Differentiating Funding and Improvement Priorities

My View

Many school districts now are fully engaged in budget discussions for the 2019-20 school year, and one phrase being bandied about a lot is “funding priorities.” Two important aspects of establishing funding priorities, as well as the central role data plays, often are overlooked.

At the core, funding priorities are concerned with areas where the limited resources should be focused. That said, this core should be coupled with expected outcomes and the time frame for delivering results. For instance, early childhood education might be designated a priority, with the expected outcome of more students achieving at grade level by 3rd grade after three years of investment.

The expectations over outcome and delivery time frame are important not just because they provide the north star to help people be oriented and focused but also because they serve as the basis for a return-on-investment review over the spending at a given time point, both of which are necessary for effective and efficient use of limited funds.

Funding priorities should not be confused with improvement priorities. The latter are areas on which the district should focus for improvement. Some improvement priorities may require mainly change in staffing or how their time is spent without the need for additional funding, but some improvement priorities cannot be addressed without new or additional investment.

In other words, all funding priorities are improvement priorities, but not all improvement priorities are funding priorities. For example, reducing student suspensions might be an improvement priority that primarily involves changing district policy and offering more professional development on tension de-escalation, none of which requires new major investments.

While funding priorities and improvement priorities will surely intertwine in discussions, it is important to differentiate and separate the two both during those discussions and when sharing funding priorities decisions with stakeholders and the community afterwards.

Data’s Central Role

At the beginning of funding-priority discussions, there could be myriads of ideas from many places, looking at issues from various angles and using different languages. While all these ideas should be acknowledged and respected, it is important to keep two things about them in mind.

First, not all are funding priorities. Some ideas are undoubtedly improvement priorities about which something needs to be done. However, only improvement priorities that need additional funding support are funding priorities.

Second, many of those ideas might be based on or influenced by misperceptions and personal biases and laden with assumptions. For example, people might propose spending more money in a certain area (e.g., student behavior or classroom technology) without realizing significant investments already had been made in that area during the past several years.

The misperceptions ought to be clarified and the assumptions challenged before funding priorities decisions are made. To achieve that, data are essential. Specifically, for each funding priority candidate, school district leaders should rely on data to answer these five questions:

 What are we trying to achieve (both expected outcomes and time frame for delivering results)?

 What assumptions are behind the idea that more money will help us get there?

 Are those assumptions valid?

 How much has been invested in the area during the past 3-5 years?

 What is the return on the investment?

Ending Confusion

Setting funding priorities is about where to spend money for the future, but it should be anchored on how money has been spent in the past and its impact on student achievement. Setting goals and delivery time frames is necessary for both setting expectations over future success and building the historical context.

Differentiating between funding priorities and improvement priorities helps clear many confusions during the process and make the discussion more focused. To achieve all this, data are key.