Budget formula fixes for education funding/achievement have their birth in Edmonton, Alberta, the “home” of performance driven budgeting.
When I visited Edmonton a dozen or so years ago the city had about seventy-thousand students, half in public and half in private/parochial schools.
The public school system contained many small schools, maybe a few hundred students each. Students could go to any school and the schools competed vigorously for kids. Many had themes, dual language: French/English, dual language: Ukranian/English and on and on … Only one school had a concentration of “minority” kids: Vietnamese.
The School District was entrepreneurial: we paid to attend the week-long conference, District vehicles had ads on the panels.
The core of the budget section was that schools received “weighted” dollars, more dollars for handicapped students, etc., and schools designed their own programs for these kids.
The District was unionized although the role of the union seemed to be limited to negotiating a contract. There was one full time union rep for the entire School District, teachers clearly played a major role in school level decision-making.
Supervisors belong to the same union as teachers and received remuneration based upon the size of the school. At that time supervisors could only spend a limited number of years in a particular school, they had to move to a larger school, or, back to a lower title.
When asked, “Could it work here,?” I replied, “Only if we hired all the Canadians.” It seemed a mellow and collegial school system, middle class and overwhelmingly white.
New York City jumped on the bandwagon with it’s School Based Management-Shared Decision-making (SBM-SDM) initiative, coupled with Performance Driven Budgeting (PDB).
The initiative was closely documented by the NYU Education and Public Policy Institute. At the District level only Community School District 22 enthusiastically supported the project.
Parent Associations, school-based union leadership and principals were heavily involved. Schools wrote SBM-SDM plans, budget workshops were offered at 9 AM, at 3:30PM and at 7 PM to facilitate attendance. District Office staff was instructed to respond promptly to all school inquiries, whether from parents, teachers or supervisors. About a third of the schools were heavily involved, another third struggled with the concept and the final third were suspicious or openly hostile.
Over the years the CSA and UFT District leadership changed and the central CSA saw the project as diminishing the power of principals.
Lessons:
- Schools with talented principals, engaged union chapters and active parent associations made innovative use of dollars and created effective programs.
- “Effective programs” varied greatly from school to school – the passion of school teams drove the programs rather than any discernible educational philosophy.
- Union chapters and active parent associations became close allies – they were “engaged” in discussions about what counted, the kids!!!
- It’s never the “model,” it’s always the people.
The role of the Chancellor, the Superintendents, the “superstructure,” must be to support teachers and parents at the “touch point,” the point were teachers and students engage: the classroom.
The creation of the Regions terminated the remnants of the project. For the last few years I’ve bumped into teachers and parents who reminisce about those halcyon days when the opinions of parents and teachers were valued.
