So what's the deal with the low income measurement?

Why is there discussion/controversy/activism about the low income implementation in school funding in the House 2 budget?

As I mentioned when I ran through the Governor's proposed budget back in January, most of the sections of the Foundation Budget Review Commission's recommendations and the Student Opportunity Law that had to do with funding were implemented at 1/7th of the goal, under the general understanding that this will be phased in over seven years.
Not low income.
What did happen with low income was this: the law provided for a one year "best option" count on students: for each district, the state looked at the direct certification count--the one we've been using, through the matching of students via the databases--and also ran the FY16 percentage of students that were low income then (the last year that everyone was being credited on free/reduced lunch, 'though some districts had already switched), and each district got the higher of those two counts.
Note that if you download the FY16 spreadsheet, you can double-check your number by calculating your percentage of low income students that year. I assume that there were business offices that did this ahead of time. And each of the FY21 preliminary foundation budget sheets has, in the bottom right corner, a comparison of the FY16 percentage applied to this year's enrollment and this year's direct certification:

Here's Worcester's. See the blue box? 

That "best of," as has been widely noted, added about 46,000 students statewide to the count of low income. Those students, of course, were not all in one district, and, as with any such count, there were districts that benefited more than others. Worcester picked by 2000 more students for this year; as Mike noted, Northbridge actually lost kids even with the FY16 count being used (it would have gone lower if it were only direct cert) and so on.
However, as a result of the the increased count of students, the state of course had to increase the amount of funding going to that line. In order to keep to the overall $300M or so planned--the overall 1/7th--the rate change was only implemented by 4/100ths, not the 1/7th of the other sections.

This was part of the Mass Taxpayers' Foundation presentation yesterday
to the Connecticut Valley Superintendents' Roundtable.
We were told it is a slide that DESE doesn't like.

This isn't a thing that I or anyone else cooked up; you can find it right on DESE's page on FY21 under "Foundation Budget Rates."
As noted in the above slide that you probably can't read, this means the rates for low income will then have to pick up the difference over the next six years in order to meet the seven year generally understood goal.
It also, as a side note, means that some of the money gets postponed having inflation applied by a year.
The slide also notes, however, that the final section of the law says that the changes are to be implemented in "an equitable and consistent manner."
Thus the question is: is this equitable? is this consistent? does it line up with the intent of the law? is in line with what was fought so hard for?

A number of us are arguing that it doesn't.

Two additional notes after the jump:

1. I was puzzled as to what was going on with the conversation in Leominster on this issue, so I pulled their spreadsheets: all that happened is their direct certification rate is higher than their FY16 percentage, so they just got essentially what they would have gotten, anyway. Their direct certification count did pick up an additional 107 students this year, but that isn't a massive shift. What I would assume they were counting on, like many, was for the rate change to make an appreciable difference.
   Over FY20, Leominster's required spending is going up by about $3.1M on an $80M budget; of that $1.9M is Chapter 70 aid, the rest required local spending. Looking at their cherry sheet, their state aid lines for schools are up over $2M, while they're losing about $27K less than last year in charter and school choice tuition.
2. Because this was a one year stop gap while the Department figured out a new way to count low income students, Worcester had this slide on Thursday night: 

slide 39; full presentation is here
Because of how the funding is tied to the percentage of students counted,
a drop of this magnitude also means a drop in the per pupil amount received.
It's a double whammy.

All that we know so far of next year is what has been said to MASBO and the urban superintendents which is: it's probably going to be direct certification, plus something else. What we don't know yet is what that's going to look like. The above slide is based on no expansion of direct certification--that is, counting only the kids who can be found in the databases that live in families of 133% of the federal poverty rate or below--and no one else being found. It is, yes, a worst case scenario (that's why we put people who think of these things in charge of budgets).

Remember, the FY16 count was based on families still needing to turn in forms to get free and reduced price lunches. In many of the cities, that is no longer the case, as districts have moved to entirely free lunch (via direct certification). The motivation is gone.
It's also important to remember that we're three plus years in on a federal administration that has only massively increased mistrust of the federal government among the most vulnerable, including those who maybe weren't filling out forms to begin with, like those who are undocumented. That isn't going to improve over the next year.
There are, of course, other options available. Maybe the direct certification gets larger. Maybe DESE uses other calculations. Maybe districts find other ways of estimating counts.

Again, though, the low income is the big ticket item and it was the big lift on the part of the state. It is only prudent to keep an eye on this.