As schools reopen this fall they will face their greatest-ever strains about money. Depleted state budgets could force cuts of more than 10 percent; these could escalate as the year goes on and state revenues fall short. District losses could be greater if enrollment falls, which will happen if some parents keep children at home until the COVID-19 threat passes. Most districts have passed the normal deadline for notifying teachers of layoffs for next year. Though state governments could create additional layoff deadlines, unions are well organized to prevent this, so major cuts in salary costs are unlikely.
In earlier financial crises school districts hung on, made incremental cuts and deferred spending, waiting for everything to return to normal. But this crisis is different. While they are taking big losses, districts must maintain at least some schools just as they were before the shutdown, but also provide remote learning for kids who will be allowed in school only part-time, and for medically vulnerable students and teachers who must continue to stay home.
For the 2020-21 school year it is difficult to see how districts can do all that’s required of them. Their only hopes of solvency are a federal bailout or massive increases in state spending that are unlikely to occur during an economic downturn. Alternatively, districts might not respond to all the challenges described above, with dire and lasting consequences for their students and communities.
And, it’s unlikely that things will ever return to the pre-pandemic normal. Future virus spikes and climate uncertainties will force more closures and returns to full remote learning. Even after the 2020-21 school year, districts will need to spend money to make sure all children have internet access and usable computers or tablets at home.
These have become necessary preconditions for learning, just like school buildings were in the past. Like school buildings, efforts to close the digital divide often require a large, one-time expenditure (for example, to purchase devices) plus annual spending on upkeep.
Yes, some parents will want their children to return to full-time school and yes, there will be school buildings and classrooms and teachers working with groups of kids. But some teachers might never stand in front of a classroom again, instead managing courses (possibly with large online enrollments) that have proven effective, or counseling or providing enrichment to students individually or in small groups. Some families will want to choose courses provided by other districts, higher education institutions, or independent practitioners, all of whom must be paid.
These necessary adaptations to reality can’t happen if districts are required to maintain the same bureaucracies and employ exactly the same people under the same job descriptions as before. In the future, public education needs a funding system that recognizes diversity of need and allows quick response to changes in what’s possible. The new system must support each individual child’s education, not a fixed set of buildings or employees.
How a new funding system would work
Districts will still have capital expenses and they will still need central offices. As always, spending on these must be held down as much as possible in order to maximize the share of all funds that go to teachers, instructional programs, and online and extracurricular learning. Districts must be transparent about how much is spent on these overhead items and what is left to be spent directly on students.
Because not all children will be attending conventional schools 30 hours per week, the money for direct services to students must be flexible. It must be available for classroom teacher salaries, but also for individual children’s shares of the salary of a teacher who instructs thousands of students online, or tutors students individually, or for a college or vendor that provides a specialized math or science course for students from across the district or even the state.
This kind of flexibility is not possible if districts automatically fund schools, as now, based on a fixed staffing schedule. Funding must follow students to the instructional and service programs they experience. Schools and online instructional programs will attract families based on what they offer, and school spending will vary according to whether all instruction is in person, or partly or all via remote learning.
To make this degree of flexibility possible, state and local governments should provide a baseline amount for every student, plus additional weights depending on student need based on poverty, language learner status, or eligibility for special education services. Families would tap this money to cover their child’s cost of attending a school, or for online courses, tutoring, counseling, or supplemental learning experiences. The entire system would be built for personalization and adaptation to student needs and available opportunities.
When a child is old enough to qualify for a publicly funded education, typically age five, that child would receive personalized assessments of need—similar to those that school districts are now required to perform if they suspect a child may have a disability.
An annual amount determined by these assessments would be set up for the child and administered by a specialized government agency that did not operate any schools itself. Students could receive follow-up evaluations and have their funding reweighted as circumstances, such as household income or the child’s need for disability accommodations, change.
Parents could choose to enroll their children in any publicly-approved school, or could choose particular courses from various schools and other providers. Schools might offer complete instructional programs provided by resident faculty, or they might offer some courses live and others via links to subject matter experts, or to other providers such as colleges, other schools, and other districts. A school’s income would depend on the numbers of students who enroll in live classes, plus any fees paid by students who enroll in its online courses.
Parents of children whose needs drive additional funding could use their extra money to pay for supplemental services, such as tutoring or speech therapy—or rolled over to pay for future educational expenses, including tuition for college or a career preparation program. A student with a physical impairment could spend some of these extra funds on an aide who could help them transition between classes. A student with a hearing impairment could spend the extra money on accommodations that allow them to learn alongside other students.
This unbundling of education funding would give rise to new challenges. What would school accountability look like in a system where a single school may no longer be responsible for a child’s entire educational experience, or even for all the instruction a child received in a particular subject during the course of a school year? Who would ensure students attain foundational skills in reading, writing, and math? Who would ensure students learn the basics of history, civics, or science? More broadly, would the responsibility for assembling a coherent educational program out of a hodgepodge of learning experiences fall to parents?
Infrastructure and oversight
In addition to providing parents information on available providers and their performance, state and local education agencies would need to develop new forms of oversight, both for mediating organizations and individual providers. This would include financial, health, and safety audits. We will have more to say a post-pandemic governance system in a follow-up post.
To help guide the use of their child’s funding allotment, parents could select a navigator—an expert or school that would help them identify needs and assemble a coherent educational program.The navigator could receive a set percentage of each student’s funding allocation to cover the costs of its own advisory services. Navigators would be essential elements of the public education’s accountability system, since they could steer students toward effective schools and programs and away from those with poor reputations. States would also need to set policies defining bona fide educational expenses. Providers with poor outcomes or a history of purchases flagged by auditors could draw greater scrutiny, or ultimately be barred from accepting public funds.
Technically, these changes are not difficult to prescribe. Pupil-based funding can be accomplished all at once either by legislation that completely replaces prior funding arrangements, or via litigation that throws out entire state funding codes and requires their replacement.
But these changes would be politically difficult to enact, since they would eliminate the guarantee of public funding for existing schools and their teaching staffs.
Several states have adopted pupil-based funding arrangements that allow individual students and localities to opt in. States could allow localities to apply for waivers from state education regulations so they could adopt full pupil-based funding systems. Allowing a handful of districts to serve as laboratories would limit political resistance to sweeping, statewide changes. State leaders and other districts also would have a chance to learn from their experiences. For more on how this can be done, see A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, chapter 8.
COVID-19 has expanded differences in what children need and how educators must serve them. The way we fund public education now works against the creation of innovative and personalized options that families need for their children, and that many educators want to provide. The new, less rigid funding system sketched here is a necessary step toward public education for the post-pandemic era. It will turn the system for allocating public funding to schools from an obstacle into a positive enabler of child-centered innovations in instruction and student support.
A version of this piece originally appeared in The 74.
