What Happened?
The Houston Independent School District received top honors from the Reason Foundation for its drastic improvements in test performance and accessibility of resources to low-income or disadvantaged students. The rankings are based on the Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook that gauges benchmark achievements to measure improvements.
The Goal
The Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook is designed to grade and rank participating school districts using portable student funding on 10 criteria. Portable student funding, or backpack funding, provides grant money to individual students which then follows them if they change schools. The goal of the project is to have a more accurate comparison of school performance when specific funding opportunities are taken into account.
The Houston Independent School District made it to the top of the Reason Foundation’s list after cutting down on achievement gaps between affluent and low income students, while boosting test scores for disadvantaged students. The rankings are determined by current performance as well as improvements from the year prior. When the results of the study are gathered, the Reason Foundation is then able to extract best practices from top performing school districts to share on the national level and make recommendations.
Yearbook Breakdown
The Reason Foundation’s Weighted Student Formula Yearbook focuses on individual student resources, performance and accessibility, rather than analyze the academic programs at each school. Because new funding opportunities place dollar amounts on students not schools, it is easier to follow the funding and record the performance metrics. A weighted student formula system has five key principles for how money should be allocated:
- Funding should follow the child not the school
- Funding should vary according to student need
- Funding should be presented as real money not in the form of teachers or resources
- Principles should apply to local, state and federal funding dollars
- Keep the funding systems simple and transparent so teachers, administrators and parents understand how it works
Each school district profiled is rated by the Reason Foundation based on 10 benchmarks known as robust school empowerment metrics. These benchmarks include:
- School budgets based on students
- District charge schools actual versus average salaries
- School choice and open enrollment policies
- Principle autonomy over budgets
- Principle autonomy over hiring
- School-level management support
- Published transparent school-level budgets
- Published transparent school-level outcomes
- Explicit accountability goals
- Collective bargaining relief
Best Practices
As a result of the Weighted Student Formula Yearbook, the Reason Foundation has pinpointed specific best practices demonstrated by the most successful school districts. Some of these winning formulas include:
- Redirect central office resources to support schools directly
- Align resources with achievement goals through the creation and implementation of school-level academic plans
- Publish detailed school-level budgets to increase transparency and awareness
- Leverage foundation grants to support small schools
- Increase equity with payout of actual salaries not average salaries
- Adopt the weighted student formula within districts and reduce restricted programs
- Link student funding weights to academic performance not socioeconomic status
Stay In School
Gov1 has reported on various school grant funding projects as well as other innovative strategies to increase access to capital for districts nationwide.