Big changes to weighted formula
Brown ups the base, lowers weights for poor kids
Responding to criticisms of his plan for school finance reform, Gov. Jerry Brown has significantly revised his weighted student formula, raising the base amount that all districts will receive, reducing the differences between district “winners” and “losers” by reducing extra money for disadvantaged students, assuring districts they will be repaid for past budget cuts, and adding contingencies in case optimistic revenue projects come up short.
State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, who four years ago co-developed a weighted student formula on which this proposal is based, said the administration incorporated most of the suggestions that it received. “I think this is a much better proposal and the one to frame the debate rather than the initial plan with flaws and omissions,” Kirst said.
It may not be enough to win over the mainstream groups in the Education Coalition, which opposed the governor’s first proposal. California Teachers Association President Dean Vogel said in a statement, “CTA also continues to have concerns about changing the school funding formula in these uncertain times. Moving toward a funding formula that creates a system of winners and losers for students will only add to the challenges local schools are facing.” And California School Boards Association President Jill Wynns expressed similar reservations about the timing of the proposal, following years of budget cuts. “There are changes in the direction we like; that does not mean we want it done now.”
But Brown wants to see the framework for his financing plan passed this year, even though he is proposing a seven-year phase-in, with little impact over the next two years. That’s because it will take only a majority of the Legislature to enact a weighted student formula, but then two-thirds – to overcome his veto – to amend it.
Brown is proposing to simplify the current system, with dozens of quirky, historically rooted categorical grants and unequal district allocations. He would fund a uniform base grant and add extra money for every poor child and every English learner who’s not poor. Nearly every categorical program would end; districts would have flexibility to spend state money as they saw fit.
Brown’s formula assumes that the tax increase he is proposing in November will pass, and K-12 schools and community colleges will see $17 billion more in revenue at the end of four years.. Here are the changes Brown is proposing:
- Higher base, lower weights. Brown had proposed a base of $4,920 per student with a 37 percent weight, an extra $1,820 for every low-income student and English learner. But he never explained where the 37 percent figure came from, and some suburban districts, with few disadvantaged students, would have gotten little more after seven years than they currently get. Brown is now proposing to raise the base about $500, to an average of $5,421, and lower the weight to 20 percent, to $1,084. That would be a 40 percent cut in extra funding.
- Concentration factor. Assuming that concentrations of English learners and poor children pose extra challenges, Brown proposed to progressively increase the weights for districts with large percentages of disadvantaged students. But he’d cut the bonus 40 percent as well. Districts with 50 percent disadvantaged students would receive an extra 4 percent instead of 7.2 percent. Districts where all students are poor and English learners combined would get an extra 20 percent instead of 37 percent.
- Deficit factor. Brown now explicitly says districts will be repaid for past cuts and lost cost-of-living raises due them before the weighted student formula is fully phased in. It wasn’t clear in the first proposal if this amount, amounting to 20 percent of current funding and known as the deficit factor, would be reimbursed.
- Grade span differentials. Brown had proposed a uniform weight of $4,920, which hurt high school districts, which currently get more than unified or elementary districts. Brown is now proposing funding K-3 at $5,466 per student, grades 4-6 at $4,934 per student, grades 7-8 at $5,081, and high school at $5,887. The K-3 figure includes what the state had been paying for class size reduction; districts can spend the money however they want.
- Targeted Instructional Improvement Grant (TIIG) and Home-to-School Transportation dollars. These two categorical grants total nearly $1.5 billion. TIIG, the larger of the two, funded dollars to districts that settled old desegregation suits. Los Angeles alone gets $460 million, or about $700 per student. Brown had proposed ending the categoricals and redistributing the money through the weighted student formula. That would have created huge losses for rural districts with large bus expenditures and many poor kids, and, in the case of TIIG, for Los Angeles and a handful of TIIG’s big beneficiaries. TIIG and transportation funding are not equitably distributed. The formula for transportation was frozen years ago, so some fast-growing districts have gotten little money. TIIG funding is a historical artifact; some districts actively sought the money and some, with large numbers of kids of color, did not. But bowing to the political reality that no weighted formula will pass without Los Angeles’ support, Brown is proposing to preserve the current amounts that TIIG districts receive. “We cannot repeal all of history,” Kirst acknowledged.
- Longer implementation. Instead of phasing in the formula over six years, it will now be seven.
- Contingency funding. The weighted formula will be delayed if projected revenues come up short. Implementation will stop at 80 percent and wait for funding to catch up.
- Accountability. This will continue to be a point of contention. Advocates for disadvantaged students want guarantees that extra money that districts get for poor kids and English learners will be spent on them at the schools they attend. But Brown is not proposing to track the dollars once they get to the district office. The State Board is considering new transparency rules so that parents and districts can document expenditures. Kirst said that the State Board may consider requiring districts to sign assurances on how they will spend the money. This will be determined over the next year.
The Department of Finance has not said when it would release a district breakdown of allocations under the new formula. Only then will it become clear whether the formula is rational and whether Brown may have the votes to get it passed.
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I’d still like to hear a justification for doing the concentration weighting by district instead of by school. I’m starting to think it’s more about the convenience of making budget projections and than about what is really needed by students.
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A related question: how is concentration weighting computed for charter schools that are authorized at the county or state level?
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Thank you John for your clear and helpful summaries of complex, constantly changing material.
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Paul: At this point, the Administration opposes weighted funding by school on the grounds it does not want to micromanage districts or say that districts cannot retain some of the money for districtwide efforts. So there remains the issue of accountability for spending on disadvantaged students, particularly in districts with diverse student populations with pockets of poverty. That money could be spread around.
SB: Funding for charters will not exceed district-level weighted student funding under the proposal, which does not distinguish district charters from county- or state-issued charters, as far as I can tell. Good point.
Sue: Thanks.
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Ditto Sue’s complement. It’s great to have TOP-Ed as a source of this news that otherwise would never get to me.
I think this is moving in the right direction. The cautionary message is right in the text though: it will take a majority vote to pass, but a 2/3 vote to undo.
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What does it mean mathematically to “phase in” this change? I’m trying to understand what is meant by implementing a wholesale structural change to the formula by 80%.
Should I interpret the above to say that (as of the hour you wrote it (!!)) the Home-to-School funding will stay and remain under its current formula?
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Why isn’t anyone asking the obvious questions about this weighted policy, such as:
Since free/reduced lunch applications are never audited, why won’t schools just encourage 100% of their enrolled to sign-up? How will that serve taxpayers (or the desire to focus more resources in truly disadvantaged areas)?
Will any student initially enrolled as an “EL” student ever transition out of such remedial work, in light of the monetary disincentive to do so (since the school would lose the extra ADA bump for each “successful” student)?
How will further “flexing” CTE dollars impact dwindling CTE programs and course offerings? According to a recent survey of school administrators, they covet these CTE dollars most (Partnership Academies, Apprenticeship, ROPs, Adult Ed, etc., etc.) so that they can spend these Voc Ed dollars on balancing their General Fund … not to sustain what little CTE they have left.
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There is still no recognition for regional cost of living differences! $5421 buys a lot more in the central valley than in the Bay Area. Until this is adjusted there will be permanent winners and losers.
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Would just like to thank previous commenters for thoughtful contributions to the weighted formula idea, and to the author, because that’s the most sense it’s made to me yet.
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Laura R: Regional cost of living was included in the 2008 version that Michael Kirst, Goodwin Liu and Alan Bersin created. There remains a good case for it, as you point out.
Fred: I didn’t include this detail, but language has been added to instruct the county offices of education to audit the EL and free and reduced lunch district data. The latter is not a great measure of poverty and the former creates incentives to classify ELs, but there are also bills sponsored by Sen. Padilla to create uniform standards for classifying ELs — something that needs to be done.
I too worry about the future of CTE, although the programs have successful enough that they would shine by most accountability measures. Rational districts would have reason to expand, not eliminate, them.
el: If you meant by “the hour that I wrote” the post, I may have been seeing double, you are correct. I didn’t do justice to explaining the phased-in implementation. The idea is that over seven years, the weights would be phased in gradually: 5 percent the first year, 95 percent current system; 10 percent the second year, 20 percent the third and so on until 100 percent in year seven. Meanwhile, the deficit factor and the deferrals would be repaid. By year six, the formula would be frozen at 80 percent funding until full repayment of the deficit factor is made. There is this language, too: “Furthermore, implementation in the phase-in will be delayed if Proposition 98 funding for K-12 does not meet predetermined growth thresholds each year.”
I have no idea how home schooling would be handled.
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Thank you for this article. Does this mean low wealth districts will go away and “equalization” will occur? Will this impact basic aid districts?
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Heh:
So it was an appreciation for the fact that the answer yesterday might not be the answer today which might in turn have a different answer tomorrow. 
el: If you meant by “the hour that I wrote” the post,
What I meant was to capture the fact that you’re reporting on a rapidly moving target… that it seems that the weighted formula proposal is changing almost as fast as you can report on it.
So on the phase in. Do categoricals stay for the early years and then extra money gets added? Do categorical requirements go away but money stays a la the Tier 3 flex, and then extra money gets added? Does money get subtracted?
I’m envisioning that the funding is calculated both ways, that the categorical restrictions go away, and then say 5% of the difference between the two numbers is applied to the final total of funds provided. Is that right?
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John: If you trust that controlling language and eventual LEA reports (count me as skeptical) on the free/reduced lunch and “EL’s” … but all of the state (and federal) accountability and mandate pressures are against CTE, so the flexibility inherent in the weighted formula will weigh against CTE (and this isn’t just conjecture: take a look at the LAO’s recent survey of administrators, and see the flexed programs they covet most, i.e., CTE leads the pack!).
So long as the state and fed’s don’t hold schools accountable for CTE deliverables and they don’t mandate such coursework (as they do the core academics, P.E., the arts, foreign language, etc.), all the state needs to do is cut the career-prep strings currently attached to Voc Ed dollars, and poof, these CTE programs will vanish in one-to-two years.
This weighted program sounds great in theory, but the path to hell is paved with good intentions … and CTE’s demise is most assuredly going to go down that greased slide if this weighted/flexed funding comes into reality (without clear, accompanying career-prep deliverables or course mandates).
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The Weighted Student Formula does not include the most expensive item in the plan: Special Education.
I participated earlier this month, as one of the parent reps from an advocacy trip to Sacramento that included 3 LAUSD Special Education Community Advisory Committee ( a state and federally mandated committee) parent reps and 3 LAUSD Division of Special Education Administrators. I would ask each appointment first of all; “Do you consider education a priority?” When prisoners receive $40,000 per person ($14,000 alone for medical) and students receive only $8000, we have to wonder. I joked that we might as well just bypass K-12 learning and put kids in prison – at least they’d get medical care. When told about the prison’s Federal Consent Decree, I replied that LAUSD’s Division of Special Education has a Federal Consent Decree as well, but the state isn’t helping with any extra funding to support that. I could only assume that the Prison Guard’s Union is much stronger (and offers more political contributions) that families of students with disabilities. We don’t have extra time or money to let therm hear our side. This advocacy trip is an annual event and we can’t compete with paid lobbyists, we realize that.
I’ve heard that Texas (of all states) considers many aspects of special education in their weighted formula and have about 10 different areas of consideration just for special education in their weighted formulas Unless the state knows what a school district is doing, they shouldn’t be making such decisions without full investigation, discussion with district leaders and understanding of what is provided. The California State Department of Education didn’t even realize until recently just how much LAUSD does for students with disabilities in spite of difficulties with funding. One “weight” to “measure” alone should be:
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Newborn and Infant Critical Care Unit (Unique to California thus a serious consideration when creating the weighted measure formula):
Service descriptions from their site: “The most challenging neonatal disease conditions are transported to us for care from neonatal intensive care units throughout the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, Southern California and other states such as Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, by ambulance, helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft. Examples of the complex cases transported to us include:
§ Medical and surgical conditions associated with complications of extreme prematurity
§ Persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn requiring complex cardiopulmonary management and potentially extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)
§ Preterm and term neonates with congenital heart disease often having multiple other congenital anomalies
§ A host of general pediatric surgical and surgical subspecialty conditions affecting the newborn
§ Infants with very rare diseases”
We are the ONLY school district with such a collaboration regarding Infant Pediatrics in the state and that should be a consideration in these “weighted measures”.
Another “weight” to “measure” in special education:
UCLA SEMEL Institute and Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital – with several programs that help identify children (descriptions from their webpages):
Center for Autism Research and Treatment: “UCLA’s Autism Evaluation Clinic provides a specialized, high-level of multi-disciplinary expertise in its approach to this difficult and poorly understood disorder.
Developmental Disabilities Clinic: “This clinic provides expert assessment and treatment for mental retardation, autism, cerebral palsy, co-existing psychiatric and developmental disorders, and psychosocial or educational aspects of medical conditions such as diabetes, renal disease, cancer, asthma, and other chronic illnesses.”
Early Childhood Partial Hospitalization Program (ECPHP): “at the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA is a short-term integrated day treatment program for young children with autism, developmental disabilities, and behavior disorders.”
Inpatient Child and Adolescent Services: “Hospitalization is provided for children and adolescents who require intensive diagnostic evaluation or treatment in an inpatient setting due to behaviors that cannot be managed at home, in the school, or in the community, or who are a potential danger to themselves or others.” (As these students exit this program, they return or enroll in our LAUSD schools)
And another “weight” to “measure”
Special High School for Foster Youth with Emotional Disturbance: LAUSD has a unique setting for Foster Youth in need of intensive intervention that provides wrap-around services and supports. LAUSD is the only school district with such a program and this should be considered one of the “weights” as you measure.
Families move here from other states to take advantage of the hospital care and move into our LAUSD neighborhoods to continue receiving care, thus becoming students in the LAUSD system in need of specialized services. LAUSD does not turn any student away and in fact welcomes them.
There are many families who came to Los Angeles for services and became part of the community.
So much needs to be considered in special education alone before finalizing any formula. Our children with special needs can’t have a “do-over” – they only get one chance. We need to press our federal officials to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) – we’ve never been given the full 40% promised over 30+ years ago. We need to prioritize education or all of the children will become wards of the state – either in the prison system or in expensive care facilities. Many of our students with disabilities could live productive lives in the community with supports. Give them the education, the job/living skills training they deserve under IDEA or they will have less productive and more costly lives in a future that doesn’t value funding education now.
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John, I’m thinking that districts still manage the money. But instead of giving concentration funding based on district demographics concentration funding is given based on school demographics. Has this approach been considered?
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As I understand it, special education will remain funded as it is now – in a categorical, as will a small handful of other programs.
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The last paragraph in my first posting is not my submission, nor my words. While I understand that comments might be edited, to completely make up a paragraph in my name is disturbing. I did not make that statement nor the question following it. The sentence structure you composed (
without my permission, using my name) doesn’t even make sense. The last sentence of my second paragraph ends in a colon, but the content I submitted to follow for illustrating specific points was eliminated.
I’m stunned that I couldn’t be contacted first about your change of MY opinion and chose instead to put false words in my mouth. This is not good journalism – it’s fiction.
And this posting will probably be removed before more readers understand that you “fake” and “alter” comments submitted in good faith.
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Sonja,
Yes, those are my words. Seems to have been a technical glitch that merged our comments.
John,
I’m thinking that districts still manage the money. But instead of giving concentration funding based on district demographics concentration funding is given based on school demographics. Has this approach been considered?
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Let me try that again. I’m thinking that districts still manage the money. But the money for teaching concentrations of poor students or english learners would be based on school populations instead of district populations. Hence districts are trusted to do the right thing with the money. Has that been considered?
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Sonja: One of the first lessons I learned as a reporter was not to assume conspiracy when the cause is probably ineptitude — or in this case technology.
My apologies for the glitch which merged your comment with Paul Muench’s. Hasn’t happened before, and I have been unable to do internal editing to fix it, which is why my own previous comment has strange coding errors. I hope we can get to the bottom of this soon.
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The Ed Coalition’s opposition to WSF is just so shallow, cynical, and callous that it’s making my head explode. They’re concerned that the WSF creates winners and losers? But they’re not concerned about the winners and losers that the current system creates? With rich districts (and families, and kids) being the winners, and poor districts (and families, and kids) being the losers? I know they try to cloak their opposition in a fiction of “more money is needed for everyone,” but we all know that that’s not going to happen any time soon. In the meantime, the Ed Coaltion stands tall in defense of the wealthy and privileged, and gladly kicks the least well-off to the bottom. It’s just a morally repugnant position; I don’t know how the Ed Coalition members can live with themselves or how they expect to be taken seriously as advocates for the supposed broad societal benefits of public education.
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Looks like the rest of my posting came through. Thanks for fixing it.
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What we heard in Sacramento is that no one wanted to touch special education and so left it out for someone else to deal with later. Julia Brownley wanted to hold a hearing on the weighted formula but was “asked” to “cancel” it. It’s being swept under the rug and no one gave us any indication that it was to ‘remain funded as it is now’. Everything is on the chopping block and we were told that education spending is always the first area to consider for cuts, next Health and Human Services and third, prisons.
As my earlier post stated, prisons get $40,000 per inmate….and we can’t make cuts with them first? Where ARE the priorities for our state and our future?
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