7. Science Violated: Spending Projections and the “Costing Out” of an Adequate Education 257 Eric A. Hanushek 8. Adequacy beyond Dollars: The Productive Use of School Time 313 E. D. Hirsch Jr. 9. Funding for Performance 329 A Policy Statement of the Koret Task Force Index 357 Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_7 rev1 page vii contributors Members of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institu- tion, is an elected trustee of the Santa Clara County (California) Board of Education. He served in Iraq as a senior adviser on education to Ambassador Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provi- sional Authority in 2003. Evers is a member of the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and was a member of the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board in 2001–2002 and a member of the Mathematics and Science Sci- entific Review Panel at the U.S. Department of Education’s In- stitute of Education Sciences in 2005–2006. He serves on panels that write mathematics and history questions for California’s statewide testing system and was a commissioner on the Cali- fornia State Academic Standards Commission. He is co-editor of and contributor to School Accountability, a 2002 publication by Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_8 rev1 page viii viii Contributors the Koret Task Force; co-editor of School Reform: The Critical Issues; and editor of and contributor to What’s Gone Wrong in America’s Classrooms. Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences. His works on education policy include Improving America’s Schools: The Role of Incentives, Making Schools Work: Improving Perfor- mance and Controlling Costs, and Educational Performance of the Poor. His current research involves understanding the role of teachers, programs, and funding in determining student achievement. Previously, he served as deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office. He was awarded the Thomas B. Fordham prize for Distinguished Scholarship in 2004. Paul T. Hill, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Insti- tution, is a research professor in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs and director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. The center develops and helps communities adopt alternative governance systems for public K–12 education. His most recent publication is Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education. He edited Choice with Equity, an assessment by the Koret Task Force, and he contributed a chapter to Private Vouchers, a groundbreaking study edited by task force member Terry Moe. E. D. Hirsch Jr., a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on education issues, including The Knowledge Deficit, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them and a series beginning with What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know that continues through each grade, concluding with What Your Sixth Grader Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_9 rev1 page ix Contributors ix Needs to Know. He is the founder and chairman of the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation. Paul E. Peterson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. He has been appointed to a Department of Education independent review panel to advise in evaluating the Title I pro- gram and, in 2003, was awarded the Thomas B. Fordham Foun- dation prize for Distinguished Scholarship. Peterson is the editor in chief of Education Next and author or editor of many books on U.S. education, including Choice and Competition in Ameri- can Education, No Child Left Behind?, The Politics and Practice of School Accountability (co-edited with Martin R. West), The Future of School Choice, Our Schools and Our Future ...Are We Still at Risk?, The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools, and Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter. Herbert J. Walberg, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoo- ver Institution, is research professor emeritus of education and psychology and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has edited more than sixty books and written about 350 articles on educational productivity and human accomplish- ment. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences and is one of ten U.S. members of the International Academy of Education. A fellow of several scholarly associations, he is member of six education boards and chairs two. He is co-author of Education and Capi- talism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools and co-editor of School Account- ability, a 2002 publication by the Koret Task Force. Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_10 rev1 page x x Contributors Additional Contributors Paul Clopton is a research statistician with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego, a co-author of more than a hundred medical research articles, and an associate editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. He is a co-foun- der of Mathematically Correct, a mathematics-education advo- cacy group. He serves on the review panel for California’s state- wide mathematics tests and is a reviewer of professional development programs for the state. Clopton previously served on the committee that drafted California’s instructional frame- work for mathematics, the panel that recommended mathemat- ics textbooks for statewide adoption, and the commission that oversees teacher credentialing for California. Alfred A. Lindseth is a senior partner with the Atlanta/Wash- ington, D.C., law firm of Sutherland, Asbill, and Brennan LLP, where he has practiced education law for more than thirty years. During his career, he has represented many states and school districts at both the trial and appellate level in complex and often controversial school finance, adequacy, and desegregation cases, including cases for the states of New York, Florida, Min- nesota, Missouri, California, Arizona, Michigan, Connecticut, and North Dakota and for major urban school districts in the Atlanta, St. Louis, Knoxville, Seattle, Savannah, Charleston, and Washington, D.C., areas. His experience includes, for example, representing the State of New York in a seven-month trial chal- lenging the adequacy of the New York City public schools and representing the State of Missouri in bringing to a close the St. Louis and Kansas City desegregation cases. Marguerite Roza is a research assistant professor in the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Her research Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_11 rev1 page xi Contributors xi focuses on quantitative policy analysis, particularly education fi- nance. Her recent research has investigated the spending pat- terns among schools in urban districts and the relation of these patterns to state and federal education spending. Her work has appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, the 2004 Brookings Book on Ed- ucation Policy, the Peabody Journal of Education, and NCES’s Developments in Education Finance. Sol Stern is a contributing editor to City Journal and a Man- hattan Institute senior fellow. He writes on education reform and is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. Aside from his work in City Jour- nal, his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Commentary, Barron’s, the New Re- public, the New York Post, the Daily News, Newsday, the Village Voice, New York, Sports Illustrated, and the New Statesman. Stern previously served as Director of Issues, Press Secretary, and Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the City Council Pres- ident of New York and as executive director of the New York State Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform. Hoover Press : Hanushek/Courting Failure hhancf fm Mp_13 rev1 page xiii introduction Good Intentions Captured: School Funding Adequacy and the Courts Eric A. Hanushek current u.s. school policy discussions are deeply rooted in concerns about student performance, and one might easily con- clude from media accounts that this is a new phenomenon. But the reality is that the discussions of student performance are not new. They directly follow a half century of almost continual con- cern about schools—a concern running from the embarrassment of segregated schools and rooted in the national wake-up call following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. Perhaps the prime lesson of this lengthy period of angst about our schools has been how impervious student achievement has been to con- certed efforts to change it. In current national debates, federal legislation on accounta- bility—No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001—has reinforced and extended the movement of individual states to set academic standards for students and to enforce the achievement of these.