Perforating Picus

Remember the Picus and Odden Report? Perhaps the most impressive work to come out of Governor Gregoire’s Washington Learns commission in 2006, the P&O school finance study was the document that was supposed to help guide school funding decisions in the legislature. If the report said that we need to fund 1000 more counselors to have a good school system, for example, then ideally the money would have been put on the table.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the final Washington Learns report—the Picus and Odden study was buried, never to be seen again, a historical curiosity that only real wonks would remember.

Wonks like Erik Hanushek, for example. Affiliated with The Hoover Institute and Standford University, Hanushek has never met a school finance lawsuit he didn’t like to eviscerate. Cynics would call him a hired gun for legislatures that don’t want to fully fund their schools; supporters would say that he’s a voice of reason and moderation in how we use taxpayer monies. Either way, in the Winter 2007 edition of Education Next has a six page article from Mr. Hanushek wherein he takes a long, critical look at Picus and Odden, and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Why is this important? The next project for Washington Learns is supposed to be to get our school financing system figured out, because (sarcasm!) no committee ever in the history of Washington State has thought to do that before (/sarcasm!). With Picus and Odden out there, along with The Conley Report, there’s voluminous evidence in the past year as to how short we’re falling funding schools here in Washington. On the other side there’s the work of Hanushek, among others.

Hanushek’s rebuttal of Picus was also prominently featured recently in a column from the Washington Roundtable, a business group that frequently comments on school issues, usually conservatively. It's also a good guess that P&O will be brought up in the school funding lawsuit, along with our old friend The Conley Report.

It's a short legislative session this year, but there could still be some neat action going on!

Read more here, if any.

The Conley Report, Part VII: The Prototypical School

Next in a series looking at the Conley Report, the Washington adequacy study funded by the WEA. Bet you though I’d forgotten about it, huh?

Here comes the meat!

In order to identify how much money you would need to bring the average school up to snuff, first you have to identify the average school. In order to do this they looked at schools that were improving and tried to identify those key factors that helped those schools get better, and after that process was over this is what they came up with for the average, prototypical school:

The prototypical elementary school serves grades K through 5 and has 475 students. 61 of those kids are special ed, 194 need remedial help through the LAP program, and 37 are ELL students.

The prototypical middle school serves grades 6 through 8 and has 681 students. 88 are special education, 255 are in LAP, and 54 get ELL support.

The prototypical high school has 1,323 students (!) in grades 9 through 12. 170 are special ed, 381 are LAP, and 104 are English language learners.

Why is this important? In the following sections where the make their recommendations they’re using these numbers to make those recommendations. For example, when they talk about adding 1.64 counselors to an elementary school, they’re doing that based off of the 250 to 1 ratio and adding to the prototypical school what would be needed to meet that ratio.

As adequacy studies go, this is where you can see the big difference this report and the Picus and Odden report from Washington Learns. Picus and Odden focused more on the state as a whole and used that to make their staffing allowances (e.g., “We have 40,000 kids, so we need 800 counselors”), while Conley’s school prototype model means more math (e.g., “We have 40,000 kids in an average of 84.2 schools, and we should add 1.34 counselors to each school to meet adequacy.”).

Next time: On to the recommendations.

Read more here, if any.