Education funding efforts suffer basic flaw, expert says

Jacob Adams, professor of Education at Claremont Graduate University, writes:

After years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent to raise the level of student performance, educators, politicians, civic leaders and parents have not produced the results they expect.

Now we know why. A basic flaw in these improvement efforts is that they look to the education finance system for solutions when the system itself is the problem, according to a five-year study of K-12 school finance by a large team of top education scholars from throughout the country. Our report, Funding Student Learning: How to Align Education Resources with Student Learning Goals was part of a recent presentation in Washington D.C.

Our conclusion is that education finance needs to be redesigned to support student performance. States will never educate all students to high standards unless they first fix the finance system that supports America’s schools. These systems dictate how much is spent, who gets what, how resources are used, and which outcomes are tracked. Unfortunately, the way they do these things no longer matches the results we expect from schools.

Funding student learning requires more than merely adjusting funding levels, tinkering with distribution formulas, creating new programs, imposing another sanction, or singling out hot-button issues. The system itself must be transformed so that resources can better support the ambitious learning goals the public now demands. The results will help elected officials and educators use resources more effectively to achieve the ambitious student learning goals that public consensus now demands.

Key ingredients in the recipe for fixing broken school finance systems are:

• Allowing dollars to follow students to their schools.
• Integrate resource decisions with instructional plans; measure and analyze results of different expenditures.
• Define and fund a research and development agenda that expands what we know about effective resource use.
• Make resource use and academic achievement central to financial reporting practices, and use funding contingencies to create fair and meaningful accountability.

In addition to myself, members of the working group included Christopher T. Cross, chairman, Cross & Joftus, LLC; Christopher Edley Jr., dean and professor, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley; James W. Guthrie, professor, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University; Paul T. Hill, John and Marguerite Corbally professor and director, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington; Michael W. Kirst, professor emeritus, Stanford University; Goodwin Liu, associate Dean and professor, Boalt Hall School of Law; Susanna Loeb, Associate Professor, Stanford University; David H. Monk, dean and professor, Pennsylvania State University; Allan R. Odden, professor and co-director, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Joanne Weiss, partner and chief operating officer, New Schools Venture Fund.

The report was produced by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.