Public schools are in desperate need of reform, and one solution gaining steam, known as “backpack funding,” would allow money to follow a child from school to school.
The “backpack funding” concept is similar to how funding for colleges work: Schools receive funding based on how many students they have. Most districts currently receive funding on a per-pupil basis, but that money gets spent on buildings, teachers and materials in a way that creates discrepancies between each school. At the school level, funding is often disconnected from what students generate.
Backpack funding, which is more formally known as weighted student formula funding, would make funding portable for students, so that their portion of school funding could be taken with them wherever desired.
Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie highlighted backpack funding in a new video released Tuesday. “Since the early ’70s, we’ve more than doubled per-pupil spending in inflation-adjusted dollars without increasing test scores for high school seniors,” Gillespie says, lamenting the current state of public education.
“A lot of the money doesn’t ever reach the school level where the kid goes because it’s not attached to the kid and it’s spent before it even reaches the school,” Lisa Snell, the director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. With funding more directly connected to a student, schools are held accountable. Dissatisfied students can simply take their funding with them to another school.
Backpack funding comes with the added benefit of improved transparency and analysis of education spending. Snell said, “Right now, there’s a lot of money that goes into a district budget, and if one school improves reading, there’s really no way to say, ‘Is that because they invested in a new reading program, or because that’s where they used their resources?’ ” Backpack funding allows school districts to better examine what is working in education.
Snell says that 25 school districts in the United States have at least a modified version of backpack funding, 15 of which have implemented it fully. Graduation rates rose by over 10 percentage points in Houston from 2009 to 2012 after the district implemented a version of backpack funding, along with improvements in student test scores and retention.
Conservative education reform advocates have long pushed for school vouchers, in which a student can use their funding for private school tuition or to attend a charter school. Some versions of backpack funding may include private schools, but the system works even if portability is only allowed to other public schools. “It’s not a private school choice program per se, it’s that all funding, regardless of the kind of institution … should be attached to the kids, it should be transparent, and it should follow the kids wherever they enroll,” Snell said. “So it’s really not the same as a private voucher program.”
In article this Wednesday, Mary Kusler, the Director of Government Relations at the National Education Association, told the Examiner portable funding is a “novel policy concept that does not work in actuality.” She insisted schools cannot easily adjust their budgets just because one student leaves. Essentially, a teacher costs the same whether they teach 20 students or 19.
Snell said this showed a “fundamental misunderstanding of how student-based allocation works.” With backpack funding, money goes to a school to spend flexibly on whatever it needs. Under the current system, schools typically have their funding limited to specific categories: a specific amount budgeted for teachers, maintenance and other needs with no ability to shift funds between categories. Accountability requirements still apply to schools with backpack funding, but it allows them to easily shift funds in response to small changes in enrollment.
School districts should always be looking for ways to improve student education. Backpack funding may not be the best option in every school district, but it has been shown to be effective where districts attempt implementation. When funding is allowed to follow a student, school districts and students win.
