A Review of Amanda Bright Brownson’s Dissertation on Texas School
Funding
By Greg Moses
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Any hour now, Texas is expecting to read
detailed “findings of fact” from the trial judge who just (and justly) ruled two weeks ago that the
state’s school funding system is flatly unconstitutional. Make no mistake, the facts are plain. And
the future of civil rights is on the line.
In a 2002 statistical review of school equity
in Texas, for example, Amanda Bright Brownson predicted exactly the court rulings that were issued in
mid-September after a six-week trial. Fully two years before the judge ruled that state funding for
education was neither adequate nor equitable, Brownson wrote that, “Issues of both equity and adequacy
must still be addressed as we try to further raise our expectations for schools and students.”
And, with the school funding lawsuit already on the docket (as she was defending her
study before a dissertation committee at the University of Texas at Austin) Brownson even hinted that a
state-mandated $1.50 cap on local property taxes might pose “capacity” problems. The judge, in
striking down the cap, agreed that the cap had reached capacity.
Furthermore, warned
Brownson, “the Legislature will have to proceed with caution if it is not going to lose ground gained
with respect to equity, as it attempts to address capacity.” And on this point, too, Brownson
predicted the structure of the three-point court ruling that now will be taken to higher courts in
Texas for review. While the judge agreed with West Orange Cove plaintiffs that the school system is
under-funded, and that the tax cap should be lifted, he also agreed with intervening districts led by
Edgewood and Alvarado, that the state’s allocation of money is inefficient (the court’s codewords for
inequitable).
Considering Brownson’s impressive run of predictions, an observer of the
school funding trial might stand vindicated for having felt that the state’s defense looked rather
desperate. We’ll get another look at the state’s logic when a formal appeal is filed.
But returning to the Brownson study; even though it presents effective findings, there are
two features of its methodology that worry me in the longer run. First, Brownson’s analysis does not
address the problem of school equity as a civil rights problem. Edgewood interveners, of course, were
more clear on this point, because Edgewood leadership has been working on the problem at least since
1968, when the first “Edgewood” case, Rodriguez vs. San Antonio, was filed in federal court. Although
the US Supreme Court denied the claims of Rodriguez, an eloquent dissenting opinion written by civil
rights legend Thurgood Marshall ended with a footnote in 1973, that suggested a legal appeal to the
Texas constitution. A decade later, the Edgewood cases were resumed, putting Marshall’s advice to good
effect.
Brownson’s study was class-based, with focus on lingering gaps between “all
students” and students who are “economically disadvantaged.” Edgewood interveners, led by attorneys
from the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) also presented statistical gaps between “Anglo”
and “Hispanic” students; between “English speaking” students and those with “Limited English
Proficiency” (LEP)–terms of struggle that speak more plainly to the civil rights legacy of the school
funding struggle in Texas.
At first glance, the example of the Edgewood interveners
might suggest that Brownson’s methodologies can be easily adapted to civil rights applications.
Brownson, for instance, showed that equity gaps increase when expenses per student include costs of
educating specific populations, such as the “economically disadvantaged.” Using the same kind of
model, Edgewood interveners argued that gaps also increase if one accounts for the cost of bringing
mostly Spanish speaking students into a system of English proficiency. In one of the more thrilling
dramas of the courtroom, trial judge John Dietz took the state’s own bilingual expert, and in three
minutes’ time, got her to admit that Texas should triple its funding formula for bilingual
education.
And, just as Brownson used test scores from state-sponsored exams to
demonstrate lingering performance gaps for impoverished children, the Edgewood interveners plugged in
test scores to show gaps that separate ethnicities and language groups. So the uses made of the
Brownson models might seem to be extended easily to civil rights demographics. As long as the state
keeps pumping out standardized test scores, then inequities in education will continue to be measurable
for civil rights purposes. But this is where I think the model will break down in the longer run.
Tests are convenient measurements of “output” for anyone who needs to place numbers on a
scale. For students, teachers, parents, principals, and policy makers alike, test numbers have become
common currency. In the Texas courtroom, test numbers collected by the state posed invaluable evidence
against the state. Not only were overall passing rates on state exams introduced as evidence of
“inadequacy,” but gaps between student “subgroups” were tagged as exhibits to show inequity.
I have an amateurish hunch that the currency of “test scores” is pretty closely aligned with
the rise of the U.S. dollar (read capitalist ideology), and my suspicion is somewhat validated by
Brownson’s gloss on the history of “production functions” in education. Today’s educational
administrator is addicted to the kinds of fixes that “production functions” make possible.
What is both interesting and tragic, however, is that “production functions” were imported
from industry (capitalists) to education (capitalists in waiting) in order to satisfy a civil rights
mandate. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that called for a major study of educational equity in
the United States and it was the resulting Coleman Report of 1966 that used “production functions” to
demonstrate that schools were less to blame for student performance than, say, “family and peer group
characteristics.” So it was a capital intensive statistical tool that was used to prove how academic
achievement was more or less “inherently” attributable to social conditions rather than schooling. And
all this was done in the name of civil rights.
Of course, if the plain logic of the
Coleman report’s findings were to be followed out, we would have to conclude that social revolution
rather than school reform would be a wiser mechanism for expanding the intelligence of a people. And
there is a deeper civil rights truth to this line of thought, a truth that cost many civil rights
activists their lives during the sixties and seventies. But in the muddled world of everyday politics
in America, there is an oh-so-patient assumption that social reform, if not revolution, might be
nurtured through school reform. And when you get to thinking about all the things that would be needed
for any semi-coherent social revolution, or when you consider the way th
at status quo defenders in
America simply execute civil rights leaders outright, school reform doesn’t look like such a bad place
to both work and live.
At any rate, the marriage of civil rights to test scores is a
tragic match in at least one respect over the longer term. The more that test scores are standardized,
the more the curriculum must follow standardized tests, and, consequently, the less freedom teachers
will have over time to innovate the very social changes that will be needed to stop re-inscribing the
“inherent” structure of social intelligence as we find it. As Carter G. Woodson argued in the
Miseducation of the Negro (1933), standardized education for white students is going to wind up being a
repressive education for black students. Which means to me that attempts to bring “subgroups up to
standards” through “standardized methods” is a logical prescription for intensified “miseducation,”
precisely along anti-civil-rights lines.
Texas state demographer Steve Murdoch is getting
a lot of credit for spurring the Texas court in the direction of its rulings. Murdoch argued that
trends in poverty and “diversity” (more of both coming soon) demand vigorous educational reform. But
if I’m not terribly mistaken in my memory, it was a similar nationwide demographic report from the
Hudson Institute (Workforce 2000, published in 1987) that coincided with the state’s development of
“standards” in the first place. Something at that time looked a little too slick to me, when “scare
demographics” were answered with “standards.” I didn’t believe then that “standards” represented a
sudden eruption of “good faith” among educational leaders of Texas, and I still don’t believe
it.
Consider a recent out-of-class experience. On a recent Monday morning, a guy starts
yelling at a cashier: “well if you understood English I could tell you!” The guy storms out of the
snack bar, and I feel obliged to buy something from the cashier right away. She hides herself,
however, behind a tall stack of product and equipment, avoiding eye contact as she attempts to regain
her self-respect. Her co-worker steps up to take the next pitch. According to Texas standards, we had
just witnessed a so-called “English-proficient speaker” attempting to communicate with a person of
“Limited English Proficiency” otherwise known as an LEP.
I think it was clear to
everyone in the room who had the real problem with intelligent communication that day, but in the
jargon of Texas education policy, there are lots of LEPs, like that cashier, whose relationship to
English is just this shaming, abusive accusation that “standard English” makes speakers so much smarter
and better than all the other people around. Of course, there is no educational justification for this
attitude whatsoever, which makes it all the more shameful that the confrontation that I witnessed was
played out on a campus of higher education.
The Edgewood interveners are not only
property poor, they are predominantly Hispanic. The students, therefore, are facing not only a class
struggle, economically, but their ethnicity also presents them to the Texas educational establishment
as a “special challenge.” And Brownson’s reliance on standardized test scores, a habit picked up by
MALDEF attorneys, begins to solidify (or “legitimate” if you will) a regime of standardized
instruction.
It was profoundly ironic that on Sept. 15 the trial judge in Texas
referenced the Texas Revolution against Mexico in his prepared remarks after closing arguments. He
said that even Texas rebels wanted better education for their kids. The judge was arguing that
educational commitments could not be severed from the cultural history of Texas law. Yet, the very
next day, Diez y seis de Septiembre, or Sept. 16, would be a lively day of celebration among many
Texans of Mexican descent, in commemoration of a quite different revolution—the one that freed Mexico
from Spain. Between the judge’s Sept. 15 reference to the Texas Revolution and widespread celebrations
in of the Mexican Revolution on Sept. 16 lies a borderland of cultural histories that Texas people
share.
After all, Gloria Anzaldua didn’t live for nothing, you know. Her Chicana,
mestiza, frontera sin fronteras sensibilities were Texas-born and Texas-bred, and we are not going to
bury anything she stood for. I remember a job interview once by telephone: “What do you teach?” Well
I’m teaching Gloria Anzaldua’s new book at the moment. “Hmm, I think our committee would be looking
for something a little more standard than that.” Precisely. What would be the point of teaching
borderland consciousness if your students are busy preparing for standardized Graduate Record Exams?
So Brownson did a brilliant job by anticipating the model of judgment that the judge
would eventually adopt. And the judge has wisely folded claims from Edgewood and Alvarado into the
claims of West Orange Cove. As a consequence, Texas school funding is heading in a helpful direction,
toward better and more equitable funding. So I don’t mean to shout “stop the train!” (as if the
conductor would be listening to me anyway). But I do want to suggest that some major “challenges” of
Texas education will require much more from this state than “adequate and efficient funding” or
standardized regimes of tests. If Texas is going to grow, it will also have to grow up. And this will
mean revisiting widespread assumptions about regimes of standardized instruction, the better to keep
“test scores” and “English Proficiency” from killing the spirit of civil
rights.
Notes:
(1) Amanda Bright Brownson: School Finance Reform in Post
Edgewood Texas: An Examination of Revenue Equity and Implications for Student Performance.
Dissertation (Univ. of Texas-Austin: December 2002). Posted in pdf format by Permission of the Author
at the Texas Civil Rights Review: https://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke/downloadz/brownson.pdf
(2) And that cashier I referenced in the incident above? She was not Hispanic. She was
Asian.
Greg Moses is Editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of
Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of
Nonviolence.
Texas Civil Rights Review 