Strayer, George D.

A leading figure in school administration at Teachers College, Columbia University, George D. Strayer, along with Robert M. Haig, is best known as the originator of the Stayer-Haig plan, which has served as the basic formula for states to make general grants of aid to school districts on an equalized basis.

Strayer (1876–1962) started his long career in education with an interest in classroom teaching, specifically in the area of mathematics, and he coauthored a popular arithmetic textbook series of the time. However, he came to be regarded as a founding light in the new field of educational administration. An alumnus of Columbia, he studied at Teachers College at a time when it was the heralded breeding ground and center of a new, empirically based, progressive educational philosophy. As head of the division of field studies at Teachers College for over 20 years (1921–1942), Strayer also served as director of the Division of Organization and Administration of Education at Teachers College from 1937 to 1942. His national reputation led to service with numerous respected organizations, among these the presidency of the National Education Association.

Along with Columbia professors Paul Mort and N. L. Engelhardt, Strayer was influential in the creation of the school survey movement. Their studies of school systems across America, conducted through Strayer's field studies unit, provided the groundwork for many of the recommendations that helped shape administrative practice in the first half of the twentieth century. From this basis, then, Strayer came to be seen as a national authority on school administration and finance.

Professor Strayer, though, probably gained his greatest renown for work that literally established the field of school finance. Richard King, Austin Swanson, and Scott Sweetland noted that Strayer, partnering with Robert Haig, first devised a plan to share educational costs between states and localities through the use of what is still known today as the foundation formula. According to their model, Strayer and Haig envisioned that each school district would levy a uniform local property tax rate sufficient to meet education costs only in the most property-wealthy school system; the state would then make up the difference between this foundation level and what could be raised locally in each of the other districts.

Under a strict Strayer-Haig formula, as utilized presently, the state specifies a dollar amount per student that all school districts must receive to guarantee a minimally adequate education. The state then guarantees the difference between the amount raised locally using some qualifying tax rate and the guaranteed expenditure level.

As part of this groundbreaking work in 1923, Strayer and Haig were first to address the need to equalize resources across school systems within a state to provide an education program for every student that at least met some minimal standard. Previously, general [Page 968]state aid to schools had been solely in the form of flat grants without regard to district fiscal capacity—the Strayer-Haig formula remedied this primary defect of the dominant flat grant system for funding schools.