Weighted Student Funding

Over on Flypaper, Stafford is blogging about today’s School Finance Redesign Project panel (the report should be here, I gather, but it looks like the site is down). She laments what she sees as inevitable union resistance to the good idea of weighted student funding, which Fordham touts as a panacea for public schools.

I don’t think weighted student funding is a bad idea, necessarily. But it’s worth noting that we’re sitting in a cautionary tale. The District of Columbia Public Schools used a weighted student formula for several of its most dysfunctional years before it was abandoned by Fordham favorite Michelle Rhee. There’s a good summary of the system from 2006 here. Among the pitfalls:

An unintended consequence of the WSF implementation is that certain key staffing decisions have become uneven and inconsistent across schools, such that DCPS cannot tell parents with absolute certainty what each school is providing for their students. Full autonomy regarding how dollars are spent has led to 150 different decisions to determine an adequate ratio for counselors, appropriate levels of support in literacy and numeracy, and how (or even if) content areas such as art, music, and PE are delivered to students.

The report concludes that the weighted student formula did not to do enough to “ensure that critical educational resources — not simply dollars — are distributed consistently and equitably.”