School Money: Success a Good Motivator (NC)
May 27, 2010
Pulling together a $392.3 million financial pie made with public money can cause a heck of a food fight.
When money’s tight, the pieces aren’t as big as people would like. So once the county manager made a recommendation — Dudley Watts released Forsyth County’s budget proposal earlier this month — the fight got louder.
And because Watts’ proposed budget fell short of meeting what the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools had requested — the system asked for a local appropriation of $114.1 million — most of the fussing at a public hearing Monday night was done by folks concerned about education.
County commissioners heard them and decided to see what could be done about it at a workshop the next day.
While they were combing through the numbers Tuesday morning, a particular word reared its head: accountability.
Opening salvo
The first mention of accountability came from Commissioner Walter Marsha ll, a likable crank who has been known to use such words as "discrepancies" and "equality" when he talks about public money.
Marshall’s problem wasn’t so much with appropriating millions for the school budget. His gripe had more to do with how the money is spent and what we have to show for it. He is not happy about poor test scores and gruesome dropout rates in the neighborhoods he represents.
"Somewhere along the line we need to start thinking like grown-ups, and somebody needs to be held accountable," Marshall said during one stream-of-consciousness ramble.
Though a few heads nodded around the commissioners’ meeting room, attention was about to turn back to squeezing blood from the financial turnip. Then, before officials could immerse themselves totally into the world of fund balances, two other officials weighed in on the accountability theme.
Commissioner Dave Plyler said that school officials had indicated that they might be amenable to "indexing" — coming up with some sort of budget formula tied to revenue. If tax collections go up, Plyler said, schools would get more money. If they go down, they would get less.
And Watts mentioned an experiment he heard about in Catawba County back in the late 1980s. Commissioners there had told the county’s three school systems that if they could get to the top 10 percent of systems in North Carolina, then they would make sure their local spending was also in the top 10 percent proportionally statewide.
"Performance-based funding," Watts said. "It had some traction."
In other words, Catawba County commissioners asked for resu lts and accountability.
‘Really talking’
It is far too late this year to start working on a system that ties performance to local financing. With the maddening array of testing and data points now required by the state, merely sorting out which measuring sticks to use could take weeks — if not months.
Dropout rates? End-of-grade test results? Which other school systems offer valid comparisons? How should the percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced lunches factor in?
When Catawba County dipped its toe into the accountability pool, fewer statistical measures were available. Officials had to compile information themselves. They decided on 10 different data points — dropout rates, percentage of students who took the SAT, average test scores, etc. — and identified the top school systems in the state.
A simple agreement was reached: If schools performed at a top level, they would be rewarded.
Guess what? Even with the added difficulty of having three different school systems, Catawba County did it. Performance increased, and so did local financing.
"We were in the top 10 (percent) statewide for awhile," said Tom Lundy, the Catawba county manager. "It galvanized everybody into action. For the first time, the public was really talking about performance and where we actually stood."
During the Forsyth budget workshop Tuesday, Watts proposed discussing performance-based financing at a future commissioners’ retreat. The devil will be in the details, but man, what a good idea.