In which the Globe misses the plot on education funding

 ...I feel as if the above title should continue "Part X of a continuing series"

Yesterday, the Boston Globe posted an article with the following headline: 

Globe headline reads:
"Pandemic funding for Mass. schools is going away, but state funding should soften the blow"

The crux of the piece is:

In Massachusetts at least, schools will probably be much better off than those in neighboring states for the next school year, according to a recent analysis from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. The research center found that while the end of federal aid could mean, on average, a 3 percent reduction in funding in Massachusetts, most districts will probably see that loss mitigated by increased state aid.

aka: It's going to be less money everywhere, but it's going to be a smaller loss in Massachusetts. 

Now, keeping up with the school finance universe is literally a big part of my job, so my having no idea what this "recent analysis" was is saying something. I assumed it had to be the Education Law Center's 2023 "Making the Grade" analysis of funding equity, released Monday (which I'll come back to!), but that's not the Edunomics Lab. I eventually managed to track down this presentation from October (is that recent?) which looked at Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts (I don't see an indication as to why not Maine and Vermont). 

The problem is that I don't see a lot here to trust in their methodology. 

We start, of course, with the ongoing issue we've seen throughout the pandemic with the Edunomics Lab and their head Dr. Marguerite Roza which I'd sum up as: they've been wrong over and over again. What we see in this case is that the Edunomics Lab continues to base their ESSER "left to be spent" on drawdown data, not on funds actually committed (you can find their data for MA here, which is taken from DESE's reporting here). As has been noted over and again, it takes time for funds that are committed to leave the custody of the federal government, make its way to school districts, and then to vendors, staff, and others.
But it not having left U.S. DoE or even DESE does not mean the funds haven't been spent. The school buses that Worcester continues to get (another five new wheelchair buses are on the road this week!), the HVAC work that Worcester schools are undergoing are funds that are committed. They will not show as "spent" in this estimation. This is the case in many districts, and much of the ESSER spending that remains.
They are not uncommitted, and thus are not available for the pie in the sky ideas that analyses such as these continue to put forward.

As for the revenue issue, it's not actually even clear where these are coming from. Here's what they say on what the Globe made the focus of the article (this is from the final slide of the presentation):

The ESSER Cliff estimates ESSER’s portion of each district’s FY24 budget to give a sense of the resources at risk when ESSER is no longer available in FY25. This analysis assumes a smooth drawdown of the remaining ESSER up to the September 2024 deadline. In Massachusetts, we offset the cliff percentage based on forecasted new state and local revenues. In other states, changes in anticipated revenues were not factored into this estimate. The cliff the district ultimately experiences may also depend on salary commitments, enrollment changes, reserve balances, and decisions on how ESSER is spent.

So for Massachusetts, that which motivated the headline we saw in the Globe their estimate was to "offset the cliff percentage based on forecasted new state and local revenues."
But which state and local revenue?
Did they run a statewide foundation budget?
Did they run out another year of implementation of the Student Opportunity Act?
With how high an inflation rate and what assumptions for poverty and English learners? 

We don't know, because they didn't share, here or anywhere, where the numbers came from. I don't know how they know this, and they don't tell us.
And note, incidentally, that it's even weaker for the other states, for which they simply assume ESSER vanishes without an offset ("changes in anticipated revenues were not factored into this estimate").

So, first, I'm really tired of ESSER headlines that are based both on a lack of understanding on how federal drawdown of these funds work topped by analysis based on...I don't know what.

But second, there actually was new analysis this week that's worth some headlines: the Education Law Center came out with their annual school funding fairness evaluation, and if you read down, it has some not great news for Massachusetts. 
Note, this is based on 2020-21 data, so we're not getting the impact of SOA in here yet, but this gives an outline of the space we have to make up. 

The early part of the report doesn't have anything that would probably surprise Massachusetts educators: we're above the national average in spending; we had larger growth than much of the country in; we had an above average inflation rate.

When we get into progressivity--that is, the measure here of the funding in high poverty districts as against low poverty districts--we start to see some news: 

Massachusetts ranks 24th, with our overall funding being flat relative to more funding going to higher poverty districts.
Remember, this is before much SOA implementation; however, this is also because, as we know, districts that have more, fund more, and the state's progressive funding system doesn't catch those poorer districts up. 

On the fairness profile, we're at least moving in the right direction: 

But look at where we are on distribution: "the distribution of state and local revenue is flat, with high poverty districts, on average, receiving 4% more than low poverty districts"

And on funding effort, Massachusetts earns a D:

...with the relative change in effort for Massachusetts--which had a 6.9% increase in funding against a 9.6% increase in GDP--declining from the prior year.

Now, again, this is 2020-21. Massachusetts has implemented the SOA since then.

But I think we tend to think that we're already in okay shape and we're building on that. For a state of our wealth, however, we don't devote as much of it to education as we could. We also don't push hard enough at the state level to mitigate the impacts of poverty.

That's noteworthy, even if it isn't gathering headlines.