Improving Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight Prepared for the The Education Policy and Leadership Center Conference on November 17, 2011 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Allan Odden Sources: • Allan Odden, Improving Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight, Corwin Press, Feb 2012 • Allan Odden, Ten Strategies for Doubling Student Performance. Corwin Press, 2011. • Allan Odden and Sarah Archibald, Doubling Student Performance … and finding the resources to do it. Corwin Press, 2011. • Allan Odden and Larry Picus, School Finance: A Policy Perspective, 4th Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008. 2 3 Parts of the Presentation 1. Background comments 2. Aligning resources to instruction 3. Cutting back when resources are tight 3 1. Background Comments 4 Education Resources Today • Have spent most of my professional life getting more money for schools – school finance equity and adequacy • Don’t like cutting budgets • Don’t like not providing compensation increases • Upset that some states are cutting education budgets by hundreds of dollars per pupil – far beyond just not covering inflation • Current fiscal context for schools is bleak 5 Education Resources Today • But it is what it is; can’t change reality • Optimistic scenario is for education dollars to stay even • Realistic scenario is that education dollars will be eroded by inflation if not cut in absolute terms and • We will lose stimulus dollars this year • And we won’t get any more in the near future 6 Must Move Forward Despite the Dour Fiscal Context • Improve student learning • Even when budgets are tight • Mindless, across the board, non-strategic budget cutting will make things worse • Must get into a strategic budgeting process of aligning resources that exist to strategies that will boost student learning 7 Step 1: Resist the Cost Pressures that Eat Up School Budgets 1. Lower class sizes 2. Multiplicity of electives • Neither boosts learning in core content areas very much 3. Automatic pay increases from salary schedule steps and lanes Eat up budgets with no positive impact on student learning 8 2. Align Resources to Instruction 9 Back to Educational Basics • Why are we in education in the first place? • What can be done with no more money? • Are there ways to use money more effectively (which means we’d also identify ways we now use money that is not so effective)? • Can we engage in some resource reallocation? • Yes – most education dollars are spent on labor so it is using labor better that constitutes reallocation 10