Who Deserves Good Schools? Cultural Categories of Worth and School Finance Reform

Abstract

From the standpoint of the existing literature on cultural categories of worthiness or deservingness, school funding equalization presents a paradox: why has a reform targeted at morally deserving children been so difficult to enact? This article investigates cultural constructions of worthiness, which have been shown to affect the debate and implementation of social welfare policies, in this new policy arena. The authors analyze newspaper coverage in California and Texas, over multiple time periods, to explore whether and how arguments about deservingness of the policy's beneficiaries appear in debates surrounding school finance reform. The authors find that even though children are widely accepted to be morally worthy, the deservingness of other groups complicates the debate. The deservingness of taxpayers, teachers and administrators, and parents is contested, and can challenge or dilute claims about the deservingness of children. These findings help make sense of the paradoxes of school finance reform by showing how deservingness can still be contested even though the target population is widely accepted to be morally worthy.