Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 1, 1991 TAG: 9102010677
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Is he?
"I guess I am," Alexander recently agreed with a smile.
In fact, for Alexander and colleague Richard Salmon at Virginia Tech, the issue of equal funding for public schools has become something of a crusade. And they are making a name for themselves in the battle.
From their claim that all schoolchildren deserve an equally funded education - rich and poor children alike - Salmon and Alexander have become embroiled in school-funding issues in several states, including Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.
Both were quoted in a 1989 Kentucky Supreme Court opinion that forced that state to redistribute public education money.
And though they tease each other about who has received the most press, both have often been quoted in newspapers and magazines in Virginia and elsewhere.
"We have been quoted a good bit together," Alexander said.
Alexander worked on school-funding issues for 17 years in Florida, where he was a University of Florida professor and then education-policy coordinator to the governor.
He went on to become president of Western Kentucky University. He has been a university distinguished professor at Tech since 1988.
Salmon is a professor of educational administration at Tech. He met Alexander while still a graduate student at the University of Florida.
The two linked up on the school-funding issue in the Kentucky court case, in which both testified.
Alexander and Salmon have both written books on the school-funding issue as well. When Alexander came to Virginia Tech three years ago, the two men's common interest in the school-funding issue made a natural bond.
Meanwhile, their expertise is well known to many close to the school-funding issue in Virginia. After Alexander's arrival here, a group of school superintendents in Virginia sought him out to talk about it, he said. Both men also sometimes get calls from state legislators.
"You work on a topic like this and people end up hearing about you," Alexander said. "They call you and ask you about it." He said school funding has come to take up the bulk of his time.
What the two men believe is simple enough. Poorer children, they say - such as those in Virginia who live on the edge of Appalachia - are entitled to the same schooling as their wealthier counterparts, like the kids in the affluent Northern Virginia suburbs.
It often doesn't happen that way, they point out. Though the formulas for public-school funding can be complex, Alexander and Salmon said school funding in Virginia and many other states favors children in wealthy areas.
The reasons are grounded in time-honored methods of funding public schools. It is the state's responsibility to provide education, they note - but in fact, in Virginia and elsewhere, the state provides only a fraction of the public-school budget. Local property taxes produce the rest.
Affluent areas may supplement the state money lavishly. In some districts in Virginia, as much as 80 percent of the school budget comes from local property tax levies.
But some other, poorer districts can add little to the state dollars. A result is a spending gap of thousands of dollars per pupil between the wealthiest and poorest school districts in the state, the professors said.
"We're saying there's no justification for this," Alexander said. The two men argue it is time the less well-off school districts got a bigger piece of the pie.
The solution, they said, is to use state money to narrow the gap in funding between wealthy and poor school districts.
"Money would be distributed in such a way that a child's education would not be a function of the wealth of the local community," Alexander said. There are, he said, several ways in which state education money could be distributed "inversely proportional to local wealth."
Alexander said a court case to press the issue in Virginia is likely.
Other states have fought in court against redistributing their education money - and lost.
Some 10 state supreme courts have forced legislatures to address school-funding disparities in the last 19 months, according to a recent Newsweek special issue on education in which Salmon was quoted. Thirteen more cases are pending, it said.
"The more states that fall, the more momentum," Salmon was quoted as saying in that article. "Within the next decade, most states will have their systems ruled unconstitutional."
Meanwhile, so well known has the two men's expertise on the issue become in some circles that officials from two other states recently asked them for help in defending their states' funding methods.
Fat chance.
"We said `No, we're on the other side of this issue,'" Alexander said.
Salmon said educating less affluent children well is in everyone's best interests.
"We don't have the luxury of millions and millions of unskilled jobs any more," Salmon said. "I think the potential for disaster in the United States is very real. We're not addressing it."
"I think it's the most important issue in education today," Alexander said.
Meanwhile, Salmon has found his notoriety on the school-funding issue has its price. Politicians, he said, are not always his best friends.
"Some of the legislators like me. Some of them don't like me," Salmon said. "It's got to be expected."
by CNB