Education is Severely Underfunded in Several States

Today’s speech by President Barack Obama’s on education at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia focused on students working harder to improve their grades.[1] And so it should have. It was an address to America’s schoolchildren; not to policymakers. In fact, a big reason the speech was predicted to be controversial was because Obama’s opponents assumed he was going bring up policy issues facing schools today. It’s irrational to think the President would give the same sort of speech to school kids that he’d give to members of Congress or voters; however, there is in fact a serious education policy issue that the President should address: school funding.

Sure, I may be biased to think that education funding should be a priority; after all, I am an intern at the Committee for Education Funding. Still, not every state education funding system is as good as New Jersey’s, which isn’t perfect itself.[2] In fact, a majority of states are cutting education funding one way or another. Recently, 25 states cut funding fro K-12 or early childhood education and 34 states cut funding for higher education.[3] While the billions of federal stimulus dollars pumped into education helps, schools are still facing problems because of deficits at the state level. Unfortunately, this results in schools laying-off teachers, thus increasing class sizes.[4] This doesn’t even begin to tell the horror stories. In Georgia, thousands of teachers are being forced to go on furlough due to the state’s deficit. This means they either have less time to plan lessons or they work without pay for a few days.[5] In California, public schools are so desperate for funds that they are seeking sponsorships![6] As much as the idea of schools using the private sector to get additional funding intrigues me, schools should not be in such a bad situation that they have nothing else to turn to.

The battle for education funding is not only in state legislatures. In fact, struggles to fund schools have found their ways to the court system. Unfortunately, in Missouri this resulted in the court’s rejection the State Board of Education’s request of $905 million needed to fund the Missouri’s schools on state constitutional grounds.[7] However, court cases involving education funding are not always a bad thing; they just tend to take a lot of time. New Jersey’s education financing system took decades to get through the courts but it paid off—and the argument was based off of the state’s constitution. Currently, the state of Washington is undergoing a legal battle to send more funding to poor schools that has been underway for 30 years. The details of the Washington case are eerily similar to New Jersey’s[8], so hopefully it will end well. Still, it remains clear that the United States of America needs more funding for its schools.

Posted by Sandy Ginsburg
CEF Intern
Cornell University Class of 2011

[2] I wrote an extensive paper on New Jersey’s education financing system, which gives the state’s poorest districts as much funding as the richest ones. Feel free to email me (slg228@cornell.ed Read more