PRINCETON, N.J. – If the nation wanted to design a system for funding public schools “to guarantee that poor children would get the least of everything that they needed in terms of an adequate education,” it could not find a better model than the current one, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., told attendees at a conference on Saturday hosted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ.
Because schools in the United States are funded through property taxes in local districts, poor areas generally do not have financial resources comparable to wealthier communities, he emphasized. The congressman, whose district covers large portions of urban Philadelphia, has been at the forefront of efforts to address the effects of this imbalance on schools through legislation.
Fattah was an advocate for the Obama administration’s creation earlier this year of the Equity and Excellence Commission to examine the effects of school finance structures on educational opportunity and recommend reforms.
“We actually do know how to have a public school system that works in terms of education excellence,” Fattah said in his keynote speech. “We see it in public schools in our suburban communities, wealthy suburban communities all across the land. These schools work very, very well. What we need to do is provide that same opportunity to all children.”
Later in the day, Robert Moses, a civil rights movement legend who is president and founder of the Algebra Project, a foundation devoted to immersing disadvantaged students in rigorous math curriculums, noted that “the greatest discrepancies in school funding are between states, not within states,” where current efforts to balance resources have focused attention.
Moses asked participants to consider whether the nation is ready to have “a national conversation about a constitutional amendment to guarantee a constitutional right to an education” as he has long advocated.
A Harvard-trained educator who was a field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Moses edited a book on that issue, Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, (Beacon, 2010).
