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Summer School Math: How Should the State Count Summer School Students?

Introduction

As summer fades away and the fall legislative session heats up, the procedure for counting the number of students in summer school classes is being debated by the Legislature’s budget-writing Conference Committee. The outcome of this debate will affect summer school enrollment, which has grown more slowly since the state imposed revenue growth limits in 1993.

Funding for summer school programs is restricted by the revenue cap formula, and particularly by the way it counts summer school students. The undercounting of these students will become much more important as schools implement high stakes testing and need to offer remedial programs for failing pupils.

Current state statutes count summer school students inconsistently for purposes of the equalization aid formula and the revenue caps. However, a provision in the Senate version of the budget would apply the same counting procedure under both formulas, thereby removing an impediment to the expansion of summer school programs.

How We Count Summer School Students

The state began imposing a revenue limit on school districts in the 1993-94 school year. The revenue cap is calculated each year for each school district by applying a formula that is driven by three factors: the district’s per pupil revenue base, the change in school enrollment, and an inflation factor (i.e., a maximum allowable increase in revenue per pupil).A district with growing enrollment will have a higher revenue cap; whereas a district with declining enrollment would have to reduce its spending if the inflation factor does not offset the enrollment decline.

Both the revenue growth formula and the school aids formula include summer school students in a district’s enrollment count (although they only began to be included for revenue cap purposes in the 1998-99 school year).And both formulas are based on the premise that the summer school enrollment should count differently to account for the shorter amount of time that they are in school. To accomplish this objective, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) converts the summer school enrollment figures into “full-time equivalent” enrollment numbers by using a ratio of the number of student hours or minutes spent in summer school compared to the amount of time in the regular school year.

The summer school FTE enrollment figure is added to a district’s regular school year enrollment for purposes of the equalization aid formula. However, for the revenue limit formula the FTE figure is divided by five before it is added to the regular enrollment. In other words, the method used to compute revenue caps gives summer school students only one-fifth the weighting that they have for purposes of the allocation of equalization aid. It is unclear whether the one-fifth adjustment was made because some legislators did not understand that the FTE calculation already adjusts for the shorter time spent in summer school classes, or whether it simply reflects a desire to limit school spending and the growth in the state’s school aid expenditures.

Source: Department of Public Instruction

Growth of Summer School Programs

Chart 1 illustrates the growth in summer school enrollment in Wisconsin in the past decade. From 1989 through 1992 the total number of summer school pupils increased at an average of 4 percent per year. However, since revenue caps were imposed in 1993, enrollment growth in summer school classes slowed to an average of 1.9 percent per year (despite a sharp rise in 1998, due largely to a significant increase in Milwaukee Public Schools' summer school program). The enrollment dip in 1993 corresponds to the implementation of the revenue cap. A direct causal relationship to the spending caps would be difficult to prove, but overall school spending growth did fall after 1992.

Summer enrollment figures for the 1990s are misleading, however, insofar as they mask enrollment trends among three discernible district groupings--Milwaukee schools, the next 24 largest districts, and the remaining 403 districts.

Table 1 presents separately the summer school enrollment for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), and the next largest 24 and 403 school districts, respectively. Much of the variability in the statewide trends in Chart 1 is explained by changes in MPS enrollment. (The largest 25 districts are those with academic year enrollment of more than 5,000 students. MPS, with just under 100,000 enrollment, is about four times larger than the next largest district of Madison. The average district size statewide is just over 2,000.)

Table 1. Summer Enrollment Trends for Districts Groupings

Source: Wisconsin Budget Project, based on Department of Public Instruction data.

The next largest 24 districts saw slow growth during the 1990s, but in 1998 were still below their summer enrollment peak of 1992. The 94 percent of districts with regular enrollments under 5,000 students grew nearly three times faster than those 24 districts from 1989 through 1998. The disparity in enrollment growth by district size is also evident when looking at the pre- and post-revenue cap periods.

The reason for this disparity is unclear. The total per pupil costs of the largest 25 districts is virtually identical to the statewide average, so funding availability alone is not an adequate explanation. If we focus in on key costs for the nine largest school districts, however, a pattern of extraordinary spending for "categorical" items emerges. The nine largest districts are those with regular school enrollments of more than 10,000 students. Their costs in key categories differ substantially from the statewide average.

Table 2 demonstrates that the largest districts spend a disproportionate amount of resources on items such as special education and pupil support compared to the rest of the state. We may ask whether these higher costs for larger districts have impacted their ability to provide summer school programs.

Table 2. Selected Costs of Nine Largest Districts Compared to All Other Districts 1996-97
Percent of Statewide Enrollment Percent of Statewide Spending Average Per Pupil Costs as Percentage of Rest of State
Regular Instructional Costs Special Education Pupil Support Administration
26% 27% 105% 143% 126% 96%

Source: Wisconsin Budget Project, based on data from Department of Public Instruction. Special education expenditures are for services for students with disabilities. Pupil support expenditures are for services that assess and improve the well-being of pupils, such as social work, guidance counseling, health services, psychological services, attendance monitoring and programs for school-age parents.

Table 2. Selected Costs of Nine Largest Districts Compared to All Other Districts 1996-97

Source: Wisconsin Budget Project, based on Department of Public Instruction. Special education expenditures are for services for students with disabilities. Pupil support expenditures are for services that assess and improve the well-being of pupils, such as social work, guidance counseling, health services, psychological services, attendance monitoring and programs for school-age parents.

High Stakes Testing

Current state statutes call for the graduation of high school seniors, and the advancement of fourth and eighth graders, to be conditioned upon passing all five subject areas in state proficiency exams, starting with the 2002-03 school year. Even if that mandate is repealed (as some legislators have proposed), it appears likely that many districts will proceed with high stakes tests. School districts will have tough choices providing programs for pupils facing retention after they fail these exams.

Holding back students has been found to reduce self-esteem, increase behavioral difficulties and raise drop-out rates (only 24% of retained students graduate, compared to 52% of similar low-performing, but never retained, peers).Many districts are likely to view summer school as a less costly and more effective option – to the extent that they can use it to reduce the number of students held back a year for failing a high-stakes exam.

As districts and parents weigh their options for the students who fail one or more subjects in a high stakes exam, the districts will find that the revenue cap formula skews their choices. Although the school aid formula is neutral with respect to whether a failing student is held back or placed in a summer school program, the pupil count used for purposes of calculating the state’s revenue cap creates a strong bias against summer schooling. Consequently, districts are likely to find their programming decisions based on the idiosyncrasies of the formulas, rather than making those decisions based on what is best for the students or most cost-effective for the district.

Fully counting summer school students (on an FTE basis) for purposes of the revenue cap formula would allow districts to spend a little more, which would also increase state costs. On the other hand, costs will also go up, and perhaps even more, if districts implementing high stakes testing have increases in their regular enrollment because of students who are held back.

Conclusion

As Wisconsin schools begin implementing high stakes testing, they are likely to consider increasing the use of summer schooling to reduce the number of failing students that need to be held back to repeat a year. However, investing more in such programs will prove to be difficult for many districts because of the undercounting of summer school students in the revenue cap formula.

The provision in the Senate version of the budget that counts summer school students consistently for the revenue cap and school aids removes an impediment to the use of summer schools. It won’t make financing summer school easy for districts, but it will allow educators to make more rational decisions about how best to help students with failing grades or test scores. To the extent that school districts can implement effective remedial summer school programs that significantly reduce the numbers of students who repeat a grade, both the school districts and the state will save money.