How A School’s Budget Affects Student Achievement
How one Florida charter school allocates its funding, and what one teacher thinks about it.
A note about this story: In an attempt to report on an education issue that real people are concerned about, I used a crowdsourcing method, based on the Hearken model, to solicit questions from students and teachers regarding our education system in America. I received many responses to this survey (which is still open for responses), and then selected one issue that both students and teachers were curious about. This story sets out to answer the simple question Where do the funds go? (Abigail, 16, student at SouthTech Academy in Boynton Beach, FL). This simple question about a school’s financial transparency will hopefully get us closer in answering this question: Why do some schools receive better funding than other schools in the U.S? (Alan, 17, student at SouthTech Academy in Boynton Beach, FL). Other teachers who took my survey had similar concerns, but framed them in a larger question about our inequitable system: Why are struggling schools penalized? (Meghan Shamdasani, A.P. Environmental Teacher, Boynton Beach, FL). This story attempts to give some concrete insight on how schools are funded, and hopefully move closer in understanding the disparities in the education system as a whole.
December 2018
by Lauren Costantino
Recently, Florida has been criticized for its public education funding system, receiving the lowest score out of all 50 states in the area of per-student funding, according to Education Week’s annual state-by-state financial assessment, Quality Counts 2018.
“In seven states and the District of Columbia, 100 percent of students are in districts where spending reaches or exceeds the national benchmark,” Education Week wrote. “In 15 states, by contrast, less than 10 percent of students attend school in districts meeting that mark, including Florida where only 0.1 percent of students are in such districts (the lowest in the nation).”
This means that compared to students in other states, only 0.1 percent of students in Florida are in districts that spend at or above the U.S. average, which stands at $12,526 per student. In contrast, according to the same report, Florida earns the nation’s highest score for finance equity at 92.4. This means that Florida has the least disparity in how money is spent across school districts.
However, student achievement is not solely tied to funding or resources. For example, SouthTech Academy, a public charter school in Boynton Beach, FL, is an A-rated school and receives adequate funding from the district, but not all the students are performing at or above grade level.
“Only 43% of our 9th and 10th grade students are reading and writing on grade level, and we’re considered an A,” said Nicole Mendenhall, the head of the English Department at SouthTech in an interview. This is 15 percent lower than Palm Beach County’s average English Language Arts (ELA) score.
Mendenhall thinks the students who are scoring very low on ELA standardized state tests would benefit from an after school tutoring program, but the one at her school was shut down last year due to transportation issues. She said that many students weren’t able to continue the program because the school was unable to provide city bus passes for the students who needed public transportation. SouthTech is a charter school, which means students come from all over South Florida, and many rely on school or city transportation to get to and from school. Ultimately, this is an issue the board should have anticipated when deciding how to distribute the budget, according to Mendenhall.
“Our students come from as far as Jupiter farm, we have our own bus system, but they’re expected to take the city bus,” she said, “but then we’re a Title 1 school, so unless they have a bus pass they can’t afford to pay, their parents aren’t going to drive way out, what do they expect?”
She said that another main benefit of the tutoring program was allowing students access to computers who don’t normally have it at home. “So they’re double penalized,” she added.
The problem with the tutoring program speaks to some of the larger issues of charter schools. Less regulation and more school autonomy is something charter schools continue to try and balance. For example, teachers at charter schools like SouthTech aren’t chained to strict curriculum guidelines. Many teachers are given more freedom in how they run their classes, which, according to Mendenhall, is a relief from how other public schools operate in South Florida. She said at her prior teaching job at a public school, she would find curriculum packet in her mailbox at the beginning of the year, which she was expected to follow very closely. “It was literally a script that you were supposed to teach from,” she said. This kind of support can be really beneficial for a novice teacher who doesn’t have the time or experience to design a curriculum from scratch that meets state standards, but for Mendenhall, a teacher with over ten years of experience, it was too restricting.
“I would not go back to that at all, she said, “I hated it.” Apparently, school administration at her old public school wouldn’t hesitate to compare a teacher’s progress to other classes, and would sometimes question a teacher about why they were ahead or behind the curriculum track.
In addition, freedom can be a downside when it comes to things like organizing after-school tutoring programs. “I’m sure the district has guidelines for a reason,” said Mendenhall. “They operate on such a big level, something like an after school tutoring program would almost run itself.”
Mendenhall says from her understanding, money is allocated to specific categories, and schools are not allowing to redistribute money once it has run out in a single area. This explains why once money has run out for student transportation, there is not much a school can do to gain more state funding, aside from applying for a grant, or staff raising the money themselves.
Based on this example, one might assume that allowing individual schools more freedom on how they allocate the budget might aid some of these issues. But, Ludger Woessmann, one of the researchers and authors of “School Accountability, Autonomy and Choice Around the World,” writes that the effects of granting more autonomy to schools can be both negative and positive. According to his research “Why Students in Some Countries Do Better,” autonomy in some areas such as letting schools decide how to meet certain goals and standards is positively correlated to student achievement, while others, such as giving schools the power to set their own budgets, has an adverse impact on student achievement.
“The educators within a school should have more knowledge of effective teaching strategies for their students than central administrators,” Woessmann said. Similarly, individual teachers should know which textbooks and supplies best serve their students.
On the other hand, more autonomy makes it easier for school staff to reduce their workload, unless they are being externally monitored and evaluated. “Putting decisions on the size of the school budget in the hands of school personnel might also harm performance; it is clearly in their interest to garner additional funds for themselves or resources that lighten their workload,” he wrote in his research.
His research, which includes data on more than 250,000 individual students . in 39 different countries, shows that students in schools that had more responsibility for setting the school budget scored six points worse in math and three in science. In contrast, giving schools more freedom in purchasing their own supplies resulted in superior student achievement (14 points better in math and seven points better in science).
Overall, if schools and teachers can use their prior knowledge to choose a teaching method that best fits their students’ needs, then they can teach more effectively. “But if they can use their influence, whether acting collectively or individually, to reduce their workload,” he wrote, “then students’ learning opportunities will suffer.”
