A New Defendant at the Table: An Overview of Missouri School Finance and Recent Litigation

Abstract

Like many other states, Missouri has gone through several rounds of school finance litigation. However, the trial just concluded was unusual in two respects. First, three taxpayers were allowed to intervene for the defense and, in the process, raise important questions concerning the efficiency of school spending and broader questions of school reform. Second, the outcome at the circuit court level, which focused nearly entirely on points of law, was a complete victory for the defense. This article provides an overview of disputes of Missouri school finance and evidence pertaining to some of the points in dispute at the trial. These lessons generalize to other states facing school finance litigation. The authors conclude that changes in school funding formulas, and the seemingly interminable litigation about those formulas, are not an effective vehicle for addressing achievement gaps or the overall level of school performance.

This article was prepared for the “From Equity to Adequacy to Choice” Conference, Truman School of Public Affairs/Missouri Show-Me Institute, October 30, 2007. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹Taxpayer-funded spending to date totals at least $5.0 million. This includes $3.6 million by the school districts and $1.4 million by the state Attorney General's Office (AGO) to a private law firm for assistance in the litigation. (Franck, 2007). These totals do not include the time of the AGO staff.

²Communication: August 2007. Abbeville County School District v. State, 515 S.E. 2d 535 (S.C. 1999) (state's attorney and counsel for the state legislature, personal communication).

³It is likely that plaintiffs view expenditures for litigation as cost effective. First, and perhaps foremost, these costs are borne by taxpayers, not the individuals involved. Second, winning almost always results in significant increases in school district revenues. Finally, increases in school district revenues almost always result in pay raises for teachers and administrators (see, e.g., Clark, 2003; Hanushek & Rivkin, 1997).

⁴ Committee for Educational Equality v. State of Missouri (1993).

⁵See trial testimony of Robert Costrell for a critique of the methodology Augenblick and Myers employed in their “adequacy” study.

⁶In several states the AG, or other state agency, contracts with a private law firm to represent the state.

⁷See Interveners' Motion to Intervene.

⁸Article X, Section 16, of the Missouri Constitution provides in part as follows: “The state is prohibited from requiring any new or expanded activities by counties and other political subdivisions without full state financing, or from shifting the tax burden to counties and other political subdivisions.” Article X, Section 21, of the Missouri Constitution provides as follows: “The state is hereby prohibited from reducing the state financed portion of the costs of any existing activity or service required of counties and other political subdivisions. A new activity or service or an increase in the level of any activity or service beyond that required by existing law shall not be required by the general assembly or any state agency of counties or other political subdivisions, unless a state appropriation is made and disbursed to pay the county or other political subdivision for any increased costs.” Plantiff CEE (Committee for Educational Equality) Findings of Facts, May 2007.

⁹There is no scientific evidence for any particular funding weight, a point conceded by one of the plaintiff experts. The decision to weight a poor student at 1.2 or 1.4 times a nonpoor student reflects a normative decision by legislatures as to fairness in resource allocation, rather than an objective assessment of the “cost” of educating the two types of students.

¹⁰Officially, Missouri has 524 school districts. However, for this study we drop 2—the St. Louis and Pemiscot County Special School Districts—and focus only on regular school districts.

¹¹ Committee for Educational Equality v. State of Missouri (1993).

¹²The complete report is available at http://www.schoolchoiceformissouri.org/trial/trialselecteddefense.html.

¹³Stated more formally, ANOVA decomposes total variation in student test scores into two components: variation in mean achievement between districts, and variation within the district around the district mean.

¹⁴A similar decomposition can be made within and between schools. At least 80% of achievement inequality is within schools.

¹⁵One important limitation of school finance data in Missouri and most other states is that spending per student can only be measured at the district level. Thus all students in the same district are assigned the same value of per-pupil spending rather than a measure of the actual resources expended on them. Although spending per student is generally not available at the school building level, some researchers have been able to secure school-level resource data in some districts (Iatarola & Stiefel, 2003; Roza, Guin, Grosse, & Deburgomaster, 2007; Roza & Hill, 2004). They find considerable intradistrict inequality, arising primarily from differences in average teacher pay between schools.