Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
PUBLIC EDUCATION'S MYTH OF LOCAL CONTROL: WHY WE CAN'T PRESERVE WHAT WE
HAVEN'T GOT
by Jeffry Flake
Arizona Republic, January 19, 1997
As the State Legislature grapples with the issue of school finance reform this session, the popular refrain "We’ve got to preserve local control" will again echo throughout the capital. While it still makes for a good sound bite among uninitiated reporters and remains an article of faith among school district officials, it rings more hollow with every passing hour. Local control in Arizona today is as meaningful and as quaint as the Grand Canyon Railroad. The Legislature should quit worrying about preserving it and instead seek to establish it.
Local control was traditionally defined as the ability of residents of a community to build, maintain and manage their own schools. Residents exercised control through the ballot box by determining how much they were willing to tax themselves to support these schools. While this type of local control was functional for several decades, a combination of factors have rendered it all but meaningless today.
First, over the past few decades the state has assumed a more active role in guaranteeing a "general and uniform" system. For nearly 20 years the state has equalized the amount that school districts may tax and spend for so-called "maintenance and operations," leaving only a 15 percent "override" margin for local voters to quibble over. While some districts do tax and spend substantially more than their state-mandated expenditure limit and overrides allow, they do so without voter approval (usually through desegregation levies).
Second, school districts, with some exceptions in rural areas, are no longer comprised of "local" communities. Although we still have 227 school districts in Arizona, more than half of the state’s students are educated in just 15 of them. In fact, the state’s largest school district has a student population of more than 80,000. What kind of voice can a parent expect to have when their child is one of 80,000? On the flip side, the state’s smallest school district, with just 17 students, has one school board member for every four children. The arbitrary and disparate size of school districts (coupled with the labyrinth of crosscutting elementary, high school and unified district boundaries statewide) makes local control, as defined by local communities, a function of geography rather than philosophy.
Third, the use of assessment ratios (businesses are taxed at two-and-a-half times the rate of homeowners) has had the effect of separating those who vote from those who pay. In other words, because homeowners vote to tax businesses they are shielded from the full impact of their "control." As a result, school bond elections today are largely a perfunctory exercise, particularly in districts with substantial business property wealth.
Meaningful local control implies that district voters can discipline their district by withholding approval for bond issues. While this has been the case in the past, the Roosevelt v. Bishop decision has virtually ensured that such an expression of local control will not be tolerated in the future. Does anyone truly believe that the court will attempt to differentiate between those school districts with low property wealth and those districts with voters who, for what might be legitimate reasons, refuse to approve a bond issue? The court will surely rule that "the children must be held harmless" and require the state to provide supplemental funding.
The State Legislature’s chosen vehicle for this supplemental funding is the newly created "Capital Facilities Board," which has been given $100 million to disperse to school districts with serious capital needs. Ironically, although the stated intent in establishing this board was to preserve local control, it is instead the last nail in local control’s coffin. It is a telling sign that the first award of funds from this board to a school district was followed by a governor’s office press release noting that the governor "must have seemed like Santa Claus" as he delivered the oversized check for a new building. Can we have local control when Santa Claus is running around showering gifts? Not a chance.
So here we are today. Because the state already equalizes maintenance and operations funding, the only way for voters to express local control is to approve or disapprove of bond issues to build and renovate schools. But if voters disapprove of bond issues, the state will step in anyway and provide backfill funding. This is a system worth preserving?
Like it or not, the era of meaningful expression of local control in public education through the ballot box is over. Blame it on demographic shifts, tax laws, assessment ratios, the courts, politicians - take your pick. It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Fortunately, we have a chance to replace local control with something far better than local control was in its zenith. It’s called consumer control.
Under the consumer control model, every child in the state would be worth the same amount, regardless of where he or she lives. All per-pupil funding would travel with the child to the school of his or her choice. Existing school districts and charter schools could leverage the per pupil amount by selling revenue bonds to finance school construction. Parents would discipline their district or school by enrolling or removing their child. Under this model, the cost of school facilities would finally bear a relationship to market realities, rather than property wealth.
Conservatives have always professed great faith in the free market. Consistent with this philosophy, they have in just a few short years redefined public education in Arizona. Rather than being the "sole provider," the state is now merely a "purchaser" of educational services. What is puzzling is why conservatives, having articulated the framework for an educational marketplace, are unwilling to move to a financing system that will make this marketplace a reality. It is as if they created the automobile and are now trying to figure out ways to finance the covered wagon.
Nobel laureate economist F.A. Hayek liked to refer to the notion that the allocation of resources is better accomplished through bureaucracy and regulation than through the marketplace as the "fatal conceit." To believe that today’s version of local control is preferable to a model based on consumer control is to fall victim to this affliction. All of us, particularly conservatives, should know better.
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Jeffry L. Flake is executive director of the Goldwater Institute, 201 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85004.