This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
When Arlene Ackerman came to Philadelphia, she said right off the bat that she planned to implement something called "weighted student funding." The idea is twofold: allocate resources based on students’ academic and other needs, and give all schools more autonomy to make budgeting decisions.
Now she is following through.
On February 9, she sent out invitations to a group of principals, including the 25 at Vanguard schools, those with high academic performance, inviting them to become part of a pilot project of up to 40 schools to test the concept and exercise that autonomy for the next budget year. The plan is for the entire district to move to WSF in 2011-12.
The invited principals were given some background materials and gathered on February 16 to learn more about the concept. Their decisions about whether to participate in the pilot were due February 18. District spokesman Fernando Gallard said there is no plan to release the list of takers.
The program, if fully implemented, would change the process of how money is distributed to schools and who makes decisions on how to spend it.
Now, positions are allocated to schools based on enrollment – X teachers for X students. The District would switch, under the new system, to allocating dollars rather than positions. Since most teaching positions are mandated anyway due to class size requirements, not a lot would change there – schools would in most cases still have to buy the teachers they’re now being allotted.
However, under weighted student funding, the schools are allocated money not based just on enrollment, but based on the demographic and academic profile of their students. Each student is assigned a certain "weight" based on the severity of their academic needs. Some factors that would figure into the weights include English proficiency, poverty, or giftedness. Presumably, the neediest schools would get more. Schools with more affluent populations will be wondering whether they will get less.
Since school-based budgeting was implemented in Philadelphia in the 1990s, schools have had discretion over a signficant portion of the money spent in a school, able to choose which of the non-required staff positions they want to buy. It is usually the principal making those decisions, though at some schools the councils that were mandated more than a decade ago are still functioning. Under WSF, principals would be expected to share decision-making. How to spend the school’s entire budget would be in the hands of a school team made up of teachers, parents, and administrators.
While school-based budgeting may be familiar and ho-hum to many here, the distribution of money to schools under WSF is an interesting, complex, and politically fraught process. The community makes decisions such as: What student factors should be weighted? How much weight? Will this work against schools with little poverty and few ELLs? What about the magnets? Will they get less money or more? You get the picture.
WSF was implemented in San Francisco when Ackerman was superintendent there, and it was one of the things that made her attractive to the SRC members who hired her, especially former chair Sandra Dungee Glenn. On February 16, a team from San Francisco came to Philadelphia to present to principals about its benefits.
"Under this approach, each school will have more flexibility to design and implement programs that meet its specific characteristics and needs," said the letter that Ackerman sent to principals.
For the new pilot program next year, schools will not be assigned dollars based on any "weights." Instead, they will get $150 extra per student as an incentive to participate. A districtwide commission will meet to decide what value to assign to what student characteristics before the full implementation in 2011-12. The main point of the pilot is to give the schools practice in setting up school councils to allocate their funds.
"The pilot is not full-blown change; that will be in 2011-12 after the public planning committee [to decide the weights]," said District Chief Business Officer Michael Masch. "We’re modeling site-based budgeting. We’re giving them the money, and the school can decide whether it would do things differently than the bureaucrats downtown. The key part is the principal bringing the staff and parents into the process, and figuring out what they would focus on that is different."
Schools besides Vanguard Schools have been invited to participate in the pilot, but Empowerment Schools — for the most part, the schools having the most student needs — are deliberately excluded.
This means that many of the schools likely to benefit most in the future from extra discretionary dollars are not being invited to practice their decision-making process this year.
Therein seems to lie a problem, and a question for how full implementation of WSF will proceed.
For Empowerment Schools seem to be the polar opposite of WSF, with the District dictating exactly what it must do and mandating additional positions, such as parent ombudsmen, a social services liaison, and an extra substitute.
If indeed full implementation of WSF is slated for 2011-12, these schools will have to do a swift about-face in decision-making, with some of them, perhaps, awash in additional dollars because they have students with so many needs.
Masch said he and Ackerman don’t see this as a contradiction, but a continuum. First of all, he said the District did not include Empowerment Schools in the pilot because they "are already getting so many things, it didn’t make sense." It could be argued that the District has already implemented a form of weighted funding by providing extras for these schools.
Secondly, he said Ackerman strongly believes that autonomy must be earned. In other words, a prescriptive program or "managed instruction" first, then freedom for more decision-making as schools get better.
But there is also a recognition implicit in all this that managed instruction only gets you so far. Masch said he has been in long conversations with people at the Broad Foundation, which gives annual awards to urban school districts that show significant improvement, "and what I get from Arlene Ackerman and Broad is that the districts getting the Broad prize all started with managed instruction."
At the same time, he added, "managed instruction reaches a plateau if you don’t move to greater autonomy as a start to get parents more engaged." What Ackerman is doing in strongly managing the instructional program while also promoting site-based budgeting and decision-making "may seem contradictory, but each has a role to play regarding performance as a whole."
It will be interesting to see how enthusiastically the principals buy into the pilot and how this unfolds over the next year.