Education Funding Debate Deserves Light, Not Heat



The Jefferson Journal

…a commentary from

The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy

Fund the Child, Not the Bureaucracy

By Chris Braunlich

Imagine taking your car for an oil change, and the dealer adds a new service – say, a complete change of your windshield fluid. “No charge,” he says. “The dealership pays for it.”

But 3,000 miles later, when you take the car in again, that extra service is done again – only this time, you’re the one paying extra for it. “Well,” the dealer says, “we added it to the baseline of services and had to increase the fee to cover it.”

That’s a little like the way Virginia’s K-12 education funding works: The state may fund, for example, a two percent salary increase for teachers. Local school systems are free to add more if they want – say, another two percent – so long as they pay for it themselves.

But then, a year or two later, when the state re-benchmarks the cost of education, the full four percent is put into the baseline and the state takes responsibility. The way it works now, state education funding can never catch up – because it is always required to build on the decisions of localities.

In an effort to rein in those costs, the budget passed by Republicans in the House of Delegates would end that practice, first with support staff and then with teacher raises. Although the House budget actually spends more for public education than either the Governor’s proposal or the Senate’s, it does so by adding back construction and lottery monies cut by the Governor, while reducing future salary costs.

Not surprisingly, the proposal has sent up a small firestorm from those who receive those salaries, and not a little concern about a system that has seen the funding gap between the highest and lowest poverty school districts widen since 1999.

Lost in all of this is a stark reality both sides should agree on: Virginia’s public education funding system – designed in an era when Fairfax County was the state’s top dairy producing county – is broken.

Our education funding isn’t based on the number of students or the difficulty of teaching them, but on indecipherable staffing ratios and special program formulas.

For example: To determine just the Basic Aid associated with each student in a school division, the maximum number of teachers the state will fund for each grade level in each division is calculated based on the Average Daily Membership (ADM) and pre-determined guidelines for the minimum and maximum number of students per type of teacher. The average salary for each type of position is then multiplied by the number of positions required by an average Basic Aid dollar amount per ADM, known as the Basic Aid PPA. This number is then divided by the number of students to get an average. This average is then multiplied by the forecasted number of students the division will have in the next year to determine total funding – which is then run through the Local Composite Index, which has its own formula.

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You understood that … right?

With expenses that can’t be tracked or understood, is it any wonder that taxpayers are angry with costs they can’t comprehend, or that legislators rebel against a system that guarantees only formulaic increases?

Worse, while principals and teachers are now held accountable for their results, they have little control over how money is used at their school or in their classroom. Those decisions are made in central offices and state capitols, using additional complex budgets and allocations that leave educators as much in the dark as taxpayers.

While the General Assembly will spend the next couple of weeks battling it out in hand-to-hand combat, both sides need desperately to step back and seriously explore alternative funding mechanisms.

One idea is to tackle school finance by creating a system of “weighted student funding.” The idea is simple: Determine the dollar value it takes to educate a child. Add a multiplier for those demonstrably harder to teach – students with disabilities, Limited English Proficiency, and/or poverty. Drive those dollars down to the school level, empowering school-based leadership to decide how best to spend the funds educating the students, and then hold that leadership accountable,

One broad-based national coalition – led by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education and Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff – already exists to foster the idea (). A 2005 study by the Claire Boothe Luce Institute suggested that such an idea could work with a foundational state student funding allowance of $6,000 per student. And Virginia’s Board of Education already has a nationally-recognized expert sitting on it in the person of Andy Rotherham, Co-Founder of Education Sector.

To be sure, there are plenty of questions. But the current debate has devolved into shouting matches between those who say the state spends too much and those who act as if it can never spend enough.

Fifteen years ago, Governor George Allen created a blue ribbon commission that overhauled public education and made Virginia a leader in standards-based education. Reform of education funding needs the same kind of commitment and commission – not in the heat of a General Assembly session, but with a serious debate that consults outside reformers and commits to a major, comprehensive, and equitable overhaul.

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Chris Braunlich is a former member of the Fairfax County School Board, and vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessary reflect the opinions of the Institute or its Board of Directors. He may be reached at c.Braunlich@.

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