A message -- perhaps a hard one to hear -- about education funding

Given the academic facts of life cited below, how would you apportion cuts in spending to K-12 and higher education in Minnesota? Big reductions would seem to be inevitable for both systems given the budgetary abyss the state is in. Yet few if any people in St. Paul seem inclined to pare elementary and secondary schools, even modestly, while it's virtually certain that the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system will wind up not nearly as lucky.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty's proposed 2010-11 budget, for example, cuts higher education by 8.2 percent while increasing K-12 funding by 1.9 percent (although school districts would have to accommodate significant payment shifts).

The first compelling academic fact has to do with the connection -- or lack thereof -- between how much money schools spend and how much kids actually learn. Some people, of course, will rail against what I'm about to say, but decades of research are on my side. More specifically:

There simply is no body of first-class research demonstrating any consistent tie between K-12 budgets and academic achievement. Yes, some studies show a positive correlation. But the great bulk of credible studies show either no correlation or even negative ones. The idea that Minnesota boys and girls would necessarily perform measurably better if school budgets were to rise by politically plausible amounts -- or, more pertinently, that students would necessarily learn less if budgets were to fall by a few percentage points -- is just not true.

But put aside reams of arcane econometrics; the lack of connection is made clear by two stark and easily recognized trends since the middle of the last century: Immense increases in spending in per-pupil, inflation-adjusted terms have led to test scores and other indicators that have been just as likely to hold steady or even decline as to increase.

A second compelling and generally unacknowledged fact has to do with the different ways in which teachers and professors get paid. Compensation for K-12 teachers is almost always based exclusively on how many years they've taught, the number of graduate courses they've taken and the number of degrees they have. Principals and other school officials have little if any ability to pay demonstrably superior teachers more than demonstratively less-effective teachers.

In universities and colleges, however, officials are usually not similarly limited by inflexible salary schedules. Rather, they have the ability to pay their best people more than their less-accomplished ones.

Whereas public school officials in Minnesota cannot go out and recruit world-class math and science teachers with the promise of paying them more than their less-stellar colleagues, University of Minnesota officials can do exactly that. And if U of M deans succeed in signing up world-class scholars, chances are strong that such faculty (especially in the sciences and engineering) will prove unusually successful in winning federal and other grants, which will lead to the recruitment of exceptionally talented graduate students to work with them, which in turn will lead to sizable numbers of such talented young professionals starting or otherwise joining path-breaking and tax-generating businesses in town once they finish their degrees.

Or, if you will: While small reductions in funding are unlikely to impair what elementary and secondary schools achieve, substantial reductions can, in fact, impair what research universities do by making the hiring and, just as critically, the retention of first-tier scholars more difficult, often severely so.

To be clear, the University of Minnesota, just like any immense organization, can absorb tough cuts without seizing, and should be expected to. And even without any new cuts, it's understood that many school districts throughout Minnesota will remain pressed, some harshly so. But these are exigent days in publicly financed programs, and they should be borne as fairly as possible across the board.

If asked, most U of M officials, rather than endorsing this comparative analysis, would rush to note how their legislative request should be judged on its own merits and not in competition with those of other, equally essential parts of the education community. Their protestations would be sincere, and not just because publicly agreeing with this interpretation would be terminally impolitic. Still, someone ought to make the case explicitly:

Although it's politically helpful to keep upwards of 350 districts worth of school board members, superintendents, parents, and Education Minnesota officials nonlivid by leaving K-12's hide largely bite-free, while alternatively taking bloody chunks out of the University of Minnesota's, it's not advantageous in any other way.