Jeremy B. Landa
Students taking my classes often struggle to conceptualize that the schools they attend actually cost taxpayers money. Few know that revenues come from the local, state, and federal governments. Almost none know that "spending on education constitutes only about 2 percent of the federal government's overall budget, while it consumes over 40 percent of all expenditures by localities and over 20 percent of each state's expenditures."
5
Likewise, they have little idea about how the revenues are distributed across a system like New Haven and how these revenues are allocated within individual schools. It is logical to infer from this information that education is paramount to a democracy because of how much we are willing to spend on the education of the children of our country.
However, if you were to walk the hallways of a random selection of schools in the United States on any given school day, you would see few signs that indicate schools receive massive amounts of tax revenue. Nor would you know that how this money is spent has been and will continue to be a hotbed of political discourse. Students certainly know little about the controversy that surrounds schools. But they should. Familiarizing young people with the perceptions about schools, the political and economic battles that happen around schools, and the inputs and outputs that people expect from them is vital towards the future of these public institutions. At the same time, it is an opportunity for my AP Microeconomics and Civics students to realize that schools operate similarly to businesses when it comes to requiring revenues to cover the costs of operation. My students struggle to understand these concepts, but they must in order to understand the motivations of business owners, governments, and consumers.
Moreover, our spending on public schools is representative of our social, political, and economic biases. By examining the economic revenues and costs of schools and then examining how the legal trends have impacted this, students are able to begin to examine the relationship between law, race, economics, and our schools. It is important to note that our schools are reflective of a judicial decision, Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which deemed busing between Detroit and 50+ suburban cities unconstitutional. This decision has effectively rendered a landscape that we see today with central cities and their suburbs, politically and economically, operating as actors independent of each other. As central cities have become increasing enclaves for minority groups, we have seen these places become segregated not just racially, but socioeconomically as well. Students at my diverse school will likely struggle to recognize the history of cities, the legal history around school equality and equity, and the nexus of politics, law, and economics on their own lives. However, they should not only understand these issues, but be prepared to influence policy-makers and community leaders with solutions to this ongoing problem.
Therefore, I am theorizing that this unit will help students evaluate the funding of schools; it will also allow them to visualize the differences between segregated and desegregated schools today and move from recognizing that schools are only racially segregated to recognizing that they are socioeconomically and racially segregated. It will allow them to question how money is distributed within a city, and it will allow them to ask why our nation's central cities and suburbs do not work together. In doing this, it will allow students to look to the past, both social and legal, and the present to begin understanding how they may be able to influence the future. It will also use economic theories regarding supply and the behavior of producers to help students how economics influences schools and politicians.