The Dynamics of School Resource Reallocation
By Allan Odden and Sarah Archibald, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Introduction and Overview: Why Reallocate Resources?
The goals and demands of standards-based education reform require the education system to use all available education resources more wisely in the short, medium, and long term. Further, research shows that many stakeholders in our nation's schools policymakers, district administrators, principals, and teachers can play key roles in making better decisions about education resource use. Today's prime education reform goal is to teach all students to high standards. One message embedded within this goal is that reform is focused on all students, or at least all but the most severely disabled students. However, teaching all students to high standards means raising performance much more and at a faster pace than resources will rise. Most analysts predict that resources will rise by only 25 percent in real, per-pupil terms over the next 10 years, the period of time in which we want to double or triple the portion of students now achieving at performance standards. Thus, underneath the stated goals of current education reform is the unstated imperative to improve the productivity of the education system. In the wake of this challenge, many educators are choosing to maintain their commitment to the ambitious goals of standards-based education reform, and are finding ways to pay for new educational strategies that will help them meet those goals.
Drawing from our forthcoming book, How Schools Can Reallocate Resources to Boost Student Performance, and other research on better resource use in schools, this booklet describes how school resources can be reallocated to pay for research-based strategies that boost stu-dent achievement. It does so by using information collected from a number of elementary and secondary schools that actually have reallocated resources and boosted student performance.
Most analysts predict that resources will rise by only 25 percent in real, per-pupil terms over the next 10 years, the period of time in which we want to double or triple the portion of students now achieving at performance standards.
The sites we discuss represent both elementary and secondary schools in cities, suburbs, and rural communities, many in the NCREL region (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin). Most but not all of the schools have fairly high percentages of students with disabilities and students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. Many have substantial numbers of limited-English-proficient children. Their minority populations range from low to high. And most have considerable evidence that their new programmatic and resource use strategies have worked: student performance has risen.
These schools adopted a number of quite expensive educational strategies such as smaller classes, more planning time for teachers, expanded professional development, and one-on-one tutors for students who are struggling to achieve to high standards all in an overall context of a more rigorous and cohesive schoolwide curriculum.
This booklet tells how the schools reallocated their resources to finance these expensive programs by describing the decisions they made. In doing so, it discusses the various roles that state, local, and federal policymakers can and do play in this process. The booklet is divided into several sections. The first section describes the change process that schools and districts go through that leads to resource reallocation decisions at the school site. The second section describes how schools pay for such reforms. The third section explores the roles of district, state, and federal policymakers in supporting these changes.
