Expertise is ideology
I got mad reading Forbes the other day. Marguerite Roza published an article taking several school districts to task for lacking "expertise in finance" as budgets crunch in the wake of the pandemic's economic crisis. What made me mad was six out of the seven cases she examines--in a conveniently cursory manner--have to do with pay and benefits for teachers. The clear thesis of the article is that teacher unions are greedy and school board members that approve budgets in line with union demands lack financial 'expertise'.
The ideology is deep here. Knowledge is never neutral. There's no such thing as pure, objective, and scientific expertise that isn't at least inflected with partisan tendencies. Technical know-how is always socio-technical, but it can be a powerful maneuver to mask one's ideological position as a simple matter of not-knowing naturally true stuff. This kind of "you're dumb so listen to me" move is very common in finance: a lot of people (me included) tend to think of themselves as bad at math, the language used in finance makes our eyes glaze over, and it's intimidating to confront someone with academic bona fides and fancy-sounding titles when they make these sorts of claims.
Roza's article is a case in point. Roza has a material interest in saying school board members need 'training': she directs a soft money center at Georgetown University that provides training in education finance for educational leaders and policymakers. Tuition for the certificate program is several thousand dollars.
I'm used to this kind of stuff in school finance, but this article requires a response. I just can't let it slide. When it comes to teachers' unions winning demands in terms of their salaries and benefits--the working conditions that create their students' learning conditions--school board members' approach to budgeting is key. If you have school board members whose ideology tells them to cut salaries and benefits, not to give into unions in principle, and generally be austerity-mavens then unions will have a hard fight. It's obviously bad and wrong to treat teachers so terribly, but this austerity-brain also myopically limits one's view to the complex terrain of financial pressures on school districts and thus limits educational leaders' sense of possibility when it comes to solving budget crises.
There's so much detail that Roza's myopic focus on expertise forecloses, ugh! Let's take a look at just two of the districts she mentions and you'll see there's a bit more going on in school finance than just the greedy teachers' unions.
Fasting for interest rates
Let's look at West Contra Costa Unified School District in California first because it's a great example of the massive subtext Roza leaves out. It's extremely disingenuous to talk about WCCUSD without talking about the district's long history of struggle. In the late 80s, the district had bad budget issues due to declining enrollments. When people move out of your district--which can happen for a variety of reasons, few of which schools can control--your schools lose money since funding relies on student numbers. In 1991, West Contra Costa went bankrupt.
The bankruptcy changed everything, including the district's ability to pay back a $5m loan from IBM. The company had given the schools a ton of (outdated!) computers with the expectation that they'd be paid back for them. In a fascinating direct struggle between a school district and a major corporation, the district asked IBM to forgive this loan in the early 2000s. You'd think that a big company would help out a struggling school district. At the time, IBM made $5 million every five hours. But no, they wanted their money--it's the principle of the thing, they said. The district was able to get a few concessions on time, amount, and interest rate, but the company wouldn't forgive the loan.
The district's budget issues had other big effects. Richmond Unified was the first school district to be put in a state receivership, which means having the state assume responsibility for its finance. It's a relatively common practice now (Philly was under receivership for almost 20 years, Harrisburg is now). Begun in 1991, part of the receivership California provided a loan to the district for $28.5m to fund its budgets. The interest rate was a high 5.7%.
By 2004, the district still had $16.5m to go on this high-interest loan from the state. It couldn't keep up its buildings, ended it sports programs, and couldn't open many of its schools. At the same time, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had cut state funding for schools in half from $4 billion to $2 billion in the budget allocation for Proposition 98. The pressure of the loan on the district's school budget combined with the cut in state aid was the last straw. That's when parents, teachers, and organizers said enough is enough. They marched to the capitol from their town. Schwarzennegger refused to meet with them. So a smaller core group decided to gather in a public space and go on a hunger strike that would last 26 days.
And they won. Long-time farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta and state legislator Jackie Goldberg worked in solidarity with the movement, getting 42 signatures from elected officials demanding the governor meet with them and act on their demands. Goldberg and others wrote a piece of legislation called the Daucher Bill, which reduced interest rates for the school district's loans from 5.7% to 1.7%. It also said that any indebted district would not have to make loan payments until changes to Prop 98 came through. Schwarzenegger met with the fasters as well.
The district didn't pay off the loan until 2012. Wendy Gonzalez was a first year elementary school teacher who marched and fasted with the group. Interviewed in 2012, when the district paid this debt off, she said it was "kind of a relief." I can imagine it was bittersweet. So much effort for a change in the interest rate, when the loan itself and the underlying system of property taxation that created its necessity remained. So yes, even now, the district has significant budgetary issues. As recently as this year, it was facing possible insolvency. But is that because the people running the district aren't 'experts' trained in the right kind of neoliberal thought? Not at all.
Birth rates and charters
Roza starts her piece with a focus on Aurora, Colorado, but all you have to do is read the links Roza includes in her sketch of the situation there to find out that there's significant uncertainty when it comes to student enrollments there over the next year, created by the general instability of the pandemic's impact on the community. The board members who made the apparently sinful decision to not fire twenty employees make two key arguments in their explaining their vote not to lay them off: (1) it's unkind to fire the workers, particularly when (2) the district doesn't know whether they'll be needed. It isn't a matter of economic expertise to see that it's mean and stupid to let workers go, particularly if you're not sure if you'll need them.
Also: this isn't a new problem. There's been a noticeable decline in new students since 2016 in Aurora. A recent bond statement links the declining enrollments with declining birth rates, resulting in fewer kindergarten students and cascading declines over time. If Roza thinks school board members 'learning' about 'school finance' will help solve the declining birth rates in the Aurora region, then sure maybe they should get some more 'training'. The Center Square reports that birth rate is a national problem and Colorado's is acute.
In the continuation of a longer-term trend stretching back over a decade, the number of births in the U.S. fell by 4% in 2020, pushing the birth rate to its lowest point on record. Experts attribute falling birth rates to the increase in the average age of mothers, as people have been marrying and having children later in life. A growing body of evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may have deterred many would-be parents from starting families...here were 10.5 births for every 1,000 people in the state between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021 compared to 10.8 per 1,000 nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Population and Housing Unit Estimates Program. Colorado's birth rate ranks as the 19th lowest among states.
I wonder what may have deterred many would-be parents from starting families, particularly in a district that's majority BIPOC? Could it be debt, incarceration, unemployment, historical wealth gaps...racial capitalism itself? This is a problem most places face and school boards have tough choices to make as their enrollments decline. Should Aurora lay off 20 workers when they might need the labor? If they can help it, they shouldn't. If the union representing those workers is advocating for them, that shouldn't be discounted in principle or in practice. The question is not one of expertise but rather values and ideology. Oh, and another thing. Not only are traditional district schools facing declining enrollments but we can see a concomitant increase in charter school enrollment during the same period. That's a 30% shift. The state formula for per pupil revenue doesn't account for the number of charter schools either. It looks like the district spent $627 million in 2020, and 10% of that went to charter schools: $62 million. Something to think about maybe?
C'mon
Roza gives each of these districts about 50 words each in making her point about expertise and school finance. Perhaps she wanted to include more fine-grained context in each case, but her editors cut that down. Whoever's responsible, I think it's flat out wrong to bracket every single other feature of these districts' contexts in order to do advertising for your expensive school finance training workshop. I haven't had the time to look at the other districts she brings up--Ysleta Independent School District, Green Bay, Wisconsin, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Ontario-Montclair--but I'm going to speculate that there are features of these districts' political and economic situations that warrant further mention then just whether the school district leaders are properly antagonistic to unions. C'mon!