jonetta rose barras: If all else fails, throw more money at the public education problem
The initial excitement among some parents and advocates was palpable last week after DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced plans to increase by 4% per pupil funding for public education in her upcoming 2021 budget plan. Overall spending in 2019 for public education exceeded $2.5 billion, according to the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. In this current 2020 fiscal year, the DC Council pushed up school spending by 3.5%.
“We are continuing those historic investments. Across all eight wards our goal is the same: to make sure every student and every school has the resources they need to succeed,” Bowser said during a press briefing where she declared her intentions and launched the DC Public Schools Pocket Budget Guide. The mayor is holding a series of community meetings as she prepares to submit her 2021 budget and financial plan to the council next month.
A spokesperson for DC Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said the mayor’s proposed increase will “complement” other spending increases, including “$2.1 million in Connected Schools that provide students and families with wraparound” social and health services; “$500,000 to support early literacy intervention programs,” and “$62 million to support students designated as at-risk.”
Officials at the DC Public Charter School Board put out a tweet thanking Bowser. However, some school leaders in that sector have complained that the increase isn’t enough, according to the board’s spokesperson.
Funding for public education has always been a hot topic, charged by racial, class and political undertones. Consequently, the hard questions are rarely asked in public. Privately, some people want to know, does it really take nearly $3 billion to educate fewer than 100,000 students in DC’s traditional and charter schools?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Education advocates as well as public policy and finance experts I spoke with over the past week insisted that more money is needed — and that the mayor’s plan may be insufficient.
“We need another 2% to 4% over the increase proposed by the mayor,” said Eboni-Rose Thompson, chair of the Ward 7 Education Council. She noted that schools have never received the funding recommended in a 2013 report, “Cost of Student Achievement: Report on the DC Education Adequacy Study.”
Earlier this month, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group, also referenced the adequacy study, arguing that the recommended per student base funding was “$10,577 or $11,839 in 2020 dollars.” The institute’s Alyssa Noth urged an increase of 6% to the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) in fiscal year 2021.
While Mary Levy, a well-known expert on public education policy and financing, had not completed her analysis, she said there is early evidence that the school system’s budget numbers don’t add up. What’s more, local school leaders are already complaining about potential cuts.
Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, said almost 2.5% of the additional funding may have to go toward personnel costs, meaning “new cash in hand” would be closer to 1.5%.
“People see an increase and they think putting more money into education is good. But what that means for the individual school gets fairly complicated,” said Thompson. “We cannot claim victory yet.”
In fact, the DCPS spokesperson acknowledged in an email to me that some school budgets “may be less than last fiscal year due to overall shifts in enrollment and student needs.”
The entire DC government budget process can seem a whimsical thing. While a District law passed more than a decade ago requires performance or zero-based budgeting, neither the mayor, nor the council, nor the Office of the Chief Financial Officer appears to be complying with that legal mandate. In a Feb. 13, 2019, management alert, DC auditor Kathy Patterson called out the violating trio. She also said they weren’t adhering to a provision that compels each agency to develop a strategic business plan.
The performance-based structure was intended to allow “public officials and managers to better monitor whether a specific department program is meeting anticipated goals from a fiscal and performance perspective,” Patterson explained in her report, quoting language in the city’s 2003 budget book. The plan requires “each operating agency to describe in detail the businesses it was engaged in — every program, activity, and service — with the expenditures identified down to the activity level.” If no one is going to follow the law, she suggested DC leaders change it. That hasn’t happened.
Instead, for public education, the executive seems to tack on additional funding — mostly across the board — without a full granular-level evaluation of not just how the money is being spent but also whether it’s producing the anticipated results.
When pitching the mayoral takeover of schools in 2007, DC officials promised a new era of accountability that would improve educational opportunities for all, particularly children from low-income families. Since its implementation, however, a generation of children from poor, working-class communities has been cheated out of a quality education either through the malignant neglect of education leaders and politicians or through the use of the antiquated UPSFF, which excludes critical supports such as ongoing maintenance costs that account for the conditions and needs of each facility.
“Everybody wants to solve everything with the UPSFF,” said Filardo, noting that the expense of wraparound and social services should not be borne by DCPS. “These formulas can guide you. If you slavishly follow them, it leads to greater and greater inefficiencies and inequities.”
The deputy mayor for education has been meeting with a coalition of education advocates and experts to review the funding formula. DCPS’ deputy chancellor is holding similar meetings dealing with the budget structure and distribution system, according to Filardo and Levy.
Will those sessions result in any changes? Will they lead to performance-based budgeting or planning? Don’t count on it.
Despite the uncertainty of the latest bureaucratic exercises, this much is clear: The current UPSFF brutally punishes schools with low enrollment by reducing financial support because of that low enrollment. Many of those schools are in working-class communities like those in wards 5, 7 and 8. The reduction of resources frequently instigates further exodus from those institutions.
In January, the city auditor released a report prepared by the Johns Hopkins School of Education Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) that found when parents look for schools outside of their neighborhoods, they often seek those with fewer at-risk students. That leaves “schools serving the highest concentrations of needy students with dwindling resources due to declining enrollments.”
It’s a classic case of blaming the victim.
In an interview, Patterson noted that the city is “not spending what we need to spend on our toughest kids,” citing as an example Washington Metropolitan Opportunity Academy, an alternative high school slated to close at the end of this school year. Patterson said she has hired a consultant to examine the issues around alternative schools. “It’s like a meat grinder; the smallest pieces are going to the neediest schools.”
Each year, there are vocal protests demanding more money for DC’s schools. Politicians respond by pledging, as Mayor Bowser did, to increase per pupil spending. But Filardo and others I spoke to said that has meant overfunding of charters and severe underfunding of DCPS. (Unsurprisingly, charter school advocates claim just the opposite.)
“There is this [politically correct] thing that prevents even the leadership in DCPS from advocating for themselves,” Filardo said. That is, DCPS administrators and principals are government employees who have to tout the party line when it comes to the mayor’s budget; meanwhile, the charter sector’s leadership doesn’t face any similar constraints.
All things in public education are not equal. Some schools and some children need greater funding than others. While a law was approved more than five years ago to boost support for at-risk students by providing supplemental funding, much of this funding has gone instead to cover cuts. The concept for the subsidy is flawed, particularly since there is little evidence of any cohesive, comprehensive strategy designed to shore up early foundational academic weaknesses experienced by many of those children. The way the city deals with at-risk budgeting is comparable to giving a physically challenged child a 10-minute head start in a race and thinking that alone will allow her to keep pace with those who do not face a similar challenge. That approach is one reason student performance at some schools, particularly those in wards 7 and 8, dramatically lags behind.
“I think people get that privately,” said Patterson, “but I don’t see anybody standing out publicly and saying it as sharply.”
I came across the reason while reading an article by Adam Gopnik in the Feb. 10 issue of The New Yorker, although it had to do with a book about President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, not education: “A good government does need a head to see the way forward,” he writes. But “it also needs a heart to make it feel and a spine to keep it upright.”
In the fight for a high-quality, fair and equitable public education system in DC, upright spines among political leaders have been in short supply for a very long time.
jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.
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