Financing Pre-Kindergarten through 12th Grade Learning

Educational Finance Policy Modeling

The Human Services Policy Center is working with a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team - the School Finance Redesign Project - in its efforts to design a new framework for financing public education.

HSPC's role in the project is to apply its policy cost modeling analysis, developed successfully for early education, to estimating the costs of K-12 finance systems that support improved student performance. In this analysis, we simulate the effects of various policy decisions, translating knowledge about children's learning directly into cost estimates. These cost estimates vary depending on the package of instructional, non-instructional, and organizational policies selected. We also analyze the degree to which alternative funding strategies target funds to disadvantaged students and communities.

HSPC's model enables policy makers to test different mixes of staffing, class and school size, professional development, pre-K, enrichment, and other instructional expenses, plus non-instructional expenses such as social and health services, transportation, nutrition, and administration. By comparing different approaches, we can identify key components that support and enhance improved student performance.

Policy Guide

For ease of use, HSPC has developed a Policy Guide, an interactive, web-based tool that functions as the user interface for the cost model. The Policy Guide asks a structured series of questions about the educational programs and services desired by the participants. It provides summaries of the research to help inform those decisions, and then captures and catalogues the participants' answers for each decision, producing a complete print-out of decisions for each policy scenario.

In developing each scenario, participants are asked to consider two different types of questions: "framing questions", which are broad policy issues that impact resource allocation and use across a wide range of policies, and "policy options" (such as teacher compensation, student/teacher ratios, or tutoring programs) which are defined sets of strategies that determine what types of staffing and resources schools will require.

Research Summaries on Strategies and Performance

To complement the Policy Guide, HSPC has simultaneously developed a research summary database spanning educational strategies and performance in Pre-K through 12th grade.

This research is supported by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education through funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grant No. 29252. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and are not intended to represent the project, center, university, or foundation.