Education finance has long been a topic of public debate. With education consuming an increasing share of public resources and adequacy cases calling for even more jumps in spending, the public is increasingly interested in how education resources are used. And the economic downturns will prompt many more questions as the public sector reconsiders spending priorities in the context of tightening budgets.
Questions about spending arise in part out of frustration with the weak link between spending and student outcomes. K–12 education spending has ballooned over the past few decades. In current dollars, U.S. taxpayers now spend almost $9,000 per pupil, which, after adjusting for inflation, still represents roughly double what was spent on each student 30 years ago. And yet, most would agree that schools are producing at best only slightly better results than three decades ago. A 30-year look at National Assessment of Educational Progress results for 17-year-olds, for instance, suggests that test scores have changed very little. Math and reading have nudged up while science and writing have dropped. How can such an infusion of funds have produced so few gains?
New research illustrates stark realities—some counterintuitive, many counterproductive—about how education resources are ultimately deployed in schools. Insights from the school level do a lot to explain the weak link between spending and student outcomes. Yet, most policy analyses consider education finance from the top down— focusing primarily on federal and state funding priorities, policies, and legal claims.
When the federal government and states allocate funds to districts, these funds are combined with other local revenues and separated into broad categories like "instruction," "pupil support," and "administration." This raw accounting helps explain where the funds originate and how evenly (or unevenly) funds are distributed among districts.
But this accounting is just fuzzy math from the school perspective. Instead of considering the source and flow of funds, this book approaches the question by asking these four questions:
- Who decides to use the money this way?
- Why is money used this way and not some other way?
- What strategy drives spending decisions, and how does it relate to what the United States is trying to do for students?
- How do costs compare across different priorities, strategies, and objectives?
Unfortunately, existing school finance texts cannot answer these questions. Neither can the people running the system. The system is simply not set up to track the fiscal data needed to answer these types of questions. The end result is predictable: education systems flying in the dark, without meaningful baseline data on school-level spending patterns to check against academic "flight plans" or to inform mid-course corrections and adjustments to spending priorities.
For the past decade, a team of researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has been digging deep into school spending and uncovering elusive spending patterns in schools all over the country. The group began by asking what it thought were simple questions: How much does the district spend on each school it operates? How do spending disparities compare with district priorities? How does spending compare across student groups? After consulting many districts, the researchers are now no longer surprised that their questions are not easily answered. They are now accustomed to getting answers only by starting at the school level and building up the expenditure patterns by tracing every dollar districts spend.
The results of the Center's work and other similar analyses are startling. They point to numerous unintelligible spending patterns within and among schools and suggest that district leaders are largely unaware of where their dollars are going. In this environment, even proven education reforms may be undermined by fiscal practices, unbeknownst to district leaders. It is no surprise that increases in education spending do so little to improve student outcomes.
This book strives to explain education finance from the school vantage point, showing how the various funding flows inhibit or retard a school's effort to deliver services to students aligned with its academic priorities. In truth, education finance includes a host of decisions, practices, and behaviors operating at multiple stages in education bureaucracies that are instrumental in driving both the types and quantities of resources to schools. This research has meticulously tracked these disparate elements involved in determining what is purchased and how resources are used across schools.
The information assembled is never reported in school district budgets, but it is critical in understanding how the finance system truly works to bring resources to schools. The examples and data will be surprising, if not shocking, to most readers. Yet, in presenting this work elsewhere, the Center found the explanations clearly ring true with most audiences. Since almost everyone has logged countless hours in schools—first as students, later as parents—they all intuitively recognize most of the forces at play.
This work details how individuals at all levels of the system (from the federal government down to the service providers) play different roles in determining how resources are used across schools. Many players have no official budgeting capacity, nor do they recognize their roles in resource allocation. The players have different agendas, often competing, that intertwine to provide what hardly look like coherent or intentional school spending patterns.
The implications of this system on school spending patterns are also clear. How are schools spending their money? Does it go to where parents, administrators, and researchers think it goes, and is it used for what they think it's used for? The answer is often no. But perhaps more troubling, it is clear that schools are not tracking this fiscal information in ways that can answer those questions. This means decisionmakers cannot possibly use resources strategically, since they are operating in the dark.
This book describes the system as is, illustrating how the current state of affairs creates an arrangement with no accountability for resource allocation decisions, and how the competing theories of action create incoherence for schools. School spending, whether adequate or not, is anything but efficient, and there is simply no way to pinpoint those responsible for the sum of parts in place today.
As the book concludes, the finance system problems are so inherent that reconnecting spending with student outcomes will require a complete overhaul. Toward this end, the book's concluding chapter offers up a framework for an aligned, coherent finance system, one with clear roles and built-in mechanisms to promote improvements in spending productivity.
