Facing the Future – Financing Productive Schools

Final Report
from the Center on Reinventing Public Education on the
School Finance Redesign Project

This report is the final result of a six-year study of America’s school finance system, including
more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million and involving an interdisciplinary
team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country’s best known economists,
policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation.

All this work leads to one conclusion, that school finance today works against the
focused and efficient use of resources to promote student learning.
Like an old computer that has become so laden with new applications that it can no longer
do anything well, our school finance system is a product of many unrelated policies and
administrative arrangements that, in combination, freeze everything up. We need a new
model that is optimized to do one thing, that is, ensure that every child learns what she
needs to become an involved citizen and full participant in a modern economy.

Today’s school finance systems fund programs, employ staff, sustain institutions, and
provide resources so that district and school administrators can faithfully execute the
thousands of laws and regulations that have grown up around public education. But the
way today’s school finance systems do these things—establishing funding levels based on
convention rather than need, masking actual allocations of funds, sustaining institutions
whether they work or not, addressing equity in one place while ignoring it elsewhere,
spending resources with little regard for results, holding adults accountable for compliance
not results—tangles the connections between resources and academic goals that make
money matter for student performance.

Our school finance system developed in a much different era in which programs were
funded, students succeeded or failed, and nobody paid too much attention. This was sustainable
then because there were jobs for people with low skills, and a healthy economy did
not require that the vast majority of workers be well educated. But that legacy is unworkable
in an era in which low-skilled workers are doomed to poverty and workers overseas
can compete effectively for skilled jobs that were once available only to Americans.

Paul T. Hill, Marguerite Roza, James Harvey

Full Report: http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/download/csr_files/pub_sfrp_finalrep_nov08.pdf

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Judge rejects new Montana school funding argument

By MATT GOURAS of the Associated Press

A Helena judge decided Tuesday to reject arguments from school groups that claimed the state isn’t adequately funding schools.

Attorney General Mike McGrath said the decision should bring an end to a four-year-old court case that at one time led to a court decision declared the state’s school funding system was unconstitutional. McGrath said the latest decision affirms the state’s case that things have improved.

"What we have is a great record," said McGrath. "I think the credit goes to the Legislature, and the governor’s office for working very hard over the past two years to put together this current package of school funding."

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/12/09/bnews/br47.txt