Current Events
Hancock v. Driscoll Education Equity Case in Massachusetts: More Money Will Not Bring Reform
"If we become distracted by another huge monetary fix, our energies will be entirely absorbed by questions of how to finance it, how to distribute it, and so on, pushing aside the central issues of accountability, leadership, flexibility, and intervention that are so critical to fulfilling the promise of education reform". Robert Costrell
CommonWealth's fall issue has a symposium on the equitable funding of education in Massachusetts. Similar in focus to the Campaign For Fiscal Equity in New York City, this lawsuit is based upon the premise that low performing schools must receive more money before they can improve. This is, in the opinion of many, simply outside the point, which is that there is a middle step which must be taken before funds are given: the establishment of an ever-changing mixture of building capacity, providing systemic transparency and accountability, maintaining political will, and obtaining union support in the right amounts. Until the system has these in place, any infusion of money has the potential of being wasted or used inappropriately.
Symposium: The Hancock Case
The Hancock Case and The Adequacy Doctrine
With the Supreme Judicial Court hearing oral arguments in the potentially landmark Hancock v. Driscoll education equity case Monday, October 4, CommonWealth is pleased to provide this package of analysis and commentary on the case, drawn from the upcoming fall issue. These analyses are written by important figures in the case, and in education reform in Massachusetts.
In a 78-day trial lasting from June 2003 to January of this year, Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford, acting at the behest of the SJC, took testimony from 114 witnesses and examined more than 1,000 exhibits. In April, Judge Botsford issued her report to the SJC, concluding that the plaintiffs - students in 19 low-income urban and rural districts representing, by extension, students in all high-poverty areas - were not being given the education they were entitled to under the Massachusetts Constitution. The judge advised the state's high court to order the state to ascertain the "actual cost" of an adequate education for all and of "provid[ing] meaningful improvement in the capacity" of local school districts to deliver such an education - and then come up with a means of paying the bill. If the SJC follows Judge Botsford's lead, the consequences - for state intervention in local schools and for the state budget - could be enormous.
Now posted online is a set of analyses of Judge Botsford's report and its implications, written by important figures in the case and in education reform in Massachusetts.
Norma Shapiro, president of the Council for Fair School Finance and a supporter of the plaintiffs, explains the background of the current case in the McDuffy decision of 11 years ago and details the evidence that led Judge Botsford to propose her sweeping remedy. "The Commonwealth is still not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide the required education to all students, particularly students at risk for school failure," Shapiro explains.
But chief state economist Robert M. Costrell offers a scathing critique of Botsford's report, arguing that the judge uses faulty reasoning and faulty calculation in reaching her conclusion that high-poverty schools are underfunded - and especially, after a decade of increasing state aid to poor schools, that more money will make a difference in the quality of education. "If we become distracted by another huge monetary fix," Costrell insists, "our energies will be entirely absorbed by questions of how to finance it, how to distribute it, and so on, pushing aside the central issues of accountability, leadership, flexibility, and intervention that are so critical to fulfilling the promise of education reform."
Then Mark Roosevelt, a co-author of the Education Reform Act of 1993 and now managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, weighs in with a moderating view, acknowledging that "more money may well be needed," but so too may be "tough reforms." In Judge Botsford's report, "the emphasis is on funding for services, not on management reforms," Roosevelt laments. "Yet without such tools, additional resources sent directly to local districts might be inefficient or simply wasteful."
Also available online, from the summer issue of CommonWealth, is Ed Moscovitch's analysis of the ruling, which argues that living up to the state's constitutional obligations in education is going to cost money - though not necessarily as much as the Botsford report implies - but it's also going to require a more prescriptive approach to making schools improve. "Properly understood and implemented, Judge Botsford's decision could help us make some long overdue changes in our decade-long education reform effort, changes that could lead to major improvements in the schools."
Click your way through this CommonWealth Symposium on Hancock, and begin your own deliberations.
Robert Keough
Editor
The state still doesn't provide equal education
By Norma Shapiro
June 15, 1993: an important day for education in Massachusetts. On that day, the Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education and defined the Commonwealth's duty to educate all public school students, without regard to their personal wealth or poverty, and without regard to their district's fiscal capacity. The SJC relied, in part, on the words John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution describing the obligation of the state to "cherish" the public schools to preserve knowledge among the people of all classes-in order to secure democracy and enable economic productivity. The court also held that the Commonwealth was failing in its duty to provide students with the requisite education.
Less well known, however, are the standards the justices adopted from a similar case in another state to be used as the benchmark of a Massachusetts education. The court ruled that public education must equip children with seven capabilities: (1) sufficient oral and written communication skills to enable students to function in a complex and rapidly changing civilization; (2) sufficient knowledge of economic, social, and political systems to enable students to make informed choices; (3) sufficient understanding of governmental processes to enable students to understand the issues that affect their community, state, and nation; (4) sufficient self-knowledge and knowledge of their mental and physical wellness; (5) sufficient grounding in the arts to enable students to appreciate their cultural and historical heritage; (6) sufficient training or preparation for advanced training in either academic or vocational fields to enable students to choose and pursue life work intelligently; and (7) sufficient level of academic or vocational skills to enable public school students to compete favorably with their counterparts in surrounding states, in academics, or in the job market. The court ordered the state to develop the specifics of how to deliver the required education to all students, to find a means to finance that education, and to meet its responsibilities within a reasonable time.
It has been almost 12 years since the McDuffy decision.
By the time the Supreme Judicial Court issues its decision in the latest round of the legal battle on behalf of public school students, Hancock v. Driscoll, it will have been 12 years since the McDuffy decision-enough time for an entire generation of children to pass through our schools-and the state is still far from meeting its constitutional obligation.
FROM MCDUFFY TO HANCOCK
Three days after the McDuffy decision, then-Gov. William Weld signed the Education Reform Act of 1993 with what the Boston Globe described as a "lukewarm pen." The otherwise much-praised legislation contained three important changes in the roller coaster history of state support for education: It established a process for setting standards; it required assessment and evaluation, by multiple means, of how the standards were being met; and it included a new "foundation level" of financial support for schools, based on an estimate of what it should cost to educate the mix of children in each district. In addition, a seven-year program of increased funding was undertaken to pay for these reforms. While each of the three major changes has sparked controversy in its particulars, hardly anyone believes that the public schools are not better off today than they would have been without education reform.
Under the 1993 law, and in response to the court's requirement under McDuffy that it develop a specific educational plan to provide children with an education that equips them with the seven capabilities, the Commonwealth developed curriculum frameworks in English, math, history and social studies, science and engineering, arts, health, and foreign language. The foundation-budget program gave the schools a significant infusion of new resources, much of them going to school districts with the neediest students.
So why, a decade later, was it necessary to file the new lawsuit, Hancock v. Driscoll? The answer is simple: The Commonwealth is still not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide the required education to all students, particularly students at risk for school failure. First, the foundation budget was developed prior to the curriculum frameworks and never reassessed in light of the new state standards established in the Education Reform Act, and it has proven inadequate to the task of paying for the education required under McDuffy. Second, much more needs to be done to improve our schools in order to educate our children to the constitutional standards.
Accordingly, 20 plaintiff children from 19 poor school districts across the Commonwealth returned to court on the grounds that many students across the state, including the plaintiffs, were still not receiving the education necessary to meet the seven McDuffy capabilities and master the curriculum frameworks; the school districts in which the plaintiffs attend school continued to be unable to provide necessary programs and services; strong research-based evidence demonstrated that many educational deficits, especially those of especially challenged students, can be significantly ameliorated, but have not been in the plaintiffs' school districts; and the state has failed to provide appropriate help, evaluation, and support, including necessary funding, to ensure every child a constitutionally adequate public education. The Hancock case was referred by the Supreme Judicial Court to Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford to conduct a trial and make findings of fact and recommendations to the SJC.
On June 12, 2003, the Hancock trial began in Superior Court in Boston. The trial lasted 78 days over a seven-month period and included the testimony of 114 witnesses and more than 1,000 exhibits. On April 26, 2004, Judge Botsford issued a 300-plus-page report of detailed findings of fact and recommendations to the SJC.
The trial focused on four of the districts-Brockton, Lowell, Springfield, and Winchendon-because the conditions in those districts were typical of the districts in which the plaintiffs attend school. In addition, evidence was presented comparing these districts with Brookline, Concord, and Wellesley, as in the original McDuffy case. Although the court offered the state the opportunity to offer similar evidence about any district it chose to demonstrate that there were low-spending, high-performing districts, the state declined to do so.
Districts lacked resources to provide adequate education.
During the trial, superintendents, teachers, and specialists from the focus districts described-without contradiction-conditions not unlike those found at the time of the McDuffy case. After considering this evidence, Judge Botsford concluded in her report that these districts continued to be plagued with "overcrowded classes"; "'extraordinary' staff reductions"; "abysmal" libraries; "difficulty filling positions for mathematics, science, special education teachers, bilingual teachers and certified librarians"; "a virulent dropout problem"; and SAT scores that "are flat and frighteningly low, if one considers the importance of college education to future success." In her report, Judge Botsford noted that on every performance measure used by the Department of Education to assess district and school educational quality, the plaintiffs' districts, with few exceptions, "have not improved at all" since 1993.
THE EVIDENCE
How is it possible that after so much money has been poured into schools, they have not generally improved? The evidence presented during the trial answered this question. First, funding has not kept up with the demands of the new curriculum or spiraling costs such as health insurance, nor has it matched the needs of school systems dealing with particularly difficult populations to educate. Judge Botsford was especially impressed that the focus districts were spending between 100 percent and 110 percent of their foundation requirement, while the state average for the 75 highest performing districts was 130 percent of foundation and the wealthier comparison districts were spending an average of 160 percent of their foundation budgets.
Second, abundant evidence showed that the focus districts lacked adequate resources to provide the required education. While the specifics differed from district to district, there was evidence of glaring educational problems, including: (1) class sizes that were too large, especially for districts with large clusters of poverty, English-language learners, and children with special-educational needs; (2) teachers not certified in the field they were teaching; (3) a lack of essential materials, such as manipulatives and graphing calculators in math, and laboratories equipped with microscopes and the other equipment needed to provide a hands-on experience in science; (4) libraries with inadequate technology and out-of-date books not well aligned with the curriculum frameworks-one Winchendon school library still had The Miracle of Asbestos and The Boys' Book of Tools on its shelves; (5) minimal or no alignment of curricula with the frameworks, including minimal or no teaching of health, the arts, and foreign language; (6) textbooks that were either out-of-date or not aligned to the frameworks, and even those were in short supply; and (7) not enough slots for those applying for early childhood education, and an inability to offer full-day kindergarten.
Expert witnesses also testified about the proven effectiveness of programs that were needed in these plaintiff districts, but not available due to a lack of resources. Long-term studies (including some lasting for decades) have proven beyond dispute that high-quality early childhood education taught by certified teachers increases school readiness, lessens the learning gap for children who are poor or bring special challenges to school, and results in far greater success in school and in later life. These quality programs have been shown, over time, to result in returns to society of between $4 and $7 for every dollar spent. Yet the plaintiff districts are unable to provide sufficient early childhood education programs because of a lack of resources. In original research for this case, the disparities in school readiness toward the end of kindergarten were detailed, demonstrating that children in the urban districts -Brockton, Lowell, and Springfield-were far behind the norm for their age and even further behind their peers in more affluent districts.
Similarly, evidence was presented about the benefits of small classes, especially for early grades. As Judge Botsford concluded, the pre-eminent research in this field is the Tennessee STAR study, which established that children who are in classes of fewer than 20 students in their early school years enjoy long-term benefits in school success. Yet, in the plaintiff children's districts this was often not the case.
FIGURE 2: Number of Classes with More Than 20 Students
The court also heard evidence about the "virulent dropout problem." In the urban districts, as many as half of students do not graduate on time. (See Figure 3, on Springfield.) The court noted that the drastic reduction of remediation programs as a result of state budget cuts had exacerbated this already serious problem.
FIGURE 3: On-Time Graduation and Progress, Springfield
Enrollments Class of 2000 Class of 2001 Class of 2002
After considering all the testimony and reviewing all the exhibits, Judge Botsford concluded that "the factual record establishes that the schools attended by plaintiff children are not currently implementing the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks for all students, and are not currently equipping all students with the McDuffy capabilities." Further, the inadequacies of the educational programs in these schools are "many and deep," and "even more profound" for those students at greatest risk of failure, "children with learning disabilities, children with limited English proficiency, racial and ethnic minority children, and those from low-income homes."
Judge Botsford found that the ability to address these issues is limited by both inadequate funds and the Department of Education's inadequate capacity to provide assistance to school districts. The department has shrunk from 1,000 employees in 1980 to less than 400 today, in spite of all the additional responsibilities under the Education Reform Act. This lack of capacity was undisputed at trial and was exemplified by the evidence that, although there are hundreds of low-performing schools across the state, the department has reviewed only a small fraction of them. "In the meantime," Judge Botsford concluded, "the plaintiff children in the failing schools continue to suffer."
THE REMEDY
In her report to the SJC, Judge Botsford concluded that the state was not meeting its constitutional obligations and that the plaintiffs were entitled to further relief. She recommended that the state be directed to perform a study under the supervision of the court to determine what it would cost to provide the appropriate education to all children as described in the curriculum frameworks and to determine the cost of providing adequate resources to the Department of Education to carry out their tasks to improve the districts. She further recommended that the state be given a limited time-perhaps six months-to conduct the study and to implement the changes and funding necessary to accomplish the tasks.
Based on the evidence at trial, Judge Botsford identified certain educational programs that "must be included" in the determination of necessary costs and others that "should be considered." Those that "must be included" are sufficient funding for (historically underfunded) special education, including professional development for all teachers who have responsibility for teaching children with special educational needs; sufficient funding to cover all seven curriculum frameworks, including health, arts, and foreign language; adequate school facilities; and a public pre-school program for 3- and 4-year-olds, taught by certified teachers, free for those unable to pay, and available to all children at risk.
Judge Botsford also identified programs and strategies that "should be considered" in the determination of cost. These included increased teacher salaries, especially in poor districts; increasing the factors in the foundation budget for low-income and limited English proficiency students; adding factors in the foundation budget for technology, teacher coaches, and school leadership training; implementation of class sizes of less than 20 through third grade; provision of adequate libraries; and institution of regular, established (as opposed to episodic) remedial programs for children at risk.
At this time, the Supreme Judicial Court has received Judge Botsford's Report and recommendations, as well as briefs filed by the Commonwealth and the plaintiffs. In addition, the court has received 15 amicus, or friend-of-the-court, briefs representing more 40 organizations, virtually all the urban superintendents, and almost 50 state legislators. Every single one of these amicus briefs supports Judge Botsford's recommendations. After oral arguments, which the court heard in early October, the SJC will deliberate, and is expected to issue its decision by early next year.
It was 1974 when the Council for Fair School Finance was formed to support litigation on behalf of students who are not receiving the education to which they are constitutionally entitled. Now, 30 years later and 12 years after the landmark McDuffy decision, it is apparent there is more work to be done to reform and equalize public education in Massachusetts.
The constitution requires that the state provide public education that prepares students to participate in the civic and economic life of the Commonwealth, and the Council continues to believe that it is in the interest of the Commonwealth to do so. The Hancock case seeks to define the challenges ahead for government and educators. The council looks forward to the SJC's decision in Hancock, and to working with the legislative and executive branches of government to make the promise of education that John Adams enshrined in our state's constitution a reality for all students.
Norma Shapiro, legislative director for ACLU of Massachusetts, is president of the Council for Fair School Finance.
Symposium: The Hancock Case
Wrong answer on school finances
by Robert Costrell
In the first week of October, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in the Hancock school finance case. The arguments addressed the opinion issued last April by Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford that funding is constitutionally inadequate in the districts of those who brought the suit and, by extension, in high-poverty districts across the Commonwealth.
Much has changed since the SJC last examined school finance 10 years ago. Massachusetts now ranks fourth nationally in expenditures per pupil. The state has vastly reduced, eliminated, or even reversed spending gaps that previously existed between wealthy and poor districts, including the four plaintiff districts that are the focus of Hancock(Brockton, Lowell, Springfield, and Winchendon). Education Trust, a national organization devoted to narrowing achievement gaps, consistently finds that Massachusetts spends significantly more in poor districts than in wealthy ones, ranking at or near the top of the nation by various such measures.
In her opinion, Judge Botsford acknowledges this progress, but holds that funding is still inadequate. This opinion has been widely publicized, but the basis for it has not. A hard look at the evidence reveals a surprisingly weak case.
Much is at stake for the next round of education reform. Should the Commonwealth, once again, pursue the monetary solution that featured so prominently in the first decade of reform? Or, instead, should we focus on developing the leadership, accountability, flexibility, and intervention capabilities needed to turn around low-performing schools? Just as important is the constitutional issue of whether the legislative and executive branches should decide our future policy direction, as opposed to the courts doing it.
ADEQUACY STUDIES INADEQUATE
In order to demonstrate the inadequacy of funding, the plaintiffs commissioned two studies to estimate what an adequate education would cost in Massachusetts. The court found neither of these studies helpful, and it is important to understand why, for several reasons. First, it explains why the court's opinion rests instead on what were clearly secondary arguments presented by the plaintiffs. It also explains why the court's opinion that spending falls below what is necessary is unaccompanied by any indication of how much spending is necessary, since the court found no reliable basis for determining it. Finally, it is important to understand the shortcomings of these studies, since the nature of the opinion, if adopted by the SJC, may force the state into the very types of flawed studies that Judge Botsford rejected.
The plaintiffs' two studies are representative of those produced by consultants for school finance cases, each of them following one of two frequently used methods: the "professional judgment" model and the"successful schools" model. The professional judgment approach asks educators to build an ideal school budget to meet certain educational objectives. In the plaintiffs' study, those objectives were the seven state curriculum frameworks (English Language Arts; mathematics; science and technology; history and social science; foreign languages; the arts; and health). The panelists build the budget from the bottom up, by answering questions such as: What is the optimal class size? How many teacher aides and computers should there be? They are encouraged to "be creative and innovative," to design new programs or services, and to assume there are no revenue constraints.
Predictably, the plaintiffs' professional judgment study implied that almost every district in the state-even the wealthiest-was underfunded (with the ironic exception of Cambridge, a high-spending but low-performing district). Judge Botsford rejected this study as "a wish list of resources that teachers and administrators would like to have if they were creating an ideal school with no need to think about cost at all."
In contrast, the "successful schools" approach is based on spending and performance data. The plaintiffs' study selected the 75 districts with the highest MCAS scores on math and English Language Arts and went through a series of calculations to estimate what it would cost for other districts to attain the same level of success. For a variety of technical reasons, the calculations led to the nonsensical conclusion that two-thirds of the successful districts were not spending enough to be successful. Consequently, Judge Botsford also rejected this adequacy study.
WEAK FOUNDATION
Despite rejecting both of the plaintiffs' attempts to calculate funding adequacy, Judge Botsford nonetheless concluded that the Commonwealth's "foundation budget"-the state's measure of the minimum cost for an adequate education-is too low to meet constitutional muster. But the basis for Judge Botsford's conclusion is problematic.
Since the court discarded the plaintiffs' direct estimates of the cost of adequacy, the court's opinion relies instead on three strands of indirect evidence. The court relies most heavily on disparities in the ratio of spending to foundation budget between high-scoring and low-scoring districts. Second, the court's opinion cites shortcomings in the foundation budget formula, especially for the cost of special education. Finally, the court sounds a note of alarm that "the funding inadequacies have been exacerbated by profound cuts in public school education funding by the Commonwealth in the last two years."
The foundation budget is central to the funding-adequacy issue. As the state's benchmark for the minimum cost of an adequate education, it is the cornerstone of state education financing. For any school district unable to fund schools at the foundation-budget level from property tax revenue, the state has pledged to make up the difference, and it has made good on that pledge even during the recent recession and fiscal crisis.
High-scoring districts are not all high-spending.
Last year, the foundation budget in wealthy districts was about $6,700 per pupil. For districts in the poorest quartile, it averaged about $8,300, some 25 percent higher. This is because the foundation budget formula assigns a premium of $2,000 to $2,500 for low-income children (depending on grade level), and an additional premium for limited-English-proficiency students.
These premiums have provided a powerful mechanism for closing or reversing the spending gaps between poor and wealthy districts. But the foundation budget is the minimum every district must spend; it's not a limit. Any school district is free to spend as much as localities choose, and many affluent communities fund their schools at levels well above the required minimum. As a result, while K-12 school districts in the poorest quartile spent, on average, more than $8,700 last year, districts with the least poverty spent about $8,500. Poor districts spent a bit more per-pupil than affluent districts, on average, but not by as big a difference as in foundation budget.
Here is what the plaintiffs made of that data. Rather than comparing per-pupil expenditure, they expressed spending as a percentage of foundation budget. By this measure, poor districts spend less than wealthy districts, even though, in real dollars, they spend more: Wealthy districts spend, on average, well above 100 percent of foundation budget, while average spending among poor districts is not much more than 100 percent. The plaintiffs postulate that wealthy districts would not spend more than necessary, so their foundation budget (about $6,700) must be inadequate for them to obtain their high level of performance. Thus, they conclude, the poor districts' foundation budget (about $8,300) must be inadequate as well, even though it is far higher.
The court acknowledges the sketchy nature of this argument, describing the approach as offering a "rough" insight. Nonetheless, this is the main basis of Judge Botsford's recommendation to the SJC regarding the constitutionality of our funding system.
Specifically, her opinion cites two facts as evidence that today's foundation budget levels are inadequate: (1) the state's highest scoring districts spend, on average, about 130 percent of foundation; (2) the state average is about 115 percent. From these facts, the court infers "it is difficult not to conclude that the minimum 'adequate' funding level for every school district in Massachusetts lies above the current foundation budget formula amount."
This inference is not justified. Four flaws in the argument are as follows:
1. Average spending is no indication of necessary spending. The court uses the average ratio of spending to foundation budget to conclude that the "minimum adequate funding" ratio materially exceeds 100 percent for successful districts. However, among high-scoring districts, there is a wide spread of spending levels, including some that are close to the foundation budget minimum. Figure 1 plots MCAS scores (scaled on the state's 100-point "proficiency index") against percentage of foundation-budget spending for two groups of districts. The districts depicted by the green dots, which are in the lowest-poverty quartile, include almost all the highest-scoring districts, and their average spending is 125 percent of foundation. But the average is no indication of necessary spending, since a number of districts that obtain this high performance spend much closer to foundation. District M, for example, is at 104 percent, but its performance level is among the highest. More than one-fifth of the students who earn these high scores are in districts that spend less than 110 percent of foundation.
Similarly, it is wrong to infer anything about minimum necessary spending from the statewide average of 115 percent: So long as districts are free to spend more than the minimum, many of them will do so, and the average will exceed the minimum. To ignore this is to fall prey to the Lake Wobegon fallacy.
2. Association is not causation. On average, high-scoring districts spend more above foundation than low-scoring districts. From this fact, the cou
Symposium: The Hancock Case
The Hancock Case and The Adequacy Doctrine
With the Supreme Judicial Court hearing oral arguments in the potentially landmark Hancock v. Driscoll education equity case Monday, October 4, CommonWealth is pleased to provide this package of analysis and commentary on the case, drawn from the upcoming fall issue. These analyses are written by important figures in the case, and in education reform in Massachusetts.
In a 78-day trial lasting from June 2003 to January of this year, Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford, acting at the behest of the SJC, took testimony from 114 witnesses and examined more than 1,000 exhibits. In April, Judge Botsford issued her report to the SJC, concluding that the plaintiffs - students in 19 low-income urban and rural districts representing, by extension, students in all high-poverty areas - were not being given the education they were entitled to under the Massachusetts Constitution. The judge advised the state's high court to order the state to ascertain the "actual cost" of an adequate education for all and of "provid[ing] meaningful improvement in the capacity" of local school districts to deliver such an education - and then come up with a means of paying the bill. If the SJC follows Judge Botsford's lead, the consequences - for state intervention in local schools and for the state budget - could be enormous.
Now posted online is a set of analyses of Judge Botsford's report and its implications, written by important figures in the case and in education reform in Massachusetts.
Norma Shapiro, president of the Council for Fair School Finance and a supporter of the plaintiffs, explains the background of the current case in the McDuffy decision of 11 years ago and details the evidence that led Judge Botsford to propose her sweeping remedy. "The Commonwealth is still not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide the required education to all students, particularly students at risk for school failure," Shapiro explains.
But chief state economist Robert M. Costrell offers a scathing critique of Botsford's report, arguing that the judge uses faulty reasoning and faulty calculation in reaching her conclusion that high-poverty schools are underfunded - and especially, after a decade of increasing state aid to poor schools, that more money will make a difference in the quality of education. "If we become distracted by another huge monetary fix," Costrell insists, "our energies will be entirely absorbed by questions of how to finance it, how to distribute it, and so on, pushing aside the central issues of accountability, leadership, flexibility, and intervention that are so critical to fulfilling the promise of education reform."
Then Mark Roosevelt, a co-author of the Education Reform Act of 1993 and now managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, weighs in with a moderating view, acknowledging that "more money may well be needed," but so too may be "tough reforms." In Judge Botsford's report, "the emphasis is on funding for services, not on management reforms," Roosevelt laments. "Yet without such tools, additional resources sent directly to local districts might be inefficient or simply wasteful."
Also available online, from the summer issue of CommonWealth, is Ed Moscovitch's analysis of the ruling, which argues that living up to the state's constitutional obligations in education is going to cost money - though not necessarily as much as the Botsford report implies - but it's also going to require a more prescriptive approach to making schools improve. "Properly understood and implemented, Judge Botsford's decision could help us make some long overdue changes in our decade-long education reform effort, changes that could lead to major improvements in the schools."
Click your way through this CommonWealth Symposium on Hancock, and begin your own deliberations.
Robert Keough
Editor
The state still doesn't provide equal education
By Norma Shapiro
June 15, 1993: an important day for education in Massachusetts. On that day, the Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education and defined the Commonwealth's duty to educate all public school students, without regard to their personal wealth or poverty, and without regard to their district's fiscal capacity. The SJC relied, in part, on the words John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution describing the obligation of the state to "cherish" the public schools to preserve knowledge among the people of all classes-in order to secure democracy and enable economic productivity. The court also held that the Commonwealth was failing in its duty to provide students with the requisite education.
Less well known, however, are the standards the justices adopted from a similar case in another state to be used as the benchmark of a Massachusetts education. The court ruled that public education must equip children with seven capabilities: (1) sufficient oral and written communication skills to enable students to function in a complex and rapidly changing civilization; (2) sufficient knowledge of economic, social, and political systems to enable students to make informed choices; (3) sufficient understanding of governmental processes to enable students to understand the issues that affect their community, state, and nation; (4) sufficient self-knowledge and knowledge of their mental and physical wellness; (5) sufficient grounding in the arts to enable students to appreciate their cultural and historical heritage; (6) sufficient training or preparation for advanced training in either academic or vocational fields to enable students to choose and pursue life work intelligently; and (7) sufficient level of academic or vocational skills to enable public school students to compete favorably with their counterparts in surrounding states, in academics, or in the job market. The court ordered the state to develop the specifics of how to deliver the required education to all students, to find a means to finance that education, and to meet its responsibilities within a reasonable time.
It has been almost 12 years since the McDuffy decision.
By the time the Supreme Judicial Court issues its decision in the latest round of the legal battle on behalf of public school students, Hancock v. Driscoll, it will have been 12 years since the McDuffy decision-enough time for an entire generation of children to pass through our schools-and the state is still far from meeting its constitutional obligation.
FROM MCDUFFY TO HANCOCK
Three days after the McDuffy decision, then-Gov. William Weld signed the Education Reform Act of 1993 with what the Boston Globe described as a "lukewarm pen." The otherwise much-praised legislation contained three important changes in the roller coaster history of state support for education: It established a process for setting standards; it required assessment and evaluation, by multiple means, of how the standards were being met; and it included a new "foundation level" of financial support for schools, based on an estimate of what it should cost to educate the mix of children in each district. In addition, a seven-year program of increased funding was undertaken to pay for these reforms. While each of the three major changes has sparked controversy in its particulars, hardly anyone believes that the public schools are not better off today than they would have been without education reform.
Under the 1993 law, and in response to the court's requirement under McDuffy that it develop a specific educational plan to provide children with an education that equips them with the seven capabilities, the Commonwealth developed curriculum frameworks in English, math, history and social studies, science and engineering, arts, health, and foreign language. The foundation-budget program gave the schools a significant infusion of new resources, much of them going to school districts with the neediest students.
So why, a decade later, was it necessary to file the new lawsuit, Hancock v. Driscoll? The answer is simple: The Commonwealth is still not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide the required education to all students, particularly students at risk for school failure. First, the foundation budget was developed prior to the curriculum frameworks and never reassessed in light of the new state standards established in the Education Reform Act, and it has proven inadequate to the task of paying for the education required under McDuffy. Second, much more needs to be done to improve our schools in order to educate our children to the constitutional standards.
Accordingly, 20 plaintiff children from 19 poor school districts across the Commonwealth returned to court on the grounds that many students across the state, including the plaintiffs, were still not receiving the education necessary to meet the seven McDuffy capabilities and master the curriculum frameworks; the school districts in which the plaintiffs attend school continued to be unable to provide necessary programs and services; strong research-based evidence demonstrated that many educational deficits, especially those of especially challenged students, can be significantly ameliorated, but have not been in the plaintiffs' school districts; and the state has failed to provide appropriate help, evaluation, and support, including necessary funding, to ensure every child a constitutionally adequate public education. The Hancock case was referred by the Supreme Judicial Court to Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford to conduct a trial and make findings of fact and recommendations to the SJC.
On June 12, 2003, the Hancock trial began in Superior Court in Boston. The trial lasted 78 days over a seven-month period and included the testimony of 114 witnesses and more than 1,000 exhibits. On April 26, 2004, Judge Botsford issued a 300-plus-page report of detailed findings of fact and recommendations to the SJC.
The trial focused on four of the districts-Brockton, Lowell, Springfield, and Winchendon-because the conditions in those districts were typical of the districts in which the plaintiffs attend school. In addition, evidence was presented comparing these districts with Brookline, Concord, and Wellesley, as in the original McDuffy case. Although the court offered the state the opportunity to offer similar evidence about any district it chose to demonstrate that there were low-spending, high-performing districts, the state declined to do so.
Districts lacked resources to provide adequate education.
During the trial, superintendents, teachers, and specialists from the focus districts described-without contradiction-conditions not unlike those found at the time of the McDuffy case. After considering this evidence, Judge Botsford concluded in her report that these districts continued to be plagued with "overcrowded classes"; "'extraordinary' staff reductions"; "abysmal" libraries; "difficulty filling positions for mathematics, science, special education teachers, bilingual teachers and certified librarians"; "a virulent dropout problem"; and SAT scores that "are flat and frighteningly low, if one considers the importance of college education to future success." In her report, Judge Botsford noted that on every performance measure used by the Department of Education to assess district and school educational quality, the plaintiffs' districts, with few exceptions, "have not improved at all" since 1993.
THE EVIDENCE
How is it possible that after so much money has been poured into schools, they have not generally improved? The evidence presented during the trial answered this question. First, funding has not kept up with the demands of the new curriculum or spiraling costs such as health insurance, nor has it matched the needs of school systems dealing with particularly difficult populations to educate. Judge Botsford was especially impressed that the focus districts were spending between 100 percent and 110 percent of their foundation requirement, while the state average for the 75 highest performing districts was 130 percent of foundation and the wealthier comparison districts were spending an average of 160 percent of their foundation budgets.
Second, abundant evidence showed that the focus districts lacked adequate resources to provide the required education. While the specifics differed from district to district, there was evidence of glaring educational problems, including: (1) class sizes that were too large, especially for districts with large clusters of poverty, English-language learners, and children with special-educational needs; (2) teachers not certified in the field they were teaching; (3) a lack of essential materials, such as manipulatives and graphing calculators in math, and laboratories equipped with microscopes and the other equipment needed to provide a hands-on experience in science; (4) libraries with inadequate technology and out-of-date books not well aligned with the curriculum frameworks-one Winchendon school library still had The Miracle of Asbestos and The Boys' Book of Tools on its shelves; (5) minimal or no alignment of curricula with the frameworks, including minimal or no teaching of health, the arts, and foreign language; (6) textbooks that were either out-of-date or not aligned to the frameworks, and even those were in short supply; and (7) not enough slots for those applying for early childhood education, and an inability to offer full-day kindergarten.
Expert witnesses also testified about the proven effectiveness of programs that were needed in these plaintiff districts, but not available due to a lack of resources. Long-term studies (including some lasting for decades) have proven beyond dispute that high-quality early childhood education taught by certified teachers increases school readiness, lessens the learning gap for children who are poor or bring special challenges to school, and results in far greater success in school and in later life. These quality programs have been shown, over time, to result in returns to society of between $4 and $7 for every dollar spent. Yet the plaintiff districts are unable to provide sufficient early childhood education programs because of a lack of resources. In original research for this case, the disparities in school readiness toward the end of kindergarten were detailed, demonstrating that children in the urban districts -Brockton, Lowell, and Springfield-were far behind the norm for their age and even further behind their peers in more affluent districts.
Similarly, evidence was presented about the benefits of small classes, especially for early grades. As Judge Botsford concluded, the pre-eminent research in this field is the Tennessee STAR study, which established that children who are in classes of fewer than 20 students in their early school years enjoy long-term benefits in school success. Yet, in the plaintiff children's districts this was often not the case.
FIGURE 2: Number of Classes with More Than 20 Students
The court also heard evidence about the "virulent dropout problem." In the urban districts, as many as half of students do not graduate on time. (See Figure 3, on Springfield.) The court noted that the drastic reduction of remediation programs as a result of state budget cuts had exacerbated this already serious problem.
FIGURE 3: On-Time Graduation and Progress, Springfield
Enrollments Class of 2000 Class of 2001 Class of 2002
After considering all the testimony and reviewing all the exhibits, Judge Botsford concluded that "the factual record establishes that the schools attended by plaintiff children are not currently implementing the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks for all students, and are not currently equipping all students with the McDuffy capabilities." Further, the inadequacies of the educational programs in these schools are "many and deep," and "even more profound" for those students at greatest risk of failure, "children with learning disabilities, children with limited English proficiency, racial and ethnic minority children, and those from low-income homes."
Judge Botsford found that the ability to address these issues is limited by both inadequate funds and the Department of Education's inadequate capacity to provide assistance to school districts. The department has shrunk from 1,000 employees in 1980 to less than 400 today, in spite of all the additional responsibilities under the Education Reform Act. This lack of capacity was undisputed at trial and was exemplified by the evidence that, although there are hundreds of low-performing schools across the state, the department has reviewed only a small fraction of them. "In the meantime," Judge Botsford concluded, "the plaintiff children in the failing schools continue to suffer."
THE REMEDY
In her report to the SJC, Judge Botsford concluded that the state was not meeting its constitutional obligations and that the plaintiffs were entitled to further relief. She recommended that the state be directed to perform a study under the supervision of the court to determine what it would cost to provide the appropriate education to all children as described in the curriculum frameworks and to determine the cost of providing adequate resources to the Department of Education to carry out their tasks to improve the districts. She further recommended that the state be given a limited time-perhaps six months-to conduct the study and to implement the changes and funding necessary to accomplish the tasks.
Based on the evidence at trial, Judge Botsford identified certain educational programs that "must be included" in the determination of necessary costs and others that "should be considered." Those that "must be included" are sufficient funding for (historically underfunded) special education, including professional development for all teachers who have responsibility for teaching children with special educational needs; sufficient funding to cover all seven curriculum frameworks, including health, arts, and foreign language; adequate school facilities; and a public pre-school program for 3- and 4-year-olds, taught by certified teachers, free for those unable to pay, and available to all children at risk.
Judge Botsford also identified programs and strategies that "should be considered" in the determination of cost. These included increased teacher salaries, especially in poor districts; increasing the factors in the foundation budget for low-income and limited English proficiency students; adding factors in the foundation budget for technology, teacher coaches, and school leadership training; implementation of class sizes of less than 20 through third grade; provision of adequate libraries; and institution of regular, established (as opposed to episodic) remedial programs for children at risk.
At this time, the Supreme Judicial Court has received Judge Botsford's Report and recommendations, as well as briefs filed by the Commonwealth and the plaintiffs. In addition, the court has received 15 amicus, or friend-of-the-court, briefs representing more 40 organizations, virtually all the urban superintendents, and almost 50 state legislators. Every single one of these amicus briefs supports Judge Botsford's recommendations. After oral arguments, which the court heard in early October, the SJC will deliberate, and is expected to issue its decision by early next year.
It was 1974 when the Council for Fair School Finance was formed to support litigation on behalf of students who are not receiving the education to which they are constitutionally entitled. Now, 30 years later and 12 years after the landmark McDuffy decision, it is apparent there is more work to be done to reform and equalize public education in Massachusetts.
The constitution requires that the state provide public education that prepares students to participate in the civic and economic life of the Commonwealth, and the Council continues to believe that it is in the interest of the Commonwealth to do so. The Hancock case seeks to define the challenges ahead for government and educators. The council looks forward to the SJC's decision in Hancock, and to working with the legislative and executive branches of government to make the promise of education that John Adams enshrined in our state's constitution a reality for all students.
Norma Shapiro, legislative director for ACLU of Massachusetts, is president of the Council for Fair School Finance.
Symposium: The Hancock Case
Wrong answer on school finances
by Robert Costrell
In the first week of October, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in the Hancock school finance case. The arguments addressed the opinion issued last April by Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford that funding is constitutionally inadequate in the districts of those who brought the suit and, by extension, in high-poverty districts across the Commonwealth.
Much has changed since the SJC last examined school finance 10 years ago. Massachusetts now ranks fourth nationally in expenditures per pupil. The state has vastly reduced, eliminated, or even reversed spending gaps that previously existed between wealthy and poor districts, including the four plaintiff districts that are the focus of Hancock(Brockton, Lowell, Springfield, and Winchendon). Education Trust, a national organization devoted to narrowing achievement gaps, consistently finds that Massachusetts spends significantly more in poor districts than in wealthy ones, ranking at or near the top of the nation by various such measures.
In her opinion, Judge Botsford acknowledges this progress, but holds that funding is still inadequate. This opinion has been widely publicized, but the basis for it has not. A hard look at the evidence reveals a surprisingly weak case.
Much is at stake for the next round of education reform. Should the Commonwealth, once again, pursue the monetary solution that featured so prominently in the first decade of reform? Or, instead, should we focus on developing the leadership, accountability, flexibility, and intervention capabilities needed to turn around low-performing schools? Just as important is the constitutional issue of whether the legislative and executive branches should decide our future policy direction, as opposed to the courts doing it.
ADEQUACY STUDIES INADEQUATE
In order to demonstrate the inadequacy of funding, the plaintiffs commissioned two studies to estimate what an adequate education would cost in Massachusetts. The court found neither of these studies helpful, and it is important to understand why, for several reasons. First, it explains why the court's opinion rests instead on what were clearly secondary arguments presented by the plaintiffs. It also explains why the court's opinion that spending falls below what is necessary is unaccompanied by any indication of how much spending is necessary, since the court found no reliable basis for determining it. Finally, it is important to understand the shortcomings of these studies, since the nature of the opinion, if adopted by the SJC, may force the state into the very types of flawed studies that Judge Botsford rejected.
The plaintiffs' two studies are representative of those produced by consultants for school finance cases, each of them following one of two frequently used methods: the "professional judgment" model and the"successful schools" model. The professional judgment approach asks educators to build an ideal school budget to meet certain educational objectives. In the plaintiffs' study, those objectives were the seven state curriculum frameworks (English Language Arts; mathematics; science and technology; history and social science; foreign languages; the arts; and health). The panelists build the budget from the bottom up, by answering questions such as: What is the optimal class size? How many teacher aides and computers should there be? They are encouraged to "be creative and innovative," to design new programs or services, and to assume there are no revenue constraints.
Predictably, the plaintiffs' professional judgment study implied that almost every district in the state-even the wealthiest-was underfunded (with the ironic exception of Cambridge, a high-spending but low-performing district). Judge Botsford rejected this study as "a wish list of resources that teachers and administrators would like to have if they were creating an ideal school with no need to think about cost at all."
In contrast, the "successful schools" approach is based on spending and performance data. The plaintiffs' study selected the 75 districts with the highest MCAS scores on math and English Language Arts and went through a series of calculations to estimate what it would cost for other districts to attain the same level of success. For a variety of technical reasons, the calculations led to the nonsensical conclusion that two-thirds of the successful districts were not spending enough to be successful. Consequently, Judge Botsford also rejected this adequacy study.
WEAK FOUNDATION
Despite rejecting both of the plaintiffs' attempts to calculate funding adequacy, Judge Botsford nonetheless concluded that the Commonwealth's "foundation budget"-the state's measure of the minimum cost for an adequate education-is too low to meet constitutional muster. But the basis for Judge Botsford's conclusion is problematic.
Since the court discarded the plaintiffs' direct estimates of the cost of adequacy, the court's opinion relies instead on three strands of indirect evidence. The court relies most heavily on disparities in the ratio of spending to foundation budget between high-scoring and low-scoring districts. Second, the court's opinion cites shortcomings in the foundation budget formula, especially for the cost of special education. Finally, the court sounds a note of alarm that "the funding inadequacies have been exacerbated by profound cuts in public school education funding by the Commonwealth in the last two years."
The foundation budget is central to the funding-adequacy issue. As the state's benchmark for the minimum cost of an adequate education, it is the cornerstone of state education financing. For any school district unable to fund schools at the foundation-budget level from property tax revenue, the state has pledged to make up the difference, and it has made good on that pledge even during the recent recession and fiscal crisis.
High-scoring districts are not all high-spending.
Last year, the foundation budget in wealthy districts was about $6,700 per pupil. For districts in the poorest quartile, it averaged about $8,300, some 25 percent higher. This is because the foundation budget formula assigns a premium of $2,000 to $2,500 for low-income children (depending on grade level), and an additional premium for limited-English-proficiency students.
These premiums have provided a powerful mechanism for closing or reversing the spending gaps between poor and wealthy districts. But the foundation budget is the minimum every district must spend; it's not a limit. Any school district is free to spend as much as localities choose, and many affluent communities fund their schools at levels well above the required minimum. As a result, while K-12 school districts in the poorest quartile spent, on average, more than $8,700 last year, districts with the least poverty spent about $8,500. Poor districts spent a bit more per-pupil than affluent districts, on average, but not by as big a difference as in foundation budget.
Here is what the plaintiffs made of that data. Rather than comparing per-pupil expenditure, they expressed spending as a percentage of foundation budget. By this measure, poor districts spend less than wealthy districts, even though, in real dollars, they spend more: Wealthy districts spend, on average, well above 100 percent of foundation budget, while average spending among poor districts is not much more than 100 percent. The plaintiffs postulate that wealthy districts would not spend more than necessary, so their foundation budget (about $6,700) must be inadequate for them to obtain their high level of performance. Thus, they conclude, the poor districts' foundation budget (about $8,300) must be inadequate as well, even though it is far higher.
The court acknowledges the sketchy nature of this argument, describing the approach as offering a "rough" insight. Nonetheless, this is the main basis of Judge Botsford's recommendation to the SJC regarding the constitutionality of our funding system.
Specifically, her opinion cites two facts as evidence that today's foundation budget levels are inadequate: (1) the state's highest scoring districts spend, on average, about 130 percent of foundation; (2) the state average is about 115 percent. From these facts, the court infers "it is difficult not to conclude that the minimum 'adequate' funding level for every school district in Massachusetts lies above the current foundation budget formula amount."
This inference is not justified. Four flaws in the argument are as follows:
1. Average spending is no indication of necessary spending. The court uses the average ratio of spending to foundation budget to conclude that the "minimum adequate funding" ratio materially exceeds 100 percent for successful districts. However, among high-scoring districts, there is a wide spread of spending levels, including some that are close to the foundation budget minimum. Figure 1 plots MCAS scores (scaled on the state's 100-point "proficiency index") against percentage of foundation-budget spending for two groups of districts. The districts depicted by the green dots, which are in the lowest-poverty quartile, include almost all the highest-scoring districts, and their average spending is 125 percent of foundation. But the average is no indication of necessary spending, since a number of districts that obtain this high performance spend much closer to foundation. District M, for example, is at 104 percent, but its performance level is among the highest. More than one-fifth of the students who earn these high scores are in districts that spend less than 110 percent of foundation.
Similarly, it is wrong to infer anything about minimum necessary spending from the statewide average of 115 percent: So long as districts are free to spend more than the minimum, many of them will do so, and the average will exceed the minimum. To ignore this is to fall prey to the Lake Wobegon fallacy.
2. Association is not causation. On average, high-scoring districts spend more above foundation than low-scoring districts. From this fact, the cou