How to Order.vp

Proactively Serving Our Disenfranchised Youth 59

or position, requires an in-depth understanding of the basic tenets of precisely what it means
to be a leader. That thought is, as a colleague of mine once said, “a rather blinding glimpse of
the obvious.” However, to examine carefully what leadership is can truly be informative.
Michael Fullan, quite possibly, defined this notion well “Leadership, then, is not mobilizing
others to solve problems we already know how to solve, but to have them confront problems
that have never yet been successfully addressed” (2001, p. 3). Problematic elements come
into play here. For example, leaders in today’s schools know or should know that finances
“count” in the lives of our children. Hedges, Laine, and Geenwald (1994) and Greenwald,
Hedges, and Laine (1996) demonstrated that additional school funding can produce gains in
overall student performance. According to their computations, every additional $100 spent per
pupil will increase student achievement by one-fifth of a standard deviation. When those
uninterested or adamantly opposed to social justice tenets purport that money does not matter
-- again, leaders can, and in my opinion, must, cite data to the contrary. In keeping with the
work of Hedges, Laine, and Geenwald, the Kansas Association of School Boards created the
following grid to show that money, indeed, does count. (See Table 1)

Table 1. Combined NAEP Scores and State Spending Per Pupil.

2003 National Assessment of

Education Progress

Average Combined

NAEP Score

Average Current

Expenditures Per Pupil

Top Ten States

150.2

$9,016

2 nd Ten States

136.8

$8,393

3 rd Ten States

127.5

$8,072

4 th Ten States 109.1

$7,392

Last Ten States

85.5

$6,860

The highest achieving states spent the most; the lowest achieving spent the least. The top
ten states in combined national reading and math scores spend the highest average amount
per pupil. Furthermore, each group of states with lower-ranking NAEP scores also spend
successively less per pupil. The highest ranked states spend an average of $2,156 (or 32%)
more per pupil than do the lowest ranked states (see http://www.usd358.com/vnews/
display.v/ ART/2005/07/22/42e128ad32324?in_archive=1). Simply said, money does count

• those who live in high wealth states or states that choose to generate significant funding for
  P-12 education do reap the benefits of this type of financial investment. Leaders must be
  willing to articulate that which is known in this arena. For example, as poverty increases in a
  given school district, readiness assessments for entering kindergarten youth have been found
  to decrease in appreciable ways. Recent findings in Middletown, Ohio (a working-class
  district north of Cincinnati) demonstrated average readiness scores that were 11% below that