When the Virginia State Board of Education approved a new state accountability system, it predictably drew attacks from the usual sources.
The new system places greater emphasis on student mastery of subject information (50-65%) over student growth (20-25%). But while growth is critical and should be recognized, under the process approved during the McAuliffe-Northam Administrations, a school could be accredited even if its students never reached the goal of actually learning the material. Youngkin’s appointees sought to correct this.
It also brought Virginia state accreditation into alignment with long-standing federal requirements that English Learners (ELs) be included in school ratings after three semesters (previously, Virginia did so only after 11 semesters). This was deemed unfair by the Virginia education establishment. On first glance, three semesters seems unrealistic to many.
However, as Todd Truitt, an Arlington education parent leader and active Democrat points out, civil rights groups have long supported including English Learners in school accountability systems. Truitt notes Education Trust’s observation that, by delaying their inclusion up to five and a half years, “generations of students — particularly students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners — have been systematically denied equitable access to … educational opportunities.”
By including such students earlier in Virginia’s accreditation process, as is the case in other states, the ability of school systems to hide English Learner performance is made more difficult. Perhaps that transparency is why, in the National Assessment for Educational Progress – an assessment separate from state accreditation — 30 percent of Florida Hispanic students score at the Proficient level, while only 18 percent Virginia Hispanic students do.
The new accreditation system creates a focus on underperforming students, not merely sweeping them under the rug.
But that’s only step one. We’ve long argued that truly addressing the needs requires changing Virginia’s funding formula as well and using it to build in accountability.
Last year’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report underscored the inadequacies of the Commonwealth’s current system, which funds education as if schools were populated by the middle class cast of Ozzie and Harriett rather than serving a student population that is 43.5 percent disadvantaged, 10.9 percent English Learners, and 14.3 percent special education – all of whom are demonstrably harder and more expensive to teach.
Instead, Virginia funds systems, determining Basic Aid with little relevance to reality. Indeed, special education students may cost upwards of $50,000 to teach, but in the last ten years, state funding for special education students has actually decreased to about $3,700 per student. The rest is left for localities to fund.
In a study for the Thomas Jefferson Institute, Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Susan L. Aud summarized Virginia’s education funding formula this way: “To determine the Basic Aid associated with each student in a school division, the maximum number of teachers the state will fund for each grade level in each division is calculated, based on the ADM (Average Daily Membership) and pre-determined guidelines for the minimum and maximum number of students per type of teacher. The average salary for each type of position is then multiplied by the number of positions required by the enrollment to arrive at a total allowable salary cost. This number is divided by the number of students to derive an average Basic Aid dollar amount per ADM, known as the Basic Aid PPA.”
While no one doubts the greater difficulty of educating low-income, highly mobile, Limited English Proficient or disabled students, Virginia’s funding system fails to recognize that harder (and more expensive) task. Education dollars flow, not on the basis of students, but on the basis of staffing ratios, special program formulas, and the political savvy of individual school district and school leaders.
Under a Weighted Student Funding system, schools would receive an additional weight for each harder-to-teach student they have. Schools with special challenges (say, a rural school with harder to gain economies of scale) might also receive added funds. This is the sort of reform put in place in a growing number of states and school districts, most recently Tennessee. Indeed, Virginia is one of only nine states using a staffing-based formula; 34 others have switched to a student-based formula.
Importantly, such a switch can build accountability into the system. Currently, school leaders (whether principals or superintendents) frequently have no control over how to spend funds. Virginia is filled with arbitrary and restrictive provisions limiting the discretion of local school leaders to make effective resource allocations best meeting student needs.
If a school determines that the most valuable thing to do is to fund English Language instruction so that students are able to read the history on which they will be tested, or if their first goal – based on student performance in their school – is to intensify math instruction, their staffing is all too often locked in by decisions made at the state level – not by the “boots on the ground.”
While principals and teachers may putatively be “held accountable” for results, in reality they have little control over how money is used at their school or in their classroom. How school dollars are spent is decided elsewhere, using complex budgets and allocations that leave educators, parents, and taxpayers in the dark.
Weighted Student Funding seeks to drive dollars into the classroom to improve outcomes for all students. This is the part of funding reform too often ignored by the Left, as they sing “Mo’ Money Blues,” focusing on merely demands for more state. Conservatives, meanwhile, focus too hard on any added costs rather than the potential for effective reform. Compromise is needed.
The General Assembly has already appointed a Joint Subcommittee to commence building new funding process, and it’s a task more important to get done right than to get done by a date certain. It requires a long period of public engagement to inform and secure “buy-in” by the public, strong guardrails to ensure targeted funding reaches targeted students at the school level, and a sense of bipartisan commitment to reform.
But the current Virginia system, as JLAC so clearly outlined, is not working for the 21st century. Nearly a quarter-century into that century, it’s time for reform.
Chris Braunlich is Senior Advisor and former President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute and a former president of the Virginia State Board of Education. He may be reached at chris@thomasjeffersoninst.org.
