Use caution, district leaders: Even in a pandemic, there’s no immunity from financial missteps
Charges of financial blunders have taken out district leaders before. Think the pandemic inoculates leaders from that possible fate? Think again.
Charges of financial blunders have taken out district leaders before. Think the pandemic inoculates leaders from that possible fate? Think again.
Control of state legislatures is particularly important in a census year, but it’s also an often-overlooked element in driving substantive education policy changes. National politics takes up all the oxygen, but it’s state legislators who make most of the big decisions about how a state’s public-education system operates, is funded, is held accountable (if at all), and much more.
Spend a few minutes on education Twitter or listening to the loudest special-interest voices, and you’d think the future of public education hinges on whether Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and the president can agree to another stimulus deal. That’s just a short-term Washington game—that will likely soon have a new roster of players.
In education, one of the more bizarre debates of the past quarter century has been over whether more money improves students’ outcomes. It’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion.
Last month, Teachers College Press is releasing Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck, a new volume edited by Rick Hess and Brandon Wright.
Proponents of test-based accountability generally believe that robust systems—those that set high bars for achieving success, generate copious and transparent data, and impose substantive awards or consequences based on progress (or lack thereof)—are enough to boost student achievement. Another school of thought posits that more funding to schools does likewise.
As we prepare to reopen our schools, school administrators must examine our back-to-school rituals and upgrade plans for re-entry to account for the challenges presented by Covid-19. In particular, schools must create and clearly communicate the processes for school drop-off and arrival that support social distancing and wellness measures.
One of the starkest differences between charter and traditional district schools is in the area of facilities funding.
Senate Republicans released their relief bill this week, the HEALS act, which proposes to steer the bulk of education aid to schools that open for in-person instruction. This is triggering angry reactions from most of the education establishment. Here's a less controversial and more constructive suggestion: Return federal education policy to its roots and require schools to provide “targeted assistance” to their disadvantaged, low-achieving students.
If we are to survive the stress and uncertainty of this year’s school reopenings, we are going to have to learn how to lead from a place of grace and empathy. None of this is easy. There are not any good, let alone perfect, options. The conditions on the ground are changing daily, and the personal circumstances of each family—whether teacher or student—are different.
School funding mechanisms are the largest and perhaps most obvious levers for policymakers to pull when attempting to reform how education dollars are distributed. To wit, a new research report from a trio of scholars tells us that there were a whopping sixty-seven major school finance reforms (SFRs) across twenty-seven states between 1990 and 2014.
With Covid-19 cases on the rise and state budgets in crisis, federal lawmakers seem poised to pass another round of stimulus. It appears that K–12 education will receive a decent portion of the emergency aid, likely exceeding the $13.5 billion-plus provided to U.S.
Conservatives are right to be leery of bailing out profligate state and local governments, especially for needs that bear little relationship to—and pre-date—the virus crisis and its economic consequences. A well-crafted bill would base the amount of funding for state and local governments upon an estimate of the actual costs and losses incurred as result of the pandemic. It cannot be a blank check to fund every item on a state’s wish list. But telling states to “make hard decisions” is not going to cut it.
The financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a triple threat facing schools this fall: (1) students who are far off track academically and socially; (2) a decline in state revenue that will result in severe budget cuts; and (3) rising costs in response to the pandemic. The silver lining is that the financial pressure could provide cover to enterprising leaders interested in tackling thorny issues like pension obligations that might otherwise have gone unaddressed.
The evidence is mixed on whether we can motivate students to work harder by offering them financial incentives.
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed significant changes to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), including eliminating the school finance portion.
Several candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have criticized the inequities created by school funding formula
In previous posts and in comments to the media, I’ve been making the case that the lingering effects of the Great Recession might partially explain the disappointing student achievement trends we’ve seen as of late, both on the Nation’s Report Card and on state assessments.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf garnered headlines recently when he announced vague plans for taking funding away from the state’s public charter schools.