Doug McRae has a sharp eye and a rational mind. A retired vice president in the publishing division of  McGraw-Hill who follows state education policy closely, McRae saw the state’s peculiar recommendations for distributing $316 million in federal money this fall for turning around the  worst performing schools and thought, There’s got to be a better way.

So McRae spent a good part of Saturday and Sunday creating a new formula for dividing up School Improvement Grant dollars that strikes me as fair and sound. Instead of giving huge sums – up to $6 million — indiscriminately, for the most part, to 63 schools and goose eggs to a dozen schools in Los Angeles Unified and 18 other schools, he’s come up with a set of reasonable criteria that school districts – even those that would get less than they had hoped –  would have a hard time disputing.

McRae sent his proposal yesterday to the State Board of Education, which has to vote on spending the money today, and shared his idea with me. The state Department of Education  jammed the State Board by waiting till late Friday to release its proposal for spending the money. But the State Board shouldn’t be rubber-stamping bad policies, because there’s no time to consider alternatives.

Out of 188 schools that made the persistently lowest performing list, 113 applied for a School Improvement Grant, using one of the four options required by the feds (see yesterday for an explanation): closure, restart (bringing in a charter school operator); turnaround (replacing the principal and at least half the teaching staff) and transformation (the most flexible, least punitive model).

State officials felt bound by a federal guideline dictating how to distribute the money: Grants must go first to districts that applied for every school on the list, giving basically the maximum amount, regardless of how big the school is or which of the four options they chose.  That left no money for nine districts that sought $99 million for 30 schools. As McRae noted, with so little time to get the SIG applications to the state, districts like Los Angeles, with dozens of schools on the list, made a prudent decision to write applications for the ones they felt most in need.

McRae went back to look at the state’s application that the feds approved and found that, sure enough, the State Board had made it clear that it would consider “other factors, such as . . . . the selected intervention model, school enrollment, and the overall quality of LEA (district) applications.”

So, if McRae is right, the State Board should have the authority to reject the Ed Department’s rigid read of the feds’ intent for the money.

Formula based on three factors

McRae proposes allocating money based on three factors: school enrollment, type of intervention model and academic standing. Some of the schools on the list aren’t among those with the worst API scores; they’re in the lowest 20, ever 30 percent of schools. Those would get less money than those in the lowest decile, which one could assume would need it more.

It makes no sense to give elementary schools with 450 students as much money as high schools with 1,500 students, but that’s what the state did. McRae would give the maximum to schools with more than 1,000 students, 75 percent to schools with between 500 and 1,000 and 50 percent for small schools.

He’d also give the maximum amount to schools that chose the turnaround model, which requires the most drastic changes, 80 percent for the most popular option, transformation, 60 percent for charter conversion and 20 percent for the closure option, since the expense involves winding down operations.

State officials should be pressed to explain why they didn’t take this approach.