Making Better Use of Limited Resources, Part I

Wisconsin Center for Education Research:

Over the past 15 years, WCER's Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has worked to find better ways to allocate education funds and to link them to powerful school-based strategies to boost student learning. This is the second of a four-part series covering highlights from CPRE research. This article covers reallocating dollars at the school level and by educational strategy; documenting best practices in school finance adequacy; and using resources to double student performance.

Reallocating School-Level Funds
The U.S. education system educates only about one-third of the nation's students to a rigorous proficiency standard. Improving education productivity must be placed onto the policy agenda and the practice agenda, says UW-Madison education professor and CPRE director Allan Odden. The goal of teaching all, or nearly all, students to high standards will require doubling or tripling student academic achievement.

But it's unlikely that education funding will correspondingly increase, Odden says. To accomplish this goal, schools will need to adopt more powerful educational strategies and, in the process, reallocate funds. CPRE research found many examples of schools that reallocated their resources to improve student performance. From that research CPRE created a dozen case studies of schools—urban, suburban, and rural—that had reallocated resources to use teachers, time, and funds more productively.

Dissatisfied with their students' performance, these schools redesigned their entire education programs. By reallocating resources and restructuring they transformed themselves into more productive educational organizations. They tended to spend more time on core academic subjects and they often provided lower class sizes for those subjects. They invested more in teacher professional development and provided more effective help for struggling students, including one-to-one tutoring. Subsequent research showed that many, but not all, designs produced higher levels of student achievement than typical schools.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 3, 2008 1:00 AM
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