September 8, 2006

Weighted Student Funding–100% questionable

Filed under: Education Funding by Maisie @ 9:18 pm

Weighted student funding is the latest thing in systemic school reform, in part because its many well-heeled, well-connected backers are making sure of it. This morning in Washington DC, there was a staged debate about it, moderated by John Merrow of PBS, with panelists Rod Paige, Bush’s first Education Secretary; John Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff; Arlene Ackerman, recently superintendent of San Francisco schools and former superintendent in DC and Seattle; and Michael Rebell, who originated the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

The debate was a lot better than the book(let). The Thomas B. Fordham Institute authored the glossy, 70-page “Fund the Child, Tackling Inequity and Antiquity in School Finance,” which lays out the idea of weighted student funding, but it’s unfocused, full of generalizations and condemnations without substantial discussion, so it’s hard to get interested in what they’re saying. This morning’s debate sharpened the issues at stake.

The basic idea is that instead of a state funding a school district or a district funding a school, the funds are assigned to each child, additionally weighted for students who are poor, special needs, or limited English proficient. This achieves more equity in school funding, they argue, because each child carries a “backpack” of funding, giving schools incentives to recruit hard-to-educate kids (who have higher funding) and the resources to attract more qualified staff to teach them.

The initiative has the support of prominent Republicans and Democrats (hence Paige and Podesta at the podium), but definitely not Rebell. (Edwize also expressed skepticism about the idea when it first came out this summer. In fact, we wondered if it might be a “Trojan horse” reintroducing vouchers. The Fordham weekly “Gadfly” shot back that it was “a gift horse, not a Trojan horse.”)

Rebell said he was amazed that Podesta and Ackerman were supporting the idea, that the proposal pays no attention whatsoever to the money coming into a school district, but is “dividing the scraps.” He said he believes it is a “political device” to shift the debate away from adequacy lawsuits around the country (including CFE). It’s fine to have funding address differing student needs, he said, but what’s really needed in schools that serve disadvantaged students is capacity building, including smaller class sizes, better academic supports and highly qualified teachers, not a rearrangement of the same inadequate pot of school money. Also, “It’s a back door to charters and vouchers,” he charged, and there is no reason that this system would be any less “political” than the way schools are currently funded.

Ackerman actually implemented weighted student funding in Seatte, DC and San Francisco, and said it worked well to “level the playing field” and bring transparency to the school funding process. But a DC parent in the audience said that she’d seen no real results from it in that city. And in San Francisco it seems that the single largest district expense, teacher salaries, are still being allotted to schools using an averaging formula. A key tenet of weighted student funding is that poor schools have more real dollars to “buy” highly-qualified teachers. Podesta and Paige both emphasized the potential for greater equity as their reasons for supporting it.

Expect to hear more about this proposal. It definitely has “legs,” given the eminence of its supporters.

But no matter what they say, it’s a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth. What if it has no teeth? or what if they’re sharp and pointed??

10 Comments

Comments are open for registered users and do not reflect the views of the UFT. Please read our general rules for commenters.

  • The fact that SF uses averaged salaries for their WSF budgets actually protects teacher seniority rules. Without that the UESF (local union) would not have gone along with it at all. There are serious equity issues surrounding the fact that disadvantaged schools tend to be staff by less experienced teachers — and the use of averaged salaries means that WSF does not address that problem. But it is curious that a union site would ding SF’s implementation on that grounds.

    The biggest problem with the SF implementation of WSF comes from the fact that so much of the district funding comes through restricted allocations. State legislators tie up so much of the money with strings that WSF, which can only be used to allocate unrestricted funds, barely covers salaries. This severely limits the efficacy and power of site-based budgeting.

    Still, it has been a very effective and important reform here in SF. Hopefully it can be expanded by bringing more of the budget under WSF.

    Comment by BernalKC — September 9, 2006 @ 1:14 am

  • Edwize takes another swipe at WSF…

    This is the second time Edwise has weighed in as WSF skeptics. The first time they swung their brickbat at WSF they claimed WSF was an attempt to undermine collective bargaining. This time they take the contradictory position that SF’s WSF is toothles…

    Trackback by San Francisco Schools — September 9, 2006 @ 1:46 am

  • As a School Board member in SF and the former President of the SF Board I think EdWize - is right on the mark -
    “the [WSF] proposal pays no attention whatsoever to the money coming into a school district, but is “dividing the scraps.”
    Right wing, pro-voucher and union-busting forces are trying to frame the debate in a misleading manner.
    Our schools in SF with the concentrations of the lowest income kids [almost all kids of color] are really left in a terrible situation in budget deficit periods [like the last 5 years for us in SF] under the WSF to cut a teacher here or a para there or arts programs or sports. Other schools with more affluent parents and an ability to raise private funds might be a little better situation but they struggle as well.
    Those difficult ‘decisions’ over ‘crumbs’ left up to the school sites have really left ‘management’ [me and other school board members and the superintendent] off the hook in the broader fight for adequate funding.
    United Educators of SF and others have been constructively critical of the implementation of the WSF in SF. The Fordham Foundation is really trying to mislead the public on this very complex issue.

    Comment by ericmar — September 9, 2006 @ 6:59 pm

  • So I follow the links from both commenters back and find two very pleasant, teacher-friendly, Bay Area education blogs.

    How does Weighted School Funding work in San Francisco? How long has it been there? And is a funding formula really a concern for us? (that last is a real question. I don’t know that it’s not, but I don’t understand that it is)

    Jonathan

    Comment by jd2718 — September 9, 2006 @ 7:25 pm

  • Thanks for your insight Eirc and BernalKC. Maisie’s right, considering the groups behind WSF it’s not an issue that’s going to disappear.

    Comment by Kombiz — September 10, 2006 @ 9:12 am

  • from Dennis Kelly, the President of United Educators of SF, the local teachers union.

    Dear Peter,

    How can the Weighted Student Formula be the “latest thing in school
    reform”? It has been kicking around for most of a decade. Perhaps it is
    the newest thing on some particular block…

    The Weighted Student Formula would make sense if it actually brought
    money to a site. The experience we have had in San Francisco is that
    the staff was empowered to cannibalize one another in fighting over the
    inadequate pot of money. The universal losers are the
    paraprofessionals. It seems easier to cut two paraprofessionals than
    one teacher, for instance.

    The administration and various committees have evolved a set of rules
    to guide school site councils in administering the allocation of
    funding. For instance, certain levels of clerical support must be
    maintained. Teachers to instruct certain classes must be maintained.
    When I was at a school and we decided to “share the pain” across the
    board, we were told that administrators could not be cut or even
    fractionally reduced. After several years the WSF gurus considered
    using actual costs instead of averages in setting salaries for all
    levels of employees. That has not been implemented. Prior to Ackerman’s
    “reconstitution” of several schools, the schools classified as
    underperforming showed no significant difference in experience of staff
    when compared to other sites. After Ackerman threw out whole teaching
    staffs and repopulated those schools with new hires, then the
    experience differences showed up.

    The actual weights tied to the funding are not apparent at the sites.
    The site council sees a pot of money and is told to operate with it. It
    does not bring more attention to students with special needs.

    Our understanding is that the Canadian origins of the concept were
    created to give principals entrepeneurial responsibilities for their
    schools.

    The WSF effort gets confused with the decentralization of budgeting
    through school site councils.

    From the description of the discussion that I have read in your note,
    Rebell comes closest to accurately describing it.

    Dennis

    Comment by Peter Goodman — September 10, 2006 @ 4:42 pm

  • This is pretty fascinating to have both the president of the UESF and one of our senior SFUSD board members participating in this thread. How cool is that? Dennis, I find it interesting that you feel that WSF is not tied to decentralization. My thesis is that WSF is a potent means to that end, but it needs to encompass more of the budget to truly deliver on that promise.

    The question of “how does WSF work in SF” triggered me to write a lengthy reply which I have posted as an article here: Comments on San Francisco’s Weighted Student Formula. My comments really are too long to post here. I hope you find them helpful.

    Comment by BernalKC — September 11, 2006 @ 12:29 am

  • I lived in San Francisco for a number of years, before I even had kids. The schools were underfunded then, and plagued by inefficient bureaucracy. Good to hear nothing’s changed. Arlene Ackerman seems like a passionate advocate for equity and for community involvement, but the comments here, together with similar comments I heard from a DC parent, suggest to me that WSF has not brought about any significant redistribution of wealth or talent to the schools in either city. I appreciate the thoughtful comments and explanations from the union folks and board members, but what I’m gathering is that WSF is more of a site-based budgeting initiative in SF, rather than an equity measure. Is this accurate? If so, then WSF may have more to do with principal empowerment than equity. Of course principal empowerment is only as good as the principal who’s “empowered.” And why lard functions like food and transportation services onto an instructional leader? The whole thing is starting to feel like a promise of all things to all people and delivery of nothing. Or as one person said, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. In New York, we are awaiting the final appeal of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, and the exit of a Republican governor, George Pataki, who has done everything he could to block the suit’s progress. If the appeals court upholds the decision to give New York City schools another $5 billion a year in operating funds, and the new governor follows through, WSF will be beside the point at best.

    Comment by Maisie — September 12, 2006 @ 8:51 am

  • Some commenters here seem confused by Maisie’s mention of the fact that SF did not include teacher salaries in its implementation of WSF. As I understood her dirift, she did not mean this as a criticism, but simply to point out that SF is not a reliable “test” of WSF because teacher allocations are a major target of the proposal. One of WSF’s primary goals is to change the distribution of experienced teachers. But, as I commented in an earlier edwize blog on WSF, it is highly doubtful it would work as proponents intend, that is, to direct more experienced teachers to poorer schools. In fact, I suspect it would make teaching in inner cities even less attractive to experienced teachers, chasing more of them to the better-paying suburbs where teachers can focus on teaching instead of coping with larger classes, shortages of books and materials, crumbling buildings, inadequate facilities and equipment, unsafe conditions and (often)lack of administrative support and respect.

    Comment by CitySue — September 12, 2006 @ 10:38 am

  • So Arlene now says that a true WSF would not use averaged salaries? How very interesting. I wish I’d been there. As I said in my comments post, if real salaries had been used in SF, the real problem would not arise in the high poverty schools. The bombshell problem would be in the schools with veteran teachers and low needs kids who would suddenly be unable to afford their existing staff.

    You are right that using actual salaries in WSF would do nothing to incent teachers to take assignments in challenging schools. Many highly paid verteran teachers working in less demographially challenged urban schools would probably opt to work in a suburban district with the same demographics if they were forced to choose between that or working in a struggling school with disadvantaged kids.

    Even with that caveat, SF’s WSF does strenghen sites, does give a strong principal more authority and autonomy. It has worked here. Our schools are doing much, much better than they were before Ackerman and before WSF. Do not discount the efficacy and power of this idea. Even with averaged salaries.

    Comment by BernalKC — September 12, 2006 @ 1:19 pm

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.