When a coalition of business, government, education and civic leaders launched the Vision 2015 school reform effort in late 2006, they set six key objectives in their plan to move Delaware from middle of the pack nationally to a world-class public education system.
More than five years later, the reform effort has seen significant steps taken on five of the six objectives—raising academic standards, investing in early childhood education, developing and supporting teachers, empowering principals and encouraging innovation and family involvement.
Today, three years from the 2015 target for achieving these goals, people involved in the effort acknowledge little progress has been made on the sixth objective, creating “a simple and fair funding system whereby resources follow individual students and are allocated based on their needs.”
Expectations for any progress this year remain low.
“We must begin to have an honest conversation about the new reality,” said Paul A. Herdman, president and CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware and a leader of the Vision 2015 implementation team. He believes, as do most advocates of the Vision 2015 reforms, that the “unit system” that provides the foundation for school finance in the state imposes so many restraints on school districts that it prevents them from dealing with their most serious problems.
State Rep. Debra Heffernan, D-Brandywine Hundred, a former president of the Brandywine Board of Education, describes the unit system as “antiquated,” but said that “the best way for things to change in Delaware is slowly.”
“I believe it’s all very costly,” said Speaker of the House Bob Gilligan, D-Sherwood Park, predicting that 2012 “is going to be another tight year” for state finances.
School reform ranks high among the priorities of the Markell administration, but that doesn’t necessarily include financial issues. The administration’s objectives include “improving student readiness, helping great teachers succeed, using data effectively to help guide decision making, and helping to turnaround under-performing schools,” as well as implementing reforms with federal Reach to the Top funds, Chief Strategy Officer Brian Selander said. “That’s where the focus is right now.”
The go-slow approach to finance reform isn’t simply about the money, or about other priorities, as Gilligan and Selander suggest, according to Marvin N. “Skip” Schoenhals, chair of the Vision 2015 implementation team and chairman of WSFS Bank.
“No one really cares to fight vested interests,” he said.
And who are those vested interests?
“Without naming names,” said David J. Blowman, chief financial officer of the Brandywine School District, “it’s any group that has a piece of [state] code or budget language naming them directly.” A short list would include advocates for special education, vocational education and pre-kindergarten, school bus contractors, as well as teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, secretaries, custodians and cafeteria workers.
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Delaware’s unit system for school funding has been around for about 60 years. “It has served the state of Delaware very well [and] provides funding in a very equitable way to all of the students,” said Karen Field Rogers, associate secretary for finance reform and resource management at the state Department of Education. But, she added, “it is very complex and it requires a great deal of knowledge to understand all of its intricacies.”
The system is so complex, Blowman said, that few people other than Delaware’s school finance professionals understand it well.
At its core, the system is simple enough. Students in each district are categorized during the annual enrollment count, which occurs each Sept. 30. A certain number of students (20 for grades 4-12, 16.2 for kindergarten through grade 3) equals a “unit.” For each unit, a school district receives state funds to pay the state pay scale portion of a teacher’s salary. For larger numbers of units, a district receives funds to pay base salaries for other personnel (a superintendent, principals, custodians and so on). Unit counts also trigger allocations that cover non-salary costs like textbooks, office supplies and building maintenance.
Over the years, however, layer upon layer of specialized units, primarily in vocational and special education areas, have been added to the system, along with detailed language specifying the types of personnel that districts can (and cannot) hire with the money.
“It is easier to amend a core law than to fundamentally change it,” Herdman said. “Taken individually, all of the commitments made to these interests made sense at the time they were approved, but it becomes very constraining as you add them all together.”
In 2007, to give the Vision 2015 effort official recognition, Gov. Ruth Ann Minner issued an executive order that also created the Leadership for Education and Development (LEAD) Committee. In November 2008, two weeks after Markell was elected to succeed Minner, the committee, also chaired by Schoenhals, issued a report on school funding.
The LEAD Committee report, said Herdman, also a committee member, “remains the most comprehensive analysis [of Delaware school funding] on record at this point.”
The report’s dozen recommendations included a call for an easier-to-understand, more transparent system of school funding; allocations that give school districts greater flexibility in how they use their state funds; and developing a system of “weighted funding,” one that directs more money toward those students who require additional resources to educate, low-income students and those for whom English is not their primary language, for example.
Many school business managers would support weighted funding, said Karen Thorpe, from the Colonial School District. “It’s not just that it costs more to educate children living in poverty, it’s that those districts [with higher concentrations of low-income children] have less ability to raise taxes,” she said.
Because there are so many vested interests within the education community, movement toward any sort of weighted funding system is unlikely at this time, even though, according to the LEAD report, 39 states already use some sort of weighted funding model.
While there is “a moral and economic recognition that each child has different needs,” Herdman said to make the case for this change “is a taking from Peter to pay Paul argument, and it is a hard political sell.” “People are comfortable with what they know,” says Rogers, the DOE finance reform leader. “If [the system] changes, how do I guarantee that all the decisions will be made the way I want them to be made?”
Schoenhals, however, isn’t closing the door entirely on a weighted system. “Eventually, it will happen,” he said, “because it’s the right thing.”
Advocates for giving districts increased flexibility in spending their state funds are more confident that they will achieve their goal, but right now their best hope is for a limited victory.
Schoenhals, in a speech to the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce on Jan. 15, advocated the ultimate in flexibility: “The legislature should allocate money to the districts in a block grant: one line item that says ‘educate our children.’”
A more likely approach, according to Herdman, Blowman, Heffernan and Rogers, is to seek legislative approval for a pilot program that would give a limited number of the state’s 19 school districts — some say three, others say six — broader discretion in how they spend their state funds.
Flexibility is essential for numerous reasons, and the most important, Blowman said, is that with ever-increasing emphasis on improving student achievement, each district needs the ability to redirect its resources to meet its most pressing needs. One district might need additional math instruction for its special education students, while another might want to boost its reading programs, or add a counselor or an assistant principal to address discipline problems.
“We have to staff based on what the formulas give us, which may or may not be what we actually need,” he said. “I can’t take a custodial position and turn it into a secretary, or turn an administrator into a classroom teacher.”
Various education constituencies — the special education and vocational education advocates, for example — are concerned that districts, if given more flexibility, would cut their programs at the expense of others, Rogers, Blowman and Heffernan said.
But Blowman said “we’ve lost so many appropriations the last couple of years, there’s not a lot to block and cut anyway,” and Heffernan, a founder of the Brandywine district’s Special Needs PTA, said she’d work to ensure that any flexibility pilot would not result in reductions in special education spending.
Another key element of any flexibility discussion is how long a pilot program would run. Joanne Christian, president of the Appoquinimink Board of Education, said she doesn’t think any funding experiment should run longer than a year. But Blowman said it would take two years, perhaps three, for a test of flexible spending to yield clear results because contractual obligations and other policies would limit how much change a district could implement in a single year.
Finance reform advocates aren’t sure how much progress they can make this year. “We’ve been talking about this for three or four years. Is it another year, another two years, I just don’t know,” Schoenhals said.
Considering the overall weakness in the state, national and global economies, “it appears that through 2017 there will be no dramatic uptick in revenues,” and that will inevitably increase the financial pressures on school districts to use their resources more efficiently, Herdman said. “I think we have to start now.”