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FAQs
About SOQs
Despite
Democrats' claims, there is no state constitutional
mandate to fully fund educational "standards of
quality."
Democrats
flatly claim that the General Assembly faces a
constitutional mandate to come up with an additional
$500 million to $1 billion next session in order to
fully fund Virginia’s Standards of Quality. It is
their principal justification for proposing an
increase in state taxes. This bold assertion needs
to be examined critically and carefully.
First,
the constitutional claim. The Constitution of
Virginia says that “the General Assembly shall
seek to ensure that an educational program of high
quality is established and continually
maintained.” The Constitution further provides
that Standards of Quality must be determined by the
State Board of Education, subject to revision by the
General Assembly.
At
no place in the Constitution is there a mandate that
the General Assembly appropriate funds to meet
standards set by an outside entity, even the State
Board of Education. The final arbiter of what
education standards will be applied in the
Commonwealth’s public schools is the General
Assembly itself. And the General Assembly retains
the prerogative to determine how and when these
standards will be funded.
There
is a critical difference between funding targets for
public schools and the quality of instruction they
offer. The teachers’ unions have consistently
attempted to blur this distinction, but the amount
of money spent on public schools does not
necessarily reflect the quality of education
provided. If money were the measure, as U.S.
Secretary of Education Rod Paige recently observed,
the public schools in the District of Columbia would
be among the best in the nation because the per
capita spending on D.C. students ranks among the
highest in the U.S.
Proponents
of funding increases for Virginia’s public
education that far exceed the rate of growth in
Virginia’s economy don’t want to deal with the
harsh reality that the public schools in relatively
poor Highland County consistently turn out better
prepared students than do the public schools in the
cities of Richmond and Portsmouth, which spend far
more per student than Highland County. The
straight-line relationship between money and quality
that the proponents of tax increases insist exists
is readily refuted by experience in Virginia and
around the nation.
The
principal engine driving the SOQs is the amount of
money projected for teachers’ salaries. Virginians
can blindly fund targets for teacher compensation
unrelated to educational achievement until the
Commonwealth leads the nation in that category, but
find that student achievement has not budged. That
is the course followed in the District of Columbia.
The
debate would more faithfully serve the interests of
the children of Virginia if it focused instead on
the real reasons for the lack of success in the
Commonwealth’s weakest school divisions. It is
much easier to blame the problem of
under-achievement on a lack of funding.
Far
more has been accomplished in Virginia in just a few
years by establishing relatively ambitious Standards
of Learning than by all the new spending added for
public schools since 1980. Even these output-based
standards — as opposed to the input-based SOQs —
won’t be enough to assure true quality.
Competition
is absolutely essential to making the kind of
progress in education that Gov. Mark Warner, the
Republican leadership in the General Assembly and,
indeed, all Virginians want. Simply raising taxes
and spending more money might make liberals feel
better and temporarily quiet the teachers’ unions,
but it’s no substitute for real improvement.
--
July
14, 2003
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