Another August

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt

Here we are at the opening of another August, a month that will close with kids back in school, and no school funding bill. As I noted last August, this "ongoing failure" was even foreseen and warned about in the Foundation Budget Review Commission report itself.
We should be clear: having or not having a bill makes no difference for the upcoming school year. The funding for that was in the FY20 budget, which, with the Governor's signature this week, is now set. And, to be fair, there was progress on school funding in the actual budget.
But it's a single year budget. It didn't change the underlying formula. 
The lack of urgency is troubling. Governor Baker, in the article linked above, swiped at those of us noting this with this:

“I think sometimes people don’t give the Legislature enough credit for how difficult it is to change that formula,” Baker said. “There’s a tremendous amount of will in the building to do that, but this is a very hard exercise.”

Many of those of us concerned know better than most what "a very hard exercise" it is, but we also note the amount of time and lack of urgency that has been present for much of the last four years.

Those four years, as Senator Chang-Díaz noted, are half of an elementary school career. I'll add that they are the whole of a high school career, and for the class of 2019, that's just what they were.
I'm not being cute to say: kids don't get that time back. It's already too late. You've already lost it, and we will never get it back.
It's thus helpful for the Springfield Republican (online as MassLive) to be editorializing about the urgency, but the stridency they criticize Senator Chang-Díaz for (and let me know when the last time is that someone used that word of a male politican) is something that instead ought to be widely shared.

I do think this point from the editorial is one we should consider:

“I think everyone is working very hard to come to a place where everyone feels comfortable,” DeLeo said.
Therein lies the problem: everyone will not feel comfortable, no matter what result is finally reached. No sensible person questions the complexity and difficult of addressing (and paying for) the varied needs of 21st Century public education.
Compromise will be required. When that happens, people on all sides must accept they didn’t get everything they thought they should, but could live with the outcome.

Yes, but who lives with the outcome? The impact of a shift in the funding formula and who pays for it impacts some districts--and thus some students--more than others. Who is being asked to give up or live with what? The kids most underfunded--those in the Gateway Cities, and particularly those students who are poor, who are students of color, who are learning English--are those least often at the table when decisions are made. They've been accepting, like it or not, an underfunded school system for years at this point. The impact of this funding bill hits those kids and their futures more than anyone else.
I don't think we should be shrugging and saying that they're going to have to live it it, strident though that may make me.

This brings us to Max Larkin's piece for WBUR yesterday about one thing that may be holding up the bills: the low income count. MassBudget, of course, has been on top of the low income count for some time. A number of cities, particularly those with high numbers of immigrants, have been concerned about the impact in particular this administration has on families' willingness to sign up for services and thus make the count.
And we should be worried about that. The national administration has had a chilling effect on lots of things, and it is part of our job at the local level to mitigate and fight what we can.
And I said yesterday:

I know nothing of how the decision of who is and isn't speaking on the record is made, but it's disappointing that DESE didn't have the people who do this talk. There's a decent conversation to be had. https://t.co/qqvFVU5iX7 #MAEdu

— Tracy O'Connell Novick (@TracyNovick) August 1, 2019

Here's why I say this: there have been ongoing discussions dating back before we switched from low income to economically disadvantaged. There have been meetings and task forces and (see above) reports on how to improve the count. There has been a TON of work done on this. I don't want yesterday's article to leave the impression that anyone--and I include here DESE--has shrugged and said whatever.
I do think that "yes, but you got more money per student" is a pretty lame response, because we all know there should be more money per student, already. We also need to know how many kids we have.
Many of the proposals in MassBudget's report have been incorporated already; I'd also argue that if kids are eligible for state services, we should be figuring out how to get them on those state services, even aside from our district counts, as kids need health insurance and food outside of school! That remains an ongoing and looming issue with the national administration.
I think, though--and I hope that those who are actually making decisions on this are asking for solid data on this--that this is not really the big hold-up. Or it shouldn't be.

If I had some sort of inspiring summing up here, I'd offer it to you. Other than noting that those who are most voiceless and most at risk are those most harmed by postponing, I've got nothing. Waylay your reps and senators when they're around over the August break, please.