Comparable Difficulties

New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been postponed. In part, it’s because the problem is obscure and confusing (what were we using before, one might wonder, fake salaries? No wonder the teachers are so cranky!). But the decision to postpone the phase-in of actual teacher salaries has important implications for one part of the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind act.

The battle is over Title I’s comparability provision. Title I is intended to target poor children with federal funds to provide additional educational resources to combat the effects of poverty. The comparability provision applies within a given school district (not across district lines) and is designed to ensure that districts spend roughly the same amount on all of their schools, then use Title I money to add extra resources for poor children. But districts can meet the comparability requirement using instructional staff-to-student ratios and budget for salaries using the district’s average teacher salary, not the actual salaries paid to specific teachers. That means in schools with lots of veteran and highly-credentialed teachers, whose salaries are higher than novices, the actual cost of paying twenty teachers may be significantly higher than the cost of paying twenty teachers in the school down the road. The schools full of veteran, expensive teachers are usually schools with the most affluent students. Researcher Marguerite Roza has proven that such disparities can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually between schools.

These intra-district spending disparities may pale in comparison to larger inter-district differences (see Roza and Kevin Carey for more), but they are compelling and quantifiable, which makes them an appealing target for federal intervention. During the 2007 Congressional NCLB reauthorization hearings, Amy Wilkins, vice president of governmental relations and communications at the Education Trust, declared in written testimony that “if Congress does nothing else in this reauthorization…it should amend the comparability provisions to ensure true funding equity at the district level.”

But the spending inequities that the comparability provision allows practices that comparability are deeply integrated into the budgeting practices of most districts. Roza also found that “despite the honest attempts of many district leaders, those in large- and mid-sized urban districts are generally not aware of the inequities revealed in dollar-to-dollar spending comparisons of non-targeted resources.” The most obvious remedy, redistributing teachers to even out the average salaries among schools, is not especially appealing.
So where does New York City fit in? Forcing transfers of teachers is not the only way to achieve comparability. Robert Gordon, now Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor at OMB, helped design the city’s Fair Student Funding plan. He has suggested that tightening the comparability provision should be paired with increasing flexibility around local and federal funding streams. That would free districts to compensate for teacher salary disparities in a variety of ways, instead of being limited to forcibly redistributing teachers. A handful of districts, including New York City, are moving in this direction with budgeting practices often referred to as “weighted student funding.” These districts determine a dollar amount of funding for students, weighted by characteristics like grade level, disability and even past performance, and then allocate that money directly to schools. The model ensures equitable per-pupil spending and allows schools to adjust spending without being limited to balancing teacher salaries among a fixed number of positions.

New York City’s decision not to transition to actual teacher salaries makes the Oakland Unified School District the only one using actual teacher salaries. This follows a transition period where schools that were benefiting from salary differences were “held harmless” with the help of a special local property tax to prevent involuntary teacher transfers or sudden shortfalls. The current economic climate makes that kind of supplemental spending seem unlikely.

The 2007 Miller discussion draft of NCLB included a proposal to require comparability compliance based on actual teacher salaries within three years. At first glance, sure, intra-district spending equity seems like a no-brainer. New York City’s decision demonstrates that the change might be harder than it looks.


(This is my last post as the Fordham Fellow at Education Sector. Many thanks to both organizations.)