ERS Updates

Tuesday, June 07, 2011 • Posted by Anna Sommers

A State Primer for Transformation

State policymakers have the power to unlock billions of educational dollars.  Restructuring Resources for High Performing Schools: A Primer for State Policy Makers, released today by Education Resource Strategies, identifies the very real barriers to using people, time, money, and technology well in today’s public schools systems and outlines alternatives to the deep and harmful cuts districts are making to staff, professional development, technology and other key programs needed for reform and transformation.

Dollars Locked in the Current System
With shrinking funds, school leaders are abandoning any hard-fought investments in transformation, because the dollars can no longer be found within the current system.  Resources are tied up by state and local policies, legislation, and contractual obligations that are not sustainable - rigid class size and teacher-student ratios, special education policies, and escalating salary and benefit plans.  ERS’s experience with districts has revealed a myriad of barriers to productive resource use and the importance of working with decision-makers at the policy level – state legislatures and union representatives – to lift constraints on spending.  In the paper we articulate how state policy makers can take action to help districts and school leaders make the most of limited resources.

What States Can Do Now
Policy makers can begin by focusing on priorities relating to teacher compensation and effectiveness, special education, state funding, and data reporting. 

• Eliminate class size requirements to free billions of dollars currently tied up in rigid staffing ratios and allow more flexible student grouping.
• Restructure teacher compensation to reward current job contribution, ease tenure and dismissal requirements, and reduce unsustainable salary increases and pension obligations.
• Use early intervention approaches and revise funding formulas to help dramatically reduce special education spending, improve accountability, and meet the needs of struggling students.
• Combine state categorical funding streams and eliminate mandates that require specific staffing levels or delivery models that do not have funding attached to them.
• Encourage weighted student funding systems to avoid wide discrepancies in per pupil spending across schools.
• Shift funding rules and systems away from specifying inputs including specific positions, time requirements, or instructional models towards creating accountability around outcomes. 
• Propose more meaningful district reporting measures to aid decisions around resource use.

Dictating how districts must spend resources is often at odds with effective daily instruction, especially when those mandates command significant and precious dollars.  With the right objectives, policies, and performance measures, states can place resource decisions in the hands of those school leaders who best know the needs of their students and provide the support to help them get there.

I think we need to get away from weighted funding formulas because the are generated from state and local property taxes…the property tax digest all over the country has dwindled and the amounts collected are far lower than what people are anticipating. These weighted funding formulas are out of date.

SouthGATeacher, you bring up an interesting point. Our comments in the state primer around weighted funding formulas were not focused on how states distribute state and federal funding to districts, but on the way that districts distribute the funds that they receive among schools. At a district level, weighted funding formulas are not intended to address funding adequacy – that is, do districts receive and spend an appropriate amount per pupil? Weighted student funding on the district level, if implemented well, can greatly increase funding equity – are districts distributing the dollars they do receive from all sources (including federal, state and local) fairly among schools and students?

Traditional district funding formulas allocate resources to schools largely in the form of staff. For example, each school might get one teacher for every 25 students, as well as one principal, one assistant principal, a librarian, guidance counselor, nurse, etc. These types of funding systems, while designed with the best of intentions, have resulted in significant inequity across schools in every district with which we’ve worked.  In fact, most districts see a range of 200-300% in per pupil funding across schools, even after adjusting for differences in student population. There are several reasons for this inequity, including rounding up of teacher and other FTEs, differences in school size, variations in teacher compensation, and differences between projected and actual enrollment. In addition to causing unintentional funding inequities, staff-based formulas can also severely limit flexibility of school leaders and their teams in determining which resources they need for their specific situation and how best to deploy those resources. Student-based funding formulas, which provide schools with dollars, instead of staff, based on the number and types of students in the building, can increase equity and give the schools more flexibility to match their workforce with their needs.
 
For more data on the types of funding inequity that we have seen in districts, on the drivers of this inequity, and on actions (including but not limited to student based funding systems) your district can take to reduce it, see our funding guide, “School Funding Systems: Equity, Transparency, Flexibility.”  (
http://erstrategies.org/resources/details/school_funding_systems/).

For more information on weighted student funding see:
VUE: Voices in Urban Education—Fall, 2010, Student-Based Budgeting
http://erstrategies.org/resources/details/vue_voices_in_urban_education/

Weighted Student Funding: Why Do Districts Decide to Implement WSF?
http://erstrategies.org/resources/details/weighted_student_funding/

Weighted Student funding District Summaries: Nine District Examples
http://erstrategies.org/resources/details/wsf_district_summaries/

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