Ohio is in the midst of a heated debate about the future of school funding. The governor, supported by House Democrats, has presented an “Evidence-Based Model” of school funding that is based largely on the work of professors Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus. This model has been roundly criticized by professor Paul Hill, professor Eric Hanushek, Fordham, and Republicans in the Senate who dismantled the governor’s plan in their version of the state biennial budget.

Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth write in their new book on school funding that such evidence-based models are “simply not credible.” As an alternative to the evidence-based model, Senate Republicans have proposed moving closer toward a system of school funding that funds the child. This has triggered calls from groups like Education Voters of Ohio for “a list of citations that suggest per-pupil funding does a better job than the evidence-based model in determining what an excellent education looks like.”

In response to such calls following is a list of some of the most recent and thoughtful pieces on the advantages of funds following the child:

1)    Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. This peer-reviewed document includes more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the studies involved an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country’s best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation.

2)    Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio from Achieve, Inc. and McKinsey & Company. This report drew on a wide range of internationally recognized experts in education and specific best-practice examples from around the world.

3)    Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity and Antiquity in School Finance from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This bipartisan manifesto on Weighted Student Funding was signed by 75 educators and policymakers from across the country, including three former U.S. Secretaries of Education, a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, and two former governors. This extraordinary coalition urged a “new method of funding our public schools - one that finally ensures the students who need the most receive it, that empowers school leaders to make key decisions, and that opens the door to public school choice.”

4)    An Integrated Approach to School Funding Reform in Ohio, a report of the School Funding Subcommittee of the Ohio State Board of Education, adopted by the full board in December 2008. This report from the Ohio State Board of Education provided recommendations to state policy makers for moving toward Weighted Student Funding in the Buckeye State.

5)    Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance, by Public Impact and the University of Dayton School of Education and Allied Professions. This report provided a detailed plan for how the state of Ohio could move toward Weighted Student Funding. It was authored by leading school funding experts in Ohio (Professors Dan Raisch and Barbara DeLuca at the University of Dayton) and the Harvard-trained (and Rhodes Scholar) school funding expert Bryan Hassel of Public Impact.

6)    Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education they Need by William G. Ouchi. This book drew on the results of a landmark study of 223 schools in six cities, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Ouchi and his research team discovered that the schools that consistently performed best also had the most decentralized management systems, in which autonomous principals—not administrators in central office—controlled school budgets and personnel hiring policies.

It’s well-documented that school funding, generally speaking, is too opaque. District budgets mask differences in teacher pay from school to school, just as they often fail to show differences in how other centrally-controlled resources are deployed in schools. These accounting shortcuts (or cover-ups) mask deep inequities in funding between schools, often at the expense of those with poor and at-risk students.

Greater transparency and clarity in district- and school-level budgets would help, so I whole-heartedly agree with the New York Times editorial board that Secretary Duncan should push for this in return for the $13 billion in Title I stimulus funding:

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, will need to make sure that states and localities clearly understand what he means when he asks them to report per-pupil expenditures school by school.

To the extent possible, the new reporting standard should take into account extra programs that are sometimes parceled out to affluent schools but not to poor ones — from administrative budgets that are billed to, say, the school district’s headquarters.

Most important, the local districts should not be allowed to persist with sloppy bookkeeping that masks teacher salary differences in high poverty versus low poverty schools. Those differences are often indicative of the fact that poor children are being taught by less-qualified, less-experienced teachers.

I wouldn’t go so far as to equate a teacher’s salary with his or her effectiveness, but I do think funding should be rebalanced among schools to the benefit of those whose teacher-salary budgets are shortchanged. If those schools could use the additional dollars flexibly, they might hire more teachers to reduce class sizes; use teacher aides to help in larger classes; or invest in their curricula, facilities, and anything else that would make the school more attractive for better teachers.

Perhaps most importantly, if Duncan succeeds in making plain the real funding gaps between schools, the outcry could lead to worthwhile reforms to fund schools and students equitably – reforms like weighted student funding . It would be terrific if the stimulus could be a federal nudge in that direction.

Ohio’s governor is being assailed, and rightly so, for his education plan, with its preference for creating adult jobs over ensuring that students learn. If he’s interested in ideas that are a bit more imaginative and reform-minded, he might look to Philadelphia.

There, Sup. Arlene Ackerman has unveiled a five year plan, which the Philadelphia Inquirer says includes weighted student funding, closing down failing schools, recruiting to run new schools “organizations with proven track records... such as the Knowledge is Power Program,” and importantly, emphases on accountability and on students over jobs. Writes the Inquirer:

Accountability has been a theme of Ackerman’s superintendency. Too often, student progress is measured and adults are not held to performance goals, she said.

“If it doesn’t work, don’t keep it up,” Ackerman said. “We shouldn’t be spending money to make people feel good.”

She acknowledged she had laid out a lofty vision. “We won’t be able to do all of this, but we will do it one step at a time,” she said.

It sounds like accomplishing even part of it would place Philadelphia on a faster track to success than the Buckeye State, if Strickland’s ideas take root.

A lot of people have been calling Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland’s schools proposal a “bold” new way to approach education in the state. He’ll take us to “world class” educational status.

And now here’s the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, today (Tuesday), saying, in effect, “Hey wait a minute. This isn’t very bold at all.” In fact, this is “same old, same old,” according to a Fordham study authored by Paul T. Hill, a University of Washington school-finance expert. What the governor really is saying is hiring more adults will somehow make for more educated young Ohioans.

According to Hill, “once one gets past the rhetoric, one finds that the main active ingredients in the governor’s plan are spending increases geared toward helping schools and districts employ more administrators, teachers, and support staff.” The details of the proposal read like a jobs program rather than an education plan.

And the governor’s idea of top-down, state-wide requirements for improving education also won’t work well in a system that needs a lot less of the way things have always been done and a lot more innovation in the classroom. That’s actually what taxpayers ought to be paying for.

The bottom line is that if Ohio wants to improve its schools, it must reward what works in the classroom. Money should chase performance. Instead, in Hill’s words, “What we have now is a finance system that is focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children.”

We we’re hoping that Governor Strickland might want to change that.

For some press accounts, see here and here.

It’s no secret states are struggling to make ends meet. For fiscal year 2009 alone, 31 states face a combined $30 billion deficit. Balancing budgets in 2010 and beyond will prove even trickier. Nowhere is this truer than in Ohio where Governor Strickland is predicting a $7 billion deficit over the next two years. That amounts to a whopping 25 percent of the state’s discretionary spending, which includes K-12 education. No wonder, then, that Strickland is out front in seeking a $5 billion bailout from the federal government.

As a popular Democrat who worked hard to deliver his once-red state to Obama, Strickland isn’t wrong to seek favors from the new administration. But despite Ohio’s budget woes, it’s not clear how an infusion of federal cash would improve the education sector.

President-elect Obama recently announced his intent to direct part of any federal spending package to school construction projects and expanding broadband access in schools. Too bad Ohio doesn’t need either. The state is in the midst of $10 billion school construction effort, and as schools are built or remodeled they are wired for high speed Internet connectivity.

Obama and Strickland both support expanding access to quality early childhood education. Yet, if Ohio received additional federal funds for early childhood, it’s unlikely that the state’s powerful teacher unions (which also rallied around Obama’s campaign) would let the governor use the money to open up more preschool slots while shorting K-12. The federal dollars would more likely supplant current state spending, allowing Strickland to move money from pre-K to K-12-without expanding preschool at all.

With 10 to 25 percent cuts in state per-pupil aid a real possibility, Strickland’s best hope for federal help would come in the form of direct assistance for school operating expenses. Such an infusion wouldn’t promote economic growth nor would it do anything to improve or incent innovation in school. It would protect jobs, but that’s not enough. The Feds should attach strings to new money and we suggest three ideas:

• •Incent a Weighted Student Funding system in which spending is transparent and money is allocated to individual schools based on children’s learning needs.
• •Incent innovations, including distance learning opportunities, high quality charter schools, and consolidation and cost-sharing among districts and other educational bureaucracies.
• •Incent and encourage national standards and a national assessment system.

An op-ed in today’s Indianapolis Star argues for a statewide weighted student funding (WSF) system to deal with the state’s budget challenges.

Headlined “Less on overhead, more into classrooms,” its author argues:

...research by management expert William Ouchi and colleagues that indicates centralized budgeting is not a good idea. “Schools perform better on fiscal and academic outcomes when there is a) local control of school budgets by principals and b) open enrollment, which allows per pupil funding to follow the child.”

The latter idea, known as Weighted Student Funding, is being piloted around the country and gaining acceptance. In its purest form, students could choose any public school in their region and per-pupil funding would go with them. The allotment would be higher for students with special needs, and school buildings would have flexibility to spend as they deem fit. Because parents could choose their child’s school, a competitive environment would force principals to spend wisely, thus more money for instruction.

[Incoming superintendent of public instruction] Bennett is philosophically behind the idea. What’s encouraging is that he understands the next wave of education reform: spending more effectively.

There are two interesting questions here. One is whether states should adopt WSF, which heretofore has been largely a district-based strategy. Fordham argued in Fund the Child for a state-level approach, and more recently we provided a roadmap for how Ohio might do so. Likewise, the South Carolina Policy Council explains here (pdf) how the Palmetto State could move toward WSF.

But states need a real, live model of WSF to follow—here’s hoping Indiana can be that.

A second, timely, question is whether a bold funding reform like WSF is easier to enact when times are lean or when funding is flush. For example, New York City’s move to WSF (or Fair Student Funding), and shifting of resources from school to school, was eased by a huge “adequacy” lawsuit windfall in state funding.

Now, in states like Indiana and Ohio, we may see whether WSF’s potential to more efficiently spend shrinking budgets pushes it to the forefront of state policy debates.

No, that’s not a typo. According to this front-page Washington Post article from Saturday, that’s what Ohio governor Ted Strickland is preparing to request, along with Democratic governors from Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts.

Surely the group doesn’t intend this to be an annual payment; the entire education system spends about $550 billion per year, so their proposal would amount to a 45% increase in per-pupil spending, overnight. They can’t possibly be that crazy. But even if they mean this to be spread out over, say, five years, $50 billion per year would more than double what Uncle Sam contributes now. This is big, big money.

But it’s not inconceivable. Some sort of "revenue sharing" for the states is practically a foregone conclusion (Paul Krugman argues that those cutting state spending now amount to "Fifty Herbert Hoovers," ), and admitting that most of that money will go to the schools (which suck up the majority of state funds) would be a bit of truth in advertising.

Writing yesterday in the New York Times , Matt Miller offers some ideas about the strings that should go along with said revenue . Mostly he wants to use the cash to equalize funding between rich and poor schools, but he’d push for various reforms too:

Federal cash could also be offered to lift teacher salaries for high-poverty schools. States or districts that accept the money would have to allow higher pay for the best teachers or those in scarce specialties like math and science, defer or eliminate tenure (or link it to student achievement gains), and make it easier to fire bad teachers. These districts could pay top teachers up to $150,000 a year, attracting a new generation of talent to America’s toughest classrooms.

Eduwonk Andy riffs on Matt’s piece to offer some strings of his own :

With the kind of money Matt is talking about Washington could exert even more leverage with an eye toward increasing productivity although perhaps in less sexy ways.   For example, a serious effort to put the federal government on track to meet its financial obligations under the federal special education law - IDEA -could be coupled with requirements to curb the over-identification of students for special education.    Federal aid could be tightly linked to even more robust efforts around data systems than we’re seeing today, especially in laggard states.  Perhaps you could even try for the national standards moonshot via more interstate collaboration or some derivative of it around enhanced benchmarking and transparency around standards and assessments.

All this grandiose thinking must be giving George Will a heart attack. Just yesterday he wrote that "Today, there is more Johnsonian confidence in government’s competence than at any time since Johnson’s policies shattered such confidence. The resurgence of confidence began under today’s Texan president." By which he refers to...the No Child Left Behind Act, with its "Great Society-style ambition and race-conscious rhetoric." (If that sounds familiar, its because Will quoted our good friend Rick Hess .)

So there will be a federal bailout of the states, and it will come with strings attached. Pushing for greater equity in school finance systems wouldn’t be the worst idea, particularly if done along the lines of weighted-student funding . Neither would Andy’s suggestions. But what’s most likely is that Uncle Sam’s intentions and his impact won’t come any where near matching, as unintended consequences creep in. You know, just like with the Great Society.

Forms of weighted school funding (WSF) are gaining traction in Ohio at the state and district levels. Emmy Partin nicely summarizes the State Board’s upcoming vote on a version of WSF, which she notes includes “weights for students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students, and gifted students.” Unfortunately, the plan is flawed. Emmy writes:

The [recommendation of the school-funding subcommittee] ultimately falls short of a true WSF plan, however. The subcommittee report continues central office control over real spending decisions and does not empower school leaders closest to the children. Nor do the recommendations call for funding to follow the child from school to school. Unfortunately, as written, the recommendations are a missed opportunity and may simply result in funding the education status quo to the tune of $1 billion more per year (see here).

Developments in Cincinnati look more promising, as the CPS board and interim superintendent plan to restore WSF in 2009-10. (Under former superintendent Steven Adamowski, Cincinnati began WSF in 1999, only to discontinue it in pieces over recent years, well after his departure.) Reports the Cincinnati Enquirer:

With student-based budgeting, the money follows the students and schools are responsible for their budgets. It was temporarily suspended after an operating levy loss. Because CPS then passed a levy in March, it’s now planning to restore student-based budgeting.

Board President Eve Bolton asked about the philosophy and purpose of student-based budgeting.

“My understanding is we couldn’t hold schools accountable until we gave them control of the funds to make decisions on how to deliver instruction to their students and how to deliver services to the students. So, this is a decentralized way to give them the dollars and the decision making,” said Jennifer Wagner, interim chief information officer.

“It was to help create an equitable system, because in the past, magnet programs got more money than neighborhood schools. This way, the dollars follow the student, not the program.”

No district has implemented a “pure” form of WSF, adhering to all the principles of such a system, so we’ll see what the new version in CPS contains. For example, I bet it will not incorporate real teacher salaries, an important component of a good WSF system - instead, they are apt to continue to budget based on an average teacher salaries, masking the higher cost of experienced teachers who tend to concentrate in better schools.

I’m glad we have Flypaper to vent our internal disagreements, as I take umbrage with Ben’s Gadfly discussion of Weighted Student Funding. In his review of an AIR report examining WSF in San Francisco and Oakland, Ben is far too dismissive of WSF as a reform (it “adjusts the inputs in a field where outcomes are what really matter”). Of course that’s true at an abstract level, but it’s a big oversimplification.

First, rearranging school funding so that the poorest schools are funded on par with wealthier schools may indeed be an adjustment of inputs, but it’s an important one. The Education Trust, Marguerite Roza, and others have long documented the startling funding disparities that exist among districts, and among schools within districts. If we want great results from schools with underprivileged students, step one involves leveling the playing fields on which they compete.

But second, a more importantly, WSF is intended to change the way schools work, so they can produce great outcomes. It is meant to give principals greater autonomy, so they can tailor their school’s offerings to meet the needs of their particular students. It is meant to give them greater say over the teachers who teach there, so that the poorest schools aren’t always stuck with the newest or the cheapest teachers. And it is meant to respond to, and enable, the realities of 21st century schooling, in which students are mobile (so their funding should be as well) and choice options are proliferating.

When we released Fund the Child, arguing for WSF, a terrific list of education leaders agreed.

Of course, it’s important that AIR is evaluating its actual implementation, and the results should be taken seriously - they did not find as many changes in the resource allocations, staffing, or school-level offerings as they expected. But they did find some, and I think they would have found more if purer forms of WSF had been implemented. So we should still be optimistic about the powerful potential of WSF.