A study published recently by Teachers College at Columbia University takes a look at the historical record of higher education performance funding plans in the states. In many instances the programs were eventually discarded, according to the published summary. "One of the puzzles about higher education performance funding is that half of the states establishing it later abandoned it," the authors conclude.
Presumably the analysis does not examine the most recent wave of "outcomes-based" funding plans, such as the Momentum Points proposed by the Coordinating Board. Such approaches are presently growing in popularity around the country.
The report was written by Kevin Dougherty, Rebecca Natow, and Blanca Vega, all of Columbia. They point to a number of factors at work in the demise of some performance funding plans, but cite especially revenue shortages, which tend to reduce the enthusiasm of policy makers to stick with a program over the long haul.
Here's the link. The entire article can be purchased.
From the abstract:
Our findings concur with but also go beyond prior analyses of the demise of state performance funding systems. We concur that higher education opposition played a key role in this demise, stimulated by a perception of inadequate consultation with higher education institutions, use of performance indicators that institutions found invalid, high implementation costs to institutions, and erosion of campus autonomy. At the same time, our analysis turned up other causes of higher education opposition to performance funding that were not discovered by previous studies. A major cause of higher education opposition was the downturn in state finances in the early 2000s, which led institutions to focus on preserving their core state funding and giving up performance funding. Higher education opposition was also provoked if performance funding took the form not of adding to existing state funding but instead holding back a portion of the state appropriation and requiring institutions to earn it back through improved performance.
And:
Conclusions/Recommendations: If its advocates are to create a sustainable basis for state performance funding, they must find ways to insulate its funding from the ups and downs of the state revenue cycle, better secure the support of public institutions, and expand its breadth of political support by reaching out, for example, to business and to social groups driven primarily by the values of educational equality rather than educational efficiency.
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