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Illinois School Board Journal
March/April 2003
Social capital: Missing link in school finance debates?
by Todd A. Berry
Todd Berry, a former school board member in Jefferson, Wisconsin, is president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX) and also is on the North Central College Board of Trustees in Naperville, Illinois. This article is based on a speech given to the statewide conference of the Wisconsin Community Education Association in October 2002.
Consolidation, equity and increased funding have become common prescriptions for public problems as of late. Merge municipalities or school districts, achieve school finance equity and boost state tax funding of education, and all will be well, we are told by those who see the world in black and white.
For them, the keys to good public policy are dollars and formulae. They focus on capital in the narrow sense of the word - what Webster defines as "wealth, money or property."
Capital - more than money
This traditional, financially based notion of capital - money, stock, bonds, machinery and equipment - has been around for a long time. In the early 1960's, things began to change. Economists started writing about human capital - the knowledge and skills that come from education and training - and the role it plays in economic progress. The G.I. Bill, and its positive impact on the postwar American economy, is sometimes cited as an example of successful investment in human capital.
With this second view of capital added to the mix, public discussion of education comes down, more than ever, to this single word, capital. How much of our tax dollar should we devote to public schools? Should we build a new high school? These are questions that invoke capital in the traditional sense.
Will improved teacher training boost student achievement? Can internships and school-to-work programs improve the economic productivity of a community's labor force? These questions touch on the human capital dimension of schooling.
A case also can be made for a third form of capital that is just now finding its way out of academic journals and into popular discourse: social capital. Traditional capital, such as state school aid, or human capital efforts, such as teacher training, are not enough to guarantee high-performing schools.
Social capital is missing from the policy debate; we ignore it at our peril.
What is social capital?
A leading social theorist defines social capital as "embedded resources in social networks that enhance the outcomes of actions." Put more simply, social capital derives from the benefits of social relationships, such things as interpersonal trust, information shared by neighbors, putting in a "good word" for someone, parental advice, teacher expectations and school rules of conduct. Social capital is the "grease" that activates financial and human capital. Without it, investments in the other forms of capital will be less effective.
To better understand what social capital is, consider a few examples:
Each of these vignettes illustrates how social capital - the mutual support, information, trust and behavioral expectations found in social relationships - can be leveraged to improve school performance, boost career prospects or enrich community life.
Old ideas are new again
The discovery of social capital in the academic world is rather recent. Although sociologists, most notably in France and at the University of Chicago and Duke University, probably deserve credit for laying the theoretical foundations for social capital in the 1980's, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam popularized the idea in the 1990's. He used falling participation in bowling leagues as a metaphor for the widespread decline in citizen participation and civic engagement throughout America, and he exhaustively documented this decline in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
The notion of social capital is not new, however. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville left France and toured a young America, recording his observations in the classic "Democracy in America." He called the state "only a second-rate community" characterized by "obscure administration." In describing the federal government, he used words such as "power" and "high station" and "functionaries."
But de Tocqueville viewed townships, the main form of government in early New England, differently. He found that they served "the purpose of interesting the greatest possible number of persons in the commonweal ... local administration thus affords an unfailing source of profit and interest to a vast number of individuals."
"The American attaches himself to his little community ...," de Tocqueville continued, "[his town] is independent and free; his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interests ... . He takes part in every occurrence in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach ...."
What de Tocqueville had to say about towns is just as applicable to the many active, proud and engaged municipalities and school districts that dot the Midwest. This is not surprising, for a community-schools advocate first used the phrase "social capital."
In 1916, L.J. Hanifan, West Virginia's supervisor of rural schools, urged community involvement in schooling, writing of "those tangible resources [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely, good will, fellowship, sympathy ... ."
A socially isolated individual is helpless, Hanifan noted, but if he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community. The individual will find in his associations the advantages of help, sympathy and fellowship of his neighbors.
At work in the Midwest
Ties between people and their schools in many of the states of the upper Midwest are just as important today as they were in West Virginia more than 85 years ago. This is particularly true for schools at the heart of life in thriving neighborhoods and vibrant communities in our region.
These are high-performing schools where candor and trust characterize the relationships between administrators and teachers, between teachers and parents, between school and community leaders.
These are schools offering cultural, athletic and learning opportunities to the surrounding community, which responds with loyal attendance and active support.
These are schools whose leaders, teachers and students don't eschew community improvement but promote it, and communities whose civic organizations embrace their schools with gifts of time and money.
These are schools with active PTA's, enthusiastic booster clubs and, often, loyal alumni.
In short, these are schools that have accumulated social capital through regular and honest sharing of information, through mutual service and support, high community expectations and lots of trust. Educators can draw on this "bank" of social capital in times of crisis and challenge.
A critical role
How important is social capital to students? Harvard's Robert Putnam reports that the "best predictor" of children who grow up free of abuse and neglect was "the degree to which they and their mothers were enmeshed in a supportive social network, lived in a socially supportive neighborhood and attended church regularly."
How critical is social capital to schools? Absolutely, according to Putnam, who quantified social capital in various parts of the country and found:
"The beneficial effects of social capital persist even after accounting for a host of other factors that might affect state educational success - racial composition, affluence, economic inequality, adult educational levels, poverty rates, educational spending, teachers' salaries, class size, family structure, and religious affiliation, as well as the size of the private-school sector ... astonishingly, social capital was the single most important explanatory factor."
No wonder Putnam has attracted so much support - and controversy. He unequivocally argues that social capital is more important than any of the factors to which researchers and advocates often point, including socioeconomic status, school funding, staff salaries and class size.
Lost in the debate
As I monitor discussions about K-12 education in this part of the country, several themes recur to varying degrees:
These are the "big" issues being debated, and they are all about money - capital - in the most traditional sense. Of course, money is important. It is needed to attract and keep good staff, maintain buildings and purchase materials.
But there is more to high-performing schools than funding, class sizes and equity. Indeed (and I know many educators will not want to hear this), published, peer-reviewed research casts considerable doubt on the link between funding and school performance, and on the wisdom of costly class-size reductions as opposed to, say, staff development.
According to Putnam, social capital in all its forms - school-community ties, principal-teacher trust, involved parents, high expectations for behavior and learning - is essential to successful schools and students. Yet, the focus of education debate lies with traditional capital: the money.
If we are going to talk about capital in the context of education, we need to consider it in all its dimensions - traditional, human and social. Currently, social capital is left out of the discussion, and the implications for future decisions could be serious and permanent.
Future missteps?
What lies ahead? The experience from Wisconsin may be illustrative. In the 1970's and 1980's, public anger over high property taxes was palpable. The state responded by hiking school aids and imposing cost controls. When criticism of the controls mounted, they were slowly eroded and finally abandoned. A surge in staff costs and school levies followed.
The cycle began anew in the 1990's with discontent over rising property taxes emerging once again. The result was again a dramatic increase in the state government's role, both in terms of money (increased state aid) and control (limits on growth in taxes and compensation). It is entirely conceivable that this cycle will play out as before: State controls will again be repealed; costs and levies will again accelerate; and the public will again demand action.
Ultimately, the state response could very well be to fully fund all schools costs and to control them through centralization of decisions regarding buildings and compensation - again, with no thought given to social capital, despite its pivotal role in ensuring effective schools.
How do I know this? Research from the Journal of Education Finance is clear and unequivocal:
From Washington state comes this finding: "...the experience of Washington's schools in the last decade suggests that a highly centralized funding system may limit the capacity of individual schools to flexibly respond to local needs and desires ... the ability of individual schools to use available resources in support of the type of ‘bottom-up' school-specific reforms championed by leading educators ... is severely limited."
From California comes similar news: "It appears that the increased equity the California system has achieved has also created more Chevrolets and fewer Cadillacs among the state's schools."
And from Hawaii, where schools are entirely state-funded, comes this: "The centralized allocation of funds has not provided a stable source of funding and, in fact, has over time resulted in a severe decline in the ratio of funds for public education to the total state appropriations."
The considerable body of research in this area was summed up recently by one public finance expert in State Tax Notes, a publication for tax professionals: "There is very little debate about whether the centralization of school funding ... has improved school performance. The evidence is almost all negative."
From a social capital perspective, this is easy to understand. When schools are locally funded and locally governed, taxpayers and parents, teachers, school officials and community leaders feel they have a stake in education.
Over several generations, this has resulted in a host of interpersonal and intra-community relationships developed around schools. These ties foster trust, involvement and support. Remove money and control from the local school equation, and you remove a powerful reason for public interest in education and a significant incentive to building social capital.
Anecdotal evidence from Wisconsin suggests this is already occurring in the wake of the increased state role that began in the mid-90s. With some districts now more than four-fifths funded by the state, some school officials report that attendance at annual meetings is down, and that numbers of school board candidates have dropped. I suspect PTA/PTO activity may be on the decline, too.
The ties that bind
Social capital is critical and fragile. We risk eroding and eventually destroying it if we focus solely on capital in its narrow, traditional sense.
If we are going to make major changes in school funding and governance, then we must acknowledge the value of all three dimensions of capital - traditional, human and social. We must assess the social capital effects of various policy proposals - and not just the easy-to-measure impacts on budgets and equity.
Those who talk only about the traditional, financially based aspects of capital are missing what could be the key to preserving what is best about the many effective schools we find in the Midwest - the personal and social ties that bind us together in communities.