More on Weighted Student Funding [UPDATED]

There were two comments from Maisie’s post from Friday about weighted student funding I’d like to highlight. One was fromn current school board member in and former School Board President Eric Mar.

As a School Board member in SF and the former President of the SF Board I think EdWize – is right on the mark – “the [WSF] proposal pays no attention whatsoever to the money coming into a school district, but is “dividing the scraps.”

Right wing, pro-voucher and union-busting forces are trying to frame the debate in a misleading manner.
Our schools in SF with the concentrations of the lowest income kids [almost all kids of color] are really left in a terrible situation in budget deficit periods [like the last 5 years for us in SF] under the WSF to cut a teacher here or a para there or arts programs or sports. Other schools with more affluent parents and an ability to raise private funds might be a little better situation but they struggle as well.

Those difficult ‘decisions’ over ‘crumbs’ left up to the school sites have really left ‘management’ [me and other school board members and the superintendent] off the hook in the broader fight for adequate funding.
United Educators of SF and others have been constructively critical of the implementation of the WSF in SF. The Fordham Foundation is really trying to mislead the public on this very complex issue.

Peter Goodman also posted part of a conversation he had about WSF over email with Dennis Kelly, president of the United Educators of San Francisco.

Dear Peter,

How can the Weighted Student Formula be the “latest thing in school reform”? It has been kicking around for most of a decade. Perhaps it is the newest thing on some particular block…

The Weighted Student Formula would make sense if it actually brought money to a site. The experience we have had in San Francisco is that the staff was empowered to cannibalize one another in fighting over the inadequate pot of money. The universal losers are the paraprofessionals. It seems easier to cut two paraprofessionals than
one teacher, for instance.

The administration and various committees have evolved a set of rules to guide school site councils in administering the allocation of funding. For instance, certain levels of clerical support must be maintained. Teachers to instruct certain classes must be maintained. When I was at a school and we decided to “share the pain” across the board, we were told that administrators could not be cut or even fractionally reduced. After several years the WSF gurus considered using actual costs instead of averages in setting salaries for all
levels of employees. That has not been implemented. Prior to Ackerman’s “reconstitution” of several schools, the schools classified as underperforming showed no significant difference in experience of staff when compared to other sites. After Ackerman threw out whole teaching staffs and repopulated those schools with new hires, then the experience differences showed up.

The actual weights tied to the funding are not apparent at the sites. The site council sees a pot of money and is told to operate with it. It does not bring more attention to students with special needs.

Our understanding is that the Canadian origins of the concept were created to give principals entrepreneurial responsibilities for their schools.

The WSF effort gets confused with the decentralization of budgeting through school site councils.

From the description of the discussion that I have read in your note, Rebell comes closest to accurately describing it.

More from Michele at the AFT’s Blog and Joe Williams.

UPDATE: Several days late but since so much of the discussion has revolved around San Francisco parent, blogger and activist KC from SFS schools is more supportive of WSF writing in the previous comment thread:

Without that the UESF (local union) would not have gone along with it at all. There are serious equity issues surrounding the fact that disadvantaged schools tend to be staff by less experienced teachers — and the use of averaged salaries means that WSF does not address that problem. But it is curious that a union site would ding SF’s implementation on that grounds.

The biggest problem with the SF implementation of WSF comes from the fact that so much of the district funding comes through restricted allocations. State legislators tie up so much of the money with strings that WSF, which can only be used to allocate unrestricted funds, barely covers salaries. This severely limits the efficacy and power of site-based budgeting.

Still, it has been a very effective and important reform here in SF. Hopefully it can be expanded by bringing more of the budget under WSF.

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