Brizard's "Equitable" Student Funding is Misguided and Harmful to Students

An Open Letter to Members of the Rochester City School Board

This year, school principals in the Rochester City School District have been compelled to submit their individual school budgets using a formula provided by the superintendent which he has referred to as “Equitable Student Funding”.   At my child’s school, SOTA, the resulting budget represents nearly a 43.7% cut in funding compared to last year’s levels.  At East High, a 40.1% cut in funding, at Wilson Magnet, a 37.4% cut in funding. At Charlotte High School a 43% cut, at Monroe a 26.4% cut. These deep cuts are occurring at a time when we all know that belts are tightening across the country.  But there are a number of grave concerns and puzzles that, due to the non-transparency of this year’s process, remain problematic and, we conclude, starkly inequitable and unwise.  The most obvious is the question of how a 3% cut in state funding to the district can possibly translate into the need for  an average cut of 21.6% across all Rochester Elementary and High Schools while suburban school districts are anticipating cuts in operating aid averaging only 3.5%.

One obvious explanation would be that, somehow, students at SOTA and other programs incurring deep cuts in their proposed budgets this year, have been receiving an unfairly large proportion of resources in past budgets.  But, in fact, that has NOT been the case.  On a capitated or per-student basis, SOTA actually falls somewhere in the middle of the pack with respect to student spending as do the other schools I mentioned.  As our city-wide parent group looked into this further, we quickly began forming a new, and somewhat disturbing conception of the process. 

To understand how an “equitable” student-funding initiative could possibly result in drastic reductions in funding of programs that were already being funded at a level no higher than other schools in the district, we needed to review some history.  Bear with me here, as the devil is very much in the details.

 The first thing to note is that, much like the “double speak” in Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984, the term “equitable student funding” is a term found virtually no-where else in the country on Google searches or detailed educational data-base searches done through the Warner School’s library at the University of Rochester.  Rather, the term “equitable” represents Mr. Brizard’s re-branding of a broader concept in district budgeting more widely known elsewhere as “weighted” student funding.  This model goes by several names, including “results-based budgeting, student-based budgeting, or “back-packing”.  In all cases the meaning is the same:  dollars, rather than staffing positions based on programs, follow students into schools.  These resources are weighted based on the individual needs of the student.  While this may seem reasonable from the high-altitude of central-office theory, in practice it has resulted in grave distortions at the level of curricular programs in schools.  Obviously, how the board chooses to “weight” resources is critical to understanding the adverse impact on many of our district’s most successful programs.  In this year’s process, SPED and ESL students are weighted at a higher rate ($5,826) than other students ($3,682).  As a result, with shrinking resources overall, school principals are racing to enroll as many SPED and ESL students as possible (I know of one mother of a SPED student who has already received several phone calls soliciting her child’s enrollment for next year). 

Where does the push for converting from a program-formula for budgets to a weighted-student-budgeting formula come from?  Largely, this is a massive initiative underwritten by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation out of Los Angeles.  Who was Eli Broad?  He was a home builder from Detroit who made a fortune in the 1960s building houses that didn’t need basements because they could be heated with natural gas.  By the mid-1960s, he and his brother had diversified into insurance.  They founded the behemoth, AIG;  you recall, that same AIG that was the largest single recipient of the federal TARP monies in the crash of 2008.  Too big to fail was the mantra.  So, here is Eli Broad, pushing a conservative agenda for the rebranding of America’s schools, based on what he has referred to as market principles.  He controls 2.1 Billion dollars in assets and is busily disposing of them to apply what one of his think-tanks, the “Reason Foundation”, refers to a “libertarian principles”.  Mr. Broad himself describes what he does as “venture philanthropy”.   We all know how well his venture capitalism turned out – we’re still paying for it and will be for another generation.

What is the direct connection between the Broad Foundation and Rochester?  It turns out that Mr. Brizard, a former math teacher from New York City with a master’s degree in education (the same basic requirement that virtually all city school district teachers meet) is a graduate of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent Academy, class of 2007.  What is that?  Created in 2002, the Broad Superintendents Academy is a “rigorous 10-month executive training program designed to prepare the next generation of superintendents of large, urban school districts.  Program participants retain their current full-time employment while attending the Academy for six extended weekend sessions.  The director of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy is taxed with “generating session content such as webinars”, and with creating “frequent, relevant assessment of Fellow performance…[including] overseeing a performance management system to track each Fellow’s learning and achievement including rubrics, frequent and relevant assessments and reports.” (http://www.broadfoundation.org/asset/102-2010tbadirector.pdf)

So….it certainly sounds as though our superintendent has somebody tracking his achievement and performance….and it is not you, the members of the Rochester City School District School Board, or us, the parents of kids whose educations as literally on the verge of being flushed down the tubes…No, it is the director of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent’s Academy in Los Angeles California – funded by the good folks who brought you AIG. 

But, rather than sink into the mire of an ad-hominem argument against the purveyors of weighted student funding, or quibbling with the doublespeak entailed in the very term “equitable” as applied to the complex formulas being thrust on school principals across the district, I want to grapple with some of the deep flaws underlying the logic of the superintendent’s budgeting formula.

To do this, let’s look at the literature promulgated by Broad’s own paid exponent, author Lisa Snell, in her “Weighted Student Formula Yearbook, 2009” (http://reason.org/files/wsf/yearbook.pdf).  This document outlines five key principles underlying student-based budgeting (another term of art for “weighted-student-funding”).  (By the way, Ms. Snell is herself not an educator, but has a degree in communication):

1. Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he or she attends
2. Per-student funding should vary according to the child’s need and other relevant circumstances
3. Funding should arrive at the school as real dollars – not as teaching positions, ratios or staffing norms – that can be spent flexibly, with accountability systems focused more on results and less on inputs, programs or activities.
4. Principles of allocating money to schools should apply to all levels of funding, including federal, state and local dollars.
5. Funding systems should be as simple as possible and made transparent to administrators, teachers, parents and citizens. 

While all of these principles seem reasonable enough on the surface, there are key ways in which they have not been realized adequately in even small pilot programs, and cannot be realized adequately in the full-roll-out precipitously called for by Mr. Brizard across the entire district.  Particularly laughable is point 5, above.  This has, in fact, been perhaps the least transparent budgeting formula in the history of the district. 

Lets use Ms. Snell’s own “school empowerment benchmarks to see why.

The argument used by Mr. Brizard and the Broad Foundation/AIG group is that if schools receive budgets based on dollars related to per-pupil funding, it gives school principals the money that each student generates and allows principals to more efficiently allocate revenue and staff.  But the structures currently in place in the Rochester City School District, including the reality of budgetary constraints from federal, state and local coffers, the lack of real mobility of students between schools, state mandates regarding curricular offerings and core competencies, and per-teacher funding costs that are non-negotiable, leave principals’ hands thoroughly tied. 

It is like the captain of the Titanic suddenly insisting that his first-mates take control of the helm just as the ice-berg comes looming up out of the fog.  In this analogy, the first-mates are school principals, and Brizard is the captain of the titanic.

In order for student-based budgeting to improve outcomes for students, families need to be able to choose between schools, and school themselves need to have access to sufficient discretionary funding to be able create meaningfully diverse curricular offerings. In such an environment, less popular schools would have both an incentive and the potential means to improve in order to attract and retain families.  The theory goes that school choice would show district officials which schools hold the most value to customers.  According to the theory the majority of schools will show improvements once principals control school budges and public schools begin to compete with one another, and if some schools cannot improve they can be merged with higher performing schools or they can be closed.  In this utopian theory, school choice is an accountability mechanism that reveals which schools are serving students effectively, by giving dissatisfied families the right to exit to a higher performing school. 

All of this would be fine, except for the fact that city students and parents actually have very little choice, and none of the principals will have access to sufficient resources to allow meaningful development of attractive new curricular options for students.  At SOTA, for example, there is simply not room for more students to enroll.  So, even though it has the highest graduation rate in the district, the highest proportion of kids going on to college (indeed, one of the highest rates for African American and Hispanic males in New York state), the limitation of space and staff mean that no more district children can be enrolled there than already are.  How ironic, then, that this, one of the true bright spots in education for the entire district, will be forced to gut its arts and advanced placement programs under the new budgeting formula.  Indeed, for parents of middle-class means, once these programs are gutted, there will be an exercise of school-choice:  kids whose parents can afford it will be sent to private schools or suburban schools whose arts and academic programs are not being eviscerated.  For the vast majority of low-income students, that will not be a choice they have.   Thus, rather than replicating our most successful programs across the district, the funding initiative decapitates them.

According to the theory, principals must be able to make decisions about how to spend resources in terms of staffing on programs, including hiring.  But, in reality, principals were asked to grapple with huge budget cuts – forcing them to axe virtually any of the non-core programs that might have meaningfully differentiated one school from another.

Unlike an evidence based approach to allocating district resources, focused on identifying which actual programs work and replicating them across the district, Mr. Brizard’s inequitable funding program distains research into effective education strategies to set spending levels.   His model, like all per-student funding initiatives, provides no guidance on how to insure resources are adequate and directed to activities that improve student achievement. 

In other words, it moves away from evidence-based strategies that improve student performance, and toward financial formulas that, on the alter of their seeming simplicity, actually decimate programs that have been demonstrably successful.  At SOTA, for example, the Arts and Advanced Placement Programs – features of the curriculum tightly linked to the school’s overall successful graduation rates and college-placement rates, will be gutted if the new budget formula is utilized to allocate resources.

In cities beyond Rochester, the Broad Foundation has placed other graduates of its Superintendent Academy who are hell-bent on imposing their free-market utopianism on their districts.  In virtually every case, the student-based funding processes have been imposed from on-high, only to founder in the face of stark budget constraints. Interviews with respondents from districts as diverse as Baltimore and Seattle, echoed the sentiment that a weighed student funding policy "is deficient if it cannot provide adequate funds to districts and schools". In short, support for the Broad Foundation’s weighted student funding policy "appears to have eroded as districts’ financial situations worsened".  Flexibility does not matter if there is not enough money to be flexible with.

In the end, as Members of the Rochester City School District School Board, you must choose whether or not to support Mr. Brizard’s theory.  I have tried to show why his theory cannot work in our setting of limited resources and limited school choice.  It may sound nice, but it has not yet worked elsewhere, and cannot work here.

I want to close with an analogy from biology.  As you know, Darwin’s theory of natural selection explained the amazing variety of animal and plant species we observe in nature.  According to this theory, cruel nature weeds out any traits that are not adaptive, while those traits that confer a competitive advantage to an individual organism tend to be preserved and passed on to that organism’s offspring.  Mr. Brizard’s funding initiative does the opposite. Rather than identifying those programs in the schools that are working and trying to replicate them across the district, Brizard’s funding formula totally ignores them.  There can be no natural selection of excellent programs when funding decisions are not made according to program assessment, but merely according to the number and types of kids attending a given school.  In a world in which the per-capita payment for students was sufficiently high as to enable principals to craft truly unique and diverse offerings, perhaps Brizard is correct that the natural migration of parents and families toward the good programs would ultimately win the day.  If we had thirty Harley Schools to choose from, where principals could craft curricular programs based on per-capita budgets in excess of $20,000/student, I have no doubt that Brizard’s theories could work.  But in our world, one in which the resources available are starkly limited and shrinking, Brizard’s formula will give no chance for any elective programs to survive the budget axe, and rather than a flowering of new options (or even the preservation of successful old ones), all options will regress toward the mean. 

In the end, the AIG-inspired free-market of schools with budgets transparently linked to student-enrollment, and the unrestricted free-flow of student-capital can only work when peoples’ basic needs are already being met.  Mr. Brizard is like Marie Antoinette ensconced in some Versailles of a think-tank policy wonk’s imagination.  He insists that his budgeting approach will enable the district’s children to feast on cake, when in reality, it will leave them fighting over scraps.

Sincerely,

Fred Marshall, M.D.