Missouri Public School Funding

At issue herein are questions regarding the issue of equality in the financial system used to provide resources to Missouri's public schools. An overview of the issue and its history, an analysis of both sides of the arguments being advanced, and a personal response to the issue will be presented.

The plaintiffs in the recent Missouri litigation are three groups of school districts, 264 in all, that represent about 60 percent of the state's pubic school enrollment (Podgursky et al. 174). Each group of school districts has advanced the argument that the formula used by the state to allocate funds is neither equitable nor equal. The defendants in the 2007 case, which was the most recent in a series of cases, include various state officials and the Missouri Board of Education. Podgursky et al. (175) contend that "in practice, the real defendant was the state legislature, which crafted the school finance law."

The issue of school finance in Missouri is not new. Accord

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re that the government spend no more than 25 percent of state revenues for funding public schools and, as long as the state was in compliance with that mandate, it could be perceived as doing its job appropriately. Podgursky and Springer (31-32) contend that Missouri school districts continue to complain about a lack of equity in funding allocation. These researchers state that Missouri has a highly skewed distribution of students across districts. Some districts have high concentrations of students whereas others are more sparsely populated. This inevitably means that there will be a disparity in the amount of funding provided to each school. Podgursky and Springer (33) also point out that the issue hinges not necessarily on the distribution of resources among school districts but among students. Unfortunately, discussions of school finance and equity are seen as conflating the two. Missouri suffers from significant intra-district inequalities in the urban districts of the state. One such inequality "arises from the use of salary schedules for teachers that set base pay entirely on the basis of years of seniority and graduate credits or degrees...Because schools with students with higher socioeconomic status are genera
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Approximate Word count = 2409
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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