What's Wrong with Private Funding for Public Schools?
Stark, Andrew
IN 1998, Diane Mancus was principal of Houston's Ser Nirios Elementary School, located in a poor neighborhood a few miles from Rice School, a K-8 institution smack in the center of one of the...
...Wainman's argument here is reminiscent of the philosophical position taken by the Cambridge moral theorist Bernard Williams, who believes that we bear special obligations to meet the needs of those closest to us, even if those needs are not as significant as those of strangers...
...According to DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 47 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS Neal Rosenberg, an attorney who represented the P.S...
...Further confirmation comes from Richard Goldstein, assistant principal at P.S...
...41 proposal, Crew warmly welcomed an alumni gift of ten million dollars to Brooklyn Technical High School, money intended to fund new computers, an aerospacequality wind tunnel, and an electron microscope, each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars...
...And, in fact, the intraschool-equity norm doesn't even protect this last redoubt of grade46 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS level teachers...
...Instead of wanting to "help the school as a whole," Lawrence says, the fourth-grade parents were "earmarking their money to benefit their own children...
...Beth Dilley, who raises private money for a district-wide fund in Grand Rapids, puts it this way: "Come on, let's not kid ourselves...
...Officials are willing to distribute public funds inequitably across schools in order to uphold it...
...I asked several parent fundraisers this question...
...What's Wrong...
...Within districts''— as Kathy Christie of the Education Commission for the States notes—"boards and superintendents do not favor one school over another when allotting public funds...
...Ironically, the denouement in the P.S...
...IN 1998, Diane Mancus was principal of Houston's Ser Nirios Elementary School, located in a poor neighborhood a few miles from Rice School, a K-8 institution smack in the center of one of the city's wealthiest enclaves...
...When, on the other hand, "you give to the school, you are engaging in a more public-spirited act...
...It has a least-common-denominator quality: when politicians know that a particular expenditure raises equity concerns not only for other school communities, but even for members of a particular school, they have enough cover to say no...
...This is true, but it is also beside the point...
...There's just one problem, though...
...41 affair...
...District-wide funds and PTAs should accept that parents prefer to give to their own child's school, and harness that preference by piggybacking on their fundraising, not hampering it...
...But this is reductionist: people's beliefs about whether they are being treated justly don't display a one-to-one correspondence with economic measures of inequality...
...it just spit out a different conclusion...
...but maybe not...
...The greatest hope of reconciling psychological reality—parents often want to give only to their own child's school—with the moral context that undermines their justification for so doing, is to split the difference in this way...
...It's that there's something selfish about their position...
...41 parents did in New York, when their plans for the grade-four teacher were turned down...
...Not only that, but by comparison with schools as close as two or three miles away, the immediately local school is somehow so much closer to home that you have a greater obligation to it 48 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS than you do to your own district as a whole...
...it's not truly communal giving since your own child disproportionately benefits...
...But in return, booster clubs and parent fundraisers should give more thought to the moral structure of their situation, and allow that if they are going to deny the claim of the classroom just down the hallway, in the name of the school's greater good, they cannot then deny the claim of the school just down the highway, made in the name of the district's even greater good...
...That's what the P.S...
...some parents say it's too much...
...As it turns out, communities across the country have, willynilly, come up with a near universally shared if universally unspoken answer to this question...
...In a larger sense, though, the growing tendency for parents to fund public schools privately and the movement to get government to fund private schools publicly are of a piece...
...Here, Portland, Oregon, where parents are allowed to pay even for extra grade-level teachers, has piloted an interesting initiative...
...In other words, the argument that Wainman uses to oppose interschool equity undercuts her defense of intraschool equity...
...Consider the first question first: Why should we prohibit parents' contributing money to their own child's school...
...Funding an extra aide is maybe more inequitable than an extra French teacher," hazards Jim Terrell of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland...
...All of which goes to show how very sacred is the rule that requires private funding to be distributed equitably within the school...
...When it comes to funding field trips—at costs of a couple of hundred dollars each—Brooklyn's Goldstein, whose school otherwise raises money in the six figures that he would never put into a districtwide pot, insists that parents put their contributions into a school-wide fund...
...Paul Vance, former superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, recalls a group of parents in an East Silver Spring school seeking to privately pay for a special computer-lab teacher...
...the two frequently diverge...
...It is no accident that act60.org—a Vermont Web site devoted to advancing the cause of private funding for public schools—also contains several links to sites that promote public funding for private schools...
...That's not charity," Singer says...
...But it can't work both ways...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 43 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS Defenders of parental fundraising have several ways of deflecting concern from the inequities that private money can introduce into the public school system...
...What's Right...
...41's proposed grade-four teacher would have served only students in the fourth grade...
...This one-third rule is a "marriage of tensions," Guyer acknowledges...
...Currently, however, they raise most of their money not from parents (with whom they often find themselves in frustrating competition), but from local corporations and foundations, which generally have no problem with interschool equity—although, perhaps because they have no personal stake in a particular child's class, they are less constrained to observe intraschool equity and so frequently take a classroom-specific focus, as Amoco does, for example, when it concentrates its support on grade-five math classes...
...The problem, however, is that intraschool equity is a very poor proxy for interschool equity...
...To see why, let's examine the anatomy of a particular parental fundraising controversy, perhaps the highest profile case thus far...
...Does anything go as long as parents can pay for it...
...If Williams says that charity begins at home, and Singer maintains that when we get too close to home it ceases to be charity, Wainman has to take both positions, thereby handing each opponent the weapon she wields against the other...
...you can't fundraise just for kindergarten . . . we have turned down contributions earmarked for particular classes...
...41 and his nod of approval to P.S...
...But so far, it's working...
...Actually, the argument of parent fundraisers provides the best answer...
...In contrast to a computer or a language teacher or even an electron microscope, all of which serve the entire student body or at least a large proportion of it, P.S...
...And yet, perhaps without saying so publicly, Crew was drawing another kind of line, not a pedagogical but a political one...
...But on what consistent principle can they then require it to stay parochially at the school level, instead of going communally to the district—to be allocated on some equitable basis to all community schools...
...But the question now confronting school boards across the country is this: assuming the inevitability and desirability of at least some parental funding of public schools, where—on the spectrum from playground equipment to computers to teachers' aides to half-time art or language teachers to full-time grade-level teachers—should we draw the line as to what private money should be allowed to fund...
...They note, for example, that there exist far more substantial inequalities in public funding for public schools...
...As the title of a recent Time magazine article on the subject suggested—and as the amounts raised at the Rice auction confirm— we have moved "Beyond Bake Sales...
...This principle of intraschool equity should not be confused with the very different principle courts have applied in cases concerning individual parental fee-paying...
...The PTA—which has always had an uneasy relationship with booster clubs like Wainman'stakes the position that individual schools must face a choice: Either they should not raise money at all or they should raise it for a districtwide fund, knowing, as Illinois PTA president Brenda Diehl puts it, that the fund "could then very well decide to use what they donate at a different building...
...The very claims of proximity that Wainman uses to defend the school against the district as a whole are also available to parents who would prefer to give to their own child's classroom rather than to the school as a whole...
...In the late summer of 1997, parents at Greenwich Village's P.S...
...it's self interest...
...Because of the longer distances involved, for example, it seems plausible to say that giving to the United Way is indeed charitable by comparison with giving a bike to your son, but that it is still sufficiently close to home, by comparison with the stranger several continents away, to fulfill a legitimate prior obligation...
...321 in Brooklyn...
...To see why this creates uniquely serious moral problems for parental fundraisers, imagine a war about obligation being fought on two fronts, but one where the alternative recipients operated at far greater range...
...The answers are no, we should not (perhaps beyond a certain de minimis level) allow parents to raise funds for their own child's school...
...But at the heart of Mancus's recollection is a story that is repeating itself in countless American communities: the growing willingness and capacity of parents to contribute private funds to their children's public school, thus introducing a new magnitude of inequality into the public system...
...The contrast between Rice and Ser Nirios is evocative for many reasons—not the least being the way in which Ser Nirios's garage sale turned into a form of personal charity for the poverty-stricken parents, not just for the school itself, while Rice auctioned off parts of the school itself—teachers' time, principal's time— and not just, as is often the case, football tickets or computers donated by wealthy parents...
...When the council said "no German teacher," the interested parents declined to make a comparable contribution to the school as a whole—just as most of the P.S...
...According to Lawrence, the money "came from a professional development fund that would have benefited all the teachers in the district...
...Both are part and parcel of a two-decades old political movement toward privatizing what have typically been public functions: from private communities demanding that the public treasury grant them tax concessions for the dues they pay to maintain their own streets and parks, to merchants in Los Angeles and Philadelphia raising millions of dollars to build police stations in their neighborhood, to the privatization of public hospitals everywhere from Boston to Cincinnati, from Tampa to Tulsa...
...In order to uphold the principle that all classes within a school must benefit from private parental support, Crew mollified the angry parents by raiding a public fund that would otherwise have benefited all schools within the district...
...massive political discontent can fix on relatively small discrepancies...
...And if not, is there an alternative...
...So Crew did have available a rationale for saying no to P.S...
...we put a stop to that...
...Or, as Portland middle-school director Peter Hamilton puts it, "when you privately fund one more grade-one teacher, it can help [the] kid in grade four because of how the splits work out...
...Here, Wainman's argument is redolent of the claims made by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who criticizes people for donating to medical research in the hope that they will thereby benefit an ill relative...
...Unfortunately, Mancus recalls, the event ended on a sour note when "several parents who worked the sale complained that others were taking some of the items home with them...
...Indeed, the universal fastidiousness with which the taboo against intraschool inequity is observed, in a nation where far more substantial amounts of interschool inequity are routinely tolerated, is remarkable...
...And even if you believe that grade-level teachers are more vital than computers, there will necessarily come a patch on the spectrum somewhere in between— say the patch separating teachers' aides from French teachers—where the issues cease to be so clear-cut...
...41 parents seem to have been saying, thereby 44 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS forcing Crew to come up with a rationale for his decision...
...So when it comes to parental giving, perhaps the answer is to move from intraschool to interschool equity by degrees...
...Wainman begins by defending parental giving that confines itself to a child's school instead of flowing to the district as a whole...
...And it is precisely this longstanding intradistrict level playing field that parents, who naturally favor their own child's school over others, disturb when they inject their own money into the system...
...There is thus a fatal inconsistency in the arguments that parent fundraisers make in defense of their activity...
...But Wainman has a comeback to parental opponents of intraschool equity...
...So it seems we come down to a stark question: given that there is no way of drawing a coherent line between acceptable and unacceptable interschool equity, should we allow parents to raise funds for their own child's school...
...The problem is that "it happened so fast and got so out of hand . . . parents were raising money in a matter of hours and that money . . . had to be embraced...
...Around the time that Crew denied P.S...
...Tocqueville noted long ago that as the most egregious social inequities diminish, the smaller ones grow vexatious and disruptive beyond their size...
...Rice held an auction, at which one parent bid $20,000 for a reserved parking space in front of the school so that he could drop his child off at the last minute...
...What Mancus describes is the reverse: parents using private resources to purchase services for the public schools their children attend...
...41 Parent Teacher Association (PTA) president, notes that a privately paid grade-level teacher—unlike a computer or a French teacher—would have created not just interschool but intraschool inequity...
...41 organized to pay the salary of a grade-four teacher who would otherwise have been yanked from the school because student numbers did not justify her presence...
...for in this case, the recipients are sufficiently distant from your own immediate circle of private interests— or, at least, your own child's interest remains sufficiently diluted within the relatively vaster student body—that there is a truly selfless, hence commendable aspect to what you're doing...
...There is thus, she says, a "policy of intraschool equity at P.S...
...Even in cases where individual classes are allowed to raise limited funds—as they still are, for example, under the old rule Chancellor Crew revived in New York—the intraschool equity norm cabins the practice within tight constraints...
...By contrast, giving to starving villagers halfway round the world—which is what Singer counsels us to do—is clearly altruistic, since there's no way that you benefit...
...She is doing it, however, in a context that requires her to fight a war about obligation on two fronts, defending the claims of the school against those of the larger district on the one hand and those of the smaller classroom on the other...
...So Crew's attempt to carve out and protect some school services as more basic than others on pedagogical grounds founders...
...None of this is to find fault with Nancy Wainman or other fundraisers, nor is it to diminish the good she and others are doing for their schools...
...Ultimately, though, Wainman's attempt to square intraschool equity with interschool inequity fails...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 49...
...Wainman reveals the strain in her argument by explicitly likening the local school to one's own "family"—so that you have a greater obligation to give to it than to the district—but then explicitly distinguishing the local school from one's "own family"—so that giving to it is distinctly less self-serving than giving to your own child's classroom...
...BUT THIS very same Singeresque argument that Wainman uses to defend the claims of the school as a whole against the classroom is also available to those who would defend the claims of the district against the school...
...giving to the district as a whole is a generous and community-minded act in a way in which giving to your own child's school simply is not, no matter how you dress it up...
...The problem is that it's not a very good answer...
...Fundraising," he says, "must benefit the whole school communally...
...And indeed, about 30 percent of the country's school districts have such funds, which are generally established and governed by volunteers operating at arm's-length from the school board, distributing the money they raise according to criteria for which all district schools are eligible...
...Once they've conceded that it's selfish to give to your own child's classroom instead of to the entire school, they've disarmed themselves against those who say it's selfish to give to your own child's school instead of to the entire district...
...The problem with the proposed German teacher at Portland's Lincoln High, by contrast, was that German was of interest only to the kids of the few parents pushing it...
...The board said no...
...their answers—which reveal the always fascinating arguments that individuals muster as they navigate the everyday politics of their lives–were best articulated by Nancy Wainman of Warner Elementary's booster club...
...equity folks say it's too little...
...41 itself had an established rule on the books that said, "No raising money for your own class...
...In other words, the very argument Wainman uses to defend intraschool equity undercuts her opposition to interschool equity...
...Charity begins at home," she says, and "the local school is a part of you...
...41's teacher (while saying yes to Brooklyn Tech's computers), but one that really had to do with intraschool, not interschool equity...
...41 case was that the chancellor, though he avoided intraschool inequity in private funding, introduced a new measure of interschool inequity in public funding...
...They cannot go ahead," Goldstein says, "and raise money for a particular grade's outing...
...If Crew had really been worried about interschool inequity, his denial of P.S...
...41's fourth-grade parents their wish to raise $46,000 for an extra fourth-grade teacher, parents at P.S...
...Others bid large sums to enable their sons and daughters to spend a day with the principal or to go on a weekend camping trip with the school's teachers...
...They insist that money be given communally at the school level, not parochially to the classroom...
...What's happening in education is another variation on this larger theme...
...It's like your extended family, and so you have the same obligation [to it as] you do to your family to help out...
...From superintendents to school boards, and from principals to parents, intraschool equity is the abiding norm across America, the mother rule to which parental fundraising for schools must recur...
...If one school "can hire a half-time art teacher with parental money, that becomes a real problem for that local community," says Sampson...
...And there may be something to that...
...Even so, defenders of parental fundraising point out, the wealthiest parents can raise only a fraction—though sometimes as much as 10 percent—of the amounts their schools get in public funds...
...Indeed, though Crew never said so, Pat Lawrence believes it was intraschool inequity that "really bothered the chancellor...
...Courts tend to permit such fees precisely when only some students within the school will benefit—asking grade-six parents to pay individually for their child's field trip, say, is okay—but not when the fees are meant to benefit the whole school, in which case they are considered an illegitimate tax...
...For many years, Lawrence points out, P.S...
...Certainly, that's more plausible than what parent fundraisers have to say: namely, that by comparison with your own child's classroom, your own child's school is somehow so significantly more removed from your circle of interests that giving to it would be demonstrably more altruistic...
...It is exactly because "public money is being spent equally within districts," says Wayne Sampson of the Illinois Association of School Boards, that "parental inequality in private funding becomes a real problem...
...One of the conditions that attaches to the hiring of an extra gradelevel teacher in Portland is that the whole school, or at least a large proportion of it, benefit...
...Does allowing parents to spend money on some items for the public schools imply allowing them to spend on all...
...And, of course, it's not always just another half-time art teacher...
...With vouchers—which, despite all the national controversy they've sparked, are actually on the agenda in only a handful of jurisdictions— parents use public funds to purchase services from the private schools their children attend...
...Mancus remembers the day in March when both schools staged fundraisers...
...Although it has received much less national attention than vouchers, it provokes fierce equity debates at the local level across the country...
...41, " and "the hiring of the grade-four teacher"—which Daniels supported— was concededly "not consistent with it...
...It "raises all kinds of moral and ethical issues...
...Public inequities exist between school districts, with wealthy districts in many states continuing to fund their schools at levels impossible for poorer districts...
...In fact not only are parent fundraisers like Wainman fighting on two fronts, they are also—unlike Williams and Singer, whose competing claimants are a family member in the next room and a starving villager ten thousand miles away—doing so at very close range...
...After prohibiting the gradefour parents from paying for their children's teacher, Crew turned around and directed the district superintendent to find public funding DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 45 PRIVATE FUNDING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS for the position...
...When you "give to your own child's classroom," Wainman says, "it's like giving a gift to a member of your own family...
...Indeed, several months after he clamped down on the P.S...
...But while intraschool equity might not govern when parental monies flow into the school through fee-paying, it rules when they come in through fundraising...
...And yes, there is an alternative: they can raise parental money for a fund that would distribute it, on fair criteria, to all schools in the district...
...where do you draw the line...
...Ser Niiios, by contrast, opted for a garage sale that raised forty-four dollars...
...The then-chancellor of New York City schools, Rudy Crew, squelched the parental bid, and he did so on equity grounds, arguing, according to the New York Times, that it was "unfair for affluent parents to be able to reduce class size in this way while poor parents could not...
...Plarents who simply want to funnel money back to their own child's classroom don't always show enough community spirit...
...Parental money now pays for auditoriums, science labs, extra grade-one teachers to lower class sizes, and much more...
...Not surprisingly, as the Times reported, "word of the gift [to Brooklyn Technical] once again raised questions about . . . a potential double standard...
...accordingly, it was ratified by the school PTA...
...321 would have been inconsistent...
...Anne Bryant, executive director of the National Schools Boards Association, offers a similar assessment: "Crew "felt it's better for parents, if they're going to raise private money, to fund stuff that will enhance all the school's students...
...It turns out, however, that the principle of intraschool equity was at play in Portland too...
...the parents were upset, and "what ended the debate," Vance says, "was that the superintendent hired the teacher himself on the public payroll...
...Defenders of the parental bid were quick to point out that there was a problem with Crew's refusal...
...Parents can pay for teachers at their kids' school," says Cynthia Guyer of the Portland Public Schools Foundation—a districtwide fund devoted to raising private money for Portland's schools—"but they must give 33 percent back to the district fund, and we take that money and pool it for high-poverty schools through a competitive grant process...
...When does the inequality become egregious...
...True, there has always been some parental fundraising for public schools, and no one proposes to get rid of it outright...
...The chancellor had allowed New York parents to pay for playground equipment, computers, French teachers, art teachers, teachers' aides: everything short of gradelevel teachers...
...She notes that shortly after the controversy, Crew began enforcing an old rule that forbids parents to give anything worth more than fifty dollars to their own child's classroom— although parents can give a thousand times that to their own child's school...
...Or, as Lydia Moss, principal of the District of Columbia's Clark Elementary, puts it, when wealthy parents contribute private funds to top up the public school budget, they are "getting a private school education for their kids on the public nickel...
...Likewise with Sam Skootsky, head of the booster club at Westwood School in Los Angeles, which raises $240,000 in parental money annually...
...Pat Lawrence, a former P.S...
...Which Inequalities...
...But with a fourth-grade teacher, parents of first-graders were saying, 'why is that important...
...But if his guiding principle was in fact "no intraschool inequality," then his two decisions are "easily reconciled," Goldstein says: "A fourth-grade teacher is more troubling than an art teacher, because its benefits to the school are less general...
...The problem is that although intraschool equity provided Chancellor Crew a rationale with which to prohibit privately paid grade-level teachers, it doesn't, as Nancy Wainman and Sam Skootsky attest, seem to preclude much else in the way of interschool inequity...
...Now, the surpluses must go into the general school kitty, to be spent by the [school's] leadership council...
...Grade-level teachers can be made fungible, and in Portland an extra one is generally used to lower student-teacher ratios not just in the grade itself but throughout the school...
...It is far from a singular case...
...41 had a "dance teacher, paid for by the parents, and there was no squawk...
...BUT IF anything is testimony to the chancellor's focus on intraschool equity, it is the way in which he finally resolved the P.S...
...It's okay, in other words, to give your own child a bicycle, even when another child is starving in a village half way around the world...
...Why was he drawing the line there...
...And this is exactly what Wainman does, when she says that parents bear an obligation to care for those near and dear in the local school, before attending to the needs of those more distant in the rest of the district...
...Unlike in New York—where parents may privately pay the salaries of French teachers but are forbidden from paying for gradelevel teachers—in Portland, parents are allowed to pay the salaries of grade-level teachers, while a parent group at one local school was recently denied permission to underwrite the salary of a German teacher...
...The inequities, they claim, aren't all that significant...
...IN A SENSE, it is not surprising that intraschool inequity should emerge as such a powerful sub rosa criterion in debates over parental funding...
...41 grade-four parents, many of them— precisely because they, too, believe that charity begins at home—thought that "their primary obligation was to see that their own child's class was well-provided for first, and then they'd concern themselves with the school...
...That description, "a private school education on the public nickel," almost makes it sound as if we are talking about vouchers...
...But some parent fundraisers—and this is their ultimate fallback position—point out that whatever the moral niceties, the raw reality is that parents simply won't raise money if it's not going to their kid's school...
...For a long time," says Nancy Wainman, head of the well-heeled booster club at L.A.'s Warner Avenue Elementary, which contributes mightily to interschool inequity by raising two hundred thousand dollars annually, "individual classes at Warner raised money for various projects and then kept the surpluses...
...But in fact the idea behind vouchers is the opposite...
...Yet Skootsky dismisses the idea of parents giving their money to a district-wide fund, one that would benefit all schools in the area, precisely because that would be "too communal...
...321 raised one hundred thousand dollars—without running afoul of the chancellor— to pay the salaries of an art and a music teacher...
...Indeed, according to another former PTA president, Rebecca Daniels, P.S...
...The alternative recipients for Wainman's funds reside in another district school only six blocks away, or in a particular school classroom maybe a mere six yards away...
...ANDREW STARK teaches management at the University of Toronto and is the author of Conflict of Interest in American Public Life...
...If confining parental giving to the school level is unjustified, even on the principles held by its practitioners, what's the alternative...
...As Steve Conn of Manhattan's Center for Education Innovation pointedly asks, however, "what is the difference, in this day and age, between computers and teachers...
...People, Wainman concludes, "just don't have the same feeling about the district...
...Consider some examples...
...Consider the case of Portland, Oregon...
...Although he had no quarrel with "efforts by individuals...to finance fringe items—like computers or enhanced teacher training," Crew told the Times, it was vital that private money not skew "basic educational services" such as grade-level teachers...
...Surely, of the two, it's better that parents raise money for the district than not at all...
...But it is useless as a standard for drawing distinctions between more or less egregious kinds of interschool equity...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
