Weighted Student Funding: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?

Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a lengthy new manifesto promoting the idea of “weighted student funding.” Endorsed by an ideologically diverse collection of education policy bigwigs (including my current and former employers), the report essentially combines some very important ideas about correcting resource inequities within school districts with a plan to pave the way for vouchers.

But left-leaning education advocates should nonetheless consider holding their fire. In endorsing the proposal, conservatives may inadvertently provide the most potent ammunition yet to those want to use lawsuits as a lever to raise taxes and increase funding for education.

In a nutshell, the report proposes that every student should be assigned a certain amount of money, which would vary--or be "weighted"--depending on their educational needs. That money should go to the school in which they choose to enroll.

This idea isn’t quite as novel as it’s made out to be, in that this is basically the way states fund their school finance systems today. Parents decide where to send their children to school by deciding where to live, and school districts receive money from the state based on how many students they enroll. Virtually all states weight those allocations already according to the same factors—disability status, economic disadvantage, etc.--mentioned in the report.

So the “weighting” is not the innovation here. The new twists are: (1) The money follows the students to the school, not the school district, and, (2) The school might not be a traditional public school.

The first piece, school-based funding, is a great idea. The papers catalogues a range of little-known and pernicious ways that certain schools in larger districts—usually disproportionately full of low-income, low-performing, and minority children—get the short end of the funding stick. Guaranteeing those schools a fair share of the funding designated for their students, and providing more money for harder-to-educate students, is an important and necessary challenge, and all the signees deserve credit for taking it on.

But it’s also not hard to see how well this fits into the voucher agenda. While the proposal takes care to limit the conversation to public schools, it also expands the definition of “public” as far as it can, referring to public schools as including “schools of choice.”

This definitional stretching is not an accident. Voucher proposals founder rhetorically on the distinction between the public and private spheres. People believe, rightly, that public dollars should be used for public purposes. So when a proposal is framed as diverting those resources to private entities like private schools, people recoil.

Weighted student funding is arguably a three-step strategy for blurring that distinction. First, get people used to the idea that education funding is first and foremost connected to real live students, not bureaucratic legal entities like school districts. Second, give students more school choices, first within the public school system and then expanding outward to include less traditional options like charter schools, building the sense that choice is an ordinary and necessary component of public education.

Third and finally—this isn’t an official recommendation, but some of the signatories make their intentions about it explicit in the footnotes—expand the sphere of eligible schools even further to include what are now thought of as private schools. At this point, the whole distinction between “public” and “private” schools starts to lose meaning, because all a “public” school means is a school that enrolls “public” students. And since all students receive vouchers, all students—and thus, all schools—are public.

This is sure to draw the ire of voucher opponents. But before they attack weighted school funding, they might want to reconsider. In supporting the plan, some conservative education advocates may be inadvertently weakening their position in another key area: opposition to new, court-mandated funding for public education.

School funding in the United States has been and in many states continues to be deeply inequitable, to the detriment of disadvantaged students, resulting in lawsuits in nearly every state. But some state courts have historically been reluctant to force legislatures to spend specific amounts of money on education, for two reasons. First, there was no consensus as to what, exactly, schools are supposed to accomplish. Second, there was no consensus as to how much money meeting those goals—whatever they are—should reasonably cost.

The standards movement has pretty much taken care of the first problem. Legislatures have defined exactly what students are supposed to know and be able to do. But the second issue—reasonable cost—remains tricky. Conservatives constantly argue that the education system gets plenty of money already to meet established goals; it just needs to spend what it has more efficiently.

Weighted school funding would put that contention to the test. As the report says:

“Under weighted school funding, if weights are implemented properly, schools will have powerful incentives to serve more disadvantaged kids. Schools may begin to vie for these populations to gain increased funding, rather than shun them as is often the case today.”

This makes the setting the weights properly crucial. While there are a number of ways to set weights, in the long run the best way is probably to let the market decide. As the report says:

“Just as the free market sets prices for goods and services, the market for hard-to-educate children can determine their weighting. Principals and schools should seek to educate hard-to-educate children because they know that with the money accompanying the child they can show improvement trends and reach performance levels. If this doesn’t happen, the district or state should adjust weights until it does.”

This market approach for setting weights would be particularly effective if there was an element of hard accountability to the system—if, for example, a school received a standard amount of money per student enrolled up front, but only received the additional, “weighted” amount once students actually met academic standards. In other words, incentives for schools to not just enroll hard-to-educate students but actually educate them successfully.

Here’s a guess—under such a system, the market-determined weight for disadvantaged students would be a whole lot higher than people realize. So high, in fact, that it would put a lot of the counter-arguments to "adequacy"-based lawsuits to rest.

In other words, weighted student funding could give school finance litigants the final, missing piece of the puzzle: solid, market-based evidence for exactly how much it costs to educate disadvantaged students up to established academic standards. How could conservatives disagree, once the market, in all its wisdom, has spoken?

So voucher opponents should be cautious about criticizing weighted student funding. The report contains a lot of valuable ideas and perhaps even the seeds of grand bargain between liberal and conservative factions in the fight over school finance—choice in exchange for adequate funding. For a system that currently has too little of both, this would be a welcome step indeed.