It’s Not How Much Money, It’s How It’s Used

Allan Odden of the University of Wisconsin, an expert on school funding, spoke this month at the national conference of the American Assn. of School Administrators. Here are excerpts from his talk, “It Isn’t Just the Amount of Money--It’s How You Spend It That Counts.”

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I actually do have a degree in divinity, and oftentimes people say that maybe the only way we can really get more money for schools is to pray. I’m trying to think of redesigning state and district finance systems and getting money to the schools--and how better to use money at the school level for the purpose of teaching students to much higher standards.

The reason I got into resource reallocation is our current levels of performance. Even if they’re higher than they’ve ever been, [we still] teach [only] 25% of the kids in the U.S. to proficiency standards which are fairly rigorous. Our goal is to get that percentage up much higher--50%, 75%, 80%.

However you look at the money we have, we may get some more, [but] we’re not going to double or triple the money over the next 10 years. We’re going to have modest increases. The only way we can [raise achievement] is to improve the productivity of the education system, which means we have to think about how we can use the current money better.

From about 1990 to 1995, we studied expenditure patterns in school districts and schools. And we were astounded in finding that these expenditure patterns were incredibly consistent across the country, across high-spending and low-spending school districts.

We were kind of in a set of grooves about how we used the education dollar: about 60% for instruction--that includes the regular classroom teacher as well as all the support teachers; about 10% instruction support and pupil support--that’s guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, curriculum development, probably professional development; about 10% on administration, actually a lower amount on administration than many other organizations in the private sector; about 5% on transportation; and about 5% on food and other.

So generally we don’t have the administrative blob that’s alleged in education. When you look at the big cities--L.A., [Miami], Chicago, New York--that percentage is lower. Even if we can make gains in other pieces of the budget . . . you’re not going to get much money. The fruitful area to look is where the most money is, and that’s the 80% on instruction, instruction support and site administration.

Now this is not to pick on Boston--if you looked at suburbs or other kinds of school districts, the story is the same--[but a prominent study asked] why in a place that was actually spending quite a bit of money were there complaints about high class sizes, 28, 30, 35? They actually had enough money and staff to have class sizes of 15, a desired goal.

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There were several reasons. No. 1: rigid staffing formulas. This is particularly a problem in small elementary schools. If you have an absolute maximum of, let’s say, 25 kids, but you got 26 kids in the first grade, the 26th kid means you’ve got to have another teacher and therefore the class size is 13. That drained away money.

Second was categorical specialists, partly driven by rules and regulations but part driven just by our current assumed practice--the “pullout programs” for learning-disabled, bilingual kids and compensatory education kids, low-income kids. Most of these programs pull the kids out and teach them in a resource room of six to seven kids, and the curriculum is remedial math or remedial reading.

Now, another take at this is: Would more money help? What happens when we give more money?

There was a study of East Austin, Texas, a place with a large number of low-income minority children. They decided over a five-year period to give [16] schools an extra amount of money, $300,000. And what happened was that, in 14, performance didn’t change at all.

In the 14 schools where performance didn’t change, they kept the same curriculum [and] hired more out-of-classroom specialists. They put very little of that $300,000 into professional development and training. So they kind of kept what they had in place and they enhanced some of their current strategies, particularly out-of-classroom strategies.

Now what did the other two schools do? No. 1: They went through a detailed analysis of where their achievement was and where it needed to be. They understood that some major change was needed to get from here to there. No. 2: They put in place the school district’s gifted and talented curriculum.

Again, this is a high concentration of low-income minority kids. If the kids are going to learn the high standards, you have to have that curriculum program that reflects high standards. So they dramatically changed instruction.

Third, they traded in almost all of their specialist staff--compensatory education people, learning disabilities people, all of those out-of-class [specialists], even reading and writing experts [and] instructional aides. They put that into a pot, cashed it all in, and hired more regular classroom teachers to reduce class size. And they used some money on ongoing professional training. And they are the two schools that actually improved.

I’m not coming up here with a new silver bullet. But what I’m trying to argue is that there are many opportunities with how we currently deploy resources to deploy them differently.