School reformers have been infatuated with D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee since she took office last fall. But for me, that ended today when I read that Rhee has ???scrapped??? the weighted student formula (WSF) used in D.C. for the last decade.
This is no mere ???budget formula change,??? as the Washington Post headline would have us believe. WSF is a comprehensive reform, one that banishes old-fashioned funding schemes and makes possible a host of other reforms. By developing school-level budgets based on per-pupil funding amounts, tailored to the needs of students, WSF is efficient, fair, and transparent, unlike district-centered models that control funding from a central office and allocate teachers and other resources to schools based on staffing formulas or the whims of bureaucrats.
Under WSF, inequities in funding between schools can be erased, as funding levels are based explicitly on the students each school serves. In contrast, the type of system to which Rhee would return allocates teachers to schools and then lets school ???budgets??? be driven (primarily) by the sums of their salaries. Certain schools can far ???outspend??? others for no better reason than that veteran teachers chose to teach there. Marguerite Roza and others have found that such nuances can lead to huge funding inequities between schools in the same district ??? inequities that may be worse than those between districts or between states.
So it's ironic that one of the stated rationales for Rhee's change would be that there are ???equity concerns across the district.??? If certain schools or students are being short-changed now, the weighted student formula can be tweaked to better target certain types of students. Instead she is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And why? The story the Washington Post tells is that seizing budget control will ???help her make good on a core promise: to provide every D.C. school with art, music, and physical education teachers.??? But if she wanted her principals to focus on these subjects, why didn't she just order them to do so? After all, they work for her, a point never clearer than now, barely a week after she fired 24 of them .
Instead, she has stripped them all of power. How now does she expect to fulfill the first stated goal of her Year 1 Plan , to ???aggressively recruit top school leaders,??? if those principals will be leaders in name only? Consolidating power in the central office is a step backward, not a step forward, for every industry besides education seems to have learned that decentralized decision-making is the way to develop high-performing organizations.
Perhaps school reformers will soon need a city besides D.C. to envy .
