As much as they might like to deny it, money matters

Please read the excellent article in the latest edition of Commonwealth magazine on the Catch 22 the state foundation formula has now placed high need and lower income districts. The districts covered are Orange and Fall River, but (as has said by others) you could put Worcester in for Orange and tell the same story.
As local aid has dropped but required school spending has incrementally increased:

“That we’re having to argue over whether to fund the schools or keep a third shift of police is egregious,” said School Committee member Joan Cohen-Mitchell after a meeting this spring to discuss the town’s dire budget condition. “This is an awful situation.”
Kathy Reinig, a member of the town’s Board of Selectmen, says Orange’s back is against the wall. “We want to fund our schools above the required level, we want to provide services everyone needs—but we can’t,” she says.

Part of what's most interesting in the Commonwealth article is the retelling of the too-little-known history of school funding (and lawsuits) in Massachusetts:

 Indeed, it was just those kinds of yawning gaps in educational resources that inspired a series of court battles culminating in a landmark Supreme Judicial Court case, McDuffy v. Secretary of Education, which inspired passage of the 1993 reform law. Just three days before Gov. William Weld signed the education reform law, the SJC ruled in favor of student plaintiffs in poorer districts in the McDuffy case, finding that the state has an obligation under the Massachusetts Constitution to fund public schools so that all children receive an adequate education.The McDuffy ruling turned on the court’s interpretation of a single word in a single paragraph in the constitution, drafted by John Adams in 1779. The “rights and liberties” of citizens are dependent on the diffusion of “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue,” he wrote. “It shall be the duty of Legislatures and Magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences….”
The SJC pondered the use of the term “cherish,” delving into texts of the 18th century, Shakespeare, and even the Bible to determine whether Adams intended the state’s educational duty to be obligatory or aspirational. The court concluded that, in Adams’s day, the term meant “nourish” or “support,” imposing “an enforceable duty” on the state to provide and fund an adequate education for all. Education was the heart stone of democracy, to be nurtured as such “for all future periods.” But the SJC left to “Legislatures and Magistrates” the task of solving glaring inequities in school funding and programs.

(there's a reason that paragraph from the Massachusetts Constitution is on the bottom of this blog)

The uncomfortable truth, as demonstrated both in this article, the December 2010 Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education report on the foundation budget and in the November 2011 Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center report  is that the "grand bargain" of the foundation budget isn't working. It has not kept pace with inflation, has given no recognition to the ballooning costs of health care, and was never intended to adequately fund special education. Nor has the loss of local aid--a major source of funding for the state's lower wealth districts--been recognized.
This is such an uncomfortable truth that those with the power to do something about it refuse to recognize it:

Reville acknowledges that “the foundation budget is under tremendous strain” because of rising special ed and health care costs. But he calls the idea that the funding formula is broken “an extreme characterization,” and says the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education report offered a “hyperbolic conclusion” in saying that without a significant change it is no longer reasonable to hold schools accountable for student performance.

Reville goes on to say:

 State education officials say schools also need to do a better job utilizing existing resources to drive student learning. “Above a certain level, it’s not clear that more money yields results,” says Reville.

Oh, dear. Here we go again.

As much as it is painful--so painful that our own research bureau--without footnotes--denies it--it in fact is the case the greater spending does make a difference.
Allow me to send you straight over to Bruce Baker again:

To be blunt, money does matter. Schools and districts with more money clearly have greater ability to provide higher-quality, broader, and deeper educational opportunities to the children they serve. Furthermore, in the absence of money, or in the aftermath of deep cuts to existing funding, schools are unable to do many of the things they need to do in order to maintain quality educational opportunities. 

He is there citing his own most recent report on inequitable school funding, the second edition of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, which I highly recommend. May I also recommend to the Secretary the excellent Shanker report Does Money Matter in Education? also published this year.

One can find this as close as our own (and, note, the Secretary's own; he does live in Worcester, after all) classrooms, however. When a level-funded foundation budget copes with enormous health care and special ed costs, while keeping teacher costs where the foundation budget says should be, what gets hit?

In Worcester's case, two places*:
Facilities, which we are currently funding at 65.8% of the foundation budget.
Student supplies (which includes technology), which we are currently funding at 27.8 % of the foundation budget.

I'm the first to argue that Worcester is doing much better on facilities than we were even five years ago, but you can't fund facilities at 65.8% of the minimum required and not see buildings hit. Buildings are important enough to education that Massachusetts dedicates one of the six (and a quarter) cents of the state sales tax to buildings. Buildings that are clean, properly lit, heated and cooled as needed, and in good repair do a make a difference in how well children learn, as cited, for example, in this roundup of research by the federal Department of Education. If that is not being adequately funded, due to budgetary pressures elsewhere, does that hurt how students are learning? Yes, it certainly does.

Student supplies here includes textbooks, paper, pencils, but it also includes student-used technology. Funding what we actually use to teach kids--be that iPads and smartboards or papers and pens--makes education possible. You have to learn to read with something; you have to do your calculating on or with something. (Even one room schoolhouses had slates and chalk!) It is not possible to fund what you need to have kids learn at less than a third of what is minimally required and not have that hit how kids are learning.

It is about time that we had people who can actually change this stop denying what we know to be true--money matters and we're not doing what we should for kids in Massachusetts--and DO something about it. Continuing to dump this problem back on places like Orange, Fall River, and, yes, Worcester isn't fair.

Moreover, it isn't Constitutional.






*these numbers are from the report from Mr. Allen we received at our June 20 School Committee meeting; due to some sort of a glitch, minutes are not up online. I'll post a link once they are; in the meantime, the link is directly to the chart.