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VI. We know:
The perfect per pupil expenditure is the one that
accomplishes the job reliably and efficiently.
FINANCIAL SUPPORT AND INVESTMENTS
No one knows what the ideal per pupil expenditure ought
to be.
Getting a handle on the adequacy of financial support to
schools will always be a work in progress. Since
financial support is only one aspect of a complex set of
factors that contribute to student achievement, the
“right” per pupil investment remains elusive, here and
throughout the nation. On the one hand, personnel
contracts alone usually account for about 85% of any
school’s budget, sometimes more. But the choices about
the mix of personnel as well as the school’s ability to
deploy and nurture its faculty to its fullest power
affects that school’s ability to succeed. Some schools
invest heavily in support services for their students –
counselors, social workers and psychologists; others
might invest in academic support such as literacy
coaches. This means that no dollar figure is meaningful
by itself, but each school’s spending patterns need to
be examined in a larger context. RI’s education funding
depends heavily on property
taxes, so the municipalities’ ability to support their
children has an inverse relationship to students’ need. Complicating the issues of school financing is, of
course, the inequity among the districts in terms of
need or student challenge. RI further compounds that
complexity with its reliance on property taxes to
finance schools. According to the RI Public
Expenditure’s Council, in 1999 RI ranked 5th in the
nation for the highest per capita property tax. Putting
a realistic dollar figure on what it would take to
overcome, for example, the challenges faced by a new
immigrant whose family is poor and not English-speaking
is maddeningly elusive, but we know the figure is more
than that which suffices for children without obvious
socioeconomic handicaps.
Heavy reliance on property taxes to finance schools
means that RI’s children are locally supported in an
inverse relationship to their municipalities’ ability to
raise tax dollars on their behalf. Communities with high
housing values and relatively unchallenged children have
well-resourced schools with good facilities and low
class sizes; cash-strapped core cities, with their high
proportion of poor and immigrant children, tend to have
old, troublesome buildings, high class sizes and fewer
resources to meet higher demands. Research is clear that
student achievement is closely correlated to median
family income. Our funding inequities mean we are not
offering every child an equal opportunity to learn. Since 1997’s
Article 31, we’ve been tinkering with
funding solutions. In the late 1980s, the RI General Assembly designed and
started to implement a financing formula that, overall,
would have shifted a higher portion of the burden of
school financing to the state. The recession of the
early 1990s halted the full implementation of that
formula – which was considered excellent and very
progressive in its day. Since then RI has developed a
slightly different strategy. The new aid assumes at
least level funding for all districts, even those that
experience a drop in student enrollment, and tries to
offer an across-the-board percentage increase when
possible. On top of that, the RI General Assembly
allocates money, on a per pupil basis, to support such
initiatives as professional development, early childhood
and technology. Initially, the Assembly increased the
amount of aid for the core urban districts, especially
Providence, above and beyond the basic financing and the
targeted investments. Recently, however, the Assembly
has felt obliged to back off of their urban initiative,
giving proportionally-increased aid to all districts,
regardless of need. Two charts visually depict tax
revenue and expenditure
data.
Residential
Property Value Per Student Compared to Tax Rate
Relative Tax
Capacity and Effort based on Residential Property Value These two charts show related
information about the district municipalities’ ability
to generate revenue to support their municipal services,
including their schools, against their efforts to do so.
The data are supplied by the RI Department of
Administration, Office of Municipal Affairs, and are
updated annually. We thank that office for its
cooperation and help. Towns with large
fiscal capacity tend to make the
smallest effort and vice versa.
Municipal salaries, such as those of teachers, cost
roughly the same from community to community. Poor
communities, with less valuable property, must tax their
citizens at much higher rates to generate the same
amount of revenue as wealthier communities. The property value per pupil is calculated by dividing
the total assessed value for all the property in the
district by the average daily enrollment of
public-school students residing in that district. The
tax rate is set by the local government, expressed as a
dollar rate per $1,000 of property value. Thus a $10.00
tax rate on a $100,000 home will raise $1,000 in tax
revenue. A house valued at $50,000 will raise only half
that amount, or $500. A poorer community, whose houses
have an average value of $50,000 will have to raise its
tax rate to $20.00 per $1,000 in order to generate
$1,000.
The tax ‘capacity and effort’ exercise illustrates the
inequities among the 36 districts, resulting from the
value of their residential property.
The Tax Capacity/Effort chart uses the assessed property
value for the whole state, divided by the statewide
capacity and multiplied by 100. The tax rate is
similarly aggregated, divided by the state tax rate and
multiplied by 100. This shows how much a municipality
can or could tax its local properties compared with how
much it does tax the local properties.
A good way of thinking about both tax-related charts is
to imagine what it would mean if the bars representing
the Effort – in the latter chart – were all the same.
Imagine moving that Effort bar to 100, which is what the
above mathematical manipulation does in order to plot
the districts on either side of that equalized 100 mark.
If the Effort were identical between the districts and
the Capacity were as it is currently, the tax rates on
the other chart would have to shift so that all
municipalities, rich and poor, were making the same
financial effort relative to their capacity. (This is
essentially what Act 60 in Vermont does by
redistributing tax dollars collected from wealthier
communities to poorer communities.) Also, bear in mind that even though the state pays a
large share of the poorer districts’ school bill, the
urbans’ tax rates, which are the highest in the state,
generate enough money to fill only some of the gap. The
poorer districts still have most of the highest class
sizes in the state, more buildings in serious disrepair
and more students with the highest need for support
services. Bigger districts require bigger
administrations to handle the old facilities, complex
transportation issues and other logistics of
administering on a larger scale; if anything,
Providence, for one, tends to be under-administered.
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RI Expenditure
Council Recommends: |
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The following has been excerpted from RIPEC’s report:
“FY 2002 Property Tax Burdens in RI” available on their
website at http://www.ripec.org.
Implement a New Education Funding System
A critical component of the State-local fiscal structure
is how Rhode Island funds schools. While the State
invests over $700 million in education aid, localities
continue to foot nearly 60.0 percent of the $1.4 billion
education bill using local property taxes.
Given the State’s annual, ad-hoc approach to financing
schools since FY 1995, Rhode Island lacks a predictable
school financing system that can support the fiscal
needs of local communities while meeting the education
needs of all students. In addition, the system of
funding schools does not put any controls on spending
levels. Therefore, there is a need to develop a specific
method of financing public schools in Rhode Island that
addresses student need, municipal tax capacity and
affordability. RIPEC will be publishing a proposal to
transition Rhode Island to a new education funding
system in the summer of 2002. This proposal will be
student need driven, control costs, provide predictable
amounts and sources of funding, limit the portion of
school budgets financed by the local property taxes,
provide equitable treatment of property taxpayers in all
cities and towns, and integrate the State’s education
reform agenda.
As part of this program, RIPEC will also develop a
program to tighten the State’s current property tax cap
(5.5 percent growth on tax levies or rates) as a means
of controlling growth in property taxes. Tighter
property tax caps may also serve to dampen expenditure
growth to a level that is more consistent with regional
patterns of inflation. |
In$ite® data facilitates
comparisons of school-to-school
and district-to-district finances. Five years ago and in collaboration with RIDE, the
General Assembly established a detailed and informative
system of reporting educational expenditures for all
school districts. The software, called the In$ite
Financial Analysis Model for Education™, tracks all
expenditures through the local school district to the
school sites. “All expenditures” includes expenditures
from all financing sources – e.g., federal, state and
foundation grants, general revenue budget, total food
service expenditures regardless of revenue source, and
debt service if part of the school district’s budget.
For more detail on In$ite, its implementation and the
specifics that define its large categories, please refer
to the Users Guide in
the 2001 Information
Works! or go to
In$ite
in the State Section. Detailed expenditure accounts for
each school are also available there.
Bear in mind exactly what ‘per pupil expenditures’
means.
Per Pupil Instruction and Instructional Support
Expenditures by District - view and/or download
chart All expenditure dollars on the school and district
charts are expressed as a per pupil figure. These per
pupil expenditures are based on the Average Daily
Membership (ADM) of students and then their Full-Time
Equivalent (FTE) in their respective programs. Per pupil
is not a simple head count, but a count by FTE. A child
enrolled for an entire school year in a full-day program
equals one FTE. A half-day kindergarten student enrolled
for a full year equals ½ or 0.5 FTE. If a student was
not enrolled for the full year, his or her FTE would
decrease by the time not enrolled. Thus, the half-day
kindergarten student enrolled for only half a year
equals 1/4 or 0.25 FTE. Each student’s FTE is then divided by the educational
programs provided to that student. A child’s
participation in Special Education Resource or English
as a Second Language is counted only as a percentage of
that child’s day. In a six-period day, a child who
spends one period in a specific program will count as
one sixth for that program. Six such periods a day for
the full school year would account for the full-time
equivalent (FTE) and for a full year’s per pupil
expenditure for that program. RI has some built-in fiscal
anomalies. The
New Shoreham district includes only Block Island,
where conducting any and all business is more expensive
because, for example, school lunch supplies must be
ferried or flown to the island, incurring costs beyond
the costs to a school to which a truck has easy access.
New Shoreham’s costs are high across the board.
Career and Technical (C&T) education is generally more
expensive than regular education because of the
specialized machinery, materials, shops and so on.
Districts with their own dedicated C&T schools absorb
the full cost into the district (although many of the
buildings are owned and maintained by the state). Some
districts share the cost of a C&T center. Still others
send their students to one of the two state-operated C&T
schools – Davies and the Met – which absorb the cost
entirely for each student no matter where the child came
from. Thus C&T costs appear to be unevenly balanced
among the districts when looking at district per pupil
comparisons. The William Davies Career and Tech School and the
Metropolitan School are the only two stand-alone Career
and Technical schools to date. Increasingly, educators
believe that students who opt for specific career or
academy programs should receive their regular education
courses at the same site, preferably in conjunction with
their technical program. Davies supports a more
traditional career-and-tech facility that houses, for
example, construction, automotive and tele-communications
industry-specific programs. Whereas other schools’
career-and-tech costs have been screened out from the
school-level charts, Davies’ full costs are represented
here. The Met School’s career strategy does not rely on
maintaining a specialized training facility, which is
why their costs are more in line with other high
schools. Instruction by category and Instructional Support look
only at the cost directly related to supporting the
child, the teacher or the classroom.
General Education Instruction and Instructional Support
Expenditures by District:
High Schools and
Middle Schools -
view and/or download charts By removing the Operations and Leadership categories, we
get a sense of the state’s investment specifically in
teaching and learning, in the child, the teacher and the
classroom. Please note that the first chart, which has
all the districts, includes all programs including
special education. Schools differ widely as to the
proportion of students in categorical programs, so two
schools in the same district may have widely differing
per pupil expenditures, but the real difference is that
one schools has a high number of, say, Limited English
Proficient children or special education FTEs.
Therefore, to get a clearer, more comparable sense of
school spending school-to-school, the In$ite charts that
examine specific schools look only at the general
education expenditure, factoring out spending on
categorical programs. The In$ite data raise
questions that must be addressed
at the school site itself. Data merely provide us perspective. We notice whatever
stands out as different from the rest. But the reasons
for these anomalies always require further, on-site
investigation; data show us where to look, but say
nothing of what we will find. For example: Why do the Providence costs for substitute
teachers appear to be so high? Historically, the capital city’s schools have struggled
to attract substitute teachers. In the past, the
district guaranteed them a permanent position if they
were willing to continue to sub however long it took for
a job to became available. In the mid-1990s the district
phased out that practice when, among other things,
recruiting more minority teachers became a high
priority. Providence created a group of long-term
“substitute-in-pool” positions, which is, in effect, a
pool of permanent substitute teaching jobs that allow
the system to support attractive candidates with health
benefits and a predictable annual salary until a
permanent position comes open. Most systems employ per
diem subs at between $55 to $75 per day, without
benefits and only on days when subs are needed. Even
with a system of well-compensated subs, Providence still
experiences serious sub shortages, especially in
high-need areas such as special education. The teacher
absentee rate is roughly the same as the state’s, so the
problem mainly lies in attracting professionals to work
with urban children, a problem that exists nationwide.
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We
recognize: |
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‘High performing’ Scituate High School, ‘improving’ in
both ELA and math, invested its relatively modest per
pupil expenditure in revamping curricula and increasing
known best practices.
As only one of four high schools in the state to be
deemed ‘high performing’ - and the only one improving in
both ELA and math – we wondered if Scituate High School
had any special wisdom about investing its per pupil
funds. Actually, the school’s laudable designation
appears to be a combination of some intrinsic luck –
relatively unchallenged students in a tight, loyal
community – along with early and effective use of the
data to drive changes at the school. According to the
25-year veteran principal David Light, the size of the
school, 500 students, makes it a naturally ideal
learning community and reasonably easy to reach out to
parents on a daily basis. The teaching strategies are a
liberal mix of both conventional and new practices;
indeed the 2000 SALT visit report commended the school
for “emerging innovative practices.” The school makes
liberal use of portfolios, and many teachers are
“jumping on board with standards-based instruction,”
according to Light. Participation in job shadowing and
career awareness activities was up to 275 students this
last year, more than half the student body.
Light says: “From the beginning, we took the reform
movement very seriously. We track students who are not
doing well and we look at our data very carefully to
build on what we know to improve performance. We used
our Article 31 money to hire subs so the teachers could
revamp the entire curriculum. The school day was
restructured, re-assigning both teachers and students,
so that over the next few years we’ll have more
cross-disciplinary units. We’re creating opportunities
for whole departments to sit down and talk because we
feel we’ll get more positive results if the teachers are
networking with each other more.” |
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The
Commissioner emphasizes: |
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In short, the school re-deploys its investment away from
education habits that have not gotten results to
recommended best practices.
Scituate High School’s one unusual financial practice is
that its sports coaches, most of whom are parents, work
as volunteers the first year and are paid a stipend
thereafter. |
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