On weighted student funding

Judge Moukawsher’s ruling in the recent school funding case, CCJEF vs. Rell, has raised discussion of Weighted Student Funding (WSF, also called student-based budgeting or backpack funding) as a potential “rational” funding scheme for Connecticut’s schools.

Weighted Student Funding sounds great: every student is assigned a weight, a mathematical factor that reflects in some way how expensive they might be to educate. Weights might be based on poverty or students requiring special education or extra support learning English. An average student might have a weight of 1, while a student with several extra needs might be weighted 1.3 or 1.8. A base dollar amount is then determined — say, for easy math, $10,000 per student. The student with weight 1 would bring $10,000 to his or her school or district, while the student with weight 1.3 would be funded at 1.3 x 10,000 or $13,000. The extra $3000 would represent the additional cost expected for that student’s education.

In many ways, this type of funding formula sounds unbiased and equitable. Putting aside the potential for fraud (districts misclassifying students to get more revenue), WSF seems practical, studentcentered and generally unobjectionable. So how did it help destroy the Hartford Public Schools, where over 200 people were laid off and some good schools are now closing?

The flaw doesn’t lie in the formula per se; it lies in the distribution of funds. A common but unnecessary add-on to WSF policies is that “the money follows the child.” It’s sort of a voucher system for public and charter schools. If a student leaves one school for another, the funding associated with that student moves as well. The idea is to set up a competitive market among schools, where student and parent choice brings funding to schools perceived as successful, while starving and eventually closing schools perceived as unsuccessful. There are winners and losers.

The problems with the competitive model are many. First, schools are not businesses; they are a public good. ntil a starved school is actually run into the ground, its students receive an inadequate education. Suppose a public school loses seven students, representing maybe $70,000 — $90,000 depending on their weights. That is about the salary of one teacher, so the school loses a teacher. But seven students, particularly if they are spread across different grades, is not a whole class. Each grade still needs its teachers. It’s nearly impossible for schools to decrease expenses incrementally like this. As a result, educational quality suffers.

Parent choices, like legislative choices, are often made based on misinformation and misleading indicators of school quality: shiny buildings and equipment, cherry-picked test scores, and glossy marketing materials. Another hallmark of WSF is that, although the money follows the child, the receiving school has no obligation to actually spend that money on that particular child or his or her needs. The extra $3,000 computed above — even the entire $13,000 — can be spent on radio advertisements instead of a bilingual teacher or extra academic support. It can also be paid out to a Charter Management Organization. One of Connecticut’s charter school chains currently pays 13 percent of their total budget to their CMO.

Putting schools in competition removes their incentive to share resources and cooperate. Any re-allocation of funds with mid-year transfers destroys the predictability of budgets. Worst of all, WSF allows for the equitable division of inadequate funds. It allows politicians to look “fair” without actually directing sufficient resources to education.

The answer to these problems is really very simple: regardless of how each district’s allocation is determined, fund it fully and pay it as a lump sum which can only be adjusted annually. Districts then decide internally how to divide up their allotment, between centralized functions such as buses and maintenance and individual school expenses such as teachers and supplies. If students change schools, it is up to individual districts to manage their own budgets as their boards of education and communities see fit, with the associated transparency that comes from public meetings and the predictability of a fully-funded budget.

Perhaps you’ve heard the slogan: “every student deserves access to great schools.” We can achieve this by improving every school until they are all great, rather than sacrificing some until only the supposedly fittest survive.