Although the District of Columbia (comprising D.C. Public Schools and 69 charter local education agencies) continues to make progress on performance benchmarks, many students still don’t have what they need to succeed. Despite relatively high funding and targeted investments toward equity, opportunity gaps persist.
To get better insight on the challenges and potential solutions, the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Education (DME) used a recent adequacy study requirement as an opportunity to reimagine how to investigate school funding. The study resulted in five key considerations that could be enacted at the local level.
Instead of a typical evaluation of adequacy and equity, the DME sought to ask deeper questions about what holds back equitable student achievement, including:
- What roles do schools serve for students and communities? Are schools funded to serve these roles?
- How do schools use the funding they receive? Where does the District see the most impact, and what strategies might be driving that impact?
- How do various existing funding and resourcing methodologies (within and outside the education system) come together to create the conditions for each learner to succeed — or do they come together at all?
Compelled by the vision and in collaboration with our partners at APA Consulting and Metropolitan Strategies and Solutions, our team at Afton Partners got to work redesigning the purpose and methods of an adequacy study. While traditional methods formed the foundation of the approach, we employed a new triangulation methodology. Combining national research, local data and stakeholder input, the methodology surfaced tensions and agreements in the data that otherwise might not have come to light.
For instance, school leader interviews and parent surveys revealed the depth to which schools were being asked to do more than they ever have — in many cases without the formal charge or resources to meet increased demands. But our review of national research suggested that their base funding weight (i.e., the minimum dollar amount set for all students) was sufficient. Without multiple methods, we would have concluded that the District of Columbia did not need to change its base funding weight.
Importantly, the quantitative data backed what stakeholders told us. We could see that, on average, less than 50% of resources going to schools were spent on instruction, and resources for mental health supports were high compared to benchmarks. Still, school leaders indicated that additional dollars for more mental health services and staffing were a top priority, which suggests that their relatively high allocations still don’t meet the full need.
The synthesis from all sources led us to a set of five comprehensive, locally relevant and actionable considerations. These include specific formula changes and broader policy considerations within and beyond the education system, such as:
- Adjusting the UPSFF to better meet student needs,
- Paying for specific, proven interventions directly, outside the UPSFF,
- Allowing schools to focus on the instructional core,
- Nudging the system to greater overall efficiency, and
- Better understanding how dollars are spent.
Overall, the District of Columbia’s innovative study offers an example for how leaders and policymakers can meaningfully incorporate stakeholder voices and rich local data to guide policy design and decisions. Triangulating the methods allows leaders to design policies that align with and effectively respond to nuanced needs.
Those of us working in school finance will be the first to acknowledge that education funding policy is often an inaccessible black box; it’s simply not easily understood by many stakeholders. The work in the District of Columbia provides a data-rooted roadmap for democratizing school funding design that informs policies that reflect the truth and value of lived experience as the powerful solution-finding resource it is.
