Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources

Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources by Allan Odden and Carolyn Busch, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, 1998. $31.95 ISBN 0-787-94060-7 Review by Carla Edlefson Ashland University Ashland, Ohio "The long-term task is to get schools...to act more like producers of high levels of student achievement rather than mere consumers of educational resources or providers of traditional educational services" (p. 25). Thus begins Financing Schools for High Performance, a book that links the current best thinking about school funding with what we know about school improvement. The central theme of the book is that "there are ways to use current resources better and...schools can begin the process of increasing student achievement with funds already in the education system" (p. 164). The first chapter summarizes research indicating that wealthy and poor school districts have similar patterns of resource allocation. High-spending districts do not pay salaries that are all that much higher, and they don't have a lower student-to-teacher ratio in the core academic subjects. They do hire more staff who are specialists, to deal with various kinds of student needs, but these specialists have little effect on student achievement. What does affect student achievement, according to chapter two, is to "center change on student learning and a rigorous instructional program" (p. 29) and to decentralize decisions about staff and resources to the building level. Part two, chapters three through five, describes three models that state governments could emulate in order to decentralize school funding. Chapter three presents the charter school model and provides a useful comparison of legislation passed by 26 U.S. states, as of December 1996. The authors stress that the success of charter schools will depend on whether or not they are adequately funded and given real authority over the use of their resources. Chapters four and five describe in some detail the funding systems in England and in Victoria, Australia, as demonstrations that site-based funding does work. Chapter six lays out steps that a state could take to structure a site-based school financing system. They are: 1) identify what will be district-level responsibilities and what will be handled at the site; 2) divide the district budget into two parts: the central office and the sites; 3) design an allocation formula to distribute the site budget to the individual schools, taking into account special student needs, etc.; 4) determine what kind of documentation schools will do; e.g., linking their budget to their school improvement plans. The recommendation is that a state would pass legislation requiring districts to do site-based budgeting and then hold individual schools accountable for student achievement results. This book is directed more at policy experts than practitioners, but chapters seven and eight should be of interest to secondary school administrators. Chapter seven, "Reallocating Education Dollars' to Improve Results," cites research on individual schools that have adopted reform models, and within existing resource levels, have reallocated and restructured in order to improve student outcomes. Characteristics of these high performance schools include a) curriculum based on high standards b) whole-school reform; c) students grouped differently for instruction; d) teacher involvement in decision-making; and e) emphasis on professional development (pp. 168-169). For example, the New American Schools (NAS) project (www.naschools.org) has tested seven different reform models. Even though each of the models requires money for new people or materials, Odden and Busch show that with reallocation, a school that has resources equal to the national average could not only afford to implement any of the NAS models, but also have money left over. …