Performance Pressure and Resource Allocation in Washington

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January 2008
Shelley De Wys, Melissa Bowen, Allison Demeritt, Jacob E. Adams, Jr

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SFRP Working Paper 26

New accountability systems require that states and districts accomplish something never accomplished before—ensuring that all students meet state standards. To explore how these heightened state and national performance expectations have altered educational resource decisions, the School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) conducted interviews of state, district, and school leaders in four states, asking these leaders about their efforts to improve student performance and the constraints they face in implementing improvement reforms. This report presents the findings of state, district, and school interviews conducted in Washington state.

Our interviews indicate that educators and policymakers do indeed feel pressure to improve student performance, especially for historically neglected and disadvantaged students, and they are responding to these accountability pressures by directing their attention and resources toward ensuring that all students achieve standards. Local educators have responded to these pressures by focusing resources on enhancing the capacity and motivation of students, teachers, and principals and by aligning resource use with system goals. Efforts to improve the capacity and motivation of students include increasing instructional time by providing prekindergarten, longer school days and year, and more time on core subjects; improving the learning environment by reducing class size, changing schedules, and providing non-academic services; and enhancing learning through instructional improvements and individualized attention. Efforts to improve the motivation and capacity of teachers include conducting professional development activities chosen on the basis of proven effectiveness, alignment with standards, and identified needs; teaching educators how to use student data; promoting collaboration and mentoring; and adopting more rigorous performance evaluations. Similarly, districts are also providing professional development to principals with an emphasis on developing instructional leaders. Finally, district and school administrators are attempting to align components of the education and finance systems. For instance, districts are attempting to focus resources on areas of need and align curriculum with standards. Districts are also trying to improve the decisionmaking process by incorporating strategic planning and the use of data, best practices, and evaluations of resource use.

While these efforts represent progress, educators reported a number of constraints to aligning resource use with goals and subsequently bringing all students to standard. First, student demographics—including the challenges associated with poverty, mobility, and immigration—pose formidable challenges to bringing all students to standard. Second, activities designed to improve instruction are hampered by insufficient resources and restrictions on the use of funds, union contract terms and conditions, historical perceptions of what schools and classrooms should look like, and lack of teacher and administrator capacity. Third, while cultural change in the education community is happening, it is doing so slowly; teacher resistance and union opposition strongly influence resource decisions at every level of the system and often prevent officials from doing what they believe is best for students. Fourth, many administrators fail to view effective resource use as the optimization of all possible educational expenditures to maximize student performance for a given cost, and those that do grasp this concept often lack sufficient data and established practices to identify effective uses. In addition, most administrators view salary costs as immutable; therefore, given that salaries consume a large portion of district budgets, reform efforts are funded on the margins, primarily through restricted and unstable grant and philanthropic funds. Finally, the allocation of resources to effective uses that would result in improved student performance is often impeded by political pressures and the demands of other stakeholders in the system, including educators and policymakers, community members, and business groups.

At the state level, officials voiced concerns that mirrored those of district-level respondents. For instance, state officials also highlighted the challenges of bringing all students to standard and the need to provide remediation services for students not passing the state test. State officials expressed various opinions about whether Washington’s education finance system is adequate or not—with some saying yes, others saying no, and several indicating that they did not know. And, while agreeing that it was a salient issue, the officials we spoke with admitted to struggling with the idea of identifying and implementing effective resource use throughout the system, citing issues with collecting data, identifying “what works,” and establishing the proper balance of state regulation and local control.

Our interviews with state officials also support the contention that Washington’s education finance system is an artifact of history that is needlessly complicated, retains some inequities, and does not support coherent instructional programs and the associated resource allocations needed to improve student performance. Finally, while conceding that union collective bargaining constrains educator and policymakers’ efforts to improve educational outcomes, state officials do not appear ready to take up the issue. While most of the officials we interviewed appeared to support the development of the Washington Learns Commission (which was charged with reviewing a broad range of P-16 education finance issues including adequacy and efficiency), and they hoped that it would lead to systemic change, others highlighted the difficulty of achieving such change given the diverse views and political strength of various education stakeholders. Unfortunately, this commission was unable to overcome historical precedent and political divisions to tackle the tough issues: revising the definition of a “basic education,” addressing structural problems in the state finance system (i.e., equity, adequacy, efficiency, and revenue issues), and developing a system linking teacher pay to performance. The inability of such efforts to make headway on key issues of education finance begs the question of how and when real change will eventually occur.

In sum, our interviews indicate that while district- and state-level leaders are attempting to improve the quality of education in Washington, lack of alignment with accountability demands and insufficient attention to effective resource use within the state’s 30-year-old education finance system impede such efforts. The current system’s complexity works against its productivity, constraining local actors’ efforts to use funds in coherent and strategic ways. Too often, reforms and interventions take place on the margins of education spending, and lack of capacity and motivation and competing political interests impede educator and policymakers’ efforts to align resource expenditures with student needs. Our findings serve to shed light on the problems that ground-level administrators and policymakers face in implementing reforms within the current system and illustrate why progress is slow, despite these well-intentioned efforts. In addition, our findings make clear that without changes to the finance system to better support actor capacity and motivation and align the system with desired performance outcomes, Washington educators are unlikely to reach the objective of bringing all students to standard. We hope that the findings of this and other SFRP reports will encourage policymakers, practitioners, and the public to overcome historical precedents, stakeholder demands, and resistance to change in order to create a system that truly makes student achievement the paramount goal.