Finance, of Public Schools

Foundations of School Finance

Finance, like economics, has been practiced since the beginning of time, but Ellwood P. Cubberley formally brought the topic of school finance to academic press in a landmark 1906 work on the funding of schools. Written at the beginning of a sea-change shift from predominantly local community funding toward state funding for public schools, Cubberley argued for greater state participation in the fiscal process. This argument was predicated in part by early rationales for investment in education as set forth by economists.

As popular necessity for state participation in school finance arrangements was recognized, methodologies in the determination of state funding developed. Early methodological benchmarks were achieved by creating a foundation model for state funding and by establishing a system for weighted pupil units of measurement. The foundation program methodology recognized that inequitable fiscal resources were bound to exist among many schools. The “foundation” was the amount of money required to provide each child with a basic level of schooling. Once the foundation amount of funding was determined, the foundation was then equalized to the extent that greater state fiscal resources were dedicated to schools that had fewer local resources.

Although the foundation program methodology accounted for monetary inequities, it did not recognize the unequal expenditures that were required to support different types of educational programs. Accordingly, Paul Mort developed a methodology in 1924 that considered these differences. The initial formulation involved fiscal support for the provision of [Page 391]educational services to secondary pupils in proportion to elementary pupils. A weighted pupil unit of 1.2 was assigned to each secondary pupil, while 1.0 was assigned to each elementary pupil for school funding purposes. The rationale behind this methodology was that secondary pupils were more expensive to educate than were elementary pupils. The same methodology could also be applied to specific program areas, such as vocational and special education services.

As political muster swelled for the creation, organization, and state finance of public schools, critical debates also ensued. The American public school began as one, individual unit. The “system,” so to speak, was a collection of these solitary units. Across the nation, each state's evolving public school system progressed at a rate different from other states' systems. A single, national system of public schools did not exist, and the vast majority of states' public school systems were predominantly locally controlled and funded. The invention of state funding for public schools, while beneficial, implied the threat of state oversight in an endeavor that was historically in, about, and of the local community.

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