Public School Funding in Massachusetts

The Mass Budget and Policy Center has recently compared Massachusetts public education spending (for 2007, the most recent year available) to other states, as gathered by the U.S. Census bureau. You'll find the full report here. Two pieces of note:

In fact, the 2006-2007 school year marked the first time in Massachusetts where local revenues comprised less than 50 percent of education spending. Perhaps due to changes to the education funding system in Massachusetts made in FY 2007, state spending on education in the 2006-2007 school year reached its highest point since data has been available.
Sounds good, right?
While Massachusetts has continued to shift some of the education spending responsibility away from local sources, compared to other states Massachusetts is still heavily reliant on local revenues. This reliance on local funds makes up for the small share of federal education revenues received by Massachusetts. Massachusetts continues to rank among the lowest in the nation in percent of education funding that comes from federal dollars.
In some ways, by the way, this is a good thing, as much federal aid is tied to the number of low income children in a district. Massachusetts doesn't rank that high for that.
There's some great charts on that page (percent of the economy is pretty damning), which I recommend.


As 2007 now feels almost impossibly far away in terms of budgeting (and was it only this time last year that we were working on Question 1?!), the report goes on to look ahead to 2011. The incredibly bad news (which you've heard here before):
The FY 2011 Chapter 70 situation is potentially even more difficult than FY 2010 because additional federal financial assistance may not be available to offset state funding reductions. Already in FY 2009 and FY 2010, the state committed to using $580 million in federal money to fully fund Chapter 70. It is possible that the state’s entire SFSF allocation will be spent prior to FY 2011.
Their suggestion? It's time to look at both Ch.70 funding and the foundation budget formula.