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.S.321 would have been inconsistent.But if his guiding principle was in fact no intraschool inequality, then his two decisions were  easily reconciled,Goldstein says:  A fourth-grade teacher is more troubling than an art teacher,because its benefits to the school are less general. 15But if anything was testimony to the chancellor s focus on intraschoolequity, it was the way in which he finally resolved the P.S.41 affair.After pro-hibiting the grade-four parents from paying for their children s teacher, Crewturned around and directed the district superintendent to find public fundingfor the position.According to Lawrence, the money  came from a professionaldevelopment fund that would have benefited all the teachers in the district.Ironically, the denouement in the P.S.41 case was that the chancellor, thoughhe avoided intraschool inequity in private funding, introduced a new measureof interschool inequity in public funding.To uphold the principle that allclasses within a school must benefit from private parental support, Crewmollified the angry parents by raiding a public fund that would otherwisehave benefited all schools within the district.It is far from a singular case.Paul Vance, former superintendent of schoolsin Montgomery County, Maryland, recalls a group of parents in an east SilverSpring school seeking to pay privately for a special computer-lab teacher foradvanced students.The board said no; the parents were upset, and  what endedthe debate, Vance says,  was that the superintendent hired the teacher himselfon the public payroll. 16 All of which goes to show how very sacred is the rule0333-4-04 ch04:Layout 1 10/29/09 3:29 PM Page 6262 EDUCATIONthat requires private funding to be distributed equitably within the school.Officials are willing to distribute public funds inequitably across schools inorder to uphold it.In a sense, it is not surprising that intraschool inequity should emerge assuch a powerful sub rosa criterion in debates over parental funding.It has aleast-common-denominator quality: when politicians know that a particularexpenditure raises equity concerns not only for other school communities buteven for some parents at the particular school in question, they have enoughcover to say no.The problem, however, is that intraschool equity is a very poorproxy for interschool equity; the two frequently diverge.Indeed, the universalfastidiousness with which the taboo against intraschool inequity is observed,in a nation where far more substantial amounts of interschool inequity areroutinely tolerated, is remarkable.Consider some examples.When it comes to funding field trips at costs of$200 or so each Brooklyn s Goldstein, whose school otherwise raises moneyin the six figures that he would never put into a districtwide pot, insists thatparents put their contributions into a schoolwide fund. They cannot goahead, Goldstein says,  and raise money for a particular grade s outing. Like-wise with Sam Skootsky, head of the booster club at Westwood School in LosAngeles, which raises $240,000 in parental money annually. Fundraising, hesays,  must benefit the whole school communally; you can t fundraise just forkindergarten.We have turned down contributions earmarked for particu-lar classes. Yet Skootsky dismisses the idea of parents giving their money to adistrictwide fund, one that would benefit all schools in the area, preciselybecause that would be  too communal. 17Even in cases where individual classes are allowed to raise limited fundsas they still are, for example, under the old rule Chancellor Crew revived inNew York the intraschool equity norm cabins the practice within tight con-straints. For a long time, says Nancy Wainman, head of the well-heeledbooster club at L.A. s Warner Avenue Elementary, which contributes mightilyto interschool inequity by raising $200,000 annually,  individual classes atWarner raised money for various projects and then kept the surpluses; we puta stop to that.Now, the surpluses must go into the general school kitty, to bespent by the [school s] leadership council. 18This principle of intraschool equity should not be confused with the verydifferent principle courts have applied in cases concerning individual parentalfee-paying.Courts tend to permit such fees precisely when only some stu-dents within the school will benefit asking sixth-grade parents to payindividually for their child s field trip, say, is okay but not when the fees are0333-4-04 ch04:Layout 1 10/29/09 3:29 PM Page 63WHAT S WRONG WITH PRIVATE FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS? 63meant to benefit the whole school, in which case they are considered an ille-gitimate tax.19 But while intraschool equity might not govern when parentalmonies flow into the school through fees, it does rule when they come inthrough fundraising.The problem is that although intraschool equity pro-vided Chancellor Crew with a rationale with which to prohibit privately paidgrade-level teachers, it does not, as Nancy Wainman and Sam Skootsky attest,seem to preclude much else in the way of interschool inequity.And, in fact, the intraschool-equity norm does not even protect this lastredoubt of grade-level teachers.Consider the case of Portland, Oregon.Unlikein New York where parents may privately pay the salaries of French teach-ers but are forbidden to pay for grade-level teachers in Portland, parents areallowed to pay the salaries of grade-level teachers, while a parent group at onelocal school was denied permission to underwrite the salary of a Germanteacher.It turns out, however, that the principle of intraschool equity was atplay in Portland too; it just generated a different conclusion.One of the con-ditions that attaches to the hiring of an extra grade-level teacher in Portlandis that the whole school, or at least a large proportion of it, benefits.Grade-level teachers can be made fungible, and in Portland an extra one is generallyused to lower student-teacher ratios not just in the grade itself but through-out the school.Or, as Portland middle-school director Peter Hamilton puts it, When you privately fund one more grade-one teacher, it can help [the] kidin grade four because of how the splits work out. 20 The problem with theproposed German teacher at Portland s Lincoln High, by contrast, was thatGerman was of interest only to the kids of the few parents pushing it.Whenthe council said  no German teacher, the interested parents declined to makea comparable contribution to the school as a whole just as most of the P.S.41 parents did in New York, when their plans for the grade-four teacher wereturned down.WHAT S WRONG?From superintendents to school boards, and from principals to parents,intraschool equity is the abiding norm across America, the mother rule towhich parental fundraising for schools must adhere.But it is useless as a stan-dard for drawing distinctions between more or less egregious kinds ofinterschool inequity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]