Implement Reform by Funding The Neediest Students First

There are a handful of reasons why this is the right way to implement education reform – altruistic reasons, sound investment reasons, and perception reasons. It’s almost elegant when you can serve all three simultaneously.

I’ll start with some opinions that lean toward the altruistic. When you invest in early education, especially in high-poverty areas, you get a great return on investment in all sorts of ways that might be hard to quantify, but are easy to see. It’s difficult to count the cost savings of what didn’t happen, but in strictly educational terms, you’re likely to see reduced LAP costs, maybe less Special Education costs, lower dropout rates, and higher test scores.

So what do I mean by Fund the Neediest Students First? To explain that, let’s first examine how 2261 gets us from education today to education redefined.

The implementation period for 2261 runs from today to 2018, which means rather than trying to make all these changes all-at-once in one-big-change (that wouldn’t work), we have about eight years to phase things in. Given that, there’s an inherent choice at hand. Either all changes could be incrementally implemented evenly, such that by 2018 all are fully implemented… or some could be deemed more impactful early on, and therefore, front-loaded in that implementation timeline.

That is precisely what I’m suggesting.

I’m suggesting the implementation front-load the budget elements that serve the neediest students. Those include, not necessarily in order: full-day kindergarten starting with the high-poverty districts; class size reductions for high-poverty districts, LAP program categorical enhancements (not poverty-based, but need-based), ELL program categorical enhancements, and early learning programs for at-risk youth.

To be perfectly clear, I am not suggesting that these programs be funded at the exclusion of other programs; I simply mean front-load the funding of those programs I just mentioned. To explain a little further, in the Funding Formula Technical Working Group (or FFTWG for short, of which I’m a member), there was this implementation tool provided to members that broke this redefinition of basic education into 19 budget elements, that we could use to prioritize each budget element as we saw fit (there was another dimension to it that addressed likely relative costs – that’s too complex to explain here). It was a smart and nifty tool, and provided great insight into how members could express implementation preferences. We dove down into this, looking for patterns, and got pretty granular (as in, “the collective results suggest that 7% of all budget units for class size should be expended in years 1-3, 9% in year 4,” and so on). In subsequent discussions, the idea was floated to create three basic categories for funding/implementation priority: front-loaded, evenly distributed, and back-loaded. Great idea (not mine) that would help make a too-detailed implementation plan more tenable. And as it ends up, I’m not alone in believing and suggesting that serving the neediest students first is a good idea, a good investment, and the right strategy. So I’m suggesting we front-load the programs I mentioned earlier, which serve the neediest students, and either evenly implement or back-load the others.

That covers the altruistic reasons, and the sound investment reasons. Now for perceptions.

You may recall from Tenet 2 that setting the local levies to 28% across the state, and having the state collect the revenues would mean higher mil rates in certain districts – those districts with the lowest assessed values (which often corresponds to higher poverty rates). Well… guess what? If the programs I suggested earlier are front-loaded in the implementation model, those same districts that are going to see an increase in their mil rates (property tax bills) will also likely be the first to see the benefits of an improved program of basic education. And if you recall in Tenet 3, those are also the districts that are most likely to see significant assistance in their capital improvement needs resulting from these increases in education programs.

Summary:

Reasoning: