David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, September 30, 2022
This semester is the 50th anniversary of my undergraduate senior seminar in 1972 when I wrote my best research paper. It shaped my academic career choices and is still, unfortunately, relevant today.
My research paper was for a Regional and Urban Economics class at the University of Dayton, a so-called teaching university. At the time, it was titled “An Argument for the Elimination of the Property Tax As a Means of Financing Public Education.” Since then, I’ve inserted “Constitutional and Economic” before the word “Argument” to make it more explanatory and to display my increased verbosity gained through years of graduate education.
During the summer of 1972, despite the Vietnam War protests, the Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign, and the beginning of rumbling about the Watergate break-in, I had read in the news about several court cases working their way up to the Supreme Court that, if decided against local and state education agencies, would have dramatically changed American public education. Several were from Texas, and one from California, challenging the system of local property taxes as the primary means of funding public K-12 schools.
Public education is largely funded by a local property tax that results in local school districts having valuable assets being more able to raise revenue to spend on their schools. The disparities among the states, and within the same state, are large.
According to the Education Law Center, the average spending per student in 2019 was $15,114 per student and ranged from $26,634 in New York to Arizona’s $9,717. Missouri is slightly below the average at $14,438. Missouri’s spending per student depends on a combination of factors that results in a disparity of more than $6,000 per student.
Faced with the challenge of selecting a research paper topic, and wanting to be timely and a bit edgy, I proposed researching about the pending court. One of the hurdles I immediately faced was my lack of understanding of public school education finance. Even terms like “per capita expenditure” and “local tax effort,” as well as constitutional law jargon, such as “suspect classification,” caused slight anxiety.
I talked with my professor, Duane Oyen, who, thought public school funding was a rather good idea, and suggested I talk with his colleague, John Weiler, who I had for another class, because he was very knowledgeable about school finance and was completing his dissertation on a related topic. The idea of talking to a professor other than the class instructor was rather novel to me. I was then faced with the unfamiliar situation of having two professors know what I aspired to do.
In this case, their expectations elevated my effort. I read several court decisions, learned about local property taxes and how they were the primary basis for local school funding, and collected data about the Ohio school system. One of the professors suggested I include a statistical analysis of school revenue and school spending in Ohio school districts. This would require calculating a correlation coefficient, one of those things I knew for the test in Stats class but had quickly forgotten. A fellow student who had done well in Multivariate Statistics in the Psychology Department helped me calculate correlations using an adding machine (this was before the IT revolution and before computers were widely used.).
Within six months, March 21 of my senior year, about a month after deciding Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. It ruled that inequalities in public school funding are not a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution because public education is not a fundamental right. I was shocked — both at the Supreme Court decision and the fact that I was “ahead of the curve” on this public policy issue. I am rather sure than my classmates were more interested in Vietnam and abortion than in inequalities in education funding as we approached our undergraduate commencement.
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, and the associated cases, may be the most important Supreme Court decision that few people heard of. Most Americans know that Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ended de jure segregation in public education but the issue of unequal resources has continued with little public attention.
Imagine if the Supreme Court had ruled that the equal protection of the laws clause of the 14th Amendment required states to provide equal education to all students. The education gap between rich and poor districts, and between white and non-whites, would certainly be much less than it is today. Imagine if graduation rates, and reading and math scores, were more equal throughout America for the last 50 years. Imagine the reduced social and political costs of our remedial efforts to close the achievement gap. But such policy change has not occurred. California, Texas, New Jersey, and even Kansas, have made efforts to equalize education spending, but it has not been a major policy goal in most states.
Fifty years later, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez still catches my attention in public policy books and media reports.
As for me, completing that senior seminar paper in the manner I did undoubtedly shaped my academic career. I experienced the excitement of learning about a topic of genuine interests, of reading as much as possible about a subject. I experience taking pride in academic work, of going out of my routine comfort zone. Moreover, I recognized the effort and attention that two professors invested in me. Fifty years ago next summer, Professor Weiler lent me a copy of his dissertation, the first dissertation I ever read. About 10 years later, I wrote my own. You never know when public and private investments in humans will produce a good return.
David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.
Webber Rough and Polished 