A few school finance updates from across the country

NPR has an update from their earlier report on school funding across the country, with updates from Kansas, Texas, and Arizona, ranging from chaos to no change to some change. As all involve funding lawsuits, worth reading, Massachusetts.
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Slate has a thorough piece on Governor Christie's proposed change in New Jersey state funding:

Here’s how Christie’s proposal would work in practice: Hillsborough Township, the leafy suburb where he delivered his speech, is 78 percent white, 8 percent Latino, and 5 percent black. Its education funding would increase by 86 percent under Christie’s plan. In high-poverty Newark, which is 84 percent black and Latino, funding would decrease by a devastating 69 percent.

That a member of the Republican presidential nominee’s inner circle has made such a proposal is frankly terrifying. Christie’s plan is a deeply regressive one that would overturn a half-century of bipartisan consensus that poor children need extra educational resources. 

 Also, worth noting from a Massachusetts perspective (emphasis added):

New Jersey is  one of the top two states in the nation on academic performance adjusted for student demographics, meaning poor children there academically outperform poor children in every state except Massachusetts.  

According to an analysis of state data by the Education Law Center, the nonprofit that brought the Abbott case, between 2001 and 2010, the average high-school graduation rate across the state’s poorest districts climbed from 71 to 83 percent. There is little doubt that extra funding for poor children drove those gains.   

Likewise, true of Massachusetts. But it stands in peril so long as we do nothing on the foundation budget.