Catania’s reforms, part 1: School funding and autonomy

Four days ago, Councilmember David Catania announced 7 proposals to restructure DC Public Schools’ operations. I’ll look at each of his proposals in turn, starting in this article with a proposal to change how much money each school receives, and who controls it.

Presently, DCPS gives funds to each school based on the size of its student body. With a few exceptions, every school receives an equal amount of money per student. Councilmember Catania wants to change the equation and instead give more money per student to schools that offer vocational programs, have low graduation rates, or whose students come disproportionately from low-income households.

Catania would also give principals more control over school budgets. They would get a significant amount of autonomy over how to spend their money, like charter school principals do.

Proposal would increase funding at struggling or vocational schools

Catania is proposing an idea which other school districts around the nation refer to as “weighted student funding.” It assumes that some students need extra resources in order to have the same opportunities as other students, and provides those students’ schools with extra funds to supply those resources.

The reasons for this extra need are not complicated. Schools with a poor track record often have to fight a culture of failure both on campus and off, especially with students from disadvantaged households. Children from families struggling with poverty face a variety of extra difficulties and often need special attention to help them focus on school amidst those other challenges. Meanwhile, vocational schools require special equipment and specially trained teachers, and those naturally lead to higher costs.

Many school systems use this approach, occasionally called the Seattle model, to help disadvantaged children keep up with their more privileged classmates. Boston, Denver, and Baltimore already have, or are in the process of implementing, weighted student funding. Governor Jerry Brown of California has proposed this approach as well.

Locally, Montgomery County Public Schools has employed this approach since the 1999-2000 school year, while Fairfax County uses a similar system under the Priority Schools Initiative, though they distribute the extra funds as fixed grants, rather than on a per-student basis. An NEA report from 2005 is cautiously supportive of weighted student funding, suggesting that while oversight and implementation difficulties may arise, the general effect was positive.

Bill would give principals more autonomy

In recent years, school administrators have complained of micromanagement and high overhead costs at the DCPS central office. Catania’s bill would require 80% of all funds that come from city revenues (as opposed to federal Department of Education support) to go to principals directly, so they can design their own programs and determine their own budgets.

This autonomy goes hand in hand with the weighted funding. The extra funds and autonomy will enable principals to rapidly upgrade their teaching staff and explore ways to transform what’s not working in their schools. Principals understand the needs of their students better than the central office; with resources and flexibility, they might find the recipe to reach students that no one has yet discovered how to help.

These changes could give DCPS schools the same array of programs and variety of approaches that charter schools enjoy while still having one consistent, system-wide curriculum. It’s hard to determine how much freedom the bill would actually give each school until the plan is put into action. Nevertheless, it may give families who would otherwise send their kids to a charter school a reason to stick with DCPS, which has been losing students for years.

Will inflexibility doom these changes?

Some worry that giving schools extra funding or more budget flexibility won’t result in meaningful changes if they’re still subject to rigid rules. Teaching DCPS’s detailed curriculum takes up most of the school day, so how much will principals be able to vary what the schools teach?

Contracts between DCPS and the teacher’s union specify specific salary levels based on seniority. A principal cannot simply offer an outstanding teacher extra money to come to a school in a more dangerous neighborhood, with more difficult educational challenges. Experienced teachers, who will get paid the same no matter what DCPS school they work for, then use their seniority to avoid teaching at struggling schools. Without the flexibility, what good is providing these principals money they cannot spend?

This also could place a costly administrative burden on each school. Curriculum questions, hiring decisions, and budget management all involve skills that staff at individual schools don’t typically have. DCPS centralized these tasks long ago to ensure that experienced officials made these decisions thoughtfully in a way that’s not too expensive. Will much of the extra money just go to overhead within the school instead of overhead in the central office?

A 2009 study raised these issues, and is skeptical that attempts to use weighted student funding to increase equity will succeed. This contradicted the earlier NEA study, and it had the benefit of collecting more data over a longer period. However, the later study only covered schools in Texas and Ohio, which may have had other factors that rendered weighted student funding ineffective.

Will weighted funding invite abuse?

One of the challenges of education reform is that changes often result in conflicting or perverse incentives to do the wrong thing. Efforts to measure teacher performance with exam scores tempted some teachers to cheat with their students’ test papers.

Will weighted school funding create an incentive for teachers and administrators to show poor performance, thus earning them extra money from DCPS? While no one will seek to avoid educating their students, it’s possible that some schools may prefer to pursue projects that make them more attractive to lower-income students who come in with lower test scores.

If schools actually seek out disadvantaged students and make them the focus of educational decision-making, that could be a great outcome. It’s not, though, if schools design programs to appeal to these students, but don’t target them as well to correct their educational deficiencies. Or if a promising program would alienate these students, leading them to transfer to a more welcoming environment (and taking with them their funding bounty) is it possible a school might drop the idea, rather than take that risk?

Schools might also become far stricter on discipline in the later years, as each disruptive student not only makes their mission more difficult by their presence, but also potentially costs them resources that might go to more “deserving” students if the troublemaker somehow manages to graduate. While this may seem far-fetched, so would the prospect of teachers erasing and re-bubbling answers to the assessment tests seem unlikely back in 2007.

Risks do not remove the need for change

While the potential problems listed above need to be addressed, it’s difficult to disagree with the NEA that both weighted student funding and school budget autonomy deserve a chance to succeed. It may be more efficient to allocate teachers centrally, but central planners only have limited quantitative data and less sense of the culture of the school. Principals can better tailor their hiring (and spending) to each student body.

Meanwhile, almost no one thinks all students cost the same amount to educate the same amount, so why should the funding formula make that assumption? Hopefully this bill will either be amended, or DCPS will take supporting action, to resolve the potential problems that exist with inflexible union contracts that will otherwise prevent any positive change from coming from this bold proposal.