Governor Baker submits a school funding bill: H 70

note that for the most part, the Legislature doesn't as yet have bill numbers for what is filed; thus everything is "SD" and "HD" until they have numbers, which is for "Senate Docket" and "House Docket." Somehow the Governor jumped the queue and already has a bill number, which is (as some have pointed out, an appropriate) H.70.
(I always wonder about these things and there never seems anyone to ask, so I try to include them.)
This is "An Act to Ensure Equity and Excellence in Education," which demonstrates that the Senate has better acronym writers. It has been referred to the Joint Committee on Education.
It's also probably good to note that there is at least some indication that this isn't a popular bill. 


The thing that is most important to know about House bill 70 is that is the product of more than one author and more than one motivation. There is a Governor Baker-oriented school funding bill with some Foundation Budget Review Commission implementation with some additional funding pieces including a draconian (literally?) funding consequence for underperforming schools, on the one hand. There is also a bill that combs through the school funding law as it currently exists and updates it to the way that we actually operate; that part comes to us, I believe, from the school finance people at DESE.
That last part is fine. We could argue over if this is really how we want to run things or if we want to make other changes, but making the actual law reflect reality on the pieces behind the calculation (not the foundation budget itself) is a reasonable thing to do.
These two pieces are intermixed, though, so disentangling the parts is necessary.

The Governor sends along a filing letter presenting his argument and his perspective on what he is doing. I don't know who wrote it--it sounds like Secretary Peyser, but that could mean nothing--but certainly expresses what I have seen of Governor Baker's view on education.

The piece that I want to wave a giant red flag on is the piece expanding the Commissioner's power, which of course has nothing to do with the foundation budget at all:

• the first bit is that currently a turnaround plan created by a described stakeholder group (MGL Ch. 69, section 1J, subsection e) is issued by the superintendent: "the superintendent shall issue a final turnaround plan for the school and the plan shall be made publicly available." The union or the school committee may then appeal the plan to the Commissioner. This bill would have the superintendent submit the plan to the Commissioner and only after his approval would the plan be publicly available. This would, obviously, render moot after that any appeal to the Commissioner by school committee or union. This is a big deal. 
• not only the superintendent, but also the commissioner will conduct an annual review of any school deemed underperforming; this is a change from what is done right now. It's not clear how that would be possible. The kind of review done by DESE is a comprehensive, time consuming endeavor by all involved. 
• the actions of the commissioner if a school substantially fails to meet goals, the commissioiner can appoint an examiner, require changes, or appoint an external partner; all of these are provided in the law already, but this section puts it together.
• the big issue is the funding piece of this, as the bill allows the commissioner if he "determines that the district is taking insufficient steps to implement changes to the turnaround plan" to take away the district's Ch. 70 aid at the beginning of the school year (if you were looking for evidence that whomever behind this is missing how school budgets work, there you go!) up to an amount equal to per pupil allocation times the number of students in the school--this in essence means that school's foundation budget. That funding would be set aside in a "Public School Turnaround Fund" of the state "until such time as the district implements the changes as determined by the commissioner." In turn, the district could not lower the school's funding, but could only be taking out of non "direct access to students." If we did this, Massachusetts would join the ranks of states that have made the grave error of taking away funding from underperforming schools. This builds on the myth that districts are overspending or spending ill on administration--most are not--and that services that don't directly access students don't serve them. This is, to give but one example, the reverse of what the state itself found in Southbridge, where it found the district was under-administered. We absolutely should not do this.

About the foundation budget piece: 

• while it keeps being said that the bill fully implements the recommendations of the Foundation Budget Review Commission, it does not in a very specific way: while the bill does implement changing the assumed in-district special education enrollment from 3.75% to 4% for regular districts, it does not shift vocational schools/districts from 4% to 5%. Those from DESE whom I have heard speak to this have argued that the needs of special education students at vocational schools were not as high as the fully population of students in special education elsewhere, thus the shift was not warranted. That wasn't the argument put forward by the Commission. 
• the bill does, as of FY21, boost out-of-district special education to three times the state average per pupil foundation budget
• the bill does, as of FY21, tie health insurance inflation to the GIC rate annually. It resets the rate for FY20 at about a 30% increase over the actual proposed budget for FY20. Offhand, I don't think that gets us where we need to be in terms of the current gaps between spending and foundation budget allotment.
• it keeps English learner as an increment, as added by the Senate this past year, and makes the increment between 27 and 33% of the base rate, progressively weighted to the higher grades (the bill uses the same numbers actually proposed in the FY20 budget). As the Foundation Budget Review Commission gave an actual dollar amount in 2015, it isn't right to make that comparison, and the progressive funding (which is the way these bills seem to be going) is a positive step. 
• it includes additional funding for poor students, keeping the decile ranking system and current direct certification counts, and using the same dollar amounts in the first five deciles that are used in the FY20 budget, but weighing the latter increments more heavily, with decile 10 topping out at $500 per pupil more than the FY20 budget does. What this doesn't do is break more than 50% of the base rate per pupil, however, save in high decile younger grades. It takes the smallest step possible within implementation, which recommended between 50-100%. They do also (as in the FY20) add the "high needs" category for decile 9 and 10 and 20% EL.
• there is not any inclusion of a data commission. This, to me, more than anything, says that someone (DESE?) thinks that work is done; see below for more on that. It was, however, a Commission recommendation.
• Note that on all of the places where it includes a dollar amount effective FY20 that is different than the actual budget for FY20, the budget is what would happen, but the bill then would become the goal rate towards which implementation was moving. 

Pieces that are neither of the above:

• The bill creates two trust funds, one for further regionalization encouragement and another for to stash the above money that would be taken from districts with underperforming schools at the Commissioner's discretion. 
• The bill requires spending reporting by foundation budget category and can require it by enrollment and by program area, which is kind of a way of wrestling with the question of if we have enough data without requiring a data commission (this is a super DESE way of handling this, by the way; they know the data exists, so they're just requiring that it get reported).
• The bill creates a regionalization assistance program and creates at Regionalization Fund for grants for planning and implementation. It gives priority to rural areas (without defining them) and other districts with persistent enrollment declines. 
• It changes the charter funding in a couple of ways. First, it boosts the facilities component that all charters get to $938 and then indexes it to inflation (that number has been the same for quite a number of years). It shifts back to 100% for the first year, 60% for the second, 40% for the third year of what they are calling transitional assistance. Most importantly, the bill changes who gets tuition reimbursement: transitional assistance funds the difference between the current charter enrollment MINUS the highest enrollment of the previous five years, thus only districts where charter schools are actively growing will receive this funding. It also creates and codifies "supplemental charter assistance" for districts that have low Ch. 70 and high charter numbers; this year, that means $6M for Boston and two towns on Martha's Vineyard (please tell me how THAT is the highest and best use!) It also ties both these sections together to be funded at the same pace.
• The bill creates a commission on rural schools to come back with trends, projections, and recommendations for rural schools in the state, and their report would be due June 30, 2020. 

The wonky "we do this but it isn't written down" bits are as follows:

• it spells out the components (and only the components!) being currently used in the foundation budget (in section 11). Note that this is part of what caught those who wrote the House bill (which we'll get to eventually, as well), as they used old language on preschool and "bilingual" students. This includes definitions of combined effort yield, excess effort, effort reduction, municipal revenue growth factor (in fact, it spells out how to calculate it!), minimum aid, net school spending, and so on, which in many cases were not codified. Note that this would put into the law something which was done this year, which is requiring that districts with a combined effort yield equal to or greater than 175% of its foundation budget be responsible for the full 82.5% of its foundation budget.
• it eliminates a bimonthly recalculation of the ch. 70 formula so that it can work with the state budget cycle (section 12)
• it gets rid of the idea of "overburden aid" which we haven't been doing in years (section 13)
• it codifies net school spending as a requirement and requires the Commissioner let districts know of their minimum local contributions by March 1 (which happens now through the Governor's budget, 'though that isn't necessarily where it ends up). It also drops a 30 day waiting period on preliminary estimates, and drops an old method of calculating regional vocational funding (section 14) 
• it repeals an automatic reduction in local required appropriation if the final state appropriation is reduced (section 15)
• it codifies taking school choice and charter tuition from a district's Chapter 70 appropriation. (section 17) Did you know this wasn't in the MGL? I didn't!
• it repeals the original phase-in of the law from 1994 (section 18)
• it codifies that in any year in which there isn't enough funding to do everything, foundation aid gets funded first (section 19)

And the bill states that it will go into effect July 1.