The Spokesman Review recently questioned the justifications offered by school officials for the very high pay of several school superintendents in the Spokane area.  Superintendent Nancy Stowell is paid $229,369 for leading the Spokane Public School District of 28,712 students, while Superintendent Polly Crowley receives $241,577 for leading the West Valley School District of 3,780 students. 

As reported by the Spokesman Review here, compensation for 21 Washington public school administrators exceeded that of the governor – $199,038 – in 2010, while 41 top school officials made more than the state’s K-12 superintendent, Randy Dorn. His total compensation was $146,751.

Lawmakers maintain a state funding formula that gives school district administrators all the power over how to spend the money.  (State lawmakers just increased education spending through this funding formula from $12.9 billion in 2009-11 to $13.7 billion in 2011-13, an increase of nearly $790 million.)

Under the state funding formulas, state funds are provided to school districts in order to maintain certain defined ratios of teachers, non-teachers and administrators for each group of 1,000 students.  And under 2009 legislation, HB 2261, the legislature defined in precise detail staffing ratios for “prototype schools,” a model which, due to the advent of online learning, is already outdated. 

A better and more equitable system would fund students, not school personnel systems.  Under student-centered finance, a state would instead provide a state educational grant to each student, and require that 95% of that amount follow that student to his school, to be spent by the school principal and his teacher leadership team.  In this way the educators closest to the students, not officials sitting in distant school district offices, would decide how to spend their school funds.

Rhode Island has just changed its funding formula to a student-centered formula, providing each student with a state grant, weighted for difficult-to-educate students.  This student-centered system is a more equitable, transparent and fiscally responsible way to fund the schools.   Seventeen states are considering adopting this new student-centered funding formula.  Right now seven districts in Louisiana are working at adopting student-centered finance, as are 80 principals in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  These districts are joining the 15 large school districts, including Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Houston, Oakland, and St. Paul, which have been using this finance method for nearly a decade to dramatically improve student learning.  

The seminal work on student-centered finance is The Secret of TSL (Total Student Load): The Revolutionary Discovery that Raises School Performance (Simon and Schuster 2009), by William Ouchi, Professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, a national expert on school finance.  Jay Mathews of the Washington Post provides this summary of Professor Ouchi’s findings: 

“Middle and high school teachers are normally subject specialists who teach three to six classes a day. Some school districts have union contracts that limit Total Student Loads (TSL) for high school and middle school teachers but still allow heavy loads, up to 170 in New York City and 225 in Los Angeles. There has been little opportunity to study the effects of handling so many kids -- reading their papers, grading their tests -- because schools rarely have a chance to reduce those workloads and see what happens. Ouchi's writings and the work of pioneering school superintendent Mike Strembitsky in Edmonton, Alberta, persuaded more districts to give their principals more budget control. That in turn led to changes in staffing that cut TSL.

Schools and school districts have been growing, as has the number of students for which each middle or high school teacher is responsible. That, Ouchi says, led teachers to abandon classrooms for staff jobs. District superintendents, defining power by the size of their headquarters staffs, created more non-teaching positions for them. Ouchi cites a 1997 study that concluded only 43 percent of school district employees were regularly engaged in classroom teaching.

"When a district has too few classroom teachers," Ouchi writes in his chapter, "student loads per teacher rise to the point where teachers can no longer know their students well enough to establish a bond of trust with them. Without this trust, a teacher can neither establish an orderly classroom nor push a student to do his or her best, and the teacher's job often becomes frustrating and constantly stressful.

Ouchi says good principals understand this. Once they have the power to use their budgets the way they think best, they cut non-teaching positions, increase the number of teachers and reduce their TSLs. "One school, for example, may not need or want security guards or professional-development staff, while another may not want attendance clerks or registrars," he says. Principals, unlike central office managers, know which jobs have been rendered obsolete by new technology and which jobs exist simply because they have always existed. Changing curriculum, such as combining English and social studies classes, or revising schedules can also reduce TSL.”

Fund the student, not the system.  Train school principals to use their new budgetary powers to reduce total student loads on teachers.  This way distortions caused by centralized decision-making will disappear, and students will learn dramatically more than they can today.