"Estimating the Cost of an Adequate Education in Minnesota"

November 2006

For the Professional Judgment/Evidence-based methodology, adequacy was defined as “meeting state and federal resource requirements and student performance expectations, including those in Minnesota’s education accountability system and the state’s federally-approved plan to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act.” This includes achieving 100% student proficiency by 2014.

Editorial comment: Achieving 100 percent proficiency is an unprecedented and, experts argue, unattainable goal. Robert Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, calls the 100% proficiency standard “unrealistically high.”

For the Successful School Districts methodology, successful districts were defined as those that were “on target” to meet 2008-09 AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) objectives for the 2008-2009 academic year, based on regression analysis, and were also meeting 2004-2005 AYP goals for two of six special-needs population groups.

Professional Judgment/Evidence-based Model:
Base cost per student: $5,938 (in 2004-2005 dollars)

Special-needs additional weightings (fraction of base costs):

• “At-risk” students (eligible for free or reduced price lunch): 0.75
• English Language Learners: 0.90
• Special Education: 1.0

Successful School Districts
Note: the Successful School Districts methodology only calculates the base student cost, without determining special needs weightings. “Calculated Additional Costs” for this methodology use the weightings from the Professional Judgment/Evidence-based method.

Base cost per student: $5,359 (in 2004-2005 dollars)

Professional Judgment: $1.79 billion in 2004-2005 dollars (a 30 percent increase over 2004-2005 levels)

Successful School Districts: $1.05 billion in 2004-2005 dollars (an 18 percent increase over 2004-2005 levels)

Note: Over 90% of Minnesota districts use local Operating Referenda to raise additional funds outside of the state funding system. Because Minnesota law says that the state is supposed to cover all of the costs associated with “core programming,” APA ignored these expenditures – over $500 million of the total K-12 spending in Minnesota – in its calculations of additional costs. Thus, the Professional Judgment estimate says that the state needs to spend an additional $1.8 billion, but that school districts need only about $1.3 billion more.

Increase funding to target amount, based on the professional judgment recommendations contained in the study.

Increase funding to include the funds currently raised by local “operating referenda,” explained below, to decrease reliance on annual referenda in local districts.

For students with multiple special needs, simply adding each applicable weighting, as done in this study, may overstate the cost of their education.

Based on the Professional Judgment methodology, only 4 of Minnesota’s 341 districts had spending at or above adequate levels. Based on the Successful School Districts methodology, this number increases to 10.

The “remoteness” (urban/rural character) of a district did not require an additional adjustment of costs. Because transportation was not included in the study, the district size and cost of living adjustments (see Methodology) covered any cost differences resulting from the remoteness of a district.

Professional Judgment / Evidence-based Approach:

• The study used recommendations from a Professional Judgment study conducted by Management, Analysis, and Planning (MAP) performed in 2004. No independent professional judgment work was done.
• The study costed out the resource recommendations from the MAP panels and compared the results to evidence-based findings from other states in order to assess the validity of MAP’s recommendations. The only recommendation altered as a result of the evidence-based procedure was a reduction in special education weighting from 1.9 to 1.0.
• The study used two statistical methods to adjust the necessary expenditures for each district. The first was a Location Cost Metric (LCM), which adjusted for cost-of-living in the district. The second was a district size adjustment, which was based on district size adjustments from several other adequacy studies that actually determined the higher costs associated with smaller and very large districts.

Successful School Districts Approach:

• Successful School Districts were defined as those districts meeting both of two requirements: (1) considered “on target” to meet AYP goals for 2008-2009, based on linear trends; (2) met 2004-2005 AYP targets for two of the six special population groups.
• The special population groups consisted of special education students, “at-risk” pupils, and ELL students, in each of the reading and math sections of state assessments.
• These requirements identified 45 successful districts, out of 341.
• The study applied an “efficiency screen”: the authors looked at costs in the areas of (1) Instruction, (2) Administration, and (3) Building Operations and Maintenance, and identified districts that were “out of line” with other districts in terms of number of personnel (for the first two areas) or expenditures (for the third area), after adjustments for demographic differences. These districts were eliminated as “inefficient.”
• The “base cost” included all three of the above areas from the districts that made it through each of the three efficiency screens (38, 39, and 43 districts, respectively).
• For the calculated additional costs (listed above), the weightings for special-needs students from the Professional Judgment portion of the study were applied to the Successful School District base costs.
  
  

This study did not consider capital funding for facilities, etc., transportation, food service, adult education, or community service costs, which are ordinarily excluded from adequacy studies.

This study did not include the cost of preschool.

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None yet.

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