Now here’s a brilliant, why-didn’t-we-think-of-that-before idea: Give schools less money as incentive to do better.
Depending on whose measure you’re using, Texas is somewhere between 38th and 49th in the nation when it comes to per-student funding. Instead of wallowing in our poor luck, or paying something closer to the national average, Senate Education Chairman Larry Taylor convened a hearing Tuesday that considered a more sanguine response: A big round of applause for forcing schools to do so much with so little.
“The school districts are capable of generating high outcomes with low funding,” Education Resource Group President Paul Haeberlen assured the Senate Education Committee. “If you give them less money, they are forced to deal with it.”
Since 1999, Haeberlen’s group has measured and promoted efficiency in Texas school districts. This year, he was one of a handful of experts — along with Lori Taylor of the Texas Smart Schools initiative — invited to address an interim charge from Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to study “performance-based funding mechanisms that allocate dollars based upon achievement versus attendance.”
In other words, Patrick wants to study how to fund schools not based on their needs, but on their results.
That would be a dramatic shift in how Texas funds its schools. The current system funds schools based on their enrollment, with adjustments for local costs and students’ special needs. The state rates schools on their test scores and graduation rates, but doesn’t tie funding to them. Teachers’ groups are already fighting Texas’ efforts to tie teacher pay to test scores; Now, Patrick wants to consider expanding that to the entire school finance system.
But with the Texas Supreme Court’s recent encouragement — in the form of its school finance ruling in May — for lawmakers to shake up school finance in 2017, even the most fringe ideas are on the table. Taylor, for one, suggested he’d be game to design a whole new finance scheme from ground up.
“If we’re gonna start over,” he said, “my thinking is we start with what does it cost to educate a kid today. Let’s get some real facts. What does it cost, why are those costs there?”
The Legislature has consistently balked at that kind of honest accounting in the past, even though state law requires such a study every two years. During the recent school finance trial, expert testimony put the cost of public education at $6,404 more per student than the state already pays.
But Haeberlen assured the committee that what schools need isn’t more money, just an attitude adjustment. An analysis by his firm, ERG, produced a list of the most efficient school districts in Texas by comparing their spending efficiency with the quality of their test scores and other measures. Haeberlen suggested rewarding those few districts — possibly financially — and encouraging all the rest to follow their lead. “People want rewards, and the rest of the crew will follow,” he said. “It’s just how business works.
What could possibly go wrong?
The good news is that this idea really is as half-baked as it sounds, in that no concrete proposal exists as yet for it. In addition, the foundation for this plan is based on even more reliance on standardized test results, which may be a tough sell even to Republicans. But make no mistake, Dan Patrick’s goal here is to spend less on schools. How he achieves that isn’t important – if this dumb idea doesn’t fly, he’ll find another one. These two Trib stories have more on this “plan” and the hearing at which it was aired, so read up and know what we’re facing. Nothing will change until the Legislature changes.