What isn’t being mentioned in state school funding advocacy: a 🦨 at the garden party post

 It is time once again for another of my “skunk at the garden party” posts; partly in response to last week's Ways and Means hearing on education and local aid, I want to flag something which is not, generally, being mentioned.

With thanks to my husband for his photos of actual Worcester skunks

A few things to start: 

• School district costs go up every year. 
• They go up by more than the inflation rate in the foundation budget, many years and especially lately.
• We in Massachusetts have committed, through the state Constitution, to "[spread] the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people"
• Through McDuffy, that has meant that we commit as a state to public education for every child "rich or poor, in every city or town in the Commonwealth"
• We do this, through MGL Ch. 70, by through a standard statewide calculation on the minimum cost per pupil and on how much each community can afford to fund of that cost per student.
• This system intentionally puts greater support from the state towards:
• students who are low income
• students who are learning English
• communities that have less capacity to fund their schools

And again: that is a standard calculation. It applies to everybody.

With me so far?

This necessarily means a couple of things:

• formula funding is, at ground, based on the number of students a district has. 
• higher per pupil amounts accompany higher need.
• that is more true than ever, because we emphasized this again in the Student Opportunity Act.
• more of the need is covered by the state in low income cities and towns.

Note that one can disagree with any of the above: you can think we shouldn't have more money going to those needs, or should have more money going to needs besides this. You can think that funding shouldn't be on a per pupil basis but on something else. You can think that a higher proportion of aid going to particular districts isn't okay. You are absolutely entitled to your opinion on this.
I'm just walking through how we have agreed to do this.

This does mean, though, that "X percent of aid going to Y districts" which is something we heard several times last week might not be a very helpful measure, unless you're also willing to talk about how many kids overall or how many of the poor kids or how many of the kids learning English are in those districts, or what proportion of the school budget communities can, by standard measure, afford.

In Massachusetts, our poor kids, our kids who are learning English, and not coincidentally our kids who are not white are heavily concentrated in a double handful of districts that are also themselves (with the exception of Boston) poor. More state aid goes to those districts. If you are going to concentrate the need--and we have done so in Massachusetts more so than many states--you do have to then take the consequences. 
If we are going to support higher need with greater levels of state aid, it's going to go the same districts the state has concentrated the need in.
If you are bothered by the aid going to those districts, but not by the students being concentrated in those districts, then we have a moral disagreement, not a funding one.

The above is the formula that the state uses to fulfill the constitutional mandate on funding, which is founded on this notion of, again, a standard formula that applies to everyone across the state. 

However, if that is what we do and then we stop there, many districts would get less aid from one year to the next: if they have fewer students from one year to the next, which is not uncommon, their foundation budgets might go down. Depending on what else is going on with their enrollment, and what proportion of their funding comes from the state, that then might mean that the state aid that they get would go down.

So, outside of the funding that comes on the standard formula that applies to everyone, the state has said, for years, two things: 

1. no district will get less state aid than the year before; and
2. every district will get some increase every year.

Those two things, year over year, then mean that the "not getting less aid than the year before" grows and grows, with no connection to any of the things that apply to everyone, and without any connection to any of the agreed-upon measurements of need.

Thus at the same time that we all have agreed that we're going to use a standard formula, we get all the way through the formula, and then essentially say, "Yeah, but we're going to ignore that for some!"

Now, those districts are required to spend all their state aid, so they have to spend the "extra" state aid (this is, for those of you who know the term, one way a district can have a required net school spending above zero). 

There are many, many districts where this never is discussed, even by the school committee. What people know is that "my district get this amount of aid from the state," maybe, and they--and this is the tricky part--they know what it looks like to have that amount of money spent on public education in their district.
That means that the expectations of the communities, on what their district looks like, include that additional "invisible" non-need-based aid. And when those things get cut--because everything about how districts are struggling still applies!--it hurts. 

Now let's be really clear: in some cases, this is really substantial amounts of funding. There are multiple school districts in which the state funding is 20% more on top of getting the foundation budget. In some cases, it's 10% of their state aid.

In total, statewide, it is about $350M in the proposed FY26 budget, of $7.3B total in chapter 70 aid. 

That $350M doesn't get mentioned, but it's become part of the assumed base of state revenue coming into those districts, in some cases for decades. And that means that what that spending looks like--smaller class sizes, programs, supplies, whatever it is--is what the community sees for what their school should be.

And none of what I am saying here is to argue otherwise: those ARE things schools should be. 
But they are also things EVERY school should be.

Those are things, though, in some cases, being funded by state aid over and above what we have, all together, agreed is a "fair and adequate minimum."
I'm the first to say it isn't at all adequate, let alone what we actually want for our students. 

But for us to say "this is fair and adequate" so long as the number goes UP, and to implicitly decide that it isn't fair or adequate when it doesn't go up, is what we're doing.

I don't think that's fair or just or even what we said we were doing in any of the documents or laws above.

And, again, we're doing it without acknowledging it.

So here's my insistence that we open that door and talk about it.