Entries tagged 'Weighted Student Formula'

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Rhee’s Questionable Budget Decision

Michelle Rhee, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, announced last week on a district Web site that she was doing away with using a Weighted Student Formula-method of funding the district’s schools.

A Weighted Student Formula, or WSF, allocates funding to schools based the number of students a school serves and on characteristics of those individual students, such as:

• Whether a student receives free- or reduced-lunch
• Whether a student is an English Language Learner
• Whether a student has a learning disability

WSF seems like common sense, but is not nearly universal. In many states, including California, groups have been fighting for such a funding formula for many years. Professor Jon Sonstelie of the University of California, Santa Barbara, explains some of the key advantages for such a system in California in his Getting Down to Facts paper, Aligning School Finance with Academic Standards.

Rhee has shaken things up considerably since arriving in D.C. from the New Teacher Project, in most cases, clearing out cobwebs that had persisted for decades. Eric Osberg, in The Flypaper blog, questions whether this consolidation of budgeting power is a major misstep and a “giant step backward.”

While my first inclination is to agree strongly with Osberg, I recognize Rhee’s concerns over the budgetary skills of her principal corps. I do think, however, that Rhee’s decision will indeed, as Osberg claims, make it extremely difficult to recruit top educational leaders and that training school leaders in the necessary skills would be a significantly better option.

Nevertheless, I trust Rhee’s pedigree and decision-making history, for the moment. I hope this move is one that five years from now was shown as painful, but necessary. I hope that by that time, D.C. has successfully recruited cadres of high-quality school leaders and that those leaders have earned back the right to site-based budgeting.

And, more than anything, I hope Rhee continues to push the reforms D.C. needs to have an educational system worthy of our nation’s capital city.

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