Alumni Gazette

Estimating the Cost of School Performance

Taylor

Appointed in 2003, Lori Taylor ’90 (PhD), an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and assistant professor at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A & M University, heads a team examining the formula the Texas legislature uses to determine how much funding school districts receive and how the funds are distributed.

What’s the goal of your analysis?

The analysis finds the level of spending required to meet performance standards.

Why undertake such a study?

The Texas legislature had devised a school finance formula that operated for about a decade but had become a tad creaky. In 1989, the formula was declared unconstitutional. The way the formula is structured, taxpayers are paying more, but schools are not getting mor.

Does Texas hold lessons for the nation?

Texas is the bellwether for this type of analytical approach. Texas has been collecting data on schools’ success rates for more than a decade.

Was that the precursor to the No Child Left Behind Act?

Yes. It was implemented when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, and, of course, there’s a flow of ideas from the state government to the national government.

Can schools be held to what is, essentially, similar to corporate quality assessment?

Schools can be held to that as long as the model for school spending reflects the variation in student needs, prices, and scale, and this model meets all three of those requirements. It’s benchmarking. This is an attractive methodology to get an estimate for cost differentials. But it’s not the truth—it’s just an estimate of the truth.