GreatSchools: Bill's Blog

Weighted Student Funding

Ever been frustrated trying to understand a school budget?

Ever wondered why your school gets however much money it gets — and why other schools seem to get mysteriously more or less?

Well, there's a funding idea floating out there that would be good for everyone in the educational system, including students, parents, teachers and administrators. It's called weighted student funding.

Roughly speaking, the idea is that funding should "follow children" to the schools that they attend. The amount of money would depend on the "difficulty" of educating the student. For example, English language learners would get a higher funding allocation than students who are already proficient in English.

Here is the plan being promoted by the "100 Percent Solution" group, a project of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute:

1. Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he attends.
2. Per-student funding should vary according to a child’s need and other relevant circumstances.
3. The funds should arrive at the school as real dollars (i.e., not teaching positions, ratios or staffing norms) that can be spent flexibly, with accountability gauged by results, not inputs, programs or activities.
4. These principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels (e.g., federal funds going to states, state funds going to districts, districts to schools).
5. All funding systems should be simplified and made transparent.

You can learn more on their Web site or check out this example of how it could be implemented. There's also a long list of education leaders and politicos from both sides of the aisle who think it's a good idea.

I think this would be a good deal for parents. It makes schools and school systems more responsive to parent needs, gives local schools more power to "buy" what they really need, and allows everyone to track the money more easily. I'm going to sign my name onto this, and I encourage you to think about signing, too.

Or better yet, talk to your school board member or superintendent about the idea. Might it work in your district?

A New Kind of Education Conversation

Sometimes I feel as if parents and education policymakers are living on different planets.

Listen to us parents talk about what kind of schools we want for our children, and we're likely to talk about school quality in a broad way. We care about the quality of teachers, the breadth of the program, the sense of community at the school and, of course, student safety. We know that educating students is not a "cookie-cutter" kind of operation. We are acutely aware of the unique characteristics of each of our children, and we want schools that pay attention to the complete development — academic, social, emotional, moral and physical — of each child that comes through its doors.

Listen to many policymakers talk about K-12 education, and you hear a lot about test scores. In fact, that's just about all you hear about. Young people will not have opportunities and America will not be competitive, they say, unless we do a better job of raising student achievement. And test scores are the measure of progress when it comes to academic achievement.

Most of us parents do care about test scores when we're looking for a school, but the importance of scores typically goes way down once we've made our pick. Once we've chosen our school, we have a close-up view of how well it is serving our children and the children in our community. We want our child (and all the other children in our community) to be happy and well rounded. We are more likely to get upset over teachers who don't care about students than we are about low test scores.

And to be fair, some policymakers and business people who influence them do care about education in a broader sense than just test scores. They understand that education is the product of an  interaction between students and teachers, and that student success depends on the quality of teachers and programs. But, reading the newspaper, you can't tell that most of the time.

So what often happens in American education? Policymakers make increasingly shrill proclamations about the need to raise student achievement — as measured by test scores — and we parents shrug our shoulders. Raising test scores is not a bad idea in and of itself, we think, but it's not worth it if it comes at a cost of making schools focus narrowly on a test-driven curriculum or if it makes schools less inclined to take careful measure of each child and serve him or her as well as possible.

This is a dangerous standoff and it doesn't have to be this way.

We parents are correct in assessing what education really should be: good schools must pay careful attention to the complete development of each young person. Of course, preparing the next generation to take its leadership role means developing their abilities in a broad sense. And even if academic development is the primary goal, wise parents and teachers know that kids learn better when they are inspired and supported. Success and happiness in life depends on a broad base of social, emotional and other skills, as well as academic abilities. 

At the same time, policymakers are correct in their assessment that many American students are not performing academically at levels that will enable them to take advantage of the opportunities in the 21st Century. The academic preparation that was good enough for us parents is not good enough for young people today. The globalized information economy makes ever-greater demands on the ability of young people to think, analyze, synthesize and communicate. Many young people will "miss the boat" unless we up the ante academically.

So I think we need a new kind of conversation about education in America: How do we reform our education system so as to increase academic achievement while at the same time paying even more careful attention to the complete development of every child? Parents need to recognize the need to improve academic achievement. Policymakers need to recognize that schools are community-serving institutions with broader missions than raising test scores.

How do we do this? Stay tuned — I'll be sharing my thoughts on this critical question in the coming weeks.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! When I founded GreatSchools.net almost eight years ago, before the word “blog” was invented, I had no idea that our tiny little Web site would grow into the nation’s leading source of information for K-12 schools. Well, here we are! I hope you find GreatSchools.net to be a useful resource for you.

This blog opens a new chapter in the GreatSchools journey for me. Over the past eight years, I’ve learned a lot about education and schools, and I continue to learn as much as I can every day. And now, I have two new "teachers:" my 4- and 6-year-old daughters.

My goal with this blog is to share some of what I am learning and to raise questions that I hope will provoke your thinking. I’ll focus on the questions and interests that motivated me to start GreatSchools.net in the first place: What is a great school? How can a parent tell if they have one? What can parents do to improve schools? What's a parent to think about the many education issues and controversies that surround us? How can we use our knowledge and power to improve our children's schools?

Indeed, we parents and community members have more power to influence educational outcomes and schools than we sometimes realize. States play a major role in setting education policy and the Federal government has weighed in with the No Child Left Behind Act. Yet, local schools and districts are still responsible for running schools, and parents have a lot of influence over schools and districts.

We parents act as our children's first (and most important!) teachers, set expectations for what kind of educational outcomes we expect our schools to produce, and provide the support that schools need to succeed. Along with local community leaders, we are responsible for the local political culture that governs the schools — typically through the elected school board.

In other words, when it comes to schools and the education of children, we parents are (or should be!) the number one players. We have the most at stake, and we have the most power to influence the outcomes for our children.

With that in mind, I'll be challenging you to think broadly about how we work together to improve schools and educational outcomes in our communities. I hope you'll share your own ideas along the way. Together we can make a difference in the lives of our children and all children in our communities!