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For more than a decade, education reformers have admired the achievements of the Edmonton Public Schools in Canada, and school districts across the United States have attempted to replicate Edmonton's success with school-site decision making. However, most districts have stopped short of implementing one policy that is central to Edmonton's success: a radical new method of allocating resources to schools. Under the leadership of Superintendents Mike Strembitsky, Emery Dosdall and now Angus McBeath, Edmonton has pioneered a program called Weighted Student Formula, in which each student receives an allocation--weighted according to his or her specific needs--that follows the student all the way to the school. Families are free to choose any public school, and principals have a great deal of discretion over their school budget, which is an aggregation of all the individual student allocations. Following Edmonton's lead, several districts in the United States have launched their own versions of weighted student formulas, or WSF: Houston, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Cincinnati already have implemented the program, while San Francisco has launched a more limited version. A dozen of the best practices that school districts have used to successfully implement WSF have been identified. The authors are hopeful that school system leaders will be able to use these lessons to design weighted student formulas that are politically viable, financially equitable and managerially workable.

Decentralization has been a popular theme in school districts for a long time. Indeed, most districts claim that they are decentralized, having latched onto the "site-based management" movement of the 1980s. Superintendents and central-office personnel point to their local school councils, staffed by parents, teachers, and school administrators, and claim that they have moved decision making down to the school level. However, they have neither achieved nor even attempted "true" decentralization, which requires that power over the budget be given to each school--and taken away from the central office. In "Making Schools Work," Lydia Segal and the author detail the results of an empirical study of nine school systems that vary dramatically in their degree of decentralization. The findings from the study demonstrate that true decentralization yields benefits in both efficiency and performance. As in other large organizations, faraway bureaucrats in central offices are in a poor position to know what should be done in each of a hundred or a thousand schools. Thus local autonomy along with accountability is essential to success in education. Decentralizing power to school principals and funding students rather than schools would be a good start. (Contains 1 figure.)