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Making Better Use of Limited Resources, Part II

February 2008

Allan Odden

Over the past 15 years, WCER’s Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has worked to find better ways to allocate education funds and to link them to powerful school-based strategies to boost student learning. This is the second of a four-part series covering highlights from CPRE research. This article covers reallocating dollars at the school level and by educational strategy; documenting best practices in school finance adequacy; and using resources to double student performance.

Reallocating School-Level Funds
The U.S. education system educates only about one-third of the nation’s students to a rigorous proficiency standard. Improving education productivity must be placed onto the policy agenda and the practice agenda, says UW-Madison education professor and CPRE director Allan Odden. The goal of teaching all, or nearly all, students to high standards will require doubling or tripling student academic achievement.

But it’s unlikely that education funding will correspondingly increase, Odden says. To accomplish this goal, schools will need to adopt more powerful educational strategies and, in the process, reallocate funds. CPRE research found many examples of schools that reallocated their resources to improve student performance. From that research CPRE created a dozen case studies of schools—urban, suburban, and rural—that had reallocated resources to use teachers, time, and funds more productively.

Dissatisfied with their students’ performance, these schools redesigned their entire education programs. By reallocating resources and restructuring they transformed themselves into more productive educational organizations. They tended to spend more time on core academic subjects and they often provided lower class sizes for those subjects. They invested more in teacher professional development and provided more effective help for struggling students, including one-to-one tutoring. Subsequent research showed that many, but not all, designs produced higher levels of student achievement than typical schools.

Toward School Finance Adequacy
Allan Odden and colleague Larry Picus studied and documented best practices in the major dimensions of schools that have cost implications – school size, class size, core instruction, specialist instruction, extra help for struggling students, professional development, and administration. They identified a level of ‘adequate’ resources for each school in a state; then they to determined an ‘adequate’ resource level for each district in the state by combining school resources with district-level operations and maintenance, transportation, food services and central administration.

[As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the term ‘adequacy’ may seem to narrowly focus on the amount of money needed to produce a desired level of student achievement. But the more general intent underlying the focus on adequacy is to redesign the education finance system to link resource levels, and to link resource use more directly to strategies that improve student achievement.]  

CPRE’s evidence-based approach to school finance adequacy has been used for state-sponsored adequacy studies in Kentucky, Arkansas, Arizona, Wyoming, Washington, and Wisconsin. Of the major states that have redesigned school finance structures to reflect adequacy, two (Arkansas and Wyoming) used the evidence-based approach as the basis for their changes. The results of adequacy studies were then incorporated into newly designed school finance formulas.

CPRE research into school finance adequacy has:

• Identified the overall levels of resources for public schools, changes over time, and general uses, by function;
• Created two detailed expenditure reporting structures: one for identifying extant professional development investments; the other for showing how resources are used at the school level, by educational strategy;
• Used this reporting structure to help identify the cost of several “comprehensive” or “whole-school’ designs;
• Developed an evidence-based approach to school finance adequacy, and
• Used a new reporting framework to identify how resources from an adequacy reform were used by educational strategy at the school level.

Doubling Student Performance
CPRE studies of Wisconsin and Washington State found successful schools that had linked resource use to their instructional improvement strategies, leading to high levels of student performance. Many schools had dramatically improved student performance, primarily on state tests. They followed a similar set of steps in their doubling performance strategies. The schools:

• Set high goals, many times trying to educate 90 to 95 percent of students to proficiency levels, and a significant portion to advanced achievement levels;
• Analyzed student data to learn more about the status of student performance and the nature of the achievement gap;
• Reviewed evidence on good instruction and effective curriculum and developed a new instructional program for the school that was more rigorous and often research-based;
• Invested heavily in teacher training, which included intensive 1-2 week summer institutes, longer teacher work years, resources for trainers and, most important, placing instructional coaches in each school;
• Used state, local, and federal Title I funds to provide extra help for struggling students, including tutoring, extended day academic help programs, summer school, and English language development for all ELL students;
• Created smaller classes in early elementary years and often lowered class sizes in grades K-3 to 15, citing research from randomized trials;
• Used time more productively. They often allocated more time for core subjects  and protected classes from interruptions during core class periods. Secondary schools offered double class periods in subjects where students struggled to achieve to standards;
• Created ‘professional school communities’ in which teachers collaborated on the instructional program and in formative assessments analyses; and
• Used programs, strategies, and resources in amounts that can be funded with the national average expenditure per pupil.

With the current revenues in the nation’s education system, Odden says, schools should be able to dramatically increase student academic performance through school restructuring and resource reallocation, at least in some subject areas, and at some grade levels.

The third installment of this series will cover use of dollars after a school finance reform, pricing adequacy recommendations and enhancing teacher compensation, and school-based budgeting or the weighted student formula.

The complete CPRE report is available online.