Teaching school finance to preservice teachers with a team-based

simulation

As teacher educators, we believe that knowledge of school finance is of critical

importance for prospective teachers, particularly as they struggle to make sense of how
their particular school contexts fit into the wider social debates about paying for public
education in a democracy (Robertson, 2008). We view this understanding of school
finance as especially important for teachers who seek to teach for justice and equity as
democratic values by working on the system as they work within it (Bartell, 2013;
Conklin & Hughes, 2016; Kumashiro, 2009). It is for this reason that we have been
engaged in the work of teaching school finance concepts to prospective teachers for
over a decade, and in this article we share the lessons learned from this work, including
preliminary empirical data of effectiveness. We begin with the premise that all teachers
require a firm understanding of school finance as a fundamental component of the
knowledge needed in order to advocate for issues of equity, both locally within schools
and districts, as well as in state and national contexts. Comprehending the operation of
school finance is an integral aspect of engaged citizenship precisely because it is the
product of democratic deliberation, negotiation, and action (Sobol, 2000). Deciding how
citizens ought to contribute to the public gooddas well as determining how funds raised
in this manner ought to be redistributed to best effectdis a question at the heart of
modern democratic societies because the amount of money used for schools has a
direct impact on outcomes (Baker, 2018; Jackson, Johnson, & Persico, 2016). In the
short term, the goal of this project is to further hone the aims, materials, and
assessments within this school finance module in order to strengthen it as an
instructional intervention.

The longer-term purpose of this program of research is to further a public

understanding of school funding issues across a broad swath of educational
stakeholders. Though the present article is limited to a focus on preservice teachers, we
envision the teaching materials developed for this project being used with
administrators, parent groups, in-service teachers, school board members, legislators,
and other community members in order to serve an educative function about the ways
in which taxation and school finance are related. This article's aims are therefore both to
describe our rationale and design for an educational intervention strategy for teaching
school finance concepts to undergraduate preservice teachers, and to report what we
have learned from our efforts to do so. Drawing upon the school finance literature, we
first present a simplified list of ten concepts that serve as the intended learning targets
for the preservice teachers in the study, and argue for the importance of teachers'
knowledge of school finance concepts generally within a framework of economic
literacy. Next, we describe the School Funding Simulation and detail the design
principles for how it is intended to foster an understanding of school finance concepts.
We then describe the findings of a qualitative pilot study of the School Funding
Simulation in four undergraduate classrooms, and conclude the paper by drawing upon
lessons learned from this project to make the case for the inclusion of school finance
concepts in the teacher preparation curriculum. * Corresponding author. E-mail
addresses: larkind@montclair.edu (D.B. Larkin), maloneyt@montclair.edu (T. Maloney).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal
homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.06.001
0742-051X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Teaching and Teacher Education
85 (2019) 1e12
 San Antonio, 78207: In America’s Most Segregated
City, a Radical School Integration Experiment
Designed Around Poverty, Trauma, and Parental
Choice Is Working

Over several months this past spring, national correspondent Beth Hawkins
tracked the groundbreaking integration efforts of the 78207, the zip code located on the
west side of San Antonio, Texas. It is the poorest neighborhood in America’s most
economically segregated city: 91 percent of students in the San Antonio Independent
School District are Latino, 6 percent are black, and 93 percent qualify for free or
reduced-price lunch. As Beth reports, into this divided landscape three years ago came
a new schools chief, Pedro Martinez, with a mandate to break down the centuries-old
economic isolation that has its heart in the 78207. In response, Martinez launched one
of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.
He started with a novel approach that yielded eye-popping information: Using
family income data, he created a map showing the depth of poverty on each city block
and in every school in the district — a color-coded street guide comprising granular
details unheard of in education. And then he started integrating schools, not by race,
but by income, factoring in a spectrum of additional elements, such as parents’
education levels and homelessness. To achieve the kind of integration he was looking
for, he would first have to better understand the gradations of poverty in every one of
his schools and what kinds of supports those student populations require, and then find
a way to woo affluent families from other parts of the city to disrupt these
concentrations of unmet need. Martinez’s strategy: Open new “schools of choice” with
sought-after curricular models, like Montessori and dual language, and set aside a
share of seats for students from more prosperous neighboring school districts, who
would then sit next to a mix of students from San Antonio ISD. Read Beth’s immersive
profile of the San Antonio experiment.
 The Predictive Power of Student Behavior

To explore the first question, I create a measure of students’ non-cognitive skills

by using the information on their behavior available in the 9th-grade data, including the
number of absences and suspensions, grade point average, and on-time progression to
10th grade. I refer to this weighted average as the “behavior index.” The basic logic of
this approach is as follows: in the same way that one infers that a student who scores
higher on tests likely has higher cognitive skills than a student who does not, one can
infer that a student who acts out, skips class, and fails to hand in homework likely has
lower non-cognitive skills than a student who does not. I also create a test-score index
that is the average of 9th-grade math and English scores.
I then look at how both test scores and the behavior index are related to various
measures of high-school success, using administrative data that follow students’
trajectories over time. The outcomes I consider include graduating high school on time,
grade-point average at graduation, taking the SAT, and reported intentions to enroll in a
four-year college. Roughly 82 percent of students graduated, 4 percent are recorded as
having dropped out, and the rest either moved out of state or remained in school
beyond their expected graduation year. Because I am interested in how changes in
these skill measures predict long-run outcomes, I control for the student’s test scores
and behavior in 8th grade. In addition, my analysis adjusts for differences in parental
education, gender, and race/ethnicity.
My first set of results shows that a student’s behavior index is a much stronger
predictor of future success than her test scores. Figure 1 plots the extent to which
increasing test scores and the behavior index by one standard deviation, equivalent to
moving a student’s score from the median to the 85th percentile on each measure,
predicts improvements in various outcomes. A student whose 9th-grade behavior index
is at the 85th percentile is a sizable 15.8 percentage points more likely to graduate from
high school on time than a student with a median behavior index score. I find a weaker
relationship with test scores: a student at the 85th percentile is only 1.9 percentage
points more likely to graduate from high school than a student whose score is at the
median. The behavior index is also a better predictor than 9th-grade test scores of high-
school GPA and the likelihood that a student takes the SAT and plans to attend college.
While these patterns reveal that the behavior index is a good predictor of educational
attainment, they are descriptive. They do not show that teachers impact these behavior,
and they do not show that teacher impacts on these measures will translate into
improved longer-run success. I next examine these more causal questions.
 Mastery mathematics: Changing teacher beliefs around in-class grouping and
mindset

The beliefs of teachers have been identified for some time as a challenge for the
reform of mathematics instruction (Stipek, Givvin, Salmon, & MacGyvers, 2001). These
beliefs are partly subject specific, related to the nature of school maths (Correa, Perry,
Sims, Miller, & Fang, 2008). This study contributes to the international body of work by
focusing on a small group of teacher researchers working in schools in England that are
implementing a mastery maths text book based scheme informed by a Singapore Maths
approach. The Singapore Maths approach was developed by the Singaporean Ministry
of Education during the 1980s in a scheme that depends on use of text books and
includes aspects of a mastery approach, for example by spending more time to
investigate each topic in depth. In our study we do not seek to associate raised pupil
attainment with a mastery approach, rather we investigate the complexity of change
in classroom practice and of teacher beliefs within the context of adopting such an
approach to maths. The commercial scheme, including textbooks, pupil work books and
teacher guidance materials, is based on a scheme used in Singapore but has been
amended for use in England and is entitled Maths - No Problem!™.
Previous research has investigated mathematical subject knowledge and
beginning teachers' beliefs (Cooney, 1985; Paolucci, 2015). In this study the focus is on
experienced teachers' underpinning beliefs during implementation of a practical
mathematics scheme engaging them in new pedagogical knowledge as well as new
mathematics subject knowledge. The seven teacher researchers contributing to this
study were in years two and three of a wider and sustained curriculum
development project that included three initial workshops, classroom experimentation,
supportive classroom observation with coaching on two or three occasions, and
primarily provision of the textbooks, workbooks and teacher guides that form the Maths
- No Problem!™ scheme. Teachers may have different conceptions of mathematics as
a discipline and of ‘school maths’. It seems likely that their personal experience of
schooling, as a pupil and then as a teacher, will be a strong influence alongside any
formal higher education experience of mathematics they may have gained during an
undergraduate degree or teacher education programme (Beswick, 2012). Teacher
beliefs are a significant influence on their classroom practice and are relatively difficult
to change despite the efforts of teacher educators and policy makers (Meirink, Verloop,
& Bergen, 2009). It is important to consider individual teacher beliefs, for example in the
way that might involve resistance to reform approaches to teaching, but also to consider
the influence of teacher discourses and professional relationships on their beliefs
(Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015). This study will consider beliefs to be on the same
dimension as knowledge: ‘those things we ‘‘more than believe’’ we refer to as
knowledge and those things we ‘‘just believe’’ we refer to as beliefs' (Leatham, 2006, p.
92). The study adopts a collaborative practitioner research approach to ask the
question: What are the self-reported pedagogical beliefs of teachers during the
implementation of a mastery math’s curriculum development project?