Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance Issues and Perspectives (1999) / Chapter Skim
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7 Enabling 'Adequacy' to Achieve Reality: Translating Adequacy into State School Finance Distribution Arrangements
7 Enabling 'Adequacy' to Achieve Reality: Translating Adequacy into State School Finance Distribution Arrangements
Pages 209-259
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From page 209... ...
A growing number of state court decisions suggest that "adequacy" is challenging "equity" as the standard to which state school revenue distribution plans should be held (see Minorini and Sugarman, Chapter 6 in this volume)
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From page 210... ...
and describes means for assembling instructional components capable of delivering whatever outcomes educational content or pupil performance levels are deemed "adequate." Here, we also discuss how policy decisions must be made about whether, and to what extent, school districts receiving a dollar value of resources deemed capable of producing adequate outcomes should be required by law or policy actually to utilize those dollars in ways research determines are most effective for achieving those outcomes. · Third, we discuss how to assign dollar values to such instructional components.
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From page 211... ...
Thus, we contend that the national "adequacy" debate can be seen, in part, as an effort to evaluate whether this spending growth has been sufficient and to ensure that the new money is distributed within states in a fashion that will produce desired outcomes. Historic "Adequacy": Politically Determined Inputs Despite recent interest, "adequacy" is not a new concept in school finance.
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From page 212... ...
States Where Court Decisions Required School Finance Reformd West Virginia 1979 837 105 Arkansas 1983 802 97 Connecticut 1977 827 94 Kentucky 1989 787 94 New Jersey 1973 795 87 Texas 1989 691 73 Ohio 1979 658 66 Tennessee 1993 632 60 Marylande 1997 625 58 New Hampshire 1997 652 58 Wyoming 1980 631 53 Massachusetts 1993 620 51 Vermont 1997 619 51 Washington 1978 576 42 Arizona 1994 543 35 Montana 1989 469 19 California 1971 384 1 States Where Court Decisions Upheld Existing School Finance System and Required No Reformf Georgia 1981 782 93 North Carolina 1987 739 83 Alaska 1997 766 81 Nebraska 1993 726 81 Maine 1992 751 78 Michigan 1973 707 77 South Carolina 1988 692 73 Rhode Island 1992 687 65 Virginia 1994 658 65 Pennsylvania 1979 666 60 Wisconsin 1989 629 60 New York 1992 604 47 Colorado 1982 594 45 Idaho 1975 593 45 Minnesota 1993 557 44 Oregon 1979 567 40 North Dakota 1993 492 30 Illinois 1996 461 23
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From page 213... ...
If this table had been adjusted utilizing the more conventional consumer price index, real spending growth would appear to be greater, but the diversity of states' growth, and the similarity of experiences within litigation status groups, would be similar.) din some of these states, a reformed school finance system was also challenged in a subsequent court case.
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From page 214... ...
However, it was initially a foundation program's statewide per-pupil revenue distributional equity which came under scrutiny, not the adequacy of that spending level. The legal assaults of the last three decades were mostly intended to ensure that stateauthorized spending levels, be they adequate or inadequate, were at least equally accessible to local school districts.
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From page 215... ...
Consider one of the early attempts by a state court to define adequate outcomes, that of the West Virginia Supreme Court in Pauley v. Kelly in 1979.
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From page 216... ...
State policymakers cannot easily prescribe the nature of instruction and the levels of resources for each of a state's literally thousands or millions of individual students. Hence, the necessity of designing a "system." Such a system should attempt to provide local school districts, local schools, and even classroom teachers with resources and inducements to tailor instruction to the characteristics of students.
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From page 218... ...
The first and second of these approaches usually depend upon states having sophisticated student achievement testing systems which provide standardized statewide measures of student performance, with data linking this performance to student background characteristics.i In states where such testing systems do not exist, then the third approach, professional judgment, seems to be the only alternative, where "getting to adequate" necessitates building an instructional resource model to which costs can subsequently be assigned. As we note below, however, we regard the professional judgment method as preferable in many respects, even where testing systems do exist.
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From page 219... ...
If adopted as a basis for policy, this correlational strategy would derive a unit cost (per classroom or per pupil) amount found to be associated with adequate levels of pupil academic achievement and recommend allocation of such resource levels to school districts or other operational agencies.
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From page 220... ...
In the case of Chambers's GCEI, for example, no test scores or other outcome measures are utilized. Nonetheless, differences in student need are considered an external cost imposed on school districts.
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From page 221... ...
They measure outcomes by lOthgrade test scores, controlled for 8th-grade scores of the same students. By this means, they attempt to isolate the "value added" by school districts, reasoning that the 8th-grade score may reflect students' social capital and instruction in other locations as well as the effectiveness of instruction in the present district.
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From page 222... ...
While this is an interesting hypothesis, and worthy of extensive empirical investigation, it is itself as imprecise as professional judgment. Even if tax-price behavior reflects something about the value of education, voters may value education based on incomplete or inaccurate information.
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From page 223... ...
We consider, for example, the Duncombe and Yinger findings of widely different costs for New York City using direct and indirect methods of estimating achievement to be a particularly provocative call for further investigation. Because the technology of calculating "adequacy" is so primitive, it can be very useful to compare, for a given state, the costs of adequacy determined by these statistical methods with the costs determined by alternative approaches described below (empirical observation and professional judgment)
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From page 224... ...
It initially involved constructing a representative pool of Ohio school districts, comprised of all Ohio districts save those which were characterized by high and low extremes of property wealth and per-pupil spending. Once such outliers had been removed, remaining districts were ranked by a composite of student performance measures in reading, mathematics, writing, and science.
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From page 225... ...
A local school district deviating from such resource norms would be at risk, unless it produced higher-thanexpected student academic achievement. A revenue distribution program that funds specific instructional components, whether derived empirically, as in the 1995 Ohio study, or through professional judgment, as we describe (below)
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From page 226... ...
also report that a similar empirical approach has now been adopted by Mississippi, which has identified 30 successful schools where test scores are satisfactory and concluded that the costs of operating these schools is "reasonable." This cost of education in these 30 schools is being defined as the cost of adequacy, with adjustments made to this necessary cost for districts with varying costs of living, student poverty rates, etc. As of this writing, however, the Mississippi method has not been described in the published education finance literature.
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From page 227... ...
As noted above, statistical "black box" approaches to adequacy attempt roughly to control for the additional costs of educating students who bring less social capital to schooling, although the success of such controls is open to question. Full controls for student characteristics, leading to sufficient resources for each demographic category of student to achieve the same adequate outcomes, are consistent with an apparent national consensus that identical minimal competency (in our terms, minimally adequate outcomes)
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From page 228... ...
A "Professional Expert" Strategy for Identifying Instructional Components An alternative strategy for determining the instructional components undergirding an "adequate" education is to rely upon professional judgment to construct an ideal-type delivery system, without either statistical or empirical inference from actual measured outcomes. The components of such a system can then be identified and costs assigned to them.
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From page 229... ...
It is possible that professional judgment, if carefully exercised, may be better able to adjust for the vast multitude of factors involved than a statistical or empirical approach. A school finance system in which the state funded, or guaranteed funding, for a defined set of resources in each district (including class sizes, teacher salary levels, a specific number of administrators and clerical staff, etc.)
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From page 230... ...
and reliance on national research and whole school designs, was adopted in 1996 by a consulting group led by James W Guthrie to calculate an adequate level of resources to be distributed to Wyoming school districts (Guthrie et al., 1997~.
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From page 231... ...
also adopted the professional judgment approach (as opposed to the Augenblick approach of inferring resources from observed adequate outcomes) not only because of concerns, described above, about poorly specified outcome measures in education generally, but because the state of Wyoming did not utilize a standardized achievement test like that in Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, or Texas, even for narrowly defined academic outcomes, and so even poorly specified outcome data were not available.
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From page 232... ...
Policymakers, educators, and voters can then enter this debate, exercising their own best judgments about whether the research evidence on the benefits of smaller class sizes in the early grades is sufficiently persuasive to justify the additional cost. As this research evidence advances, the professional judgment method will be able to improve the precision of its results.
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From page 233... ...
The first wave of experts assembled was comprised of three educator panels, one each for elementary, middle, and secondary schools. These were selected from among experienced and qualified teachers, pupil personnel professionals, and administrators employed in Wyoming's 49 local school districts.8 Instructional Strategies and Their Implications for Resource Allocation Panelists were informed repeatedly that consultants would not restrict their creativity or decision-making freedom.
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From page 234... ...
However, in other instances it can be stigmatizing to the child to be identified as exceptional and it may be instructionally inefficient to depend upon pull-out programs. The small class sizes contained in the Wyoming prototypical model, particularly in the primary grades, were intended to enable a classroom teacher, with appropriate professional training, to identify students in need of extra assistance and provide such assistance herself or himself.
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From page 235... ...
All school districts then receive a small amount of additional resources for extra supplies, field trips, etc., for 3 percent of their enrolled students. Beyond this small amount of additional resources, however, the small class sizes funded in the model ensure that gifted children receive the specialized instruction they require in the regular classroom.
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From page 236... ...
This is because of the role played by federal funding, a role that must be addressed if states, for the first time, begin to require that school districts provide an adequate education using state and local resources alone. The Wyoming Supreme Court, for example, required that money be allocated to districts based on the actual costs experienced by these districts, including the greater costs which may be entailed in the education of economically disadvantaged or racial minority students.
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From page 237... ...
Whereas the prototypical model is comprised of instructional components constructed by education experts, it is still an abstraction constructed by individuals remote from the day-to-day circumstances of teachers who interact with particular students. Out of a belief that those who actually instruct students should have maximum professional discretion in determining strategies and tactics, the funding model recommended by the consultants in Wyoming deliberately places the prototypically generated resources into a "block grant." This mechanism attempts to restore as much conventional local control to Wyoming school districts as a Supreme Court decision will permit, but also is intended to enhance the professional discretion of local officials and professional educators.
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From page 238... ...
A district choosing to pay higher salaries than the model recommends will probably be required to have larger classes to offset the cost of higher salaries, and a district choosing even smaller class sizes in selected grades than the model recommends will probably have to increase class sizes in other settings in order to stay within its total block grant. However, while districts are not required to spend block grants as the prototypical models recommend, it would not be unreasonable to expect state regulators to scrutinize especially carefully those districts whose performance appears to be notoriously low while spending resources in radically different ways from the prototype.~° And, of course, while the finance block grant carries no requirements for particular spending strategies, the state department of education may have other rules and regulations (about course offerings, curriculum, etc.)
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From page 239... ...
Administration and miscellaneous expenditures 3. Transportation $152,514 $1,296 $2,167 $26,352 $7,200 $93,064 $159,323 $77,180 Total Enrollment: 288 Total cost $1,775,433 Adj.$/ADM $6,165 aAssumptions: 288 students; class size 16; pupil/teacher ratio 14.4.
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From page 240... ...
Administration and miscellaneous categories 3. Transportation Total Enrollment: 300 Total cost Adj.$/ADM $158,869 $1,350 $16,179 $27,450 $7,500 $112,500 $165,961 $80,396 $1,921,014 $6,403 aAssumptions: 300 students; class size 20; pupil/teacher ratio 15.4.
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From page 241... ...
Administration and miscellaneous categories 3. Transportation $317,738 $2,700 $100,203 $58,500 $15,000 $342,600 $331,923 $160,792 Total Enrollment: 600 Total cost $4,066,441 Adj.$/ADM $6,781 aAssumptions: 600 students; class size 17; pupil/teacher ratio 17.
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From page 242... ...
. In the absence of a market, therefore, it is not possible to assume that actual costs of education inputs are equivalent to what school districts actually spend for those inputs.
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From page 243... ...
School districts were allocated per prototypical teacher the statewide mean amount for units in excess of a bachelors degree. Thus, there was no implicit recommendation in the model about whether school districts should use these funds in the traditional way (requiring teachers to take additional courses to earn salary points)
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From page 244... ...
on salary schedules, districts with unusually senior teachers would be penalized and districts with unusually junior teaching forces would receive more than that required to provide children with an adequate education. Because regional variations in economic conditions were the main cause of atypical seniority distributions (districts hire large numbers of teachers during periods of economic growth, and hire few during slowdowns)
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From page 245... ...
A more fully developed costbased adequacy model would also require validation of operations and maintenance costs by, for example, a survey of the conditions of existing plant and equipment. Because school districts typically cut back first on necessary maintenance activities in response to fiscal stress, validation of these costs should be a priority for further study.
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From page 246... ...
Permitting school districts to deploy resources as they see fit not only preserves the possibility that school districts may develop equally, or even more effective delivery systems, but also preserves a Wyoming tradition of local control in education, which is a political value that Wyoming wishes to maximize for its own sake. Therefore, while the prototypical model cost is calculated utilizing, for elementary schools for example, an average class size of 16 and an average teacher compensation cost of $41,433, districts may pay teachers more or less in compensation, offsetting these choices by increasing or decreasing class sizes or by trading salaries for benefits.
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From page 247... ...
If the salaries of managers, accountants, engineers, and other professionals with college degrees are consistently higher in one of the state's communities, it should be expected that a teacher of comparable quality would be proportionally more expensive to attract and retain in that community. And the revenues to a school district in that community should then be adjusted to reflect that higher cost of professionals, in proportion to their relative importance in the prototypical model.
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From page 248... ...
Teton school district administrators complained that the high price of housing made it difficult if not impossible for them to hire and retain teachers, that teachers accepted positions only to quit after finding they could obtain housing only in trailer camps far away, and that only a regional cost adjustment that fully compensated the district for the higher housing prices its employees must pay would permit Teton to compete fairly with other districts for teachers. In response to this challenge, Guthrie et al.
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From page 249... ...
presently distribute revenues to school districts after adjusting these revenues for estimated differences in geographic costs. Each utilizes a different method for calculating the adjustment, based on the state's geographic characteristics and data availability (Rothstein and Smith, 1997~.
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It has only 100,000 school children, a population which is stable to slightly declining. It has only 48 school districts.
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From page 251... ...
Consider these issues, touched on very briefly in previous pages, to which we presently have few satisfying answers: · Defining adequacy must entail specifying resource levels minimally necessary to produce desired outcomes, not a level that wastes resources unneeded for this production. Yet even if we could determine resource levels that generally produce adequate outcomes, this level may be too generous if the resources are utilized inefficiently.
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From page 252... ...
Or is it neither of these, and simply a case of the TIMSS being flawed, for example, being better aligned with the outcomes we seek in the 4th grade than the outcomes we seek for older children? Do we assume, in funding an adequate education, that the level of resources necessary to produce adequate outcomes in reading are the same as those necessary to produce adequate outcomes in math?
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From page 253... ...
And the efforts of the education policy community to develop criterion-referenced standards, which in principle are necessary if resource levels are to be attached, are still relatively undeveloped. Great attention has been paid to the analyses of NAEP scores by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB)
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From page 254... ...
Let's make the simplistic assumption that the only important resources in education were teachers and other classroom inputs. Then, if a typical district in Wisconsin required resources for an adequate education sufficient to fund class sizes of 20, and if ReschovskyImazeki's analysis were correct, then Chambers's adjustment would give Milwaukee suburbs 28 percent more resources than needed, or resources sufficient for class sizes of about 14 students.
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From page 255... ...
11. Because in each state, different expenditures were excluded for consideration from an adequacy model, and because of inter-state cost differences, this adequacy level cannot be compared to the $3,930 Augenblick deems adequate in Ohio, or the $4,225 Cooper deems adequate in Illinois, or to whatever amount is eventually deemed adequate in Mississippi, as calculated by an inferential model; or to the $6,331 Reschovsky and Imazeki deem adequate in Wisconsin, as calculated by the statistical model.
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From page 256... ...
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1997 Consumer Price Index homepage.
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From page 257... ...
Clark 1997 A Proposed Cost-Based Block Grant Model for Wyoming School Finance. Sacramento, CA: Management Analyst & Planning Associates, L.L.C.
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From page 258... ...
National Academy of Education 1993 Setting Performance Standards for Student Achievement. A Report of the National Academy of Education Panel on the Evaluation of the NAEP Trial State Assessments: An Evaluation of the 1992 Achievement Levels.
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From page 259... ...
Imazeki 1998 The development of school finance formulas to guarantee the provision of adequate education to low income students.
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