Reason Foundation

A Sea Change for School Funding in America

Posted on October 21, 2011, 12:49pm | Lisa Snell

In the United States, we are in a great transition period, moving from funding institutions to funding students. K-12 education funding, across multiple sectors, is moving closer to how we fund higher education in the United States. We are moving away from a system funded by local resources and driven by residential assignment to a system where funding is driven by parental choice and put in the child's rhetorical "backpack."

At Learning Matters an affiliate of PBS Newshour, I make the case in an online debate on school funding  that "money should follow students." I reprise the my point in the debate below, but go to read the debate to see what other education experts have to say.

In 2011, there are now 26 school voucher and tax credit programs in 15 states with close to $1 billion in school funding following students to schools. There are more than 2 million students enrolled in charter schools with more than 100 cities with 10 percent or more charter-school market share. In New Orleans, for example, 80 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools with money attached to the student and following the student to the school of choice.

Taking this even one step further, with the growth of digital learning and the need to customize education at all levels, we are beginning to see examples where not only will school funding follow students to the school, but to multiple education-service providers. In Utah, for example, the Statewide Online Education Program allows high school students to select courses from multiple high-quality course options and multiple course providers, while still being enrolled in their public high school. The money follows the kids to the course selection. In April 2011, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Arizona Empowerment Accounts. Empowerment Accounts allow parents - in this case, parents of special-needs children - to remove their children from the public-school system and receive the money the state would have spent on them in an education savings account. Every quarter, the state deposits up to 90 percent of the base support level of state funding into a parent-controlled ESA. Parents can then use that money to pay for a variety of educational options including private-school tuition, private tutoring, special education services, homeschooling expenses, textbooks, and virtual education, enabling them to customize an education for their child's unique needs.

Traditional public school funding systems at the state and local level are also adapting to a "school funding portability" framework where state and local funding is attached to the students and given directly to the institution in which the child enrolls. More than 30 "school funding portability" funding systems are funding student through a student-based budgeting mechanism in cities like New York, Baltimore, Denver, Hartford and Cincinnati. In 2011, Rochester, Newark and Boston have moved to full weighted student formula systems where the money follows the child. Los Angeles Unified is moving from 100 pilot schools being funded based on per-pupil basis to all 800 schools funded based on where the student enrolls. In Louisiana, 7 school districts are piloting a student-based budgeting system, including the largest school district in the state, Jefferson Parish, with 50,000 students. New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Indiana have all recently changed their statewide school funding systems to a state formula where the money is attached to the child.

As Indiana's Tribune Star reported "Of all the sweeping legislative changes coming to K-12 education, from private-school vouchers to performance-based pay for teachers, the one that may have the most impact is tucked inside the 270-page budget bill. It changes the way schools are funded, following a new formula to divvy up nearly $13 billion in K-12 education dollars. The new formula follows the mantra that "money follows the child." As Representative Ed Clere, who sits on the House Education Committee explained "The new formula is a "sea change" from the past. We're no longer funding schools. We're funding students."

New Orleans: Most Market-Driven School District in Nation Increases Test Scores Again

Posted on May 26, 2011, 3:31pm | Lisa Snell

New Orleans kids continue to improve under the market-driven charter school system. This year 71% of all New Orleans public school students attend charter schools and 77% of students enrolled in grades K-8 attend charter schools. In addition, there is no residential assignment in New Orleans and even in traditional schools which are not charter schools there is open enrollment and the "money follows the kid."

Today NOLA.Com reports on the continuing progress in New Orleans based on the just released test scores: 

The largest gains overall came among the New Orleans schools the state took over after Katrina because of their historic poor performance. Most of those schools are now independent charters overseen by the RSD, which also runs a number of traditional schools.

RSD students, including charter and traditional campuses, posted their fourth-consecutive year of improvement, increasing the proportion of students scoring at grade level or above to 48 percent. That's a 5 percent gain compared to 2010. With that progress, the proportion of RSD students scoring at grade level or better has more than doubled since 2007, from 23 percent to 48 percent.

RSD Superintendent John White said the results show the district is a national model for broader education reform efforts."The New Orleans system of schools works. Period. End of story. And we cannot go back to a system that does not put children's needs first." he said. "These results should close the book on that question."

New Orleans' kids #winning. Let's make choice and "money following the kids" a national model.

Student-Based Budgeting One Possible Upside to $578 Million Los Angeles High School

Posted on September 13, 2010, 10:45am | Lisa Snell

As the nation's most expensive public school opens in Los Angeles today at $578 million or more than $140,000 per student there is one ironic silver lining: the six academies at the school are part of Los Angeles Unified's Transparent Budgeting Project which is embracing student-based budgeting and giving local schools autonomy over budget and curriculum. So while the capital costs at the school site are ridiculous, moving forward maybe the student-centered funding will help principals at the school budget for higher student achievement.

Louisiana School Choice News

Posted on December 4, 2009, 3:41pm | Lisa Snell

Louisiana's Streamlining Government Commission recommends two new school choice proposals. The first directs the state government to pursue a funding system in which the money follows the child into each school through a student-based budgeting system. The second recommendation is the implementation of a statewide refundable education tax credit program that would offer parents of children from failing public schools the choice to attend any private school.

According to the News-Star,which reports on 143 reccomendations by the commission, the recommendation on student-based budgeting states:

Direct the Department of Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to pursue student-based budgeting. It is an effort to streamline education funding by reducing duplication in central office and directing more resources to the school level to focus on improving school outcomes.

Learn how student-based budgeting works from Reason's Weighted Student Formula Yearbook  here.

In addition,  Education Week reports on the commission's education tax credit proposal:

The state streamlining commission is recommending that Louisiana embark on a statewide school choice program that would give out tax breaks for sending children from failing public schools to private schools. . . .

Under the proposal, parents could get a $4,000 refundable state income tax credit per child, if the parents move the child from a public school deemed "academically unacceptable" to a private school.

The proposal also would give a $4,000 state tax credit to any taxpayer who donates $4,000 to a nonprofit organization that uses the money for scholarships to families who move their children from a failing public school to a private school.

For Real Equity: Give Schools the Money Instead of Staffing Positions

Posted on November 13, 2009, 12:18pm | Lisa Snell

In the "Highly Qualified Teacher Dodge," the New York Times editorializes that the Obama administration has failed to drive reform that would give poor students better teachers.

The rules for the Race to the Top Fund, which is designed to reward states that embrace reform and bypass those that do not, are generally sound and have been greeted with enthusiasm. But some school reform groups and some in Congress have reacted with dismay to the part of the stabilization fund that was supposed to require the states to end the longstanding and reprehensible practice of shunting unprepared and unqualified teachers into the schools serving the poorest students.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was clear in requiring states to remedy situations in which high poverty schools were being disproportionately staffed by teachers who were inexperienced, unqualified or teaching in fields that they had not majored in.

The country would be much further along on the reform trail had the Bush administration followed the law. Instead, it allowed the states to define away the problem by re-labeling the existing, inadequate teacher corps as “highly qualified.”

Congress tried to discourage the use of inexperienced and unqualified teachers a second time when it passed the stimulus act. Education advocates inside and outside Congress

Unfortunately, federal regulations are never going to correct for problems that are inherent in the collective bargaining and labor practices of school districts. The federal government would be much more effective if they attached strings to federal dollars and required school districts to pay schools in real dollars rather than teaching positions. As long as staff is placed in schools based on seniority and school principals do not control the resources generated by their students, teachers will continue to be distributed inequitably between schools. If principals had the resources that each student generated they could use the money to hire more qualified staff or arrange their schools in ways that better served the unique needs of their students. Currently, the way resources are distributed within school districts guarantees that higher paid teachers will keep moving to what they perceive to be “more desirable” schools. If two schools have 20 students and one school has a new $40,000 a year teacher and another school has an experienced $80,000 a year teacher; the resource allocated through staffing looks the same on paper. Each school has one teacher for twenty students. However, one school is receiving a lot more money for the same 20 students. The federal government can define "highly qualified" any way they want, and until local schools receive money rather than staffing positions based on collective bargaining rules, these inequities will persist. We need true vertical equity in public schools that attaches the money to the backs of each child and sends that money to the school where the child enrolls. This will go much farther in solving the teacher equity issue in our schools than federal rules that decide which teachers are the most qualified.

To see which school districts are succesfully attaching the money to the backs of students see Reason's Weighted Student Formula Yearbook 2009.

"Money Following the Child" Working in Baltimore

Posted on October 21, 2009, 11:49pm | Lisa Snell

Today's Education Week reports good news from Baltimore's student-based budgeting efforts. Baltimore's Superintendent Alonso has one of the most aggressive student-based budgeting programs in the nation with close to 90 percent of resources going to principals to control through the school budget. Check out this great story about how student-based budgeting is changing the behavior of school leaders. Baltimore demonstrates how student-based budgeting can introduce real competition into public schools when the money is attached to the backs of children.

The Baltimore schools are seeing steady progress in student achievement and recently were released from 'corrective action' status by the state.

Two years ago, only 150 students attended Holabird Elementary, then a K-5 school in the southeastern corner of this city. Competition from charters and from regular public schools in nearby Baltimore County had drained families from Holabird, a chronic underperformer.

So when Andrés A. Alonso, the chief executive officer of the Baltimore city schools, began last year to allocate money to schools based on their students’ needs, Holabird stood to be hit hard. Achievement had started to rise, but its small roster put the school at risk of losing six teachers unless more students enrolled.

Principal Lindsay Krey, about to start her second year as the leader of the school, decided to knock on some doors.

“We were worried about how much we could lose, but it became a rallying point for our staff and our parents,” says Ms. Krey, now in her third year at Holabird. “We were starting to see some real progress, so our parents went door to door to tell others what was happening.”

Percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in reading:

Percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in math:

Superintendent Alonso has made rapid changes to the Baltimore school district:

Given broad latitude by the appointed school board members who hired him, Mr. Alonso has replaced roughly 40 percent of the city’s principals, eliminated more than 450 positions in the central office, shut down or overhauled failing schools, and opened a variety of schools designed to serve children at risk of dropping out.

I profile Baltimore's student-based budgeting system in the 2009 Weighted Student Formula Yearbook here.

Denver School Closures Improve Outcomes for Students

Posted on September 24, 2009, 4:00pm | Lisa Snell

I profiled the Denver public schools in the Weighted Student Formula Yearbook. The Denver public schools have used school closure as an accountability mechanism in their sudent-based budgeting program. In 2007, the school board approved the closing of eight schools that were under-enrolled and low-performing.

The board projected that the realignment of students from these schools to higher performing schools would achieve projected yearly operating savings of $3.5 million. Those resources were used to improve the education of students that were affected by the school closures, deliver additional resources to under-performing schools and create funding opportunities for new schools and new programs.

In addition to the standard per-pupil revenue that followed students to their new schools, the district reinvested $2 million or 60 percent of the savings from school closures, to follow the students into their schools of reassignment.

A new district report finds that these students have improved their academic scores since moving to their new schools. According to a district analyses reported in the Denver Post:

Students from schools in Denver that were closed two years ago in a reform effort are performing better academically in their new schools, according to a district analysis.

In 2007, Denver Public Schools shut down eight elementary schools and announced the revamping of programs at five schools in a sweeping reform meant to reduce facility costs and improve student achievement.

The analysis of individual student scores from the 2008-09 Colorado Student Assessment Program shows that, at least initially, the effort is working.

The 2,000 affected students made more academic growth in their new schools in reading, writing and math than they did in the schools they left behind, according to DPS.

In New Orleans School Choice and Autonomy Drive School Improvement

Posted on September 16, 2009, 10:33am | Lisa Snell

In Education Week Leslie R. Jacobs and Paul Vallas argue that autonomy, budget control, and school choice drive school improvement in New Orleans.

New Orleans schools now operate under a decentralized system that is unique. Sixty percent of students attend charter schools, and both charter and noncharter schools have autonomy over staffing and budgets. All schools are schools of choice. The money follows the student, so schools receive funds based on their enrollment. There is no longer a collective bargaining agreement, nor a citywide salary schedule.

The results thus far are compelling. In the four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, New Orleans has shown more growth in student achievement than any other district in the state. The percentage of failing schools is down significantly, and student test scores are up in every grade and subject. Some of the gains are dramatic. The 10th grade math proficiency rate has jumped from 39 percent to 58 percent, and the senior graduation rate from 79 percent to 89 percent. The percentage of 8th graders proficient in English has grown from 26 percent to 42 percent. For context, from 1999 until the state takeover in 2005, 8th grade English proficiency had improved by a meager 3 points.

For a look at several districts that are moving toward charter-like autonomy, budget control, and choice see Reason's "Weighted Student Formula Yearbook."

California School Districts on the Brink

Posted on July 23, 2009, 12:49pm | Lisa Snell

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The state is taking over a Monterey County school district that was facing bankruptcy and lending it $13 million, state officials announced Wednesday. . . .

School districts must file reports showing their financial health to the state, and the latest reports showed that 19 districts, including King City, would not be able to meet their financial obligations for the school year that just ended, or the upcoming school year, without making drastic cuts.

Eighty-nine districts, including big-city school systems in Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Ana and Sacramento, are in jeopardy of not meeting their financial obligations in the school year that just ended or the next two years.

Here's a modest proposal. Districts that actually are bailed out with state money should have to be the first to decentralize central office power and give the money to the schools through student-based budgeting. Districts that can't manage their resources should have minimal control over resources. These should be the first districts to have the majority of resources follow the students into schools. Alternatively, these districts could be the first to become all charter districts. In this case, each charter school would also receive the money directly from the state without dealing with the central office at all.

Reason Foundation's student-based budgeting work is here.

The Great Charter School Debate

Posted on June 10, 2009, 7:02pm | Lisa Snell

In today's Los Angeles Times I begin The Great Charter School Debate with Cal Poly Pomona History Professor Ralph E. Shaffer.

From my first installment:

Charter schools are based on a premise of school choice, and parents are not compelled to enroll. If the discipline and ideology are too much, parents have other choices available. In fact, charter schools have led to systematic district reforms that have increased the number of high-quality choices for families. Oakland is a case in point.

In Oakland, charter schools accounted for 16.8% of the district's public school enrollment in 2008; there, charter schools are outperforming their district peers at all grade levels. Low-income students, English-language learners and ethnic minority students are sharing in this success. This competition from charter schools has led Oakland to embrace district-wide reforms, including funding schools more like charters and giving principals control of school resources through student-based budgeting. Oakland has also embraced an open-enrollment school assignment policy that allows parents to choose any campus in the district.Even as the Oakland Unified School District is forced to make significant budget cuts because of declining enrollment and California's budget crisis, the district is acting more like a charter school organization. The majority of the district's budget reductions have been made at the central office, and 87% of the district's unrestricted budget will go to schools in the 2009-2010 school year.

Oakland Unified has been California's most improved large urban district, adding 73 points to its Academic Performance Index (California's benchmark for student achievement) over the last four years. In addition, Oakland has seen improvements over a wide variety of indicators: more AP classes, lower dropout rates, more students passing high school exit exams and more rich activities such as debate and chess teams. While Oakland has five of the top-performing charter schools in California, it also saw 21 traditional district schools make double-digit percentage point gains in reading and math scores in 2008.

This story is not unique to Oakland. Charter schools are a stalking horse for real school district reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that in 2008, 12 communities across the country had at least 20% of their public school students enrolled in charter schools, and 64 communities in the U.S. now have at least 10% of their public school students in charter schools. According to the Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook 2009, 15 districts have moved to student-based budgeting and open-enrollment school choice policies. In places like Baltimore, Denverand New York City, competition from a large number of charter schools has led districts to begin offering their schools and families some of the same freedom as charter schools enjoy.

New Jersey Supreme Court Backs Statewide Student-Based Budgeting

Posted on May 29, 2009, 10:55am | Lisa Snell

As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

The New Jersey Supreme Court has upheld Gov. Corzine's school-aid system, backing his plan to reshape education funding in the state and redirect the flow of billions of dollars in aid.

Yesterday's 5-0 decision effectively throws off a series of court mandates that had required enhanced funding to 31 historically poor areas while tight budgets squeezed the state's 585 other school districts. . . .

When Corzine took on the formula, he said many communities with similar needs had been left behind as state aid increases flowed almost exclusively to the districts covered by the court.

By 2006, Abbott school systems got 55 percent of state support while educating 23 percent of the student body. Other schools had become home to half the state's "at-risk" students, but lawmakers and governors facing tight budgets largely shut off aid to communities without court protection.

Corzine's plan directs aid to all districts under a formula based on enrollment and their shares of needy students - those who are poor or have limited English skills.

This ruling essentially gives New Jersey a statewide weighted student formula funding system. Weighted student formula is a policy tool and financing mechanism that can be implemented by Governors, within the confines of existing state education budgets and economic constraints, to create more efficient, transparent, and equitable funding systems across all schools in a state. Weighted student formula is a student-driven rather than a program-driven budgeting process.

It is also an equitable funding system to help support the emergent charter school movement. Because dollars follow students and not programs, it puts every public school, including charter schools, on a level playing field.

For example, in New Jersey in 2008, after years of court-driven, ad-hoc approaches to school funding, Governor Corzine pushed through a weighted student formula school financing reform to create an equitable and predictable mechanism to distribute funding to all children in New Jersey based on individual student characteristics. Governor Corzine’s weighted student funding formula was equitably applied to all school districts and charter schools beginning in fiscal year 2009. In New Jersey charter schools will greatly benefit from the legislation. Under the old system, charter schools received as little as half as much funding as their public school neighbors. Now they will be funded based on the number and type of student that enrolls in the charter school just like every other public school in New Jersey.

New Jersey still needs to work towards other characteristics of school empowerment including local control of funding by school principals and more school choice. However, changing the statewide funding formula to be based on student characteristics and enrollment is a good first step.

Reason's Weighted Student Formula Yearbook and research is here.

Reason Foundation's New Weighted Student Formula Yearbook

Posted on April 30, 2009, 3:00pm | Lisa Snell

Much of our education funding is wasted on bureaucracy. The money never actually makes it into the classroom in the form of books, computers, supplies, or even salaries for better teachers. Weighted student formula changes that. Using weighted student formula’s decentralized system, education funds are attached to each student and the students can take that money directly to the public school of their choice.

At least 15 major school districts have moved to this system of backpack funding.  Reason Foundation's new Weighted Student Formula Yearbook examines how the budgeting system is being implemented in each of these places and, based on the real-world data, offers a series of “best practices” that other districts and states can follow to improve the quality of their schools.

In places where parents have school choice and districts empower their principals and teachers we are seeing increased learning and better test scores. The results from districts using student-based funding are very promising.  Prior to 2008, less than half of Hartford, Connecticut’s education money made it to the classroom. Now, over 70 percent makes it there. As a result, the district’s schools posted the largest gains, over three times the average increase, on the state’s Mastery Tests in 2007-08.

San Francisco Unified School District has outperformed the comparable large school districts on the California Standards Tests for seven straight years. A greater percentage of San Francisco Unified students graduate from high school than almost any other large urban public school system in the country.

Oakland has produced the largest four-year gain among large urban districts on California’s Academic Performance Index since implementing results-based budgeting in 2004.

In 2008, Baltimore City Schools faced a $76.9 million budget shortfall. But Superintendent Andres Alonso instituted weighted student formula. He identified $165 million in budget cuts at the central office to eliminate the deficit and redistributed approximately $88 million in central office funds to the schools. By the 2010 school year, Alonso will have cut 489 non-essential teaching jobs from the central office, redirecting 80 percent of the district’s operating budget to schools.

The experience with weighted student formula also shows that one of the most important factors in the success of schools is decentralized decision-making. Principals should have autonomy over their budgets and control the hiring of teachers for their schools. This flexibility allows principals to tailor their schools to best fit the needs of their students.  Eliminating the top-down bureaucracy lets principals and teachers focus on teaching.

Weighted Student Formula Yearbook 2009 (Full Study .pdf)
Weighted Student Formula Overview (.pdf)
Weighted Student Formula Best Practices (.pdf)

Weighted Student Formula Case Studies Excerpted from the Yearbook:

Baltimore Public Schools (.pdf)
Belmont Pilot Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District (.pdf)
Boston Pilot Schools (.pdf)
Chicago Public Schools—Renaissance 2010 Schools (.pdf)
Cincinnati Public Schools (.pdf)
Clark County School District (Las Vegas) (.pdf)
Denver Public Schools (.pdf)
Hartford Public Schools (.pdf)
State of Hawaii (.pdf)
Houston Independent School District (.pdf)
New York City Department of Education (.pdf)
Oakland Unified School District (.pdf)
Poudre School District (Fort Collins, Colorado) (.pdf)
Saint Paul Public Schools (Minnesota) (.pdf)
San Francisco Unified School District (.pdf)

Reason Foundation's Education Research

Unions Will Not Negotiate: LA Unified Lays Off 5,000

Posted on April 15, 2009, 12:33pm | Lisa Snell

According to today's Education Week, the Los Angeles School Board has voted to lay off 5,000 employees including teachers and support staff.

While Los Angeles Unified is clearly overstaffed and losing enrollment and money, the extreme measures of laying off thousands of employees could be avoided if the unions would just negotiate less radical across the board reductions and short work furloughs.

Cortines said he held meetings with all the district's unions over the past two weeks in a last-ditch effort to gain concessions that would reduce the number of layoffs, including furloughs, salary reductions, and freezes on raises, but no headway was made.

A.J. Duffy, president of teachers' union United Teachers Los Angeles, said he does not support furloughs and salary reductions because "there is still plenty of fat in the LAUSD budget that should be cut, including millions spent on outside consultants."

The union rules also guarantee that the neediest schools are always hit the hardest.

Many teachers who received layoff notices told the board that the inner-city schools are getting disproportionately hit because a majority of their staffs are new hires. State law mandates school districts make job reductions according to seniority.

Ray Cortines, the Superintendent of LA Unified, claims that these cuts are unavoidable because in the past the district has been adding new positions with declining enrollment. Cortines is in a bind, but the district has not looked seriously enough at cutting central office adults that do not work in schools. In both Baltimore and Oakland the budgeting philosophy has been that the money stays at the school level. These districts have forced the bloated central office staff to go back to the schools.

Both Baltimore and Oakland have used a student-based budgeting and weighted student formula-like budgeting reform to prioritize money following students into schools. They have restructured their districts to focus on schools rather than the central office. Therefore, school principals get much larger shares of the district's operating budget and the schools are largely shielded from the impact of budget cuts. These districts prove that, large bureaucracies can change their priorities to focus resources on schools.

• In Baltimore, for example, Superintendent Alonso, facing a similar budget deficit for the 2010 school year, has cut 489 jobs from the central office, redirecting 80 percent of the district's operating budget to the schools.
   
• Oakland’s strength is the budgeting discretion it provides to schools as it continues to move larger amounts of unrestricted funds and restricted funds to the school level. For example, even as Oakland Unified is forced to make significant budget cuts because of declining enrollment and California’s budget crisis, the majority of reductions were made at the central office, and the district worked to protect the unrestricted funding that goes to schools so that more than 87 percent of the unrestricted budget would go to schools in 2009-2010.
   

Secretary Arne Duncan Advocates Mayor Control of Schools

Posted on April 2, 2009, 1:23pm | Lisa Snell

Over at Education Week's Politics-K-12 blog, they report on Secretary Duncan's declaration that city schools "are best left in Mayor's hands."

Mayor control has a very mixed record in the United States. Simply changing administrators isn't enough. It depends on what they do. New York City and to a lesser extent Chicago have been successful examples of Mayor control because these Mayors have empowered school leaders to improve their schools by implementing school financing structures that devolve funding to the school level in exchange for accountability.

In New York City, for example, Mayor Bloomberg has implemented "Fair Student Funding" in which dollars follow students to the school their parents choose. Principals are responsible for school budgets and have autonomy over hiring and school design. This is like a market-based system within a public school system. More than 15 school systems in the United States have done this and all are seeing positive trends in student achievement. Most have done this by implementing agressive school choice and student-based budgeting systems in which dollars are attached to the backs of children in exchange for accountability. These public schools are much closer to charter schools than traditional public schools. The most aggressive districts: Denver, Baltimore, Hartford, and Oakland have all done this without Mayor control and are all experiencing rapid and positive changes in student outcomes. New York has implemented this system aggresively with Mayor control.

The point is that it is not about who governs (Mayor, school board), it is about what kind of school system the governance structure allows. We need school systems that give kids the right of exit to higher quality schools and give principals a financial incentive to improve their schools. Principals need autonomy and control in exchange for accountability. As long as most schools operate from a top-down structure in which central office dictates what happens in schools, little will change. If Mayor control can move us more aggressively to a school system where parents and principals are in charge of schools,then lets have more Mayors in control. Otherwise it is just more of the new boss, same as the old boss.

Under Stimulus Rich School Districts Get Richer

Posted on March 23, 2009, 5:37pm | Lisa Snell

The New York Times reports on how the federal stimulus package is pouring cash into school districts, whether they need the money or not. Complex funding formulas do not target the funding to school districts that actually need the money to backfill their budgets or ensure equal funding for similar students.

Surprise, Surprise, the $95 billion in education money is not necessarily going to schools with the greatest need. In fact, some schools with greater needs will receive less funding. At the very least one would expect that similar students might receive similar amounts of funding. But then you would not be playing in the random world of school finance in the United States. Perhaps not as troubling as big AIG bonuses, but still you would expect some comparability in per-pupil funding amounts from the federal stimulus. The New York Times reports that the federal stimulus package is NOT targeting school districts that actually need the money:

Utah, where a $1.3 billion budget deficit has threatened deep school cuts, will get about $655 million in education stimulus money, or about $1,250 per student, according to the federal Department of Education. Wyoming, which has no deficit and has not cut school budgets in many years, will get about $1,684 per student.

North Dakota, which also has no budget problems, will receive $1,734 per student. California, which recently closed a $42 billion budget gap through July 2010 partly through deep spending cuts, will get $1,336 per student...Democrats in Congress decided to use the formulas to save time, knowing that devising new ones tailored to current conditions could require months of negotiations.

Congress shouldn't just give the money away. If they were going to give schools billions in new resources, they blew a one-time opportunity to revamp school funding and at least make it more equitable and transparent.

The complex federal formulas mean that the same student with similar characteristics is not worth the same from one state to another. This is compounded by the fact that the money eventually flows to school districts and not students. School districts do not allocate the money based on per-pupil characteristics in a transparent manner. Districts fund programs and staff positions rather than students. Therefore, even within a school district, similar students at neighboring schools draw down vastly different amounts of per-pupil funding including federal dollars based on the characteristics of the employees rather than the students. Schools with more senior staff get more money and the school is only charged for average district staffing levels.

Congress missed a chance to rethink school funding transparency and intentionally decided to continue with inequitable formulas in the name of expediency.

Congress could have required this money to be driven-down to the school level on a per-pupil basis--forcing districts to consider within district disparities.

However, for too many districts this will be a government windfall that matches the pattern of the various bailouts and stimulus thinking in other sectors. Spend now and think about it later.

President Obama Visits Model School Choice Program in Los Angeles

Posted on March 19, 2009, 6:09pm | Lisa Snell