Comments on the local contribution study

 As you may remember, one of the several studies required by the Student Opportunity Act is one on local contributions. Comments for that study are due this week. Here is what I submitted; please do note the opening paragraph.

Let me begin by noting that my comments here reflect solely my own perspective as a single member of the Worcester School Committee, albeit one that spends a significant time on school finance. These comments do not reflect my employer, the Mass Association of School Committees, nor necessarily those of the rest of the Worcester School Committee.

I think it's of utmost importance to stress that the underlying principle of the local contribution for Massachusetts public schools—that communities that have less local wealth contribute less—is sound. This is the philosophy of the commonwealth, that the wealth the state is held in the common good, interpreted through the McDuffy case, requiring that the state's people as a greater body provide for all the children in the state through its public schooling, even when, or especially when, the local community cannot. At least philosophically, Massachusetts holds that zip code should not determine one's education. 

 It is difficult to see that as an honestly held value, however, when one reviews the evidence. The Education Law Review’s “2019 Making the Grade: How Fair Is School Funding in Your State” report found, as other such reports have in the past, that the state’s effort on education funding was a mediocre C; that is, when one looks at the amount of wealth available to the state, and the proportion of that wealth applied to public education, Massachusetts simply doesn’t try very hard. The overall proportion of funding of schools contributed by the state—41% of the foundation budget—thus is an appropriate place for your study to begin.

 The way in which funding has been handled this year itself is instructive: precisely as those who study school finance warned against back in April, Massachusetts made no provision to cushion the outsized blow an across-the-board cut would make to districts with a great dependence on state aid. Instead, the state not only implemented, but touted as a strength, an inflation and enrollment-only increase for FY21, making no provision for what the state itself said through the Student Opportunity Act is an overdue necessity of funding higher need at higher rates. In “Weathering the Storm: School funding in the COVID-19 era,” a piece in Phi Delta Kappan in June of this year, Bruce D. Baker, Mark Weber, and Drew Atchison, after noting the stabilizing influence of property taxes as a source of revenue, wrote:

Specifically, [states] should take into consideration which districts have the greatest ability to access the stabilizing force of property taxes. Those districts are the ones with the greatest property wealth and income (and, concurrently, the fewest students in economic disadvantage). To put it bluntly: States should cut or redistribute school aid away from affluent districts that can most readily make do with their own local revenues, and toward districts in high-poverty communities that take in relatively little revenue from property taxes. 

Massachusetts has not done this. The difference such a decision made to a difference like Worcester, where 64% of our total budget comes from state aid, in comparison to districts where state aid is less than 10% need not be imagined, as the headlines over the past several months speak for themselves. We in August cut $15.5M out of our FY21 budget, avoiding layoffs only due to remote learning allowing for transportation cuts.

The mandated state-contributed allocation—17.5% of every district’s foundation budget provided through state aid—provides for a margin that in many districts makes a real difference. In their recent report “Missing the Mark: How Chapter 70 Education Aid Distribution Benefits Wealthier School Districts and Widens Equity Gaps,” the Mass Business Alliance for Education noted that 104 districts across the state could afford to fully fund their own school districts; all of those districts get state aid through this provision. In the midst of the emergency of the pandemic, having these additional dollars available means COVID testing of students and staff; day care for teachers; heated outdoor tents; and more in districts that can fully fund their own schools. We in Worcester, of course, cannot manage such provisions. That the state provides an extra bit for those who have more, while not meeting the provision under the Student Opportunity Act of those who have less does not appear to be an appropriate use of the Commonwealth's limited resources, nor is it in keeping with both the constitutional and statutory provisions for public education in Massachusetts. 

 Moreover, due to the build-up of hold harmless and minimum aid, the state is funding the requirement that some districts in Massachusetts spend a quarter or a third more than their foundation budgets, while other districts remain, due to little local capacity, funded at less than their full foundation budget. My own district has struggled for years to break more than simply funding foundation, even as we advocated for a reconsideration of the foundation budget, while in those same years minimum aid increases from the state continued to boost dozens of districts well over their foundation budgets. Statewide, this aid now totals $319M. While I am sympathetic to my colleagues in rural districts, and agree that simply cutting this at once would be destabilizing, neither should the state continue this funding inequity, particularly if the state also intends to continue to claim that it is unable to fund the Student Opportunity Act. The Department has been aware of this state-mandated inequity for at least two decades; it is past time for a corrective.

 I have found useful the recent inclusion in state data comparison of the foundation budget of the district to the combined effort yield of the municipality, as a standard ratio of district need and means to support it. I would recommend this cross-district comparison as a more meaningful starting point for discussion than an isolation of either measure. If, after all, what we are about is providing for education, then let’s found the conversation there, in the ability to fund.

 The municipal wealth formula itself also warrants another look. The addition in 2007 of income to the calculation doesn’t, as anyone new to the formula inevitably observes, make a great deal of sense, as local communities have no way to tap income as a source of municipal revenue. Of Worcester’s FY21 $108M in combined effort yield, $59.8M is from income, but the City of Worcester does not and cannot tax that income. An evaluation of actual sources of revenues for cities and towns would be more to the point.

 Finally, I would recommend for your deliberation both the examples of Vermont, which attempts to level out local communities simply continuing to further tap local resources for their own districts by means of pooling some of those resources, and some of the researchers cited above. There are those who specialize in such areas of study; I would think we would do well to call on what they have found.