Costing Out the Resources Needed to Meet Michigan’s Standards and Requirements
Prepared for the Michigan School Finance Collaborative in 2018
Augenblick, Palaich and Associates (APA), in partnership with Picus, Odden, and Associates (POA), was hired by the School Finance Research Collaborative to examine the resources needed for students, teachers, schools, and districts to meet Michigan’s academic standards. The study team also includes national school finance experts Michael Griffith, Chris Stoddard, and Jennifer Imazeki.
This report details the approaches used by the study team to estimate the resources needed in Michigan to meet state standards. The study team’s implementation of adequacy approaches focused on engaging educators from around Michigan, ensuring the study included the complete state context in its findings. The data collection brought together over 250 educators from school districts, public school academies (charters), and intermediate school districts to examine the resources needed for students to meet state standards. These teachers, principals, special education educators, district administrators and other education professionals came from all over the state and from districts of various sizes to examine and provide input on Michigan’s resource needs.
The study resulted in the following reccomendations:
Using the results of the study, create an adequacy based funding system using appropriate base cost, weights, and adjustments for district characteristics.
The base cost per student and special needs adjustments should be funded at the same levels for districts and brick and mortar charter schools.
Retirement costs above the costs used in the costing out need to be funded for all entities facing the expense.
Transportation funding should be provided outside of the base per student amount and funding should be tied to actual transportation costs.
The state should undertake a full capital study that examines the costs faced by districts and charter schools.
The study team suggests utilizing a Comparable Wage Index (CWI) to adjust for cost differences due to geographic location.
The study team suggests utilizing a 0.10 weight for every CTE student.