What Happened to Student-Centered Funding?
It’s unlikely that many people will read hundreds of pages detailing 278 programs in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers audit released this year on the Department of Education, but the key problem highlighted is that appropriations are allocated by “program” and staff ratio formulas required in union contracts versus per pupil funding based on the individual cost of educating that student.
When the Hawaii State Legislature passed Act 51, “The Reinventing Education Act of 2004,” 70 percent of $1.7 billion in appropriations was supposed to go to schools. Instead, the DOE merely converted statewide, union-mandated position allocations into salaries that are charged off to each schools budget, whether the school needs that staff or not.
The pilot schools under the Act received only about half of the $7,700 per student average that they should have received under the 70 percent formula. Why are taxpayers spending $11,000 per student, while the schools are getting less than $4,000 per student? What is the other $7,000 per student being spent on?