Link Funds to Outcomes, Carefully Track Spending to Improve Achievement

Policymakers need to turn the nation’s school finance systems on their heads by connecting education dollars to student-achievement goals and outcomes, giving better information about how money is spent, and funding research that’s more closely aligned with the classroom, according to a study by top education researchers released last week.

The 39-page "Funding Student Learning" is the product of five years of work and a $6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It was researched and compiled by the 11-member National Working Group on Funding Student Learning, a team that included nine university professors, an official with a venture philanthropy that focuses on schools, and a former assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush.

“We have been faced with this daunting challenge,” said James W. Guthrie, a public policy and education professor at Vanderbilt University, referring to the increased expectations under state and federal standards-and-accountability laws. “How [do we] educate virtually every child to high standards? That’s new.”

The researchers stressed that their recommendations would not necessarily require increased funding—a selling point at a time when national economic woes have worsened state budget deficits and forced education program cuts in more than a dozen states.

“This agenda works whether funding is going up, going down, or staying the same,” said Jacob E. Adams Jr., a professor at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., and the chairman of the working group. “It’s not about the amount of money, but how we use the money.”

Nor does the report suggest that there are easy fixes, such as investing more money in certain programs over others.

Instead, researchers propose a rethinking of how states and local districts pay for schools—recommendations that are the product of empirical studies, background papers, and interviews in 70 schools in 18 districts representing four states (North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Washington).

Read the report online.

Source: Education Week, 11.5.08