Study calls for more targeted school funding
San Francisco Chronicle 3/14/07
The state should also consider making it easier for principals to hire and fire teachers, according to a 30-page summary obtained by The Chronicle. The study will be made public over two days, starting this afternoon.
The voluminous treatise -- 23 separate studies by academics and educators -- highlights failings in the current system and offers ideas for improvement, concluding that dumping money on schools won't cure what ails the 6.3 million student system.
Authorized in 2006 and paid for by several foundations, the study is intended to offer new ideas on how to create a public education system that allows each school to meet or exceed a score of 800 on the state's Academic Performance Index -- a 200-to-1,000-point yardstick of pupil achievement with 800 considered excellent.
"The underlying concept with adequacy is once we decide what we want our districts to produce, you ought to somehow be able to sit down and look at the student population and design a school system that anyone could reasonably expect to produce those results," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.
Until the current public school system is overhauled, throwing more money into it is unlikely to improve student achievement, the study says. It criticizes California's time-honored method of paying for education without attaching the money to specific academic goals.
Although the study provides no recommendations, the research shows that if the state continues to separate its finance policy from its academic expectations, then schools -- and students -- will continuously fail to reach their potential.
"The tradition of school finance is that you call in a bunch of school finance experts, but don't explore the interconnections between the money and the governance,'' said Mike Kirst of Stanford University, a researcher on the study and a former president of the California Board of Education. "It just got built like topsy, layer upon layer, with no coherent, underlying rationale."
The study appears to support the idea that children with higher needs should attract more education dollars to a school or district. Traditionally, that approach is known as the "weighted student formula."
One way of understanding is to imagine one school filled with well-off students, and another with low income children who speak little English.
"If you gave the same money to both schools, clearly, the same amount of money would not yield the same result," said Jennifer Imazeki, a San Diego State University economics professor who calculated several of the spending estimates contained in the report.
Imazeki said that while some schools need more money than others, "how much more is not so clear."
Meanwhile, state revenues are down this year by nearly $1 billion from last year's projections with the potential for more fiscal difficulties looming.
Wells and others fear policymakers may forsake a sweeping approach to reform and instead cherry-pick ideas from the study, doing the easiest and cheapest ones.
There is "no evidence that tinkering on the margins will meet goals," according to the study's summary, which is a PowerPoint presentation given in January by lead researcher Susanna Loeb of Stanford University to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, legislative leaders and state schools chief Jack O'Connell.
Many of the conclusions in the study are well known to educators and state policymakers, who are keenly aware that since 1978, when voters approved the property tax cap known as Proposition 13, school districts have had trouble raising money and have had little flexibility in deciding how to spend the money doled out to them by the state.
The study's summary also identifies such shortcomings as top-heavy employment regulations.
Currently, the state has broad authority over teacher credentialing, tenure, dismissal rules, pensions and more. Locally, school districts bargain the specifics with labor unions.
But in the study, principals told researchers that the performance of schools and students would improve if it were easier to fire ineffective teachers.
According to the summary, 75 percent of principals surveyed said they would like to be able to fire one or two teachers at their schools. Charter schools -- autonomous public schools where labor unions rarely operate -- don't have such employment constraints, according to the study.
Leaders of the California Teachers Association were not available to comment on Tuesday.