It seems most everyone is calling for change in the Hamilton County school system following a rocky year punctuated by plummeting test scores, a basketball player’s rape that sent the young man to surgery and the resignation – under pressure – of the school superintendent.
But even before all those revelations, a number of community organizations had begun efforts and studies to seek improvements.
As the school year’s events unfolded, those efforts have taken on new urgency.
Now, one of the efforts – a look at how to redirect local school funding to help the students most at risk – looks promising.
Metro Ideas Project, a reshaped kind of think tank, put data to what most of us already thought: Hamilton County’s per-pupil spending is higher than Tennessee’s average but we’re not getting as much for our buck. Hamilton County scores and graduations were among the bleakest in the state.
For example: In Tennessee counties with average per-pupil expenditures of less than $9,000, graduation rates are higher than 90 percent. In Hamilton County, where per-pupil spending in the 2014-2015 school year was $9,728.80, according to to the Tennessee schools Report Card, the graduation rate dropped to 85 percent.
And when Metro Ideas looked at teacher salaries in schools across our system, they found that higher salaries alone (sometimes subsidized by various funding intended to improve student success) still did not seem to determine student success.
Generally speaking, most school districts in the U.S. still spend roughly 80 percent of their operating budgets on salaries and benefits. In Hamilton County, it’s more. (Don’t be fooled into thinking we spend too much. Hamilton’s per-pupil spending is higher than the Tennessee per-pupil spending, but Tennessee ranks 38th in the nation for education spending. Georgia ranks 36th, and Alabama is 44th.)
But perhaps the most telling finding of the Metro Ideas Project report is not really about comparative averages. It’s about priorities. The report finds that Hamilton County’s individual school leaders – the principals – may know their students best but have almost no control over how to spend their school’s allocated budget. In fact, principals can control only 1 or 2 percent of that money.
That means, for instance, that they can’t add teacher assistants to certain struggling grades from other grade levels that are doing OK.
The report’s take-away is that the focus of school budgeting needs to be on the students, not the enrollment figures. And that school superintendents and school board members need to listen to the principals and teachers – and then empower them.
“Some students cost more to educate than others. They face different challenges and barriers to success. A one-size-fits-all budgeting process does not account for the educational needs of a large and varied student population,” the Metro Ideas report states.
It is what we know instinctively, yet current budgeting practices focus on staffing, buildings and programs. And at the state level, funding mechanisms have pushed school districts toward enrollment-centered funding strategies.
Metro Nashville has already bucked the standard and moved to a student-based funding system giving principals considerably more control.
There, the system and principals attach a base amount of funding for every student, then boost it depending on their grade and poverty levels, academic achievement, whether they are learning English or have certain disabilities. The scale is set by the school board.
Each school then receives funding based on the specific students who attend, and the modifications used to determine funding can be changed yearly, based on the district’s goals. The flexibility allows a principal to experiment and also to easily abandon what’s not working, freeing up the funding for something that can better target student needs.
Michelle McVicker, principal of Buena Vista Enhanced Option public school in Nashville, said that new flexibility and targeting have allowed her school to increase proficiency in every tested content area for the last three years, according to standardized testing data. She added that school-level data also shows tremendous academic growth.
“If you expect us to do something different, you have to give us the opportunity to craft something,” McVicker said.
The Nashville educators said the program was phased into all the system’s schools over three years, and it’s still too early make any concrete conclusions on its effect on overall student achievement.
It’s worth a try here. We know what we’re doing now isn’t working.
As David Eichenthal, a senior fellow with the Metro Ideas Project, wrote in a portion of the report: “The mathematical science of budgeting – getting the arithmetic to work – is really the easiest part. The hard part – and the true art of local government budgeting – is getting the policy priorities right. Budgets are less about numbers and more about policies and priorities.”
Let’s give it a try.