EmpowerEd Testimony School Budget Bills Hearing

Testimony of Scott Goldstein, Executive Director, EmpowerEd

School Budget Bills Hearing- DC Council

January 20, 2022

Good Afternoon Chairperson and Council Members. Thank you for the opportunity to testify

today on the Schools Full Budgeting Amendment Act and the Schools First in Budgeting

Amendment Act. We approach this conversation with two important guideposts- how do we

provide our schools the stability they need and how do we ensure equitable budgets that truly

provide each school community with what that specific community needs. Both of these bills are

aimed at the first objective, providing schools more stability, but do not address how to make

budgeting more equitable. I must say upfront the timing of this hearing provides a difficult

context. DCPS is currently undergoing a process to modify their longstanding budgetary

approach with a mixed formula approach that in theory will center equity- but for which we have

not yet seen simulations with actual schools. Without that context, it becomes difficult to judge

how these separate efforts would interplay with a new budget model and what the ultimate

results would be for school communities.

As basic tenets, we agree that school budgets should start, at least, with what they received in

the prior year to ensure that schools have predictability and stability- able to keep all staff who

are valuably contributing. We also agree that we should absolutely prioritize spending at the

school level over central office spending. We agree with Chairperson Mendelson’s stated

objective to end the yearly crisis in budgeting and provide schools more predictability. There are

several things in these bills, however, that warrant some concern and further study. In the more

prescriptive “Schools First” legislation- there is a distinction made between spending on central

administration, school support and local schools. It seems pretty clear based on past practice

that it will be fairly easy for central office to simply label a lot of traditional central office roles as

school support in order to continue to expand the size and scope of central. We should force

central office to make some hard choices about how to redirect supports towards schools- but

the mechanisms in this bill may not do that.

Our biggest concern is with the switch in budgeting schools in the first year based on actual

teacher salaries and not average salaries. First, the WTU contract would prohibit this, and

rightfully so because using average salaries is what protects from schools discriminating against

more experienced educators. Second, the Chairman has noted that under this new formula,

about half the school would have a larger base budget and half would have a lower one in the

first year it is in effect. They would then build from there. So I did a calculation based upon a

representative sample of schools in each ward to see how this change would possibly impact

schools in the first year. Many of our lowest income schools actually have the highest

percentage of teachers with over 10 years of experience. So in the first year, these schools,

which need the additional money, might get it. But the problem is that in all of the successive

years, these schools would have the largest incentive to turn over more experienced educators.

If you ensure they will have at least last year’s budget after year one but year one was based on

actual salaries- there’s a huge perverse incentive for principals and LSATs to consider that they

could, in many cases, replace one teacher with two. You may not find them likely to make that

decision, but we should not be creating an incentive for them to do something that could harm

the quality of teaching.

Finally, we must address equity. For many years our school budgets have fallen fall short of

adequacy. Yes, it’s a problem that schools have almost no time to receive, consider and petition

changes on the budget each year (and these bills don’t address that timeline), but it’s also a

problem that the formulas do not examine the needs of individual school communities. One

example is schools that have a programmatic theme- like dual language, STEM or global

studies. They are asked to do more, but not necessarily provided any additional funds for the

additional courses and programs DCPS advertises them for. This isn’t addressed in this bill, but

should be part of any budget reform conversation. We also aren’t creating any additional

funding streams here, or revising existing funding to target schools areas of needs. If OSSE

acts to follow up on the SBOE recommendations and creates a school dashboard instead of a

summative school rating, we will have tremendous potential to focus on each school’s areas of

strengths and unique challenges and target funding and resources accordingly. That should

also be part of a broader budget reform conversation.

In closing, we applaud the effort to provide schools more predictability in budgeting, but we must

have a fulsome conversation about how to provide both stability and equity in our school

budgeting process. For that, we should slow down and do this both well and comprehensively.