Education Week Grading System Gets a Failing Grade
It’s that time of year again. Time for Education Week Quality Counts to grade the states on a number of education policy issues – ranging from accountability systems to school finance systems. But, once again, Education Week’s Quality Counts ratings of state school finance policies simply lack understanding of the goals of today’s state school finance policies and methods for better understanding and evaluating state school finance policies. We have been working diligently to develop an alternative set of indicators to be released sometime in the near future. I will attempt to provide my critique of the Ed Week indicators herein without divulging to much detail about our alternatives – yet.
Here is a blurb I wrote a short while ago in which I lay out the initial critique of two popular state school finance rating systems:
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Two existing reports are disseminated annually and highly publicized. The first is the Education Trust Funding Gap Report which has as its focus, characterizing the differences in average per pupil state and local revenues between high and low minority concentration districts and between high and low poverty concentration school districts within states. The report appears to have significant traction in policy circles but is methodologically problematic and deceptive in a number of ways. First, the report calculates its funding gaps with respect to “need adjusted” estimates of state and local revenues per pupil. In order to generate these need adjusted estimates, the authors must adopt a set of weights that prescribe how much more a child from impoverished background is expected to need and how much more a child with disabilities is expected to need. That is, the method requires an a priori assumption of the magnitude of differential need for certain populations.
Second, the Funding Gap report overlooks entirely other major factors that affect the costs of Continue reading: Education Week Grading System Gets a Failing Grade – School Finance 101
Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America's Students: Bruce D. Baker: 9781682532423: Amazon.com: Books - https://www.amazon.com/Educational-Inequality-School-Finance-Americas/dp/1682532429