Next Generation Cost Studies

The concurrent session Next Generation Cost Studies looked at an issue the National Access Network considers key - education finance studies - and focused on studies in New Mexico and California.

New Mexico: Keeping the Public Involved

The highlight of the conversation was Jay Chambers’ discussion of a cost study currently underway in New Mexico, which is unusual in that it involves a substantial public engagement component. Public engagement, Chambers explained, provides three important elements of a cost study: awareness, buy-in, and input. When the public is engaged in the process of costing out education they become more aware and informed about the costs of running schools, and when the public is involved they are more likely to “buy into” the study and accept its results as legitimate.

Chambers’ main interest is in the “input” part of public engagement. In determining the educational goals that are being “costed out,” the study team asked the public – the citizens of New Mexico – what they thought were the components of an adequate education. The researchers compiled over 1700 responses from an online public survey, held 23 town hall meetings that comprised over 650 participants, and held a stakeholder meeting with 50 education stakeholders in the state. Chambers is Senior Research Fellow and Managing Director of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and leads AIR’s New Mexico study team.

What the People are Saying

The preliminary results that Chambers presented are fascinating. When asked about what knowledge and skills were important for children to learn, survey respondents ranked English literacy first, but put skills such as communication, logic and creativity, and ability to access information at the top of their list. In addition, fully 40 percent of respondents said schools should put more focus on personal development – such as development of personal responsibility, honesty, integrity, and respect – than on academic skills. When asked about various educational programs, school environment and student health and wellness were ranked as more important than academics.

Chambers added that there are many other places where public engagement is necessary. Pre-kindergarten, he said, is one area that can account for a large part of recommended spending increases, so the public needs to be involved in the conversation of who should be eligible for state-funded preschool. Decisions like these can impact the results of an adequacy study, and they are fundamentally decisions that should and will in the end be made by the public.

AIR’s results are important, too, because they highlight how public engagement is a critical element of cost studies. Public engagement, as Access has long argued, is a credible and practical way to inform key judgments in cost studies. The importance of public engagement is also a key issue raised in Michael Rebell’s recent article, “Professional Rigor, Public Engagement and Judicial Review: A Proposal for Enhancing the Validity of Education Adequacy Studies.”

While public engagement also played a significant role in the New York Adequacy Study – also performed by AIR – most studies have afforded the public little or no opportunity to become involved. Hopefully, the New Mexico and New York studies can start to push other education cost studies in this direction.

Lessons from California

California researchers released a set of major education finance and governance studies, together titled “Getting Down to Facts” in March 2007. Jorge Luis Ruiz de Velasco, Co-Director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford – the institute that directed the study – and Abe Hajela, Special Counsel for the California School Boards Association tackled the issue of costing out education in California, a state that educates one in eight U.S. students and has a large and increasing population of special needs students such as English learners.

Velasco discussed the difficulties facing education funding in California, describing an “unstable” and “chronically under-funded” system that has between one-third and one-half of state education aid tied up in hundreds of “categorical” sources that leave school administrators almost no leeway in how they use funds. Hajela added his concerns about the way California funds education. The legislature, he said, is too hampered by ballot initiatives and resistance to taxes to raise any real revenue. In addition, he commented that state officials like to wear both regulatory and accountability hats, a mindset he summarized as, “Do this with the money, and if you fail to improve, we’ll blame you.” Changing the finance system cannot be accomplished without changing how education is governed and regulated in California.

Hajela responded to issues raised by Chambers’s presentation on what the public wants from schools. The more you broaden your goals, he said, the harder it is to apply specific dollar amounts to the suggested reforms. Specific resource-based inputs may not be popular with the public, but they are much easier to connect to specific dollar amounts. That people have such diverse ideas of the goals of education means that there needs to be a broader public discussion not only about what the goals are, but about which goals to cost out and how to link them to the distribution of money.

In addition, Hajela addressed another concern: the dollar amounts needed, particularly in a state as large as California, can be enormous. He fears the IREPP “Getting Down to Facts” study may be detrimental to the cause, because the dollar amounts recommended were so large and had so many caveats attached that he feels people might shrug off the findings. Studies like the California study must be treated and presented as a starting-off point for discussions between stakeholders and policy-makers about where to go next. As presented, the California study may be ignored by policy-makers, he said.

Linking Cost Studies to Best Practices

Several members of the audience asked the panelists how to ensure that cost studies take into account best practices, to ensure efficiency and effective use of funds. However, the panelists did not have detailed answers to this question, which is going to become critical as more states use cost studies in determining school funding. Abe Hajela noted that attaching dollar amounts to specific outcomes is extremely difficult. Without knowing exactly what reforms to use, it’s hard to attach specific dollar amounts to the reforms; this was a major problem in the California study. Jay Chambers explained that in the New Mexico study, AIR used expert judgment recommendations as the starting point for professional judgment panels, and they asked panelists to remember that they are taxpayers and must make their recommendations as efficient as possible.

The panel was moderated by John Myers, an education finance consultant who has worked on education cost studies for years with the firm of Augenblick, Palaich, and Associates.