International trends in the education of students with special educational needs

9.5 General Principles of Funding

1. 
   The funding of education and special education is extraordinarily complex.
   
2. 
   In efforts to resolve funding issues, the starting point should not be with how to fund special education, but rather with how to fund general education.
   
3. 
   There is no single, ‘best’ funding model. Every model has strengths and weaknesses, incentives and disincentives, and positive and negative outcomes that may affect different students differentially, so a combination of funding models seems desirable.
   
4. 
   From an economic efficiency viewpoint, it is best to allocate resources where they will do the most good, for example, to early identification and intensive education for students who struggle with learning, and in ways that support system or school policy, for example, improvements of students functioning in the lowest quartile.
   
5. 
   Resources should be allocated in ways that are coherent with, and promote, system policy, for example, towards greater inclusivity, lifting the performance of all students and particularly those functioning in the bottom quartile and improving equity. There are sound pedagogical and financial rationales for using resources to further integrate special and regular education.
   
6. 
   Funding should be flexible enough to meet the needs of children who experience complex needs.
   
7. 
   Undue perverse incentives and disincentives should be avoided.
   
8. 
   Resources should be directed to approaches for which there is evidence of effectiveness in improving students’ learning outcomes.
   
9. 
   Arrangements to ensure accountability, including the monitoring of the use of resources and outcomes for children, should be included.
   
10. 
    Funding should be transparent and equitable, with individual schools clear about the resources available to them.
    
11. 
    Funding should be allocated in ways that give schools the flexibility, within appropriate accountability frameworks, to implement practices that work for them and assist teachers to meet the learning needs of SWSEN in the context of accountability for a quality education for every student.
    

More recently, the writer has outlined a set of criteria for school funding that targets learners from low-SES families (Mitchell, in preparation). These are equally applicable to SWSEN and overlap with the above principles.

According to Levacˇić (2006) and Ross and Levacˇić (1999), school funding formulae may be assessed in relation to the four standard criteria of transparency, adequacy, efficiency and equity. To these four criteria, the writer added two more: robustness and freedom from unintended consequences (Mitchell, in preparation). Each of these six criteria are summarised as follows:

Transparency refers to the situation when stakeholders have easily available information on the amount of funding each administrative unit receives, the basis for this allocation and how these resources are used.

Adequacy refers to resources being sufficient to achieve a specified standard of education for students. In the case of funding for low SES students, there are several problems in making such a determination. First, with few exceptions, countries have not linked their funding levels for such students with their educational outcomes. Second, most jurisdictions do not specify the uses to which additional funding can be put. Third, since a number of countries that have introduced formula funding have done so nation-wide, there are no control schools with which to make comparisons. Fourth, comparisons of changes in attainment scores over time are unsatisfactory tests since other policies aimed at improving attainment, for example accountability and high stakes testing polices, have been implemented at the same time. Fifth, it is difficult to disentangle SES-related funding from other sources of grants to schools. All of these points have similar applicability to SESEN.

Funding models must give serious consideration to determining their adequacy. In other words, there is a need for rigorous cost-benefit analyses. Here, a costing-out study carried out in Pennsylvania to determine the basic cost per-student of providing an education to meet the state’s academic standards and assessments, is a possible way forward. Also, the School Improvement Grants recently instituted in the US, with their emphasis on funding having to show positive effects on important outcomes, provides a useful model (Federal Register, 2014). In a similar vein, Chile requires schools in receipt of supplementary funding to develop plans for educational improvement with specified educational outcomes (OECD, 2012).

Economists distinguish two types of efficiency—internal and external. Internal efficiency is concerned only with the production of a given output (e.g. exam results) at a minimum feasible cost and makes no assumption about the social value of that output. External efficiency is concerned with using a given amount of resources to produce the combination of educational outputs, such as qualifications at different levels, specific skills, attitudes and behaviours that are most valued by society. Attempts to measure schools’ efficiency are generally limited to internal efficiency—which considers only the relationship between inputs and schools’ outputs (as far as these can be quantified).

Regarding SWSEN, one of the (presumably) unintended consequences of some funding regimes is the possibility of working against inclusion. This can occur, for example, when SWSEN attending special schools are funded more generously per capita than SWSEN in regular schools. Likewise, when a ‘bounty’ is attached to students classified as disabled this may lead to an over-identification of such children and the risks of them being stigmatised.

A fitting conclusion to this section is Parrish’s (2001) advice to policy-makers on the allocation of resources:

We need to support programs that attempt to assist students prior to their referral to more costly special education interventions – especially in light of ever increasing student standards and high stakes accountability. We also need to target supplementary special education aid to districts serving students with extraordinarily high cost special needs. At the same time it is essential to begin bridging the gap between general and special education programs and providers to more fully address the educational needs of all children (p.8).

9.6 Funding and Inclusive Education

• 
  A recent comprehensive review of provisions to support inclusive education, carried out for the European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education by D’Alessio & Donelly (2013), makes the following points regarding funding:
  
• 
  Procedures for identifying, classifying and categorising of disability may reproduce forms of discrimination, despite their overt purpose to do otherwise.
  
• 
  Alternative approaches that focus on the requirements of learners with disabilities without the need to categorise them should be pursued. For example, Lebeer et al. (2010) have developed a framework of graded support in an attempt to move away from the medical model. This framework provides support at five levels in relation to students’ functional difficulties and environmental barriers. This is similar to what occurs in Finland where, as Sahlberg (2011) points out, up to half of all students completing their education at age 16 have received som special/additional support at some point of their schooling (see also Mitchell 2014b, chapter 28).
  
• 
  One of the main problems with funding inclusive education is not so much a lack of resources, but rather the inefficient use of existing resources (Slee, 2007) and the lack of clarity as to whether funds are deployed for the purposes for whch they were intended.
  
• 
  Rather than struggling with limited resources, schools should develop networks of support involving collaboration between local stakeholders.
  
• 
  The World Bank (Peters, 2004) provides some examples of measures that can be used to resource inclusive education. These include teacher education and professional development, using people with disabilities in the training processes, developing centralised resource centres, and community-based rehabilitation programmes.
  
• 
  The development of inclusive education, rather than a reproduction of special schooling within the mainstream requires the management of resources in such a way as to improve the capacity of the entire mainstream school to respond to the diversity of the student population (Ainscow et al., 2006).
  

9.7 Summary

1. 
   The means of allocating resources to SWSEN, and the quantum of these resources, has long exercised policy-makers around the world, and continues to do so.
   
2. 
   Funding is impinged on and, in turn impinges upon almost every issue explored in this review.
   
3. 
   Historically, funding arrangements for special education have often been kept administratively separate from the mechanisms that govern fiscal resources for general education.
   
4. 
   For the past decade or so, funding models for special education have been under review in many countries, driven by rising costs, concerns over efficiency and equity in the use of resources, and concerns about the incentives inherent in funding formulae for contra-indicated practices.
   
5. 
   There is not a strong body of evidence to show that finance in itself has a direct and major effect on student learning outcomes.
   
6. 
   Research has found, however, that particular types of expenditure do have a positive impact on student learning.
   
7. 
   Overall, per student education expenditures for those who receive special education services in the US are 1.91 times greater than expenditures for students who received no special education services. This is comparable to other estimates.
   
8. 
   .Three funding models can be identified: (a) demand (b) supply, and (c) output. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, with the consequence that many countries employ mixed funding models.
   
9. 
   .Another taxonomy of funding models, based on the sources of funding for SWSEN, has five categories: (a) discretionary funding, (b) categorical funding, (c) voucher-based funding, (d) census-based funding, and (e) actual-cost funding.
   
10. 
    Sources of funding for SWSEN vary considerably among countries, with different proportions coming from national, state and local educational authorities.
    
11. 
    General principles that should be taken into account in determining the most appropriate funding model(s) for SWSEN include:
    
    1. 
       the starting point should not be with how to fund special education, but rather with how to fund general education,
       
    2. 
       Every funding model has strengths and weaknesses, incentives and disincentives, and positive and negative outcomes that may affect different students differentially, so a combination of funding models seems desirable.
       
    3. 
       Resources should be allocated in ways that are coherent with, and promote, system policy.
       
    4. 
       Arrangements to ensure accountability, including the monitoring of the use of resources and outcomes for children, should be included.
       
12. 
    .In addition to meeting these principles, funding models should be transparent, adequate, efficient, equitable, robust and free from unintended consequences.
    
13. 
    .In evaluating the worth of funding arrangements, consideration should be given to the extent they facilitate inclusive education.
    

 

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