8 Reduce Reporting by Eliminating Restrictions on Education Funding BY ROYCE VAN TASSELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR All of public education wearies under the burden of never-ending reports. Today a new survey. Tomorrow an assurance. An update to the grants management system. Not to mention the mountain of reports and uploads from section staff and monitors and auditors. Especially at a charter school, these never-ending reports sap the director’s energy and creativity. Instead of being the school’s instructional and educational leader, they become automatons, pushing paper here and there. School administrators must fill out these reports to demonstrate to the Legislature and the State Board of Education that they have spent the various streams of money in accordance with the restrictions on those streams of money. Based on extensive analysis of Utah’s many funding streams, it’s clear that policymakers place several different kinds of restrictions on how schools can use those funding streams. Some restrictions are relatively light, while others layer on top of each other, wringing innovation and energy out of our schools. Kinds of Restrictions Policy Makers Impose Use of funds spelled out The most obvious restriction policymakers use is to tell schools exactly how they may spend the money. This money can ONLY be used to pay for computers or software. That money may only be used to pay paraprofessionals. You can give a bonus to these teachers, but not to those teachers. The uses of funds spelled out by policymakers may be good ones. They may even reflect the same choices schools want to make. However, applying the restrictions means the school has to demonstrate that they have spent the money according to policymakers’ requirements. This flavor of restrictions often shows up in legislation, but may also be in rules adopted by the State Board of Education. Matching requirements Sometimes policymakers restrict how a school may spend money by requiring schools to match their state dollars with other local dollars. In theory, that matching requirement means the state stream of money is controlling other unrestricted funds, which means the director’s judgment about what is best for their school takes second place to the policy preferences of elected officials. Certainly, those officials mean well, but there is scant evidence to support the belief that they know better how to run a school than the school’s board and director. Reimbursement requirements Another way that policymakers restrict how schools can use funds is when the school can only receive the funds on a reimbursement basis. In other words, policymakers prescribe how a school can use the funds. Then to verify that they’ve done so per the policymakers’ expectations, the school must spend its own dollars first, demonstrate that they’ve already spent that money on approved items, and then the school can receive the flow of funds to pay for it. Tied to a specific employee type Sometimes policymakers tie a specific funding stream to a given type of employee. Sometimes the funding is only
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