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Record W2090860180 · doi:10.1177/003172170808900919

Fix the Flawed Funding Formula!

2008· article· en· W2090860180 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenuePhi Delta Kappan · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Policy and Governance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMathematics educationPolitical sciencePublic administrationLaw and economicsEconomicsPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

SPRING is season for announcing funding to schools in Canadian provinces. Some provinces, such as Manitoba, announce funding early in calendar year for following school year, but in most provinces funding for schools is announced following release of provincial budget. This, in turn, usually follows release of federal budget, which occurred in Canada this year late in February, just as I was writing this column. By time you read this in May, just about all provinces will have announced their 2008-09 school funding. Schools in Canada today are funded at reasonable, though not extravagant, levels. However, level does vary significantly from one province to another. Canada now spends about $50 billion per year on its schools, which is about $10,000 per student per year or about 3.5% of our gross domestic product. On most international measures, our spending is about at middle among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Given Canadian students' excellent results on international tests, Canadian school system provides good value for money. Almost all money for Canadian public schools comes from provincial governments. In only two provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, is a significant share of school funding still derived from property taxes levied by local school boards, though substantial local funding was norm in Canada until 1980s and 1990s. Because school districts get their money from provincial governments, not only does total amount of money matter, but so does formula through which it is allocated. Provincial governments give a great deal of attention to their annual decisions on education funding. After all, this is one of biggest single items in their budgets and also one that gets a lot of public attention because many people are connected with schools in one way or another--as students, parents, extended family, or staff. Making funding decisions and announcements were among most important things I did as a senior official in two Canadian governments. Yet no matter what announcement was, dominant reaction from education sector always seemed to be disappointment. And same result holds in every other province today. When it comes to funding schools, it's hard to please anyone, let alone everyone. In both provinces where I worked in government, Manitoba and Ontario, education sector argued that funding formula used by province was problem and had to be changed. In making this claim education groups were aided and abetted by media, who liked stories on conflict over funding and whose understanding of real mechanics of school funding tended to be quite limited. In Manitoba, provincial funding formula was usually described by a major newspaper as the complex and convoluted funding formula, as if that were its official name. I could imagine minister intoning, Today I am pleased to announce our Complex and Convoluted Funding known as CCFF for short. In Ontario in last two years, media have often referred to provincial funding formula as Flawed Funding Formula, based on constant repetition of this assertion by various parties in education system. In reality there are several reasons why no funding formula and no funding announcement will ever satisfy education sector. And there are some big reasons why this endless dispute over money is a problem for whole education sector. Let's start with inherent inadequacy of any school funding scheme. Schools as human service organizations will never have enough money to do everything they would like to do for their students. No matter how much is currently being done, it's easy to see how a new program, or some more staff, or better facilities would help even more. No matter how much is spent on schools--and whether purely for reasons of selfinterest or not-- people in education will want and see need for more. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.454
Threshold uncertainty score0.935

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.313
Teacher spread0.239 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it