Education Week - September 25, 2019 - S20

7 Elements of an Effective Resource
Allocation Review
n Examine all funding from all sources. This should include federal,
state, and local funding, and not just money dedicated to school
improvement.
n Assess whether individual school spending levels fully reflect their
need. "Equal" is not the same as "equitable"-students and schools that
need more resources should get them.
n Review critical dimensions of resource equity beyond funding. How
much is only part of the story-reviews should also capture teaching
quality, curricular rigor, whole child supports, and other critical aspects
of the student experience.
n Identify root causes of spending-related problems. While it's important
to know if schools lack access to a critical resource, it's also necessary to
know why in order to fix it.
n Check for sustainability. A common pitfall is to use short-term funding
intended for school turnaround to meet the ongoing, underlying needs
of students. Once those funds are gone, the needs are again unmet.
n Align school funding and planning timelines. School system leaders
are limited in what they can do to address results of a review if they
have already released schools' budgets and staffing allocations or have
already created next year's master schedules.
n Engage a wide range stakeholders in the results. Changes may require
difficult trade-offs. Community and stakeholder involvement is not only
required by the Every Student Succeeds Act, but can be an important
step toward building support.

How States Can Support Districts
in the Review Process
n Provide models, templates, and technical assistance.
n Provide comparative data, including the per-pupil spending levels
now required by ESSA and state-calculated analytics that districts can
supplement with their own data.
n Assess similarities and differences in results across districts to inform
state policy and allow for tailored support.
SOURCES: Education Resource Strategies;
The Education Trust

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 25, 2019 | www.edweek.org

reason why, many argue, the $7 billion in School
Improvement Grants spent under the No Child Left Behind
Act (ESSA's predecessor) had so little impact on district
outcomes.
"Too often, our low-income students, black students,
and Latino students are given fewer advanced-coursework
opportunities, fewer supports they need to succeed, forced
to rely more heavily on novice teachers. ... The list goes
on," said Ary Amerikaner, the vice president for P-12 policy,
practice, and research for the Education Trust, an advocacy
group that pushes for heavy accountability and greater
spending on low-income schools. "These patterns are all
too common across our country. This is an opportunity to
unearth those patterns and then make changes to address
them."

Aligning Money, Goals
Forty-three percent of district administrators say their
budgets don't line up with their academic goals, according
to a recent Education Week survey.
That's hard to fix, they say, in part because spending
data are often buried in outdated and hard-to-use
software, making it virtually impossible to understand
historical trends. And staffing and budgets are often an
amalgamation of local, state, and federal priorities built up
over decades and rolled over from one year to the next.
That is especially true in academically struggling districts
where there's high turnover among administrative staff
and a cacophony of district- and nonprofit-led school
improvement and wraparound initiatives.
A resource-allocation review is seen as an important
tool to address that problem. To conduct such a review, an
outside organization typically interviews employees and
analyzes years of budget books to get a detailed sense of
how a central office staff's time, money, and expertise are
deployed across the district.
The reviews vary in scope and depth. While the bulk of
the analysis often deals with district spending, consultants
can also look at where districts' most-effective and
experienced teachers work, which employees participate in
which professional-development programs, and at which
schools gifted programs are offered.
Once administrators are presented with that type of
information, the theory goes, they can spot duplicative
or ineffective programs. They can cut costs, correct
inequitable-spending patterns between low- and highperforming schools, and more effectively target new money
toward proven initiatives and the students that need them
the most.
"For generations, CFOs have been perceived as the
ones focused on scorekeeping, ensuring efficient financial
operations, and ensuring that we don't overspend," said
Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource
Strategies, which has conducted resource-allocation
reviews for the past 15 years. "The part of the role that's
about enabling leadership to make good decisions about
how funds are allocated and used wasn't there."
ESSA requires that states "periodically review resource
allocation to support school improvement" in districts that

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Education Week - September 25, 2019

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