Values-In-Tension; Valuing Tension: Framing Education Finance for the Next Generation

What do we talk about when we talk about education finance? Given the range of topics and approaches in educational studies and scholarship, it is fair to ask: is education finance an identifiable field of study and, if so, does it have something to say to the wider education policy and research communities? This question has particular relevance for us here today, as we think about charting a path into the future for the National Education Finance Academy (NEFA). As much as we need to focus on issues of membership and operations, NEFA needs to also have a shared intellectual mission in order to focus our collective scholarship and research. Identifying what binds us together as education finance researchers is complicated for a number of reasons. I identify three: topical diversity, vocational diversity, and methodological diversity.The first of these is NEFA's topical diversity. In this room are scholars who focus on birth to kindergarten, K-12, 12-16, and P-16 policy arenas. We have scholars who focus on public, quasi-public and independent educational organizations. Each of these organizations and policy arenas receives revenue from different sources, distributes funding via different mechanisms, prioritizes different resources within those mechanisms, and assesses success in different terms.In addition, NEFA is an organization with vocational diversity, representing the research, policy, non-profit, higher education and practitioner communities. Uniting a group such as this around a coherent conceptual framework is daunting. People from each of these groups have different needs and timeframes for conceptualizing and operationalizing research and utilizing research findings.Finally , NEFA is an organization with methodological diversity. The study of school finance draws from the insights of policy scholars in economics, policy studies, politics of education, educational leadership and administration, and law, because, as Cubberley put it so long ago, “the problem of sufficient revenue . . . lies aback of every other problem.” (Cubberley, 1905, p. 3).2 This methodological diversity enriches our conversations while at the same time can prove frustrating as researchers seek to establish a common vocabulary around key terms within education finance research. For an example of this we need look no further than the articulation of the fairness principle in resource allocation in which the construction of ideas such as fairness, justice, equality, and equity (horizontal and vertical) can overlap and conflate depending upon the positionality of the researcher as a legal, political, or administrative scholar.Within these diversities that exist among the community of education finance researchers, I would argue that a values-based analytic model, based in policy studies, is sufficiently broad enough to serve the needs of our diverse field but cogent enough to allow a common mapping of the intellectual terrain in education finance. I'd like to take this time to introduce the values-in-tension model: by sharing some history and articulating properties that recommend it to our field. I identify key qualities of the values-in-tension model—it is flexible, neutral, ecological, and scalable. I touch upon each of the values that anchor the model. I'd like to reflect on three areas where the application of the values-in-tension model could be further developed to serve our field. Finally, I'd then like to end with some thoughts on how the use of a values-in-tension model allows us as scholars to speak with a more unified voice to the broader field of education research despite our diversity of topic, method, and vocation.It does not take long in educational policy studies to arrive at a question that involves resources. Although there were technical developments in school financing mechanisms throughout the 1900s, it was the work of the National School Finance Project of the 1970s that devoted systematic attention to the assumptions, tools, and methods of school finance research with a focus on ideas of fiscal neutrality and tensions with ideas of governmental liberty (Herrington, 2013; Johns et al., 1969). Behind this impetus were the results of the Coleman report, indicating that educational interventions in eh US had a limited reach, with a subtext that educational spending must therefore be leveraged to provide impactful expansion of educational opportunities (Coleman, 1968).However, the publication of A Nation At Risk codified a shift in the intellectual frameworks of educators and policymakers (“A Nation at Risk,” 1983). Earlier theories and policies that privileged access and an input-orientation towards educational systems were diminished; perspectives privileging competition and an output-orientation were ascendant. The field of school finance studies was shaped by this shift (Verstegen & Driscoll, 2008). This intellectual structure was challenged to accommodate not only new input structures, but a new focus on outcomes and outputs of educational system. To manage this our field evolved a policy- and values- oriented conceptual model based in public policy values as a tool to sort and organize multiple research strands and agendas (Charter School Finance | 19 | Handbook of Research on School Choice |, n.d.; Houck & DeBray, 2015; O'Day & Smith, 2019; Smith & O'Day, 1990; Weber, 1991).At its core the funding of schools is a political process. As such, some scholars of education finance looked to conceptual frameworks built from political science to help bring order to the complexity of school funding and resource allocation across states, districts and schools. These models focused on the tensions between policy ideas based in broad public values (Anderson, 2010). Early models in education finance focused on tensions between three values: equity, efficiency, and liberty (Guthrie, 1983, 2006).However, as the US moved into an era of systemic or standards-based reform, post A Nation At Risk (1983), a fourth value was added to the model in order to acknowledge the relationship between inputs and outcomes in educational systems. Originally conceived of as an additional inflection of the value of equity (referred to as “Equity II” by some scholars; see Guthrie et al., 2006), this fourth value became codified as adequacy as a response to a new wave of school finance litigation in which plaintiffs found success in arguing for school finance reform based on the qualitative language of state constitutions (Brimley et al., 2020; Thro, 1990; Verstegen & King, 1998). A four-value framework was then established as a useful tool for organizing thinking about school finance and resource allocation and is presented as Figure 1 (Rolle, 2004; Houck, 2015; Houck, 2025).Early iterations of a values-in-tension model attempted to label contextual factors that influenced movement within the model. Guthrie, for example, bounded his construction of the values-in-tension model with factors such as demographics and economics to acknowledge the influence of powerful external forces on policy developments. While acknowledging these factors, later researchers such as Rolle waved away this level of modeling in favor of a broader yet unspecified construction of “context” (Rolle, 2004). Rolle was insightful; the model befitted from addition by subtraction, achieving broader applicability by allowing researchers themselves to seek and identify contextual factors influencing the model.In the values-in-tension model, a study or analysis is identified with a core value. The model presents each of the four values as being equally weighed; however, that weighting can change based on the policy being analyzed or the orientation of the policymaker or scholar conducting the analysis. For example, a funding policy rooted in the value of equity might diminish levels of liberty, efficiency, or adequacy in a policy system, but those trade-offs might be considered acceptable, or even desirable. To use one specific example: federal Title I funding targeted to students facing economic disadvantage presents a necessary check on the liberty of districts to use these federal funds for any purpose; however, this diminished liberty is deemed acceptable in the pursuit of the achieving greater equity in the distribution of federal funds. I label this quality as neutrality, not that the model demands neutrality of scholars but rather that the model itself is agnostic to the values represented within it.In addition to this flexible neutrality, the values-in-tension model has other benefits as a conceptual model. The values-in-tension model is ecological: it provides the insight that every value in a policy system is connected to, and has implications for, the other values in the system. A focus on equity as a primary value, for example, must place limits on the degree to which the other values of efficiency, liberty, and adequacy can be expressed. Similarly, a focus on efficiency will have similar implications for the remaining three values. The magnitude of these limits and decisions about the worthiness of these tradeoffs are matters of empirics and policy preference, but the strength of the values-in-tension model is that these tradeoffs can be made clear.The values-in-tension model is scalable: it is sufficiently broad to capture the complexity of school funding in the US and international contexts. It can be deployed across different units of analysis such as state, district, school, and even classroom levels; it captures the dynamics within both capital and operating budgets in K-12, higher ed and early education frameworks; and it can be useful in analyzing revenues, expenses, and costs associated with not only dollars but other purchased educational resources such as teacher and administrator salaries, teacher and administrator qualities and qualifications, student assignment and attendance patterns, and levels of organizational efficiency and efficacy.The properties of the values-in-tension model as presented: flexibility, neutrality, ecological-ness, and scalability allows its use as a touchstone for a range of scholarly approaches and analyses within our field of education finance studies. It may, therefore, serve as an umbrella model under which much of the research of the fields that make up education finance can be conducted. I'd like briefly offer thoughts on the four values that make up the values-in-tension model, with full knowledge that I am speaking to a room of experts in research around these ideas.Equity—The issue of fairness in the distribution of revenue as it relates to student, school, and school district needs (variously defined) has been a hallmark of school funding and finance research. Levels of school funding and educational resource allocation can be analyzed by frameworks that define an object: equity of what and for whom? Objects can range from dollars to purchased inputs to the distribution of student, teacher, and administrator characteristics. Equity can be understood as having horizontal and vertical dimensions with tools of analysis ranging from simple means comparison to range ratios, the McLoone index all the way to more complex approaches of multiple regression or even causal modeling (Hickrod et al., 1975; Rolle, 2004).Efficiency—refers to the relationship between inputs and outcomes in educational systems, animated by a general understanding that particularly in a publicly finance system, the spending of resources must include a responsibility to achieve the most for the least. While much of the efficiency discussion in education finance relies upon notions of technical efficiency, some have sought alternate approaches to the efficiency question, noting that educational systems pursue multiple outcomes simultaneously instead of a singular animating goal (Rolle, 2004). Applications such as a quadriform approach and frontier-based models seek to determine the relative efficient performance of units instead of a technical estimate of omnibus efficiency (Färe et al., 1985; Houck et al., 2010; Needham, 2023)The study of educational costs and cost effectiveness/benefit analysis is also a topic in educational finance related to the value of efficiency (Hummel-Rossi & Ashdown, 2002; Levin et al., 2017). The broader availability of data and development of cost methodology has spurred advances in cost and cost effectiveness/benefit analysis. Consideration of costs—and a desire to understand the relationship between costs and outcomes—combined with aforementioned changes in legal strategies at the state level to litigate school finance lawsuits, spurred to conceptual development of the value of adequacy.Adequacy—The concept of adequacy refers to examining levels of funding based on the notion that a sufficient collection of resources is needed in order for districts and schools to meaningfully operate and for students to meaningfully learn. Adequacy was originally conceived as a more nuanced way to speak of equity by examining inequities in the distribution of academic performance and outcomes (Berne & Picus, 1994) but developed around the understanding that an equitable distribution of inadequate resources was just as unhelpful to student learning as an inequitable distribution. Adequacy as a value has legal origins in the field of school finance litigation; specifically, the case of Rose v. Kentucky (1989). Adequacy language also comported well with the emerging standards movement of the 1990s since it linked resource provision to performance expectations at a time when the policy focus was on defining educational standards and quantifying systema and student performance via proficiency level or value added measures.Liberty—Liberty as a value in school funding takes on two dimensions. Originally, the idea of liberty was focused on the notion of subsidiarity; that is, the autonomy/accountability tradeoffs between various bureaucratic levels of education governance (Guthrie, 2006; Guthrie et al., 2006). Since the 1970s, however, the idea of liberty has been primarily focused on polices related to parental choicecharter and voucher programs and the issue of parental choice within educational environments (Berends, 2009; Coons & Sugarman, 1971, 1978; Hoxby, 2003). Of interest to scholars is the development of charter school funding policies, as these are transfers of public monies to public schools via policies that are sometimes grafted into state level school funding mechanisms and sometimes layered upon them. The addition of charter funding provisions strains traditional school funding models in ways that have made funding levels of charter schools compared to traditional public schools unclear or created unanticipated consequences for policymakers, such as the ability of charter school attendees to cross the borders of traditional public school districts, thus challenging assumptions about geographic boundedness established in Milliken (Abbott, Houck, & Lauen, 2022).I would like to draw three points that build upon this framework for our field. The first point is that each of these values has a valence that can be used to further clarify analysis and research questions. To my mind these valences range from traditional to critical, and I would charge the field to consider the truth of this assertion and to begin to operationalize it. Two examples come to mind. Regarding liberty, scholars have already begun to think about a school choice continuum that ranges from a more traditional view of parental choice within a constrained public system to a more radical view of choice as articulated in Freidman's full voucher proposal. Similarly, and more recently, the value of equity has been framed as possessing a more traditional valence that includes constructions of horizontal and vertical dimensions, to a more critical valence that accounts for the philosophical assumptions that go into the creation of dialogue around equity and/or identification and acknowledgement of the persistent and systemic barriers to achievement funding equity—such as the absence of race in state level funding mechanisms (see, for examples, Martinez et al., 2019; Yang & Knight, 2023). Defining, identifying and describing these valences of the values within the values-in-tension model can be a challenge for our field that would have resonance and implications for the broader field of educational studies.A second point is that the values-in-tension model allows scholars to be more inclusive of frameworks that we use to interrogate school finance issues. As the field of educational finance studies has moved from examining inputs and opportunity to outcomes and liberty, it has incorporated the perspectives of human resources scholarship with an emphasis on the hiring, firing, mobility, and replacement costs of teachers and administrators and that field's attendant theoretical frameworks and approaches (Tran, 2024). There is also a great deal of opportunity in the space of administrative and leadership theory with which to interrogate the manner in which education finance policies are understood and implemented. But these are just examples. A values-in-tension model could inform historiography—a field that is emerging in importance in educational finance space (Kelly, 2024; Rothstein, 2017).A third point is that there is space within this model to focus on the interactions between values. The standard application of a values-in-tension model is the identification of research anchored in a specific value: an equity study; an efficiency analysis. However, as our conference theme suggests, there is space for us to value the tensions that the model provides. As presented in figure X.1, the values-in-tension model present six tensions: equity/efficiency, equity/liberty, equity/adequacy, efficiency/adequacy, efficiency/liberty, and adequacy/liberty. There are numerous education finance studies that examining tensions: school choice papers examining equity/liberty tradeoffs of legal studies examining equity/efficiency tradeoffs. Cataloguing and reviewing these studies using the value-in-tension model would provide education finance scholars with an overview of how these tensions are addressed in the literature and provide pathways for future research agendas around under-identified or under-studied tensions (Knoeppel & Sala, 2018).As academia becomes ever more niched, many of the topics that define our field of education finance studies have drifted into other intellectual field and sub-fields due to an identification with methods. For example, economic studies are targeted to economics journals, law studies are targeted to law journals, etc. Adopting the language of the values-in-tension model would allow education finance researchers to “come home” as it were to shared intellectual space that can be topically and methodologically diverse and participate in this shared discourse with a shared framework and shared vocabulary. Using the values-in-tension model in this way empowers education finance researchers to refrain from trying to limit or proscribe the type of analysis that “counts” in our community; it encourages us to have shared conversations around commonly understood terms while still allowing those terms to be challenged, interrogated and perhaps ever redefined; strengthened by our diversity of topics, vocations, and methods. This is helpful in terms of publications and conferences, but it is also helpful in terms of citation. Conversations bracketed by values-in-tension language provides education finance researchers an avenue to cite each other; i.e. support each other, as they pursue individual academic endeavors without losing any of their methodological or disciplinary values-in-tension model, allows education finance researchers to understand education finance as a field of study bounded by values and it also up dialogue and discourse around those perhaps allowing us to as a field of study and NEFA as an organization that support that particular field of a manner that will draw to our The values-in-tension model allows for an of the diversity and of topics in our field will allowing us to a common language as we work together to understand the and use of educational resources across multiple contexts.