I’m all for building schools dedicated to the arts, especially for students hailing from low-income neighborhoods. I’m just not sure it’s worth $230 million while kids in other districts learn in classroom trailers.

The editorial board of the Washington Post looks back on Mayor Fenty’s first year after taking control of the D.C. public schools and is pleased so far. Unlike me, they’re not too concerned by the fact that Chancellor Michelle Rhee is abandoning weighted student funding—rather, they look forward to “the promise of music, art and physical education teachers in schools this fall.”

And ironically, they caution that:

There have been problems, including with the amount and quality of information provided to the public as changes are made.... We also worry about the amount of money being spent. In seeking control of the schools, Mr. Fenty vowed that money was not the issue, but an extra $200 million later, it’s clear that the administration was either kidding itself or the public. The system needs to show it is fixing, not just throwing money at, the problems.

Transparency is one of the great virtues of weighted student funding. Rhee’s step backwards is only going to make it harder to tell how money is spent in D.C.

School reformers have been infatuated with D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee since she took office last fall. But for me, that ended today when I read that Rhee has “scrapped” the weighted student formula (WSF) used in D.C. for the last decade.

This is no mere “budget formula change,” as the Washington Post headline would have us believe. WSF is a comprehensive reform, one that banishes old-fashioned funding schemes and makes possible a host of other reforms. By developing school-level budgets based on per-pupil funding amounts, tailored to the needs of students, WSF is efficient, fair, and transparent, unlike district-centered models that control funding from a central office and allocate teachers and other resources to schools based on staffing formulas or the whims of bureaucrats.

Under WSF, inequities in funding between schools can be erased, as funding levels are based explicitly on the students each school serves. In contrast, the type of system to which Rhee would return allocates teachers to schools and then lets school “budgets” be driven (primarily) by the sums of their salaries. Certain schools can far “outspend” others for no better reason than that veteran teachers chose to teach there. Marguerite Roza and others have found that such nuances can lead to huge funding inequities between schools in the same district – inequities that may be worse than those between districts or between states.

So it’s ironic that one of the stated rationales for Rhee’s change would be that there are “equity concerns across the district.” If certain schools or students are being short-changed now, the weighted student formula can be tweaked to better target certain types of students. Instead she is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

And why? The story the Washington Post tells is that seizing budget control will “help her make good on a core promise: to provide every D.C. school with art, music, and physical education teachers.” But if she wanted her principals to focus on these subjects, why didn’t she just order them to do so? After all, they work for her, a point never clearer than now, barely a week after she fired 24 of them.

Instead, she has stripped them all of power. How now does she expect to fulfill the first stated goal of her Year 1 Plan, to “aggressively recruit top school leaders,” if those principals will be leaders in name only? Consolidating power in the central office is a step backward, not a step forward, for every industry besides education seems to have learned that decentralized decision-making is the way to develop high-performing organizations.

Perhaps school reformers will soon need a city besides D.C. to envy.

School Funding’s Tragic Flaw, a new paper from Education Sector’s Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education is a nice, quick introduction to the reasons that school funding is often inequitable and unfair and under-funds the neediest schools. Carey and Roza contrast two schools (one in Virginia and the other in North Carolina) that serve similar kids but have drastically different budgets to show why inequity persists.

They point to a number of problems. Federal Title I funding is skewed toward the wealthiest states, and at the district level, its sneaky “comparability” provision effectively erases differences in teacher salaries between schools, giving schools with more experienced teachers more than their fair share of dollars. (District budgeting practices are to blame for that, too.) And some states are far better than others at making up for local property wealth differences.

Carey and Roza call for some sensible solutions, including changes to Title I and for districts to let money follow the child—that is, to “allocate a standard amount of money per student to each school.” These ideas may not be new to Flypaper regulars, but this paper is worth checking out because it plainly explains some complicated problems.

The Center for Education Reform released an analysis of 2006 charter school funding, claiming that charters receive 39 percent less funding than district schools, on average. That’s a huge, unfair difference, if it’s true.

But is it? Fordham’s own such analysis three years ago found gaps that were very troubling, but only about half that size—22 percent on average. True, we only reviewed some of the states, and CER hits them all, but even state-by-state there are big variances. So who’s right? If you were hoping for a nerdy data discussion this Friday, you’ve now found it, as I have a few major concerns about their work.

First, it’s worrisome that they rely on a 2006 “Charter School Survey” for some of their data. Did they literally ask schools how much money they received? Three years ago, Fordham’s team found that the only way to get reliable charter information in many states was to unearth school-level audits and add them up. Any good analysis needs to involve something equally rigorous.

Second, it’s a huge red flag that they cite the U.S. Census Bureau for district-level data. Our team found its district funding data often included some charter school funding, overstating the actual district-only budgets. These funds couldn’t be separated out, making the data worthless.

Third, even accurate district data needs to be purged of certain revenues, like those for adult education, pre-K, or other programs outside of normal K-12 education, in order to have an apples-to-apples comparison. CER may have done so, but it’s not mentioned.

So it’s not surprising that some of CER’s results are, shall we say, surprising. In Florida, we found an 11 percent gap, and CER finds 31 percent; in Michigan, it’s 13 percent versus 35 percent; the list goes on. Of course we looked at different years, but huge changes over three years would be odd—school funding changes slowly, not radically.

We commend CER for tackling this problem, and we agree that charters deserve their fair share. But to be worth doing, the analysis has to be done well. Fortunately, my fellow data nerds can look forward to 2009, when I hear there will be a reunion of the team behind Fordham’s Charter School Funding report. I’m anxiously counting down the days.

The upcoming issue of Education Next (which Fordham sponsors) reveals that “Almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.” In fact, they vastly underestimate these figures:

The average respondent surveyed in 2007 thought per-pupil spending in their district was just $4,231 dollars, even though the actual average spending per pupil among districts was $10,377 in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).

And:

On average, the public underestimated average teacher salaries in their own state by $14,370. The average estimate among survey respondents was $33,054, while average teacher salary nationally in 2005 was actually $47,602.

Obviously troubling, considering how frequently exaggerated claims about funding are invoked in ed policy debates.

“Per pupil spending down”

* Until you realize the article’s about charter schools.

In Florida, where a state income tax is verboten, the housing crisis has had a particularly damaging effect on state revenues. Education is being hit hard. Piling on, today the St. Petersburg Times reports that “lackluster lottery sales” will hurt school budgets even more.

Lawmakers, already grappling with a drop in state tax collections, must finalize a 2008-09 state budget over the next three weeks. And they’re already planning to cut school spending for the first time in decades. The new forecast could mean deeper cuts. Lottery dollars account for about 5 percent of the state’s education spending.

Last year, the New York Times published a long piece about how lotteries are notoriously unreliable vehicles on which to base education funding. And they may actually make legislators less willing to devote dollars to schools because lawmakers sometimes believe (mistakenly) that their state lottery provides education a lot of support. In Florida, for example, the lottery accounts for only 5 percent of state education spending; in other states, the percentage is less.

Florida, though, is saddled with a particularly dubious class-size requirement, which is popular with citizens but costs the Sunshine State loads of money that could be better spent elsewhere. One wonders if the current budget crunch will cause some reevaluation of education priorities.