Imagine
taking your car for an oil change, and the dealer
adds a new service – say, a complete change of
your windshield fluid. “No charge,” he says.
“The dealership is paying for it.”
But
3,000 miles later, when you take the car in again,
that extra service is done again – only this
time, you’re the one paying extra for it.
“Well,” the dealer says, “we added it to the
baseline of services and had to increase the fee
to cover it.”
That’s
a little like the way Virginia’s K-12 education
funding works: The state may fund, for example, a
two percent salary increase for teachers. Local
school systems are free to add more if they want
– say, another two percent – so long as they
pay for it themselves.
But
then, a year or two later, when the state
re-benchmarks the cost of education, the full four
percent is put into the baseline and the state
takes responsibility. The way it works now, state
education funding can never catch up – because
it is always required to build on the decisions of
localities.
In
an effort to rein in those costs, the budget
passed by Republicans in the House of Delegates
would end that practice, first with support staff
and then with teacher raises. Although the House
budget actually spends more for public education
than either the Governor’s proposal or the
Senate’s, it does so by adding back construction
and lottery monies cut by the Governor, while
reducing future salary costs.
Not
surprisingly, the proposal has sent up a small
firestorm from those who receive those salaries,
and not a little concern about a system that has
seen the funding gap between the highest and
lowest poverty school districts widen since 1999.
Lost
in all of this is a stark reality both sides
should agree on: Virginia’s public education
funding system – designed in an era when Fairfax
County was the state’s top dairy producing
county – is broken.
Our
education funding isn’t based on the number of
students or the difficulty of teaching them, but
on indecipherable staffing ratios and special
program formulas.
For
example: To determine just the Basic Aid
associated with each student in a school division,
the maximum number of teachers the state will fund
for each grade level in each division is
calculated based on the Average Daily Membership (ADM)
and pre-determined guidelines for the minimum and
maximum number of students per type of teacher.
The average salary for each type of position is
then multiplied by the number of positions
required by an average Basic Aid dollar amount per
ADM, known as the Basic Aid PPA. This number is
then divided by the number of students to get an
average. This average is then multiplied by the
forecasted number of students the division will
have in the next year to determine total funding
– which is then run through the Local Composite
Index, which has its own formula.
You
understood that … right?
With
expenses that can’t be tracked or understood, is
it any wonder that taxpayers are angry with costs
they can’t comprehend, or that legislators rebel
against a system that guarantees only formulaic
increases?
Worse,
while principals and teachers are now held
accountable for their results, they have little
control over how money is used at their school or
in their classroom. Those decisions are made in
central offices and state capitols, using
additional complex budgets and allocations that
leave educators as much in the dark as taxpayers.
While
the General Assembly will spend the next couple of
weeks battling it out in hand-to-hand combat, both
sides need desperately to step back and seriously
explore alternative funding mechanisms. One idea
is to tackle school finance by creating a system
of “weighted student funding.” The idea is
simple: Determine the dollar value it takes
to educate a child. Add a multiplier for
those demonstrably harder to teach – students
with disabilities, Limited English Proficiency,
and/or poverty. Drive those dollars down to the
school level, empowering school-based leadership
to decide how best to spend the funds educating
the students, and then hold that leadership
accountable.
One
broad-based national coalition, led by Ronald
Reagan’s Secretary of Education and Bill
Clinton’s chief of staff, already exists to
foster the
idea. A 2005 study by the Claire Boothe Luce
Institute suggested that such an idea could work
with a foundational state student funding
allowance of $6,000 per student. And Virginia’s
Board of Education already has a nationally
recognized expert sitting on it in the person of
Andy Rotherham, Co-Founder of Education Sector.
To
be sure, there are plenty of questions. But the
current debate has devolved into shouting matches
between those who say the state spends too much
and those who act as if it can never spend enough.
Fifteen years ago, Gov. George Allen created a
blue ribbon commission that overhauled public
education and made Virginia a leader in
standards-based education. Reform of education
funding needs the same kind of commitment and
commission – not in the heat of a General
Assembly session, but with a serious debate that
consults outside reformers and commits to a major,
comprehensive, and equitable overhaul.
--
February 25, 2008
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