Designing and Funding Quality Schools

--Berkeley Studies the Options

A Report on the Superintendent's Comprehensive Planning Process

by Trina Ostrander, Executive Director, Berkeley Public Education Foundation

In my travels recently I have encountered many people with questions about the planning process that the Berkeley Unified School District is currently conducting. The Berkeley Public Education Foundation is co-sponsoring the public forums, and I serve on the Resources work group, both of which are important components of this process. This report is my effort to share my impressions of what is taking place. If you have questions, or something to add, please contact me.

trina@berkeley.k12.ca.us; 510/644-6244

Introduction

This January, Superintendent Michele Lawrence launched a remarkable, community-wide effort to identify the "essential components of quality public schools", and devise reliable ways to fund them even in the face of stubborn state shortfalls.

The Superintendent’s initiative is an optimistic move in a state that stands 43rd nationally in school spending. The plight of our schools has been so daunting for so long—but with this effort, in true Berkeley tradition, we may finally be taking action to beat a path out of a political landscape we think is wrong.

Designing and Funding Quality Schools had its origins in the community meetings held a year ago, which led to the inclusion on the November ballot of Measure B. (Approved by 72 percent of the voters, Measure B is a two-year special parcel tax that supplements the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project—BSEP—in keeping class sizes small and maintaining music and other programs in the face of eroding school funding and skyrocketing costs.)

As Superintendent Lawrence tells it, she listened during those community meetings to proponents of school libraries competing for funds with advocates of arts and music, or athletics, or enriched literacy programs. There was a "zero sum" mentality that assumed we would not be able to pay for everything, no matter how essential the various programs might be. The strongest advocates would see their programs funded, and others would lose.

This mentality is the result of decades of inadequate, splintered state funding that changes from year to year. School districts have found themselves compelled to plan in crisis mode. This has resulted in inefficient overlap and gaps in programs, wasteful start-up planning for programs that don’t receive sustained funding, and other misdirection of resources. We can see how student achievement is suffering as a result.

The Superintendent began to be convinced that the wisest planning would begin instead with an agreement on what our schools need—always, as a base—and lay out a blueprint to align available funding to meet those needs.

This is the goal of the Superintendent’s initiative. The Berkeley Public Education Foundation commends her for her vision and leadership on this effort.

How the Planning Process Works

Designing and Funding Quality Schools is based on a decade of research at institutions including UCLA, USC, and the University of Oregon. It’s called an Adequacy Study, and 31 states, in various forms, are approaching school funding in this way. Berkeley is at present the only local district to do so. Researchers have consulted with states to complete funding plans that:

1. Define the indispensable components of an adequate educational system (no pie-in-the-sky in this era!).

2. Determine the dollars needed to provide an adequate level of programs and materials to yield high student achievement; and then,

3. Align available funds (providing additional funds where appropriate and feasible) to meet the adequacy needs.

Drawing on research already done over the past ten years, and bringing in experts from UC Berkeley and beyond, in January the Superintendent launched a three-pronged planning process:

1. Two working groups, comprised of educators and leaders from within our own community, are meeting twice each month to hear from experts, review the research, analyze how it applies to Berkeley, and publicize their evolving understanding of options for our schools:

Education
Led by Neil Smith, Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the Berkeley Unified School District, this group is working to define the programs and services our schools require to educate our diverse community well. Topics they are studying include optimum class sizes, school day and class period length, libraries, athletic and nutrition programs, and student support programs including Special Education (for students with disabilities).

Resources
Led by Jim Slemp, Principal at Berkeley High School and former Associate Superintendent in Eugene, Oregon, this group is reviewing current resources and where they go, and studying mechanisms we can develop to finance the essential educational components reliably and effectively.

2. Public Forums, co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Education Foundation, present to the community at large some of the research and strategic thinking that experts are sharing in working sessions with the Education and Resource Committees. The first two, held in late January, focused on school funding and the details of adequacy studies. (My summaries of these forums are presented below; a full recap of each session is available on the BUSD website at www.berkeley.k12.ca.us—look under "planning process information".)

3. Community Discussion Groups, to be convened within the next few weeks, will give the broad community an opportunity to hear from work group members what they are learning and directions in which they are leaning, ask questions, and add perspective.

In June the Education and Resources groups are scheduled to issue a combined report to the Superintendent with specific recommendations for aligning funding to adequacy needs. As such a report has never been drafted before, specific uses it may be put to are, at least in my mind, not entirely predictable at this point.

Both Measure B and the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project, which together provide well over ten percent of our total school budget, are up for renewal in 2006, and these recommendations will be key to planning for any renewal measure.

Whether the report will lead to lasting curriculum or funding changes for the School District has yet to be determined. One of the goals of this process is to develop a base of understanding and expertise on school funding issues within our community so as to strengthen our planning over the long term. I serve on the Resources work group, and judging from our discussions I believe this goal will be met—and that our schools will be much better off for it.

Reports from the Field

Below are my very brief summaries of key presentations the Resources workgroup has heard. For a full review of these proceedings, please visit www.berkeley.k12.ca.us—look under "planning process information".

1. Does Education Matter? California at the Crossroads Public Forum and Resources Work Group Presentation, January 25, 2005
—Presentation by Ken Hall, Chairman of the Board, School Services of California

School Services of California was founded in 1975 by Ken Hall as a finance, management, and advocacy consulting firm for California public schools and school districts. A widely respected expert on school finance and management, Ken has worked with the state legislature on the California Master Plan for Education, and as an expert witness on major litigation including the definitive Serrano v. Priest case that changed school financing in the 1970’s. In the early 1970s, he was Chief Deputy Director of the State Department of Finance.

Ken presented a wide-ranging discussion of California school finance, its history and effects, with an interesting look at Berkeley in particular.

Key Points

• After years of spending decline, California schools are at a crossroads: "Either adopt the 'adequacy' approach, or accept mediocrity."

• New state academic standards put California in the nation’s top three in terms of academic expectations, yet we are 43rd in funding, at about $6,300 per student.

• California has the second-highest class size in the nation.

• California's staffing-to-student ratios are lower than the national average: 24% below for instructional aides; 54% below for counselors; 62% below for librarians (we're last in the nation on funding for school libraries); 32% below for administrators.

• In theory, at least, the money is there. Californians spend 3.5% of their personal income on K-12 education; the national average is 4.7%. The difference is $2,500 per year per student.

• California's current funding system means it's all about attendance. Most of our school money comes through a state allocation based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA). That means not the number of students enrolled, but the number in class on the day attendance reports are made. Each day missed by one student costs us all $28--which currently adds up to $3 million per year.

• Berkeley's attendance is good at 93%, but one to three percent below state average: a one-percent increase would bring in nearly half a million dollars. (Berkeley High accounts for most of the below-average attendance.)

• Berkeley has a unique funding profile:

• The Berkeley Schools Excellence Project (BSEP) provide a local source that most communities don’t have; BSEP funds a whopping 16 to 24 percent of all local teacher salaries.

• Our funding on Special Education is above average, accounting for 20 to 25 percent of our budget whereas the state average is 15 to 20 percent. Most of this is spent on non-teaching staff--student support and program administration personnel.

• Employee benefits are the second highest in California, costing $700 per student and increasing at 12 to 15 percent each year (or 5 percent of the increase in state funds per student).

• "If you’re in financial trouble, accepting interdistrict transfers is right on." "As long as you have the facilities, the per-student ADA income is more than the additional cost per student," Ken contends. Berkeley’s class size is below the state requirements, which gives us flexibility to accept transfer students and still qualify for state Class Size Reduction funding.

(Note: teachers in the work group noted that students who commute from outside Berkeley lower daily attendance rates and can be more difficult to teach when they have not participated in Berkeley programs such as Early Literacy and an enriched science curriculum. Hall acknowledged this and responded that accepting transfer students in the earlier grades may make more sense than integrating them into the later grades.)

• In these difficult times, "school districts are doing a miserable job" of sharing resources with cities, parks and recreation departments, libraries. Out of California’s 8,000 school districts, only 60 have any joint-use programs with public libraries.

(Note: Berkeley has a groundbreaking joint use agreement with Rosa Parks Elementary School, guaranteeing long-term community use of the park, recreation rooms, and Family Resource Center, as a product of the $1.2 million capital campaign led by the Foundation in 1996; Longfellow has a similar joint use agreement for its theater. But these agreements primarily add to the community, rather than enabling to School District to save money.)

In sum, Ken Hall left us thinking about improving our income stream by increasing daily attendance (and enrollment), and revisiting the advisability of accepting inter-district transfer students. We could look at controlling costs by examining more city and other collaborations, and perhaps looking at some employee savings (the District made some significant savings this year by self-insuring Workers Compensation, for example.) We left with glimmers of hope on the resources front. But our work had only begun …

2. An Overview of Adequacy Funding: Models and Policies Public Forum and Resources Work Group Presentation, January 31, 2005 —Presentation by David T. Conley, Associate Professor and Director, Center for Educational Policy Research, University of Oregon

Professor Conley has conducted adequacy studies for several states including Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Explaining that "adequacy goes beyond the traditional focus by considering resources needed, not just resources available," he gave us a detailed overview of the adequacy study process with thoughtful insights as to how we might apply the process locally.

Having made many presentations to the legislators who are in charge of allocating school funding, Conley assured us that “legislators never start from 'here’s what we need to do to achieve X'; they start with 'here’s the money we’re willing to allocate this year.' " Adequacy, he said, gets away from politics directly into substance. Even if it doesn't "create new money", it becomes a better starting point for budget discussions.

Key Points

• Adequacy studies begin with what few school districts have: a clear picture of where the money is going now. School budgets are generally based on state-imposed formats designed to prevent fraud, rather than to clearly communicate program spending. Financial reporting has proven to be a "huge obstacle" to adequacy studies.

• Adequacy studies should contain specific, regularly reviewed outcome measures. An adequacy study that fails to measure the degree to which our spending plans are affecting student achievement "is nothing more than a gigantic wish list lacking credibility in almost every arena." And yet, Conley cautioned, it can be difficult to relate school funding to results, as there are so many variables.

• "Most states are overwhelmed by the size of the figure that results from the adequacy study." Even though the goal is to provide all the funds needed for a quality education, adequacy studies are useless if they call for too substantial an increase in funds, or an increase over too short a period. But that’s where long-range planning, and politics, comes in: Maryland implemented its plan over a ten-year period; Wyoming has increased its funding gradually.

Any local adequacy plan, particularly in California, must bear in mind that local school districts simply do not have much flexibility in generating additional school funding; thus, cost efficiency is crucial.

• Steps to a Local Adequacy Study:

1. Determine the precise goals the school district must achieve—state and federal mandates, school district vision, other community values.

2. Determine current baseline: where is our money going now.

3. Identify essential programs that are directly linked to articulated goals. This should come from research where possible, and can include the number of teachers and support personnel per student, optimum number of books or librarians in the school library, intensive reading tutorials, preschools, and other programs directly linked to goals.

4. Cost out each essential program. Look for the most cost-effective methods.

5. Define, or forecast, expected results for each essential program.

6. As essential programs are implemented, be prepared to evaluate their cost-effectiveness, and revise as necessary.

Professor Conley’s presentation was focused and positive. Afterwards, the Research work group discussed the need for the kind of current baseline information he said was so difficult for school districts to provide. At our next meeting two weeks later, Peter Bloomsburgh, the Berkeley Unified School District’s data manager, produced an admirable first cut detailing exactly where the average Berkeley elementary school spends its money. This is the first time such information has been presented in such a clear, accessible manner, and in itself reflects a major step forward in our understanding of how our schools are financed. Thank you, Peter!

Coming Up

"Rethinking Student Support to Enable Students to Learn and Schools to Teach"

UCLA Professors Present Public Forum - March 15, 7:00 p.m.

Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, psychology professors at UCLA and Co-Directors of the University’s School Mental Health Project, will present a public forum on designing schools with a built-in system of comprehensive "learning supports" to foster the success of all students.

Their presentation will be at the Berkeley High School Library (on the corner of Milvia and Allston) on Tuesday, March 15, at 7:00 p. m. Admission is free. The forum is cosponsored by the Berkeley Unified School District, the Berkeley Alliance, and the Berkeley Public Education Foundation.

For more information: Consult the Berkeley Unified School District website at www.berkeley.k12.ca.us, or call Jay Nitschke at 510-644-8549.

Comments or questions? Contact me at 510-644-6244 or trina@berkeley.k12.ca.us