Brown wants financing reform
Weighted formula's demise exaggerated
Gov. Jerry Brown hasn’t taken the Education Coalition’s “no” as a final answer on a weighted student funding plan.
In the last two weeks, Brown administration officials have been telling districts and civil rights groups that he remains determined to reform how schools are financed. However, Brown also is open to changing the formula to respond to some of the objections to his initial proposal, Sue Burr, executive director of the State Board of Education and the governor’s key education adviser, said this week.
“The governor made a proposal in January, and, as with all governors, he intends to see it through,” Burr said.
Brown is proposing to simplify the state’s complex, inequitable and outmoded funding system while directing about an extra third more dollars per student to English learners and low-income children. Brown’s version of weighted student funding is largely modeled on a plan proposed four years ago by Stanford emeritus professor Michael Kirst, who’s now president of the State Board of Education, and others. Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Committee on Education Excellence endorsed the idea, as have civil rights advocates. Even the Education Coalition, representing school districts, the state PTA, and employee unions, in its March 6 letter opposing Brown’s plan, praised its “laudable goals.”
The Education Coalition opposes Gov. Brown's weighted student formula for finanace reform. Click to enlarge.
However, coming off of consecutive years of budget cuts, the Ed Coalition letter called this “the worst possible time to consider changes to the school funding formula.” As proposed, the formula would simply redistribute dollars while leaving substantial budget cuts in place, the Coalition said. Though not in the letter, several education leaders questioned Brown’s judgment in creating potentially divisive policy changes, with winners and losers among districts, at the same time that he was campaigning for a significant tax increase in November.
Burr acknowledged there was “a major miscommunication” when the weighted student formula was introduced in January that fed the assumption that the administration did not plan to pay back money owed to schools. This debt, called the deficit factor, primarily consists of unpaid cost-of-living adjustments, and now totals about $9 billion, or 20 percent of Prop 98 funding. With the Department of Finance projecting an additional $16 billion in new Proposition 98 funding over the next six years, assuming the proposed tax increase passes, the deficit factor could be repaid, while the weighted student formula is phased in, Burr said.
Brown has proposed phasing in the weighted student formula over six years. Every district would receive a base funding level plus 37 percent extra per child for every unduplicated English learner and poor child. Districts with concentrations of disadvantaged children would get an additional percentage increase – as much as $3,500 or more per child.
Paying off money owed to schools
The current plan proposes raising the base and the extra weights equally as Proposition 98 revenue increases over time, about 40 percent at the end of six years. But another way is to build up just the base as the deficit factor is repaid, Burr said. That would address criticisms of suburban districts with few disadvantaged students, which would see their per-student funding barely increase under the initial proposal. This would mark a significant change while initially reducing extra money for needy children.
Nothing is final, Burr said, because the governor hasn’t made up his mind on various options.
Other changes that the administration is considering:
- Differentiating funding levels by grade level. That’s how funding is now, with high schools getting more money per student. Setting a uniform rate hurt high school districts under the current weighted student formula. The administration has all but committed to this change.
- Maintaining funding for a few categorical programs as special cases, therefore not including them in the pot for redistribution under the weighted student formula. One is bus transportation, whose funding Brown had proposed protecting for only one year. The argument is that some small rural districts could potentially lose thousands of dollars per child if transportation money is not protected. Another is called the Targeted Instruction Improvement Grants, or TIIG. This is basically desegregation money, totaling nearly $900 million, that for years has primarily gone to a few urban districts: Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. The policy argument is that these districts entered into court-approved plans for spending the money. The political argument is that Brown needs the support of these districts.
- Taking a few years longer to phase in the reforms.
- Stretching out paying down $10 billion in deferrals, late payments to schools that are part of the state’s “wall of debt.” Brown has an accelerated schedule for eliminating deferrals. Instead, he could scale this back.
Brown will make changes to the weighted student formula part of his revised state budget in mid-May. As Burr notes, every year the Legislature can examine the funding formula and tweak it to make it right. “Every year, the Legislature can make a judgment,” she said. “The formula is not set in stone.”
The Education Coalition still may not change its position, but Brown only needs a 50 percent majority of the Legislature. The big winners under the formula – districts like Fresno, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino – have yet to make their voices heard. And a formula that is more palatable to some of the “losers” would make it easier to pass.
I guess one of the implications of the weigjted formula is that charter schools will likely get a lot more money due to the students they typically serve. True?
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Paul: Those that serve high portions of needy kids would get more funding, yes. Special education will continue to be treated outside of the weighted funding formula so those charters that serve fewer special education students would not be financially penalized under this plan.
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“This debt, called the deficit factor, primarily consists of unpaid cost-of-living adjustments, and now totals about $9 billion, or 20 percent of Prop 98 funding”
I thought the Wall of Debt was $30 billion and included COLA, suspension of Prop 98 and deferrals. And the $9.2 billion was just the deferrals portion. I’ll have to look it up again.
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The “wall of debt” is more than $30 billion; it includes non-education debts such as $6 billion borrowed to balance the budget under former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, plus billions in internal borrowing and delayed payments to Medi-Cal, CalPERS and local governments for unpaid mandates. This from the Sacramento Bee.
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The Ed coalition really has it wrong on this one. Everybody knows that the finance system that we have is ridiculous, fraught with history, and inequitable. Its nonsensical basis makes a great argument for those who oppose adding any funds to education: “You want to add money to THAT?”
The Governor’s student-based funding approach is much better, and no surprise: it has been designed based on careful, nonpartisan policy work over many years of study. There is NEVER going to be a comfortable moment to shift from allocating money the old, goofy, inequitable way to allocating it in a fairer way. Seriously, Ed Coalition: do you like the system that we have? Did you notice the part about a multi-year phase-in? Please find a pretext to reverse your position!
Legislators: The Governor is pushing for a policy that makes sense. Five years on, people will look back on today’s crazy system, shake their heads in disbelief and say “can you imagine that they allowed it to work that way for so long?” This is the kind of smart “good-government” policy change that many have come to believe can only be accomplished through the initiative process. Please, ignore prove the doubters wrong and show California that its legislature is capable of principled action!
School boards, PTAs and community organizations: Please tell your communities that the Education Coalition has it wrong on the budget. This is a bad fight. Support the budget act to get the system fixed, then support the initiatives to get the funding fixed.
Lest there be any confusion: I know that California education is badly underfunded. The $20 billion in cuts to education have done permanent harm, and fixing this is vitally important. But California also needs a school finance system that makes sense. There is no virtue in failing at both.
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I like the idea of the new approach. But, the devil is in the details, and I think the initial proposal – which was to switch to it whole hog next year based on only the one modifier – was terrifying. It won’t hurt to take some time to work out the analysis for each district, to give people the chance to send feedback like, “Hey, you really need to allocate more per student for high school,” and to find other places where the proposal causes new inequities and problems. For example, as I understand it, Career Technical Education funding goes away – not added to the general fund for districts – it’s just gone. If that’s so, and the main programs are still starved for funding, CTE programs will die, and it’s not something that should be done inadvertently. I think it’s worth taking the time for everyone to be able to understand the effects and give feedback. California’s a big state and what may work for LAUSD and San Diego is not necessarily going to meet the needs of Lassen or Humboldt county schools.
The slower phase-in is also going to be very helpful, since districts that end up with lower funding are going to have to cut staff. Giving them time to plan that is important.
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El is right. The Gov’s proposal would throw CTE $ to the four winds with ZERO vocational education accountability (and without addressing all of the policy drivers that have already led to the historic erosion of such Voc Ed programs). The devil is definitely in the unintended details of this sweeping funding reform proposal. Either the Administration isn’t aware of what would happen to CTE or they simply don’t care.
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I think we should make make changes to SARCs to go along with any weighted funding changes. The purpose being to make school boards more accontable to the public on school by school funding. I still think that school based weighting makes much more sense than district weighted funding. Or at least a combination of the two. I’d love to hear a defense of using district weighted funding exclusively. I bet it would be eye opening for me.
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We all look at school finance from our own part of the elephant. The fact is, the issues and the way money is allocated between a district like LAUSD and small local district can be dramatically different. LAUSD’s board is so far from its schools that it’s not physically possible that the board members have visited all the schools they oversee, and it’s hard for the parents of any single school to hold them accountable. Thus, allocating money at the district level could still create huge inequities either deliberately or accidentally. By contrast, in districts in my county, the schools are all pretty uniform in demographics and achievement within a district, and boards are representing far fewer people. The board members are all able to personally visit each school, multiple times in a year if they wanted. The parents of one school could swamp the board and make a difference if funding skews too much to other schools.
That’s a long and wordy way of musing on what @Paul said, about allocating to schools vs. districts. On the other hand, I can see a district making a deliberate choice to overfund elementary schools versus high schools (or vice versa), and I don’t have a problem with that.
An interesting factor is that while the students don’t change that much, most schools have the experience that older kids apply less for school lunch subsidies (embarrassment, parents go back to work, other?), and obviously we hope by then they are no longer ELL. But, while we use those statuses as markers, it’s probably likely that those kids still need more support than kids who were never low income and never ELL. Certainly you would expect, for example, that those kids are less likely to have had a parent who went to college, and thus they would need more counselor support at the very least. It’s these kinds of nuances that we need to really think through.
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Paul, you are right about the importance of SARCs in the weighted funding context. The SARC (at least in principle) is at this point the only home of a great deal of data needed to cast sunshine on equity-in-practice. (Education Trust West has done a ton of work on this.)
At a recent Grantmakers for Education meeting, Mike Kirst addressed a question about whether funds ought to be allocated directly to schools according to student weights. He echoed the logic behind the Ed Excellence committee’s recommendation on the subject. In a nutshell, let us beware unintended consequences and first try sunshine.
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Paul: As Jeff indicated, revising SARC is a priority for the State Board in the coming year. Michael Kirst has indicated that.
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I read the “Students First” report summaries. All the language talks about allocating funds by school and increasing accountability by school. That makes intuitive sense to me.
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The committee recommendations do preserve the fiduciary role of districts. The report calls for districts to carry through to schools and programs the student-based distribution pattern modeled by the state. In the full report, recommendation 2.1.6 (page 5-23), titled “Ensure that targeted funding gets to schools whose students generate it” directly addresses this question and some of the practical questions of how to accomplish it. http://everychildprepared.org/docs/5finance.pdf
The committee’s recommendations came at a really unfortunate time. The stock market collapse triggered a budget collapse that effectively thwarted any attention that might have otherwise been paid to a carefully crafted set of recommendations about education reform. The full technical report of the committee is well-structured, surprisingly readable, and still relevant. I encourage anyone who wants to play a role in getting the system right to put the technical report on their reading list. (This certainly includes anyone who reads this far down the comment stream in a blog entry on finance reform!)
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I probably need to be more clear. I think schools that have concentrations of students with more needs should get the increased funding. I don’t like the idea of making the funding decisions based on district populations.
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Hi Jeff. To be honest, I have some problems with that report. In order to avoid writing a manifesto again, let me just summarize that my biggest concern is probably related to the question of funding sufficiency and how it relates to funding efficiency. The report admits that there is no definitive answer on the question of sufficiency (and in fact provides extensive examples on the direct lack thereof), but then goes on to propose ’solutions’ to ‘problems’, both of which are dependent on an assumption that sufficiency already exists, and more subtly, that current inefficiencies are largely or even solely a function of something other than insufficiency. That seems odd, at best.
How is it that we can avoid creating policy that is based on assumptions that are clearly inaccurate or at least unsubstantiated. One of our state’s biggest problems seems to be extreme knee-jerk reactions to perceived problems, which most times turn out not to have been accurately characterized, and worse, the reactions would have been over-corrections even had they been accurate. Which means in the actual case, they likely work to do nothing but create a new problem.
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It might be quite interesting, the more I think about it, to compare the ‘correctness’ in terms of educational need as a metric using “free/reduced lunch status” versus “has a college graduate in the household.”
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The governor’s proposal also destroys California AVID, the most successful, long term, data driven program that exists. CA AVID sends more than 10,000 ethnic minority, first in the family to attend college, and poor students to college every year. Research shows that these students have a higher retention and graduation rate than their peers. This policy is going to hurt California and its economy for generations to come.
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Doug McRae submitted this comment:
“Under the NCLB law, the federal government insisted on one test administered to all eighth graders.”
This statement is not true. North Carolina has a 2-test scheme [a full Algebra I test and an Algebra Lite test] that was approved by the feds in 2006. It has a shared scale of measurement [in technical terms, a vertical scale] linking the two tests to allow for a single set of cut scores and performance standards applied to both tests. CA can do the same for 8th grade math with the current Algebra I standards-based test for the 2/3rds of CA 8th graders now taking Algebra I and an Algebra Readiness standards-based test based on Algebra Readiness curriculum frameworks, instructional materials, and professional development approved by the State Board in 2007. The statement quoted above is continuation of a myth perpetuated by CDE staff when the Grade 8 Algebra issue came to a head during the summer of 2008.
The larger issue, however, is whether CA’s goal for Algebra I for 8th graders, established back in 1997, has been a success. It is hard to argue with the big picture facts generated by STAR trend data since the standards-based tests were installed in 2003 – In 2003, 1/3 of 8th graders took Algebra I and 39 percent scored proficient or above, and in 2011, more than 2/3 took Algebra I by 8th grade and about 50 percent scored proficient or above [the 2011 data includes 7th graders taking Algebra I in 2010]. These data document a stunning success story doubling the number and percentage of CA’s 8th graders taking Algebra I and significantly increasing both the number and percentage of those students scoring proficient or above on the Algebra I standards-based test. Yes, there have been some poor implementation practices in local districts and schools pushing 8th graders not yet ready for Algebra I into a full Algebra I course, but overall the Algebra I for 8th grade initiative in California has been a major success story. It needs another 10-15 years for full fruition.
To back away from the goal of Algebra I for 8th graders in California is very simply to dumb down the expectations that were established 15 years ago. Rather than back away from the goal, the action needed is a mid-course fine tuning of implementation practices.
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