The Abbott Problem
Abbott Elementary is a great show. It's great for a number of reasons--it's hilarious, a solid portrait of urban education, it centers Philadelphia, it gives money to actual schools--but there's something I've been thinking about beyond these qualities. The show, particularly its pilot, illustrates something really deep about school finance injustice. It's a philosophical problem I've encountered in both thinking and organizing around money and schools. If you don't know the show, let me set the scene.
The main character Janine is a relatively new teacher of very young students (I think first grade). One of her students has an accident and pees on the class carpet. As all primary school teachers know, carpets are important. They're a collective meeting space and a place of comfort, sharing, and community. So the loss of the rug is a big loss. In a poignant vignette, we see one of Janine's students sleeping on the cold floor of the classroom during lunch. He's got a difficult situation at home, so he gets the sleep he needs in school, usually on the carpet. Now he has to lay his head on the tiles.
Janine goes on a quest to get a new carpet. The problem, as always, is how to pay for it. Earlier in the episode the group of teachers featured in the show are complaining about money. It's one of the first things they talk about: how the district can't afford this or that. There's a brief mention of work being done on a new football stadium which, when juxtaposed with the teachers' and students' needs in the school, is clearly absurd.
Back to Janine's project. Of course there's not enough money in the budget for a new carpet, nor are there ready replacements available. A veteran teacher tells her to be resourceful and figure it out herself (buy a new one with her own money, eg) because, in her experience, leaders in the district can rarely deliver things like this. With well-meaning and plucky naiveté, Janine doesn't give up. She goes to the principal, Ava, who may be one of my favorites on the show. We find out that Ava got the principal job because she caught the superintendent cheating on his wife and blackmailed him to hire her. She doesn't have experience in education and is neither sympathetic nor competent. Her character's humor comes from the fact that she's in charge of this school and is the last person who should be.
Ava obviously rebuffs Janine's request for a new rug. Janine decides to write a formal complaint to the District Office about Ava. Then, as the day goes on, Ava makes an announcement over the loudspeaker that she's excited to show the entire school something new. She mentions that she applied for an emergency grant to the District after Janine's complaint and got $3,000 to spend using her discretion, and she's spent the money on her new exciting thing. Janine's eyes brighten--maybe there will be money for a new carpet!
As teachers and students file out to the entrance of the school at Ava's direction, Janine's hopes are dashed. Ava has spent all the money on a huge, gaudy sign with her picture on it to hang above the school's front doors. Dispirited, the episode ends with one of the long-time teachers securing new rugs from a friend working construction on the new stadium project. The friend pilfered some extra rugs from the work site and delivers them to the school in an unmarked truck, looking over his shoulder as he does so. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this story since I first saw it.
The accountability imperative
This narrative is a perfect illustration of what I've come to think of as the tension between two imperatives in education finance: accountability and revenue. By accountability, I mean the imperative that education leaders should be held accountable for their decisions. They should be responsible, transparent, efficient, equitable, and competent when it comes to their work. This applies particularly to their decisions about allocating funds. One common iteration of this imperative is that school districts should be accountable to the taxpayers who fund them. A more recent iteration comes from turn towards testing and accountability in the 1980s in the wake of the Nation at Risk report, often seen as a conservative watershed moment. In this sense, schools should be accountable for what they teach students. They should thus be assessed with tests frequently to see if students are improving.
The accountability imperative emerges from an emphasis on the power of individual adult decisions at school. The quality of a school system, it presumes, chiefly relies on those adults making good decisions when it comes to curriculum, pedagogy, and budgeting. The predominant version of this imperative comes from moderate and rightwing ideological positions. This focus on individual decisions at the school and district level has an inherent distrust in 'government', specifically the provision of public goods through taxation of private property. But there's a leftwing version of the accountability imperative too: we want educational leaders to fund our schools justly, treat students and teachers and parents justly, and be transparent in communication.
The rightwing accountability imperative, as I mentioned, comes with a distrust of public spending. One pillar of the accountability imperative is the idea of the money myth. The idea follows naturally from the accountability imperative: the problem with schools isn't money. In fact, we spend too much money on schools. The way to make schools better is not to provide more money for them but rather hire and fire the right people. Typically, the 'right people' come from capitalist business and finance and push for market solutions. This tendency, which spans the Democratic and Republican parties, has set up a strong redoubt in educational apparatuses, starting think-tanks, policy groups, research institutions, and distribution venues posing as journalism for their ideas (like with vouchers, eg). Justified by research done by the economist Eric Hanushek in the early 1990s, this pillar of the accountability imperative says schools can and should do more with less.
The revenue imperative
But Hanushek's research has been widely disproven over the last decade. A group of educational economists, most recently C. Kirabo Jackson and Claire Mackevicius, have shown that his claims don't hold up. They and other researchers like Bruce Baker provide a dialectical response to the money myth (the money myth is a myth!), and thus the entire accountability imperative. Theirs is another imperative: revenue.
Actually, says the revenue imperative, schools need money to do well. Schools that have money are good schools. Education is a human resource intensive process and to do it well you have to spend. Much of what looks like "increased educational spending" in the last generation is actually due to huge improvements to special education, which is even more resource intensive.
Schools can't do more with less. They do less with less. Furthermore, calling for accountability without properly funding the school system is absurd and wrong. To withhold resources from institutions and then blame their leaders for poor decision-making is blaming the victim of a larger force over which they have no control. To attribute failure to school systems without providing the resources for success is to set them up to fail.
Thus the revenue imperative says fund the schools. Provide more resources. Give schools more money, particularly those schools serving populations who need more. The revenue imperative is socio-centric. Rather than emphasizing the good or bad decisions of individuals in charge of education, it focuses on the structural policies in place to give these individuals what they need to do their jobs well. This imperative has a competing redoubt in the educational apparatus, advanced by entities like Rethinking Schools, Network for Public Education, Economic Policy Institute, Shanker Institute and others.
The Abbott problem
The pilot episode of Abbott Elementary is a perfect example of the tension between the two imperatives of revenue and accountability. The elementary school needs money. Specifically, Janine's classroom needs a new rug. The district should be able to pay for that new rug but resources are notoriously scarce. There's evidence everywhere in Philadelphia of the revenue injustice committed against the city's schools, chief among them the $4.5 billion of deferred maintenance on our school buildings. We need revenue.
On the other hand, there are leaders out there like Ava. They make decisions that impact the allocation of funds. They spend the money and they're not entirely trustworthy. There must be accountability for school leaders in making these decisions. We have to be able to trust that they won't go and spend an emergency grant on a terrible new sign that does nothing for the school except serve their own misguided interests.
This is what I'm calling the Abbott problem: schools need revenue and that revenue needs to be spent well. The insight shouldn't sound new or groundbreaking. It's actually pretty obvious. But politically, it actually isn't obvious that we need both. The rightwing has set up camp on the accountability side and the leftwing has largely set up on the revenue side. How should socialists navigate this Scylla and Charybdis of school finance?
The first step is thinking about them together rather than separately, recognizing that both revenue and accountability are necessary for a good school system but are somewhat at odds. They're definitely at odds politically (rightwingers tend to call for accountability while leftwingers err on the side of revenue) but I think they might be at odds policy-wise to some degree. If you provide resources, to what extent can you guarantee that they'll be spent well? If you hold institutions accountable, how do you know if you're putting too much emphasis on preventing waste, fraud, and abuse than the resources you're providing for success? These are questions I want to look at more, like: do well-resourced school districts have more or less corruption than poor districts?
The Abbott problem is a kind of corruption and bureaucracy problem. How can we avoid corruption in bureaucracies? But corruption and bureaucracy broach much larger political, economic, and social problems. How can you maintain just institutions--ones that have enough resources to accomplish their task, good people to do that work, and that in doing so achieve justice--that serve large numbers of people?
At the beginning of this post I called the Abbott problem philosophical. By that I mean that it's not necessarily resolvable through empirical research. It's a knot you have to untangle with arguments and concepts. It's the kind of problem that generates hypotheses rather than verifies them. One thing philosophy can help with here is setting out the parts of problems and narrowing down the question. I think the Abbott problem evokes profound themes of policy, politics, government, freedom, and economics. Questions include:
How can you make sure something like an education system is good? What does 'good' even mean there? What kind of arrangements are best for getting that result: increased privatization, markets, business-oriented thinking; social-democratic structures like elected school boards, state governments, and federal governments; or various forms of socialism (and what would those forms look like here and how)? How should we understand generosity and austerity in educational policy? When and how much and whom should be taxed for education in a capitalist economy? To what degree can we hold individuals responsible for the decisions they make given the social context in which they make them?
I think socialists have very compelling answers to these questions, but we should articulate them clearly! This newsletter is partly a response to this problem, particularly when it comes to money, and a lot of what I have written and will write is an attempt to untangle what this entails.