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I did a post a short while back about the fact that there are persistent inequities in state school finance formulas and that those  persistent inequities have real consequences for students' access to key resources in schools - specifically their access to a rich array of programs, services, courses and other opportunities.  In that post I referred to the post school funding equity era as this perceived time in which we live. Been there, done that. Funding equity? No problem. We all know funding doesn't matter anyway. Funding can't buy a better education. It's all about reform. Not funding. And we all know that the really good reformy strategies can, in fact, achieve greater output with even less funding. Hey, just look at all of those high flying, no excuses charter schools. Wait… aw crap… it seems that many of them actually do spend quite a bit. But, back to my point. Alexander Russo put up a good post today about those pesky school funding gaps, asking whatever happened to them?

The February 23 release of proposed school aid for 2012-13, backed by Acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf's "Education Funding Report," has now made it clear: Governor Chris Christie is attempting to do an end run around the Legislature in order to impose reductions in school funding for the third year in a row. As outlined in the Cerf Report, the Governor's proposed FY13 Budget, if adopted by the Legislature, would implement major changes in NJ's school funding formula - the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) - that will trigger substantial cuts in funding for districts across the state in 2012-13. The Governor has made clear that he intends to impose these changes to the SFRA formula not just next year, but for the following four years. Put simply, the Governor intends to use the annual budget bill to make these changes permanent, bypassing the legislative process of amending the SFRA formula law.

"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card" posits that fairness depends not only on a sufficient level of funding for all students, but also the provision of additional resources to districts where there are more students with greater needs. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four separate, but interrelated, "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. Using a more thorough statistical analysis, the report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation. The results show that many states do not fairly allocate education funding to address the needs of their most disadvantaged students, and the schools serving high numbers of those students.

"Public preference for property taxes stands in perfect inverse relation to the public taste for parfaits. Everybody loves parfaits[i] and everybody hates property taxes.[ii] No, I don't plan to spend this blog post bashing parfaits. I do like a good parfait. But, even more blasphemous, I intend to shed light on some of the virtues of much maligned property taxes. I often hear school funding equity advocates argue that if we could only get rid of property taxes as a basis for funding public schools, we could dramatically improve funding equity. The solution, from their standpoint is to fund schools entirely from state general funds - based on rationally designed state school finance formulas - where state general fund revenues are derived primarily from income and sales taxes.  In theory, if the state controls the distribution of all resources to schools and none are raised locally through property taxes, the system can be made much fairer, even more progressive with respect to student needs and cost variation "

Yesterday, the US Department of Education released a new report addressing how districts qualified for Title I funds (higher poverty districts) often allocate resources across their schools inequitably, arguing that requirements for receiving Title I funds should be strengthened. The report is here: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/title-i/school-level-expenditures/school-level-expenditures.pdf Related resources here: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/ppss/reports.html#comparability-state-local-expenditures It is certainly problematic that many public school districts have far from predictable, far from logical and far from equitable formulas for distributing resources across their schools. This is a problem which should be addressed. And improving comparability provisions for receipt of Title I funding is an appropriate step to take in this regard. However, it is critically important to understand that improving within district comparability of resources across schools is only a very small piece of a much larger equity puzzle. It's a drop in the bucket. Perhaps an important drop, but not one that will even come close to resolving the major equity issues that plague public education systems today.

Most readers of the NJDOE report on reforming the state's school finance formula likely glided right past the seemingly innocuous recommendation to shift the enrollment count method for funding from a fall enrollment count to an average daily attendance figure. After all, on its face, the argument provided seems to make sense. Let's fund on this basis so that we can incentivize increased attendance in our most impoverished and low performing districts. (Another argument I've heard in other states is "why would we fund kids who aren't there?"). The data were even presented to validate that attendance rates are lower in these districts (Figure 3.1). I, however, could not let this pass, because Average Daily Attendance as a basis for funding is actually a well understood trick of the trade for reducing aid to districts and schools with higher poverty and minority concentrations.  I have both blogged about this topic in the past, and written published research directly and indirectly related to the topic.[1] The intent of this blog post is to provide a (very limited, oversimplified) primer on the common methods of counting general student populations for purposes of determining state aid to schools (charter and district) and to provide some commentary on the pros and cons of each.

As the United States emerges from difficult economic times, the challenges of increasing child poverty, revenue declines and state budget cuts appear more daunting. Yet, so too is the national challenge of ensuring all students, especially low-income students and students with special needs, the opportunity to receive a rigorous, standards-based education to prepare them for today's economy. In order to address the challenges of concentrated student poverty and meet the needs of English-language learners and students with disabilities, states must develop and implement the next generation of standards-driven school finance systems, expressly designed to provide a sufficient level of funding, fairly distributed in relation to student and school need.  The inaugural edition of the National Report Card, issued in late 2010, served to focus attention on these important issues. This second edition, which analyzes data through 2009, seeks to continue and sharpen that focus. Amidst the ongoing effort to improve our nation's public schools, fair school funding is critical to being successful and sustaining progress. Creating and maintaining state systems of fair school funding is essential to improving our nation's public schools.

"New schools founded in the last three years get more money per student than schools the city began shutting down this year, a Daily News analysis finds. Under a reform - ironically called Fair Student Funding - the city distributes the bulk of school funding based on the enrollment and demographics of each school. The reform introduced in 2007 hasn't been fully funded because of budget cuts in recent years, but all 30 new schools opening this year get their full share of the money to which they're entitled while the struggling schools remain badly underfunded."

Gov. Chris Christie Thursday unveiled sweeping plans to change the way the state's schools are funded by reducing the amount of money allocated to at-risk kids; tying funds more closely to the number of students in classrooms each day; and cutting funds for districts where enrollment is declining. Christie also released district-by-district state aid figures for the coming year that incorporate the changes. This means a loss of state aid for 97 of the state's roughly 600 school districts. Among those losing aid are 36 districts with declining enrollment - some, like Newark, where charter schools have cut significantly into the "regular" district population.

On April 9 we learn that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will also cancel their ALEC funding, after their current funding runs out (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout): Following Kraft, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Intuit, another influential sponsor of ALEC has withdrawn its support from the right-wing corporate front group. ... Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Color of Change, among others, had targeted the Gates Foundation for giving more than $375,000 to ALEC over the past two years. Well that's nice (sorta - their grant still has 17 months to go). But wait ... the Gates Foundation was funding ALEC? Why? Aren't they half-way between that wonderful Steve Jobs (blessings be upon him) and that even more wonderful Warren Buffett (likewise)? In a word, No. There's a right-wing war to destroy public education, and the Gates Foundation is in the thick of it. Again, ALEC writes the laws that bought-off state legislators get passed.

As Blue Jersey reported, Chris Christie's nominee to the state Supreme Court, Phillip Kwon, was voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines. This is a very big deal in the NJ education debate, because Christie has made it clear he wants to overturn the court's ruling that mandated adequate funding for the poorest districts in the state. These are the famous "Abbott Districts," named for the landmark case brought by the Education Law Center. The original ruling has since been superceeded by the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA). Christie has made no secret that he wants to stack the court with nominees that will overturn SFRA; that would mean a huge cut in school funding for the poorest districts, and big tax cuts for Christie's wealthy base. This is in addition to the changes he has proposed to SFRA, which ELC estimates will be a $400 million cut to at-risk children across the state.

Gov. Chris Christie plans a new challenge to a court-ordered state education funding formula that has provided billions of dollars in extra funding to poverty-stricken schools within the so-called Abbott districts. While he didn't discuss specifics of how he would continue the fight, Mr. Christie said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he would nominate two state Supreme Court judges this spring who won't "grossly" overstep their powers-as he argues the court has by ordering more school funding.

Commissioner King's decision to cut off funding to School Improvement Grant (SIG) districts will disrupt services to our neediest students and deprive their schools of millions in promised federal funding - in what appears to be an arbitrary exercise of brinksmanship. Instead of requesting a waiver for New York's SIG school districts to give them a reasonable extension of time to construct quality evaluations that support teacher development and growth in student learning, SED is using a blunt instrument - taking away funds that provide essential services for students in our neediest schools.

The main source of funding for public education is property taxes, which explains to a large extent the inequities between and within states. State governments also spend differing amounts on their school systems, and the federal government offers differing amounts of money depending on a range of criteria. This isn't, incidentally, the way other nations with successful public education systems fund their schools. It is very nice that there are people like DeGeneres and Bieber who are willing to write out big checks to needy public schools. Good for them. Yet there is something sad and scary when a check from an entertainer or private company is seen, in history's wealthiest country, as a godsend to a school principal who herself has spent her own money trying to help her students, or to a school where teachers agreed to work for free for free because of budget cuts, bad management, and other factors.

The NJ State DOE has just released a report commissioned by Denver-based Augenblick Palaich and Associates (APA), which seeks to answer the question, does the School Funding Reform Act adequately fund district costs for students with disabilities?

I've heard it over and over again from reformy pundits. Funding equity? Been there done that. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. It's all about teacher quality! (which of course has little or nothing to do with funding equity?).  The bottom line is that equitable and adequate financing of schools is a NECESSARY UNDERLYING CONDITION FOR EVERYTHING ELSE!

[Passed by the House 9/13/11 365-54] This legislation would amend the section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that governs federal financial support for charter schools, creating a program that would award grants to charter school developers via state educational agencies, state charter school boards, or governors to open new charter schools and expand and replicate existing charter schools. Priority funding would go to states that take specific steps in support of charter schools, including removing limitations on the number or percentage of charter schools that may exist or the number or percentage of students that may attend charter schools, and ensuring equitable financing for charter schools when compared to funding for public schools. The bill creates a "credit enhancement grant program" that would provide funds to public and private nonprofit entities to help charter schools secure private sector capital to buy, construct, renovate, or lease appropriate school facilities. The legislation also allows charter schools to serve prekindergarten or postsecondary school students.

Liberals and conservatives alike have made "weighted student funding" a core idea of their reform prescriptions. Both groups see such weighted funding as providing more dollars to the specific schools they tend to focus upon, and both see it as inspiring improved achievement through newfound political pressures. Unfortunately, both groups are very likely wrong.

Over the past three years, more than $75 million in federal education funding has been diverted to just a handful of private, pro-voucher advocacy groups. This torrent of public funding appears to benefit and strengthen the advocacy infrastructure created by a network of right-wing foundations dedicated to the privatization of public education.  

Dozens of hedge fund managers have funded the charter school movement - & stepped into one of the most contentious public debates in America.