A new report from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center argues that Ed Reform falls short of its goals in adequately funding education and remedying inequality in state education spending. (Includes an interactive tool to see how your district is doing.)

Sunday, November 27, 2011

by Luc Schuster

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Education Reform Act of 1993 dramatically overhauled the formula for providing state education aid to the Commonwealth’s K-12 school districts, in large part by creating the state’s foundation budget, a calculation of adequate baseline spending amounts for every district individually. The foundation budget has been in place for almost two decades now, and it has not yet been comprehensively reexamined. This paper contributes to the growing statewide conversation about the foundation budget’s present adequacy by identifying major gaps between what the foundation budget says districts need for certain cost categories in Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 and what districts are actually spending. We gather this data for each of the state’s 328 operating districts, allowing us to analyze trends for different types of districts, especially for districts of varying wealth. Key findings of this paper include:

• Foundation understates core SPED costs by about $1.0 billion
  
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• Foundation understates health insurance costs by $1.1 billion
  
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• Districts have not implemented the low-income student program envisioned in the original foundation budget
  
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• Most districts hire fewer regular education teachers than the foundation budget sets as an adequate baseline
  
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• Inflation adjustments have not been fully implemented, causing foundation to lag behind true cost growth…

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