UC Berkeley professor takes on school spending

Do we spend enough on public education? What does it mean that California has fallen from near the top of per-pupil spending in the United States to very near the bottom?

Money has long been at the center of debates over education. Now a book from a UC Berkeley professor argues that the entire debate is wrongheaded.

In “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), W. Norton Grubb argues that how much we spend is less important than how we spend it. For decades, Grubb says, school spending has inexorably risen, while student achievement has stayed relatively stagnant. Maybe it’s time to look at which expenditures actually improve education, he argues, and which are a waste. The Times’ Mitchell Landsberg spoke to Grubb about his book.

Let me try to boil down the message in your book: Money matters, but only if it’s spent well. Is that right?

That’s certainly one of the conclusions, absolutely. And again, this phrase that I use constantly in the book is, “It’s often necessary, but it’s not sufficient.” So it’s finding what the necessary resources are in the school and then directing money and other resources -- like leadership, vision, cooperation, collaboration -- to them that makes a difference.

When you talk about resources, what does that take into account?

The resources that everybody talks about most of the time are what I call simple resources. So, most people argue most of the time about class size, teacher salaries, the average experience and credential levels of teachers, about the amounts of spending on books and computers and science labs and so forth. But many of the resources in schools turn out to be compound resources. We spent a lot of money in California on class-size reduction, and the evaluation that was undertaken showed no increases in test scores on average, because what happened is that the districts had to lower the quality of teachers to get more of them, particularly in urban schools. So the effective resource is class-size reduction and professional development to teach the teachers how to teach differently and adequate physical facilities and keeping the quality of teachers up.

So are our assessment tools appropriate to measure this?

You know, they’re not. And I think that what may happen under Round 2 of the movement for accountability -- Round 1 being a lot of state tests and No Child Left Behind -- is that we might try to develop more subtle assessments.

You say in the book that money is especially likely to be wasted in urban schools.

I think instability in urban schools contributes to that. Because urban schools do seem more unstable than many suburban or rural schools. For example, schools will get started on a particular reform under a principal, and then a new principal comes in and says, “Oh no, we’re not going to do that, we’re going to do this.” Well, all that time and whatever money was spent on the older reform is now wasted, right? And that does seem to be a much more powerful feature of urban schools than suburban schools.

At the moment, we have schools losing state funding [but] gaining federal stimulus money. Is this an opportunity to change the way they do business?

I think it is, or at least it could be. If the federal stimulus money is just used to fill in shortfalls caused by the state budget problem, then of course there won’t be any pressure for change. But my understanding is that the Obama administration is trying to use some of the stimulus money in what we would call project grants, grants for which districts have to apply and show what they’re doing with that money in more innovative ways.

You don’t seem persuaded that charter schools are the answer.

The problem with talking about charter schools is that they vary so much. And there are, of course, some brilliant charter schools, and there are some charter schools that are doing everything right. But the core of the charter school movement, I think, is this group of schools that I’ve labeled entrepreneurial. And they are schools managed by educational management organizations and charter management organizations. They tend to see education as a managerial problem. There’s very little attention in this particular entrepreneurial sector of charter schools to the quality of instruction.

Do you see examples of districts that are using their resources well?

Well, let’s see. San Diego, to some extent. Long Beach is always mentioned. A group called Springboard Schools profiled three of them: Elk Grove, Oak Grove and Rowland, which is a district I’ve never heard about. These are known places, and people have been visiting them, and I don’t think it’s a secret what they’re doing, but getting districts to change is difficult.

Any discussion about resources in schools usually comes around to the role of teachers unions and whether they’re a force for, you know . . .

Good or evil?

Good or evil. Where do you come down on that?

Unions don’t have to be barriers, but I think they sometimes are, given that we have lots of old-style industrial unions. I think reforming unions needs to go on in parallel with everything else.

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mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com