Managing Alabama’s school funding problems isn’t fixing them

Students walk through the hallways of Livingston Jr. High School in Livingston, Ala. on Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023. (Will McLelland/Alabama Reflector)

There’s a pamphlet in the Alabama Department of Archives and History written by Booker T. Washington. It’s called “ How To Build Up A Good School in the South ” and dates from the first decade of the 20th century.

Washington was trying to address a practical problem for Black Alabamians: how to keep their schools open. Because Alabama’s Jim Crow government had segregated the system and was doing all it could to destroy Black education.

The taxes Black Alabamians paid to educate their children got spent on white schools. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the practice . The lack of funding meant Black communities often struggled to pay teachers. Many communities could only keep children in class for three months at a time.

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Washington faced a desperate situation. So he gave desperate advice.

He urged Black communities to dig even deeper into their pockets and buy lumber to build a school.

Washington even suggested putting children to work on a cotton patch to raise the money needed to pay a teacher.

“Some parents may object to this at first, but they will soon see that it is better to let the school close at 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon and let the children work on the school land for an hour or two, and in this way keep the school open six or seven months, than to let it close at the end of three months,” Washington wrote.

Imagine that. Your government makes it so hard for your children to get a rudimentary education that a respected educator suggests subjecting them to the hot, hand-shredding work of picking cotton.

There are few better illustrations of the foundational cruelties of Alabama’s education system than that.

I don’t know if Arthur Orr and Danny Garrett have these atrocities in mind as they look at overhauling Alabama’s public school funding method. But I hope they do.

The Alabama Legislature’s education budget chairs are leading an effort that could spell changes in how the state distributes tax dollars to schools.

The state uses a system known as Average Daily Membership (ADM). The state takes an average of a school’s enrollment in the 20 days after Labor Day. It then divides the ADM in a formula that creates “teacher units,” a rough approximation of the number of teachers needed in a school, which determines funding.

This way of divvying up resources can lead to major inequities. A small school in a poor area with high rates of absenteeism — poverty often correlates to low school attendance — could get less money than it needs.  So can a school with declining attendance. The formula does not take into account certain populations that may need more resources than others.

In last spring’s legislative session, lawmakers approved an Orr-sponsored bill to set up a commission to study the system and create a “modern, weighted, student-based funding model that would reflect the true cost of educating various student groups and moving all students toward proficiency.”

The bill names some of these groups: English language learners; gifted students; low-income students, poverty students (it separates the two) and students with disabilities.

The commission’s early work looks promising. A May meeting focused on funding students with lower incomes and creating funding for students who have special needs. Recommendations should emerge in February.

Of course, it’s important to watch those proposals evolve. It’s one thing to increase funding for low-income students in public schools. It’s another to steer money out of those schools and toward charters that cater to gifted students — one plausible outcome from these recommendations.

But give lawmakers credit for trying to alleviate the inequities of our system.

It’s just that they’re not addressing the core problem: perpetual underfunding of public education.

We make it very hard for local communities to fund their schools. That’s a legacy of Jim Crow and white elites’ racist hostility to Black education.

Local taxes are severely capped, particularly on residential property. Rural districts that sit next to large swathes of timberland can’t really tax it; the state constitution protects the forest barons from civic responsibility.

If a community wants to raise taxes to provide adequate funding, it has to go through the Legislature and the unelected groups that dominate it.

When Montgomery leaders moved to increase property taxes in 2020 to provide desperately needed funding for public schools — a measure that passed with 62% of the vote that year — they first had to deal with the local chapter of the Alabama Farmers Federation , a powerful organization that generally opposes property tax hikes and made it very difficult for the county’s democratically-elected representatives to exercise democracy. They convinced Republicans to put delays on the funding that pointlessly starved schoolchildren in Montgomery of resources.

Lawmakers can find ways to better distribute the state’s education revenues. But that’s not solving the problem. That’s managing it. If communities are not given more control over their local finances and are not allowed to provide their educators with the resources they need, Alabama schools will continue to lag behind the country’s.

Maybe our lawmakers aren’t asking children to go to work to make up for our failures. But the state government is still getting in the way of communities making the right choices for their children.

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