Worcester gets an article after all: building a bigger table

...but before we talk about that, let's note this nice piece from Sentate President (and former Ashland School Committee member and yes, I am always going to remind us of that) Karen Spilka:

This week, the Massachusetts Legislature passed the Student Opportunity Act unanimously. This historic vote demonstrates our commonwealth’s continuing commitment to ensure a quality public education for all our children.
It also represents a deeply personal achievement for me and MetroWest, as I first ran for the Legislature 18 years ago to address what I saw as inequities in school funding in my hometown. With my two young children in public school, I first ran for school committee, and then convened the Chapter 70 Roundtable.
A statewide coalition of parents, teachers, administrators, school officials, advocates and stakeholders, we sought to advocate for equity, adequacy and predictability in educational funding. the passage of the Student Opportunity Act, I am proud to say that we are finally seeing the culmination of that advocacy two decades later.

Very true, and we should note that the leadership of Senate President-emerita and former Worcester School Committee member Harriette Chandler, as well, and that list is considerably longer. 

Earlier this week, I was lamenting the losses among the local press and what that meant for coverage of this school funding bill's impact locally; I am more than pleased to have been proven wrong this morning:

Front page of the Sunday Telegram has a headline that reads "Filling the blanks" over an image of a teacher leaning over a little girl with headphones looking a laptop screen

And the article is online here. 

I would say there are three things happening in this article:

1. Is this really over?

This is the crux of the question over if the potential lawsuit involving Worcester will be dropped, for starters. We should note that Worcester, involved in the potential Mass Association of School Superintendents lawsuit, has not been among those represented in a currently filed lawsuit. The lawsuit that aleady exists through the Council for Fair School Finance (of which, yes, MASC is a member), is Mussotte v. Peyser, was filed in June, and involves children from Chelsea, Chicopee, Fall River, Haverhill, Lowell, Orange, and Springfield. That lawsuit has not been dropped, and I don't know anything of that decision, but the note coming from Worcester's administration that this becomes about implementation is, I think, the key.
I think we also need to remember that "they're trying" was more or less the state's (successful) defense in the Hancock case, so the hopes of a lawsuit being successful under those terms is much less certain.
Which brings us to Brian Allen's answer to "how much?":

As Worcester’s chief financial and operations officer Brian Allen pointed out, while the SOA establishes the goal-funding rates, left unsettled is at what number those rates will be phased in each year.
“It appears to fully cover the gap in the foundation budget we’ve been talking about,” he said, referring to district estimates that Worcester has been underfunded by around $100 million under the current formula. But a host of variables, including the performance of the economy, means that money isn’t technically guaranteed as of the passage of the bill, he added. “Our individual yearly budget will still be subject to what the rates are phased in at (in any given year) ... there’s still going to be a level of uncertainty.”

 This isn't a money bill.

My slide from my 70 on 70 presentation; this is what this becomes about.

There is no actual funding being passed by this bill. It lays out a plan SUBJECT TO APPROPRIATION of what will be done, and, as Mr. Allen notes, there isn't an actual schedule in the bill, either. There are also, as I noted back when the Governor leaked DESE spreadsheets, a lot of pieces that are still WAY up in the air: how are we changing the low income count? are we changing the municipal finance side? what are the inflation rateS (there are two now, remember)? and yes, does the economy slide or worse?
That is in ADDITION to the pieces that change year to year, anyway, with the biggest being enrollment, district by district (WHICH DESE DID NOT HAVE UNTIL OCTOBER), and what the municipal economies look like.
We don't know a lot of that. And even the part that we DO know for next year (as we'll be using the FY16 low income counts, for example) is something we know for one year.
AND we still don't know what state implementation will look like.
Thus Superintendent Jokela is right in not getting ahead of things. We need to plan, but we also need to wait.
I've now said this to school business officials, and to school committee members, and to superintendents: the most accurate numbers right now are going to be LOCALLY GENERATED.
And they're still only going to be for one year.
This is one of two areas our advocacy needs to shift to: we need year by year commitment by the Legislature and the Governor to implementation.

2. But are we going to get anything at all?
Let me note up front that this is not a Worcester question; the answer for Worcester is yes, but HEY WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MUNICIPAL CONTRIBUTION YESTERDAY.

For many other districts, it's the question of if the state is going to be contributing more than the minimum per pupil increase, along with the fear that their local contributions are going to be increasing a great deal. On the first, there's a reason the Education Committee included charter reimbursement and the (massive) addition of out-of-district transportation to the circuit breaker (which is getting frozen at the FY20 level, plus inflation). ASK HOW MUCH THAT IS FOR YOUR DISTRICT.
On the second, let me direct you back here . This is one that you CAN with a little work mostly figure out; you just have to know how much your actual municipal contribution was for last year, versus how much was required. Rolling forward, what's the division on foundation of the target? Most of you are going to find that your local municipality(ies) are already well over minimum required.
...which brings me to what IS my main concern here: If you are a district that lives in the 5%/7% or so over, and it's a struggle every year to get there, my concern is those that would prefer to spend no more on schools are going to say "we've given you what is required; you should be fine," when perhaps you are not.
If this is your reality, the time to start having those discussions is now.

3. What do we do now? 

Even given Mr. Allen (et al)'s conservative (small c) caution on implementation, we're going to see the largest increase in school funding in Massachusetts since the 1993 Education Reform Act. What are we going to do with it?
If you read this blog with regularity, you can perhaps tell that Scott caught me mid-blog post in my comments in the article. Thinking back to Ben Forman's work on how representative school committees in cities in Massachusetts are (not), we have a responsibility to be very blunt in our assessment of who is at the table and who is not, and work strenuously to counter that.
Long term, this means electoral work; for this coming budget, it means we make this as big a table in as many contexts as possible. Jack Foley, to his credit, has been absolutely unrelenting in making this point over the past several months in Worcester; if you're reading this from elsewhere, is anyone making that point in your district? If not, make it you.
That is our other round of organizing work: when the Governor's budget drops in January and we start that countdown to July 1, we need to be gathering around tables across districts to get everyone's voices heard. That isn't always going to be about the district doing it--though I would argue that the school committees have an absolute responsibility to make this their job--but about any group of any kind that cares about kids and the future to get people together to have these discussions.
And for those who are in Worcester, please consider this my open invitation; I want to hear about these! 
As we have those discussions, I also think we have--and here I mean as people we have--a responsibility not to get distracted by the bright and shiny. We have bedrock needs that are not being met in our districts:

Many underfunded districts have become accustomed to going without the kinds of essential, often ordinary things, like up-to-date novels or working drinking fountains, that wealthier schools “basically take for granted,” Novick said.
“There’s almost an attitude shift that has to happen, to acknowledge the level of need, that this is how big the gap is,” she said.

I mean it when I say that I think that we don't even know what we don't have. We have gaps that are chasms in basic things like teaching and student supports, in building maintenance, in supplies. That's not about new programs, before meeting current needs; it's not about new buildings, before fixing the ones we have; it's not about shiny new curriculum or technology, before getting updates to what is crucial.

The work isn't over; the advocacy and organizing isn't over. Let's start NOW to shift gears towards implementation at the state and local levels.
And let's build a bigger table as we do so.