EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Time:	4:00 PM -- 5:30 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

WASHINGTON, JUNE 29, 2009--At a recent AEI event, conservative scholar Eric Hanushek and school litigation lawyer Al Lindseth were joined by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, to discuss school funding and whether and how it can deliver improved student achievement. Drawing from their recent volume Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America's Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), Hanushek and Lindseth asserted that more money has not resulted in the hoped-for results.

Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution, argued that the additional dollars funneled into K–12 schools have served only to fund more of the same, rather than reform our current schooling structure. "There is ample evidence that the quadrupling of funding between 1960 and today has been unmatched by anything like that in terms of performance," he argued.

Lindseth, a partner at the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, concurred. Drawing from their research on court-ordered increases in school funding in Wyoming, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, he concluded, "The results are disappointing. Clearly we need to do something better with our money."

Acknowledging that she shares some of Hanushek and Lindseth's skepticism of school funding, Weingarten said that she differs with them "at the margins, as opposed to . . . the big picture." She emphasized the need for more money, the importance of spending it wisely, and the importance of including teachers in the development of sound standards and accountability systems. "Teachers have to be involved in both what the standards are and equally, if not more important, how to make them happen," she said. "You want [teachers] engaged every single day, thinking about what works, what doesn't work, how we're going to make it happen."

Hanushek added that state legislatures "should not think of funding as separate from policy . . . You can't do these policies piecemeal. They interlock." He called for accountability metrics that hold individuals accountable for performance: "You can't reward people for success without knowing how success is measured." The discussion quickly turned to address how additional school funding is allocated, the best way to compensate teachers, and the controversial idea of paying teachers based on their performance in the classroom.

"We do think that the use of performance-based pay over the years will have a positive impact on the teaching force," Lindseth said. "And that it will cause good teachers, effective teachers, to stay in the profession instead of leaving for some more lucrative job . . . and may also cause less effective teachers to leave the profession." Weingarten took issue with performance-based pay, however, commenting that the first step is to provide teachers "a decent middle class salary. . . . Performance pay, as the antidote, doesn't work if one wants to build the capacity of your entire teaching force." She explained that experience and advanced degrees that are used as benchmarks in current salary schedules correlate with effectiveness. "The salary schedule . . . was proxy for fairness," she explained. "It was rooted in what in that time made sense."

Hanushek added that designs for pay for performance should be established at the state and local level but that states and localities had yet to come up with any viable possibilities. "Up to now," he concluded, "the finance system has been used to pay for things, but all the incentives that financing and money can provide have been left on the side. We think that's an important weapon that can be used . . . that we're not making good use of." Ultimately, he stated, effective reforms "don't cost money. They cost leadership and commitment."

--JULIET SQUIRE

• Video, audio, and event materials
• Related Education Outlook by Hanushek and Lindseth