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Making Better Use of Limited Resources

December 2007

Allan Odden

WCER’s Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) offers strategies that schools and districts can use to align the level and use of their resources to dramatically improve student performance, which it labels as doubling student performance, over a period of 5–10 years.

Schools face more demands for accountability as the education system shifts its emphasis to rigorous performance standards and the global economy requires a higher level of cognitive skills for high wage jobs. In the school finance community, this emphasis has induced a shift from equity to adequacy, in both policy and litigation.

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 resource use more directly to strategies that propel student learning.

CPRE research over the past 15 years has linked school finance equity and adequacy. According to UW-Madison education professor and CPRE director Allan Odden, the research “has aligned effective allocation and use of resources to the most powerful and comprehensive school-based strategies that can boost student learning.”

How the Education Dollar is Spent
CPRE research documents a steady increase in per pupil education funding in the U.S. over the past 100 years. After adjusting for inflation, education funds have risen on average about 3.5% annually. Odden says the consistent rise in spending has not, however, been accompanied by a similar rise in student performance, at least over the past 30 to 40 years. Current education goals are thus not likely to be met without determining how better to use school resources.

Today, about 60% of the education dollar is spent on instruction. Another 10% is spent on administration, 10% on instructional and pupil support, 10% on operations and maintenance, 5% on transportation, and 5% on food and miscellaneous items. Odden says this pattern is similar across districts, regardless of demographics and enrollment.

To align resources with strategies for improving student achievement, Odden suggests thinking of education spending as divided into three “portions”:

• One portion for core instructional services, professional development, and site administration;
• A second portion for instructional and pupil support services, which help the education system accomplish the goal of student achievement in the core subjects; and
• A third portion for overhead (school operation and maintenance, transportation, food services, and central office administration).

The policy and practice question then becomes: Can expenditures in any of these three areas be made more productive, both by maintaining current student achievement with less money and by boosting student achievement by using current and any new funding more effectively?

Answering this question will require more detailed information about resource use. Traditional fiscal reporting systems are limited, Odden says. They track expenditures by function and object at the district level, but not at the school level, and not by the three categories listed above or the strategies within them. Unless instructional resources are spent more effectively, increasing available resources will not likely improve student learning.

Professional Development Resources
CPRE researchers developed a framework for collecting expenditure data on investments in teacher professional development (PD). The framework tracks six cost areas: (a) teacher time; (b) training and coaching; (c) administration; (d) materials, equipment, and facilities; (e) travel and transportation; and (f) tuition and conference fees. This framework provides a way to identify and analyze the PD resources that districts or schools make available to teachers at a given school. The framework also can identify the costs of any specific PD program.

CPRE studies of PD in several large cities found that districts were investing between $4,000 and $8,000 per teacher per year in PD. Higher amounts were associated with more pupil-free days or summer training institutes. The studies also found that the PD strategies were generally “a mile wide and an inch deep” and had little impact on teachers’ instructional practice.

Odden recommends that districts conduct a PD fiscal audit to fully understand their investments. PD should focus on improving instruction in core subjects (mathematics, science, reading, and history). Districts should restructure PD to provide long-term support that enables teachers to incorporate new and powerful instructional strategies into their practice, and begin funding it with reallocated extant PD resources.

Tracking Resource Use
CPRE developed a school-based financial information database to better report education expenditures by educational strategy and program at the site level. This fiscal reporting system provides more insight into effective and ineffective uses of education funds, and it clarifies spending in the three categories of dollars mentioned above.

Odden suggests reporting education expenditures at the school and district levels by educational strategy. The CPRE expenditure framework “unpacks” the instructional category to isolate core instruction, specialist instruction, PD, and types of extra help for students with special needs. This framework includes non-monetary indicators that further clarify resource use—for example, number of minutes allocated for reading and math instruction, class sizes, and percentage of core versus elective classes.

The complete CPRE report, “CPRE’s School Finance Research: Fifteen Years of Findings,” is available online.

This is the first in a four-part series on the work of CPRE. The second part will cover reallocation of dollars at the school level by educational strategy; school finance adequacy; and use of resources to double student performance.