Some of the costs of doing education business with Washington

As the Senate moves forward with Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) bill to overhaul U.S. K-12 education, with a greater emphasis coming on the side of local control and funding flexibility, states are still shouldering federal expectations that aren’t expected to go away any time soon.

Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government — even as the country moves beyond NCLB — and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.

One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on “billions” spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.

Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement — a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.

Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, calculated the ratio of standardized test spending to all the expenditures on students. In California, with $9,000 per pupil, $14 is directly spent on standardized testing. Rhode Island spends a total of $15,000 per pupil, with only $15 going to standardized testing. Washington spends slightly more, $47, to the roughly $10,000 pegged to each student.

The costs of testing are fairly stable and are not expected to change in the future. Data from one of the two consortia working to roll out the Common Core State Standards show the range in per-pupil test costs is $4.93 to $30.62.

The other costs associated with how much time a teacher must allocate to testing prep outside regular instruction are not always so easy to quantify. Doing so is often a trip down a rabbit hole of finding out what tests even gauge in the first place.

A 2008 paper for the National Research Council tried to make a more encompassing assessment on the costs of implementing not only testing, but also standards and accountability systems. It looked at three states to determine the additional dollars needed to proctor and administer the exams and found that these costs ranged from an additional $24 to $35 per student — hardly the close to $10,000 per pupil states often pay.

Tucker explained that the attempt to quantify everything that contributes to student testing can become limit. “‘Test prep’ is highly subjective and extremely variable across schools,” Tucker told TAI in a follow-up conversation. “Many would argue that good instruction prepares students for tests. Others obviously don’t. There are definitely opportunity costs in terms of teacher/student time, but if we eliminated testing, it’s not like we wouldn’t pay teachers for those days.”

A second cost incurred by states to adhere to federal standards is in needing to monitor outcomes. States are required to track information on how a student fares after graduating from high school, stemming from a bargain made with the Obama administration in 2009. The scope of the system includes looking at not just in-state higher education programs but all postsecondary institutions.

States took on the task because few had a choice — it was one of the requirements in accessing the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), the $40 billion in emergency education stimulus funds dolled out at the height of the recession. States got some money for starting the program, but now it has turned into a new additional expenditure.

As Anne Hyslop of Education Sector explains, states were happy to take the money then but not all had a finished product in time for the September 30th deadline. The Dept. of Ed ended up pushing the deadline to December of 2012. Hyslop also explained that many states were on their way to tracking the performances of high school graduates in higher education already.

The Obama administration has not signaled any coming change to the policy. When laying out the terms for receiving a waiver from NCLB requirements in late September, states were reminded they had to comply with developing a collegiate tracking system.

There is one benefit to having these new metrics, however: once fully developed, states can even use the data to better monitor individual school performances.”If a state wants to incorporate these measures into how they evaluate and hold high schools accountable for student performance, they can choose to do so in their application for an [NCLB] waiver,” Hyslop told TAI. “But there is no requirement for states to do so, and it was not encouraged in the waiver request.”

But there is one simple way for states to save a significant amount of money on education spending. States that pursue a quid pro quo arrangement with the Dept. of Ed. to opt out of NCLB can look forward to more spending flexibility.

Supplemental Education Services, a provision in the original 2002 NCLB legislation, requires states to put aside 20 percent of Title 1 school funding — the $14.5 billion federal aid pot given to schools with poor students — for tutoring and other extra student assistance if a school misses performance benchmarks at least three years in a row. As a result, less dollars were available for other school funding needs.

Jeremy Ayers, an education policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, explained that the new waivers give states a way to opt-out of that funding agreement. However, he explained, “Some states may still require districts to administer SES.”