We invest public resources into the education of the public for the benefit of the public. (Bruce Baker, Educational Inequality and School Finance, 2018, p. 18).

Two key points: in public school funding, money matters, and cuts cause harm.

How much money a school system has available, as well as how that money is spent, make a big difference in the experiences kids have in school, whether their educational needs are met, and whether they go on to flourish in their adult lives. This seems like a common sense statement regarding U.S. public schools.

Yet for decades there has been an active campaign to claim the opposite. While the main point of Bruce Baker’s book is to argue how to think about and analyze school finance systems, Baker devotes his third chapter to discussing and debunking this misleading literature. If you are inclined to believe that money doesn’t matter, I urge you to read at least that chapter, or this report, which discusses some of the same sets of arguments.

Baker is careful in the language he uses to critique these studies, but honestly, how seriously can one take a study (for example) that assumes that all state court orders on education funding led directly to appropriations by state legislatures fulfilling those orders? Researchers just made this assumption, and did not bother to collect any information about actual appropriations and implementation, and claimed that court orders didn’t matter. This assumption flies in the face of American history. The history of New Jersey is a history of court orders ignored and resisted, and only slowly and grudgingly implemented, with ample backsliding in economic downturns. Nationwide this is more the rule than the exception.

Indeed, the New Jersey state aid formula that the legislature itself adopted in 2008 has been underfunded by the state legislature basically since it was adopted; see this coverage from 2015. Yes, that shortage from four years ago is more than one billion dollars. This year’s state budget proposes to increase school funding by about $200 million dollars, which is an improvement, but still means that the state is not fulfilling its own promises. (To see more details for Jersey City, check out Civic Parent’s analysis and visualizations.)

I don’t study education policy, but the arc of the argument that money doesn’t matter is very familiar to me from the literature on gender, race, and social policy in the U.S. Baker talks about the persistent but false narrative that U.S. public schools have bloated costs and have shown no progress on student achievement. Just like the false, racist, and intentionally misleading story of the “welfare queen”, this education policy narrative persists despite clear evidence to the contrary. The narrative serves the same purpose: discrediting public goods, in this case public schools, and indeed the very idea of a common public life. And it hurts our kids.

But it is more pernicious and counter-intuitive than that, because schools in the United States have always been unequal in their access to resources, and until Brown v. Board this was official, legal and legally and violently enforced public policy. This argument that money doesn’t matter is based on an ideology that some kids don’t matter, or at least that some kids in some schools matter more than other kids in other schools. In case it wasn’t clear, this is an anti-democratic ideology.

In Other People’s Children, Deborah Yaffe mentions an encounter between two New Jersey school board members, one a white man from Westfield, one an African-American man from Paterson, brought together in a meeting not long after the first Robinson v. Cahill ruling in 1972. Yaffe reports that the white school board member had this question for his counterpart in Paterson: “‘Why are you people making such a big deal out of money? After all, your kids don’t need what my kids need.'” (Yaffe p. 33). Again, in case it wasn’t clear, this is not just racist, it is factually incorrect and also anti-democratic.

Reading this made me think of this point, made years ago by leaders in WTOS, the west Texas IAF affiliate organization. These leaders described the first time they tried to get the city of Lubbock to do something for their majority Latino neighborhood–this was before WTOS was organized–and went to a city council meeting to testify, only to be told “there’s no money”. As they left the meeting, a city employee followed them out, to tell them, “Don’t give up, keep asking. What they are saying is that there is no money for you. Keep coming back. There is money.”

Money matters. It matters for kids whether their schools have adequate funding. And while the New Jersey state funding mechanisms after the Abbott v. Burke decisions began to actually be implemented is actually one of the better state school finance systems according to Baker, he notes that the actual appropriations from the state started to decline around 2005, even before the recession, and the adoption of SFRA in 2008 (pp. 112-113 and see this report).

A second point: cuts matter. Social scientists often look for “natural experiments”, and the recession of 2008 and subsequent cuts to education funding throughout the U.S., unfortunately for kids, provide such a phenomenon. Did cuts to state and local spending on education as a result of the recession cause changes in student outcomes? Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg have analyzed the effects of the recession on a variety of education finance and equity outcomes, including student achievement. The recession had a negative effect on student achievement, and had the largest effect in districts with the largest cuts to school personnel. Cuts have negative effects on kids. Again, this seems like a common sense conclusion, one that we could see just by talking to middle school students in Jersey City, who had their sports budget completely eliminated last fall. But in case you trust social scientists more than kids, there is your evidence.

Kids need schools that have enough funding to meet their educational needs. Money matters. Our promises to our kids matter. Our democratic public life matters. School funding cuts in districts where school funding is already inadequate hurt kids.

Let’s try to keep at least some of our promises to our kids. All of us will benefit.