Insight
‘Equalizing’ teachers: Where DOE’s Fair Student Funding falls short
Mar 15, 2007 12:06 PM
Equity is one of those words in education that can be used to inflame passions and justify either side of a debate. Who is the true defender of poor and minority student rights? It’s a discussion that’s loaded even before a situation becomes clear.
The mayor and chancellor walked right into this fire in promoting the new school funding formula they plan to initiate in September. They claim their “Fair Student Funding” will fix the inequity of the current system. At a church in Jamaica, Queens, the mayor called school reform “the great civil rights challenge of our time,” and, as reported in The New York Times, said that a difference of as much as $2,000 per child in current school funding was a result of racial discrimination. The chancellor, echoing the mayor, said, “I think it’s important to the city that we can say that we are being equitable.”
In truth, as the chancellor himself has noted, the current variations in schools’ per-pupil funding are quite random. They are based more on the size of the school (with economies of scale kicking in at larger schools) and on historical funding decisions carried forward. “Variations in school funding levels don’t systematically favor high poverty, low poverty or anything else,” he told reporters at a briefing. The mayor implied that deliberate discrimination was behind the historical inequity, saying the funding differences exist “because some neighborhoods seem to have more political power than others.”
The Departmennt of Education’s Fair Student Funding brochures invoke national experts as endorsers, among them former Bush education secretary Rod Paige and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. Fair student funding, known nationally as Weighted Student Funding, may or may not be more equitable, but it is being ushered in with great fanfare before a national audience that Tweed seems at pains to impress as much as the educators and parents who will live with the changes this formula brings about.
What does FSF do exactly?
Instead of funding each school according to its present needs, FSF will fund schools based on enrollments — funding children rather than schools — with additional “weighting” for students who are poor, English language learners or have special needs. The model originated in Edmonton, Canada, about a decade ago and has been implemented in Cincinnati, Houston, Oakland, San Francisco and Seattle.
Only one of those districts has tried the most controversial part of the model: a plan to “equalize” teacher experience and credentials across schools by funding the same per-teacher amount in every school regardless of the actual cost of teachers in the building. The net effect would be to take money away from schools with more experienced, higher-paid teachers and give it to schools with newer teachers.
Would this promote equity? It sounds good at first. But right now schools are “held harmless” for teacher salaries. They simply receive the amount that their chosen teachers cost. Teacher salaries don’t reduce or increase the school’s ability to spend in other areas. Under FSF this would change. When an experienced teacher leaves a school, the school would be funded only for an “average” teacher — currently about $63,000 — to replace him or her. If the school chose to hire a $70,000 teacher, it would have to come up with the $7,000 balance from somewhere else in its budget. If it chose to hire a $53,000 teacher it would have $10,000 left over to spend elsewhere.
The idea is to engineer a redistribution of experienced teachers across the system, so that schools with relatively new teachers would be able to “afford” experienced hands. But the equity here may be illusory. The current “hold harmless” provision protects schools. Under FSF, many schools with experienced teachers serving poor students could find their budgets reduced when one of their veterans leaves. The principal would then have to weigh experience against cost in finding the best replacement.
The UFT research department ran some numbers on 14 selected districts and found 90 schools, with a combined free-lunch eligibility of 75 percent on average, that stood to lose $4,000 to $8,000 from their budgets every time a teacher leaves because most of their current teachers earn above-average salaries. Those schools may receive additional funds from their students’ weightings, but how much is unclear at this time.
How to weight poverty?
The final weightings have not been set, but the DOE proposes weighting poverty at somewhere between 1.05 to 1.25, meaning a free-lunch-eligible child would bring with him an extra 5 to 25 percent of funding beyond a base amount. English language learners would get 6 to 20 percent extra, and special education students could get an extra 50 to 200 percent. Low academic achievement would also get additional weighting.
Those are quite small marginal amounts. To weight a low-income student at an additional 5 to 25 percent probably wouldn’t cover the costs of, say, a Reading Recovery specialist, reduced class size, small-group tutorials and other proven supports to help that student catch up to his middle-class peers.
Title I, the federal program to support high-poverty schools, would help, but probably not enough. The mayor says FSF would take the politics out of school budgets, but who assigns the weights? In Cincinnati, the district added a 5 percent weighting for poverty and a 20 percent increase for gifted and talented, a program with more political support.
The Educational Priorities Panel, a longstanding education budget watchdog, warned that FSF could do “lasting damage” when this mayor and chancellor are not around to suffer the consequences. “A per-pupil funding system is no assurance that funding will be adequate,” EPP wrote. “More importantly, per-pupil amounts can become an abstract dollar figure with no relationship to the real costs of teachers … Will successful schools be forced to reduce their teaching staff because of higher salary levels?”
Robbing Peter to pay Paul
Equity is not always the same as making everything equal. Sometimes it requires unequal resources to a fill a need. Ultimately, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case rested not on equalizing education funds but on identifying educational needs and ensuring adequate funding to meet those needs.
Michael Rebell, who led the 13-year CFE battle, made this point in a recent Daily News Op-ed piece: “The mayor and the chancellor should be applauded for their desire to help the city’s neediest students, but the best way to do that is simply to identify their needs and meet them. The system they have proposed is just playing with abstract — and inadequate — numbers.”
It is strange, too, that at a time when the schools stand to get billions of additional dollars, we are being asked to rob Peter to pay Paul as a means towards equity.
