How Within-District Spending Inequities Help Some Schools to Fail

School district budgets are in the news. In the past year, super intendents in Seattle, Rochester, and Baltimore have all left their jobs under pressure because of unexpected deficits, and as of summer 2003 Oakland's superintendent was in similar trouble because of a $50 mil lion deficit for the year. The bad economy is partly responsible. These and thousands of other dis tricts have suffered simultaneous declines in local, state, and federal rev enue. But in these cases, district actions made the worst of a tough situation. Instead of adjusting expenditures as revenues declined, these districts con tinued spending, with some plugging their budgets (that is, inventing rev enues to make the books look balanced) in the hope that things would work out in the end.1 Such plugging is neither new nor limited to Seattle, Rochester, Baltimore, and Oakland. As a former superintendent involved in an earlier financial meltdown elsewhere explained to one of us, "You can always find money if you are committed to doing something. You just spend it now and cover it next year when the budget goes up." Another justification for budget plugging is uncertainty. Few districts know precisely how much money they have, and surprise surpluses are also possible. Even in these recent recessionary times, the Philadelphia public schools found $8 million it did not know it had?enough, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, to employ 180 teachers.2