Report's claims possible only through time travel

Contact: Bruce Baker, (732) 932-7496 ext. 8232; bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo. (May 13, 2009) -- Two weeks ago, the libertarian Reason Foundation released a report titled Weighted Student Formula Yearbook, which advocates for a package of reforms concerning funding, governance and school choice. A new review of that report, however, finds that it cherry-picks evidence, lumps many different strategies under a single reform umbrella, ignores contradictory findings, and in one third of its examples credits the reforms for outcomes that actually preceded the reforms.

The Yearbook was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by Bruce Baker, a school finance expert who is an associate professor at Rutgers University.

Drawing from 15 case studies, the Reason report relies on two underlying premises: (1) budgets should be allocated directly to schools within a district, with the amount based on each child's needs; and (2) school principals should have full discretion on how to allocate those funds. The report examines 14 city school systems and one statewide one -- Hawaii -- that the report presents as reflecting "best practices" in implementing what the report calls Weighted Student Funding (WSF) reforms.

For many, the principle underlying WSF is appealing and common sense. The strategy is arguably intended to ensure that education funding adequately and fairly reflects the needs of students. In practice, however, the strategy has been found to be complex and its results much more ambiguous -- and very much dependent on how it is implemented.

Reason's Yearbook ignores all these complexities. Instead, the report mixes the basic WSF funding reform with other reforms, from site-based management and budgeting to school choice programs, including pilot, magnet and charter schools. In Baker's words, the report "selects a hodge-podge of district reform strategies." Some of those directly employ WSF but others "have little to do" with the funding strategy itself, or with district-wide reforms, Baker observes.

In fact, examples drawn from Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Clark County, Nev., simply revolve around a handful of schools given lump sums in return for greater autonomy. "These reforms are substantively different from and conceptually antithetical to WSF reforms," Baker writes. WSF reforms are intended to more fairly distribute resources across all schools in a district, while selective, pilot programs included in the Reason yearbook "grant preferential autonomy to some schools with the intent to draw resources and creative energy into those schools and away from others, generally without attention to the plight of others."

Indeed, notwithstanding the report's title, Weighted Student Funding actually gets only limited emphasis among the reforms the report advocates. And WSF's original objective -- "increasing resource equity across schools within districts," in Baker's words -- is ignored in the basic principles that the Reason report advances.

Instead, Baker writes, "the report derives a set of policy recommendations, which include the advocacy of cherry-picked elements of current policies and practices" employed by the 15 districts under study. Yet these elements are advanced with no real evidence: "Many of the selected practices remain either completely untested or are actually refuted in recent empirical studies."

The report's bias is reflected in its choice of research, neglecting "large bodies of relevant literature" and, further, ignoring "disagreeable findings in the literature it does cite."

But the most egregious flaw in the Yearbook is that, in one-third of the examples it cites -- five of the 15 case studies -- "outcome successes mentioned actually occurred prior to the implementation" of the touted reforms. This is remarkably illustrated by the Reason press release promoting the report, which points to impressive 2007-08 test score gains in Hartford, Conn., and attributes the gains to a change in policy directing 70% of resources to the classroom. Yet as the report itself notes, that WSF policy only began a year later, in 2008-09. The release makes the indefensible claim that future reforms managed to improve past results.

"The report haphazardly aggregates a multitude of discrete policy issues under an umbrella labeled as WSF and deceptively suggests that all related policies are necessarily good -- even going so far as to credit those policies for improvements that took place before the policies were implemented," Baker writes. "The report then irresponsibly recommends untested, cherry-picked policy elements, some of which may substantially undermine equity for children in the highest-need schools within major urban districts."

Instead of adding any serious information to the body of knowledge on WSF, Baker concludes, Reason's Yearbook is "a major step backwards."

Find Bruce Baker's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-Weighted-Student-Formula-Yearbook

CONTACT:
Bruce Baker
Department of Educational Theory, Policy and Administration
Rutgers Graduate School of Education
(732) 932-7496 ext. 8232
bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate."

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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
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