Is OUSD supporting a charter school? Why so much monies ans staff for this position?

There are many costs that should be cut before it affects students and this may be one of them.

We disagree on this one. The 10th amendment leaves to the states education. Kids will be sick. I don’t get why money should be taken from the school. The school has fixed costs and doesn’t get to pick its population if it is a traditional public school.

I believe it is in the State of New Mexico that the State for enrollment purposes gets a report on attendance and the funding for the year is based on that one report. It makes predicting a budget easier than in California.

Jim Mordecai

Paying a school to teach children who are not there does not make sense to me.

And yes, a school does have some power in increasing attendance. It can provide:
– safe, clean environment
– caring, professional teachers
– contact with families, community outreach and parent education
– on-campus health, mental health and family counseling programs.
– inviting extracurricular activities which give students incentives to attend class
– truancy official.

Personal anecdote: When I was a kid, I missed a LOT of school one year because I was “sick.” In reality, I was depressed by and frightened of the school I was attending. The next year, that hellhole was shuttered we moved to a brand new campus with a good principal and I made a miraculous recovery!

In response to comment #13: In most school districts a school’s attendance does not directly impact the school’s finances. Lost State revenue for those not attending is a hit taken by the whole district. It does not solely impact on the school’s allocation of money but the impact is diluted by virtue of being a part of a district.

I believe that Randy Ward was trying to increase attendance at schools with poor attendance by tying the amount of money each school received to students attending. That experiment failed to increase attendance but that provision of RBB continues with the Board’s inaction.

Some may say that if kids don’t attend a school then the school shouldn’t get money. Others, me included, would say that attendance reflects differences in socio-economic groups and subtracting money from a group with poor attendance is wrong. Poor students need more resources and not less.

In addition, since I started teaching in 1967 there has been a change in the State’s method of calculation of attendance. The State now only pays if a child is in their seat. The State had accept a signed parent absence note and provide full payment for such excused absences. Again in terms of differences in socio-economic groups in terms of health and attendance the schools without poor students attending receive more money from the State.

But, unlike money taken under RBB and redistributed to schools with higher attendance, the State of California does not have to pay when students don’t attend. There is actually an economic incentive for poor attendance in California schools as such absences save the State money. California taxpayers have gained by the poverty of its school children but the cost of prisons has not made for such a good deal.

Jim Mordecai

Isn’t that why we have good vice principals?

I went to a high school with 1800 students. Just by reading the yearbook, I knew the names of most students at the school. Furthermore, the morning our principal smiled and called ME by name, it was a little disconcerting! But then I smiled back at him in the hallway, and that silent relationship between two busy people was really all the support I needed from Dr. Stattner.

My music teacher, however, was like a second father to me. I’d never have graduated without his support.

It’s quite possible for a large school to do its job exceedingly well. The principal doesn’t have to do everything. And while I don’t at all want to bash the small Oakland schools that are doing their jobs well, educating 1800 children at four excellent small schools is always going to cost more than educating 1800 children at one excellent big school.

ANY excellent school, though, needs to stay where it is and keep doing what it’s doing. Yaaaaay indeed!

But…when carving up a school results only in complex, multifaceted mediocrity, putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is an expensive, disruptive undertaking.

Are you saying that if two schools have different daily attendance numbers they should receive the same amount of money based on the number of students actually enrolled, including ghost students?

I am skeptical of Broad, et al, but I like local control — are you saying the attendance clause is some sort of crafty loophole to accomplish some nefarious end? Help me out here.

A study of weighted student budgeting in San Francisco and Oakland recommended that attendance be dropped from the RBB model because it did not do what it was designed to do and increase attendance. The theory did not work in practice. But, RBB continues apace and money is taken from poverty schools and given to schools with better attendance numbers.

The Oakland School Board continues to ignore this recommendation to end using attendance in the RBB model. Strange that the Board pays for a study and then ignores a recommendation that would seem calls for Board action.

By the way, the theory of RBB was built on the work of a Southern California UCLA business professor William G. Ouchi. He has out a new book and uses Oakland as an example of how the implementing of site based budgeting and RBB has driven up test scores.

The RBB approach is favored by Eli Board and some would think that return of local control was contingent on the Board keeping its hands off of RBB approach to budgeting.

And, although there was a comparative study of San Francisco and Oakland’s use of a student weighted budget model, nothing in the study indicated that the student weighted budgeting model was more cost effective than the models most districts use as few districts have experimented with the student weighted model approach.

It appears that RBB as a decentralized approach is inefficient in responding to the crisis of needing to cut budget. Sure many principals want to maintain control over their site budgets and don’t want to return that power to the central authority. But, I would argue that the true cost of decentralization is never identified. Whether the model is good or bad is now moot in a time of budget cuts.

The question is can OUSD afford RBB in time of budget cutting?

And, the question should not be what does Eli Broad want?

Jim Mordecai

No safety problems at your school? Spend less on security. Tons of remedial math students? Spend some money on remedial math curriculum.

And like any solution, it brings with it new and different problems. If your school is poorly managed or even corrupt, for example, giving the site more say-so can lead to bad things indeed.

My point was that the two aspects of the job are very difficult to balance, not to suggest we necessarily need to spend more money on administrators overall.

I was thinking of the schools which have 1500 to 2000 student where the principals can’t get to know their staff or students because they are constantly dealing with paperwork, district meetings, and trying to find the money to keep things rolling.

But at any size school, if a principal can’t out of their office or meetings and into the classrooms and schoolyards, they can’t lead or evaluate well.