Editorial: “100% Solution” Fails the Test

Recently, the Fordham Institute issued a “manifesto” titled Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity and Antiquity in School Finance, which lists dozens of signatories from across the political spectrum. Since many of us have worked diligently over the years to tackle inequities in education finance, we would like to be able to invite others to climb on a bandwagon in support of a better funding scheme.

Unfortunately, however, the proposal for Weighted Student Funding (WSF), touted as the “100% Solution” in this report, would actually be more harmful than helpful to children’s interests. In certain circumstances, WSF (a per-pupil amount theoretically weighted according to student needs) can be an effective way to distribute education funds within very large school districts, but without a host of other measures, WSF cannot create equity in our public schools.

Focusing on WSF as a cure-all for school funding inequities is wrong for at least three major reasons. First, this Solution totally ignores what almost all agree is the biggest funding problem facing public schools—inadequate funds. Although the authors of the report state that they would not “presume” to tell state officials whether funding is adequate to provide students the basic resources they need to meet state standards, state high court justices in 21 of the 28 major decisions regarding constitutional requirements for public school funding have not hesitated to declare funding inadequate. By ignoring the basic need for adequate funding, the authors have invalidated the panacea they claim to present. WSF’s proposed reshuffling would merely rob from Peter to pay Paul and leave many schools short on basic needs.

Second, the Fordham Solution does not acknowledge the difficulty of implementing the weightings that would be critical for equity under WSF. Almost all of the current weightings for at-risk students, students with disabilities, and English language learners have resulted from political compromises, rather than any objective, systematic analysis of student needs. This has led to bizarre results, like Cincinnati implementing a WSF system that provides an extra 5 percent for students from poverty backgrounds and 29 percent extra for gifted and talented students. Promising methodologies for developing fair and accurate weightings are being developed and implemented, and the Solution’s neglect of these important developments in favor of setting weights through political compromise and/or “market mechanisms” is totally unjustified.

Third, when it comes to the proposal’s tight coupling of weighted student funding with a radical decentralization of educational governance, the only apparent motivation is to pave the way for implementation of a large-scale voucher system. The 100% Solution simplistically assumes that giving the lion’s share of educational funds to individual principals will ensure effective spending and ignores the very complex realities of school improvement. There is no credible evidence that decentralization alone or coupled with WSF leads to improvement in average outcomes or reductions in achievement gaps in the few large districts that have tried it. School improvement depends on a variety of programs, strategic planning, professional development, parental involvement, a rich and rigorous curriculum, alignment with state standards, and other educational actions, some of which are more efficiently handled at the district or regional level.

Fordham’s proposal identifies some of the challenges schools face in achieving equitable learning environments for all students, but WSF plus radical decentralization adds up to the wrong answer. Absent the right answers of adequate funding, weightings for at-risk students based on need not politics, and hard work on the many factors necessary to create good schools, the proposal earns a failing grade.

Michael A. Rebell, Executive Director of the National Access Network
September 15, 2006