Spending dollars to make a difference

School superintendents rarely get fired for moving too slowly to improve student achievement. However, when it comes to financial mistakes and improprieties — or the perception of them — they tend to lose their jobs in a hurry. No part of their work is more visible to the public and more inviting of criticism than the ways in which they spend and allocate money. But while the use of school system resources is the most heavily scrutinized of the superintendent’s roles, it affords them the least amount of autonomy.

From teachers and parents to elected officials, community leaders, employers, and on and on, everybody has a stake in decisions about their local school budget. Even the most apathetic and unengaged of citizens tends to keep an eye on education spending and the ways in which it might bear upon their daily lives. Which is to say that in most school districts, the annual budgetary process provides a great opportunity for all sorts of people to engage in political theatrics.  (To give you a flavor of just how large a cast of characters can be involved in school budget negotiations, consider this: When I was superintendent in Stamford, Conn., a city of just 125,000, I had a nine-member board of education, a six-member board of finance, and a 40-member board of representatives. By contrast, Chicago, a city of nearly 3 million, has a 50-member city council.)

In most districts, personnel costs swallow roughly 90% of the budget, leaving scant discretionary funds on the table. But even those few remaining dollars can be enough to trigger a frenzy of hyperbolic wrangling among local stakeholders, each of whom has a passionate interest in a particular cause or educational program. And in the diverse urban/suburban school systems that I’ve led, the process is further complicated by fierce debates about race, entitlement, and the extent to which public education ought to be treated as a private commodity or a public good.