Public Impact‘s mission is to dramatically improve learning outcomes for all children in the U.S., with a special focus on students who are not served well. We are a team of researchers, thought leaders, tool-builders, and on-the-ground consultants who work with leading education reformers.

We believe that if we focus on a core set of promising strategies for change, we can make dramatic improvements for all students. Toward that end, we work on initiatives to:

• Find, develop, retain, and expand the impact of great teachers and leaders vital to operating great schools;
• Equip states and districts with tools to implement turnarounds in failing schools;
• Evaluate, replicate, and expand the supply of high-quality charter schools;
• Improve other areas of K-12 public education policy and management that serve as important levers for school improvement and reform.

Our clients include private foundations, state and federal policymakers, innovative districts, charter management organizations, child advocacy non-profits, and other reform-oriented leaders.

Introduction

In 2009, several of Rhode Island’s mayors asked Public Impact, a national education research organization, to study the Ocean State’s K-12 funding system and make recommendations on how to improve it. Based on our strong interest in the increasingly dynamic Rhode Island education system, and our expertise in state funding policy, Public Impact agreed. The Rhode Island Foundation in turn agreed to fund this report, which summarizes our findings and recommendations for state policymakers.

Our overarching conclusion is that to ensure Rhode Island’s economic competitiveness, boost student achievement, and fulfill the promise of equal opportunity, the state must transform the way it allocates state funding for public education. Other states and leading large school districts around the country are moving towards education finance systems that distribute funds on the basis of carefully designed calculations that take into account the number of students served by schools and districts and each student’s needs. The Ocean State, by contrast, continues to fund K-12 education without a guiding formula. Instead, the state makes a line-item appropriation to each town, based largely on the previous year’s funding level. Over the last decade, a growing chorus of voices has raised serious concerns about this system because it does not meet the challenge of providing a quality education to every student in the state of Rhode Island under the state’s Basic Education Program.
How the state allocates funds is just one of a trio of important funding policy issues facing any state. The other two, simply put, are how much money to spend (the overall amount of money to devote to public education), and who should pay the bill (the relative contribution of state and local tax funds). This study does not tackle either of those questions, not because they are not important, but because devising a system for allocating money based on students’ needs is a critical precursor to subsequent policy decisions about “how much” and “who should pay.” The first imperative for state policymakers is to create a transparent, dynamic system of allocating funds – whatever the amount and whatever the sources. With such a system in place, policymakers are then in a dramatically more solid position to consider changes in the overall level of spending and the tax policies that generate the required level of revenue.
As a result, this report recommends a new allocation system that is budget neutral; that is, it does not change the amount of funding available for public education in the Ocean State. And it presumes that, for the moment, Rhode Island will continue to use a pre-existing method of determining the proper mix of state and local dollars for education. Once a new allocation system is in place, Rhode Island’s policymakers can – and should – turn to questions of how much and who should pay. This report has four major sections following this introduction. In the first section we introduce the concept of student-based funding. Next, we examine the shortcomings of Rhode Island’s current system for allocating education funding. The following section recommends four principles for a new allocation system in the state. Finally, we describe how the state could make the transition from its current model to one based on individual public school students and their educational needs.

Read the Report

In the Flypaper and Eduwonk blogs and on the pages of Education Next, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel have engaged in a debate with Fordham’s Andy Smarick about how the nation should address its chronically failing schools. Smarick contends that the only strategy with promise is closing failing schools and replacing them with new start-ups. The Hassels argue that new school creation alone can’t meet the challenge. We need a national strategy that includes both new school creation and classic turnarounds, in which a leader receives “the big yes” to carry out the needed changes. On January 28, 2010, the debate went live. Watch the video webcast here.

View the Presentation

Performance pay, hard-to-staff incentives, and other special payments combined make up only 1% of the teacher pay “pie” nationally. With school budgets tight, the prospects of new, long-term infusions of funds for alternative forms of teacher compensation are bleak. For districts and states eager to reform teacher pay, then, the only viable, sustainable strategy is to “re-slice the teacher compensation pie”—reducing the amount of funding that goes to reward master’s degrees, experience beyond the first five or so years, and other qualifications that research suggests are unrelated to student learning. This presentation shows how re-slicing—whether modest or bold—could dramatically increase the resources available to pay teachers for their contributions to student learning.