Smart Commentary from “Smart Money” Author

Please take a look at Jacob E. Adams Jr.‘s recent commentary posted by Ed Week. It’s an excellent summary of his book, Smart Money, Using Educational Resources to Accomplish Ambitious Learning Goals. The book is a great collection of the best education resource thinkers including our own Karen Hawley Miles. Here’s an excerpt from the commentary:

For policymakers, a smart-money approach means, first, delivering resources to schools transparently and flexibly, while maintaining the connection between dollars and students. Converting most general and categorical dollars into student-based funding, then depositing these student-based dollars in school-based accounts, would do the job.

Second, focus and enable educators’ work. How? By reconfiguring funding incentives; providing educators with better data that link student learning, finance, human resources, and family information; bolstering teachers’ and principals’ capacities to make good resource decisions; and rethinking the structure of collective bargaining, which alone controls the bulk of local education funds.

Third, invest in resource-oriented R&D, so that the field can expand knowledge of effective resource practices while experimenting with new methods.
Finally, redesign resource accounting and accountability to signal forcefully that student learning matters most.

Stay tuned next week when ERS with Ed Week will release the beginning of our new series Practical Tools for District Transformation—a series of guides and online tools to help district leaders take these steps.