Analyzing the 'Policy Frankenstein' in the room

What went wrong with education funding in New York?

ELIZABETH LEPRO
Posted 2/13/19

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — If you’ve never delved into the world of education funding in New York State, get ready. Despite the fact that New York State spends more money on education than any …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Analyzing the 'Policy Frankenstein' in the room

What went wrong with education funding in New York?

Posted

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — If you’ve never delved into the world of education funding in New York State, get ready.

Despite the fact that New York State spends more money on education than any other state in the country, distribution of those funds has not seemed to work out as planned. According to a study by the Education Trust, districts serving the most students from low-income families get between five and 15% less funds than wealthier districts in New York. The only state that fares worse in this category is Illinois.

Superintendents from the Livingston Manor and Fallsburg school districts—which have students among the most impoverished in upstate New York—have said they see faults with distribution.

“The current formulas and the factors used in [in determining the distribution of funds] don’t seem to work fairly for rural schools,” Superintendent of the Livingston Manor CSD John Evans said in a recent TRR article. He is also superintendent of the Roscoe Central School District. “According to the formulas, [Roscoe CSD] is considered a wealthy district. I can assure you it is not a wealthy district.”

Evans isn’t the only one. Superintendents across the state, along with education funding advocates, take serious issue with the way money is doled out. Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed this year—along with a $1 billion boost in funding—a new formula to add to the mix. Cuomo quickly received pushback on that plan.

Along with proposing a new formula, which he’s calling the “Education Equity Formula,” and continuing his push for districts to be more transparent about how they distribute money, he offered what education advocates say is a “paltry” $338 million in funding toward Foundation Aid.

This formula, created in 2007 to distribute money based on student need, has been a point of contention for the last 10 years.

What is the Foundation Aid Formula?

In order to understand the current state of New York education funding—claws and all—we have to go back to 1993.

That year, a group called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity sued New York City schools for failing to provide students with a “sound basic education.” It took 13 years for the lawsuit to come to a close, with a ruling in the campaign’s favor that required the state to spend more on classrooms in the city. After that, New York State passed the Education Budget and Reform Act of 2007, along with a $7 billion bonus in school funding over four years. Thus appeared the Foundation Aid formula, which promised $5.5 billion. It calculated funding by district based on the cost of education, student need and how much local taxes could cover.

In other words, areas that have a combination of low property values and low-income residents would receive more aid from the state. That means that there was potential for more money to flow into a district like Fallsburg or Livingston Manor.

Then what happened?

For about two years, this solution seemed to be working.

Then the recession hit in late 2008, and by 2011, funding promised by the Foundation Aid formula dropped off. In the 2010  to to 2012 budget years, the state cut $2.7 billion from schools, which impacted high-need districts that relied on state aid—rather than local taxes—the most. Livingston Manor saw its state aid drop by about $400,00 going into that school year, while its tax levy rose from roughly $7 million to nearly $9 million. A budget presentation from the 2011-2012 school year noted that the district was facing “unprecedented fiscal challenges” in the years to come and pressed a need for a reorganizational strategy in light of economic distress. That year, Fallsburg proposed slashing more than $600,000 in spending on technology, textbooks, materials and supplies.

To this day, many districts—including half of the districts in Sullivan County—never received the full funding they were promised through the Foundation Aid Formula. As of last November, Fallsburg was still owed $5,224,417, according to the Alliance for a Quality Education New York. That’s roughly $3,750 per pupil. Livingston Manor was owed $153,759 in the 2017-2018 school year, the last year its data was available, which comes out to about $351 per pupil.

The Public Policy and Education Fund estimates that only $2.2 of what was supposed to be $5.5 billion was ever given to schools.

So, what now?

A “policy Frankenstein,” is what education reporter Susan Arbetter called the NY education funding formula in an article for City and State New York.

The entire system, which consists not only of Foundation Aid but also of two other formulas called “the shares agreement” and “save-harmless,” have collectively become “a policy Frankenstein that grows by accretion and political acquiescence, piling on new agenda-driven calculations with every passing budget negotiation. It’s a mish-mash of mismatched elements comprised of three competing meta-formulas that seem to belong to different political philosophies,” she wrote.

It’s becoming more complex.

Gov. Cuomo has made two proposals recently that emphasize his belief that New York’s funding issue is not one of how much money the state is allotting, but where the money is going. In the past, Cuomo said he relied on superintendents to distribute funds properly to the poorer schools in their districts. In his State of the State address in January, he said he doesn’t think that happened.

So, Cuomo is requiring certain schools, in phases, to submit “allocation reports” to the state that lay out the ways in which districts are spending their money. The first round of this would require 76 districts to send reports to the state in 2019-2020, and 306 more districts with four or more schools, to do the same the following year.

Cuomo plans to adopt a new formula based on those reports. Districts that contain within them an “underfunded, high-need school” would be required to spend 10% of their Foundation Aid increases on per-pupil expenditures in that school. Essentially, the state would be dictating not only how its money is spent among districts, but which school the money would go toward within a district. Sullivan County schools would not be subject to these requirements for at least three years.

Bob Lowry, deputy director for Advocacy, Research and Communications for the New York State Council of School Superintendents said this new formula proposal is “clumsy.” If a district receives an increase of $156,000 in Foundation Aid funding, that district would have to spend $15,600 in one school.

What’s that going to fund? Lowry asked. “Half a teacher?”

In its recent testimony to the New York State Legislature, the superintendents’ council said it was unreasonable to assess school spending habits based on these reports, since there are reasons more money goes toward one school over another. “Not every disparity is an inequity,” the organization testified. Teachers with more experience will cost more money. Buildings in some schools require more funds than others.

In testimony on the 2019-2020 proposed education spending, the New York State Council of School Superintendents estimated that the proposed budget means it will take more than 10 years for the state to meet its initial funding promises. “A fifth of the state’s school districts would remain more than 25 percent below their full phase-in amounts,” according to the council. “Their increases would average less than 1%, and they are predominantly average wealth or below. “

It’s unclear how Sullivan County schools—rural schools in general—will gain access to more state funds in the next few years. In the meantime, organizations including the New York State School Boards Association and the Alliance for Quality Education in New York say that the Foundation Aid should be tweaked and better funded, but remain, because it works—or at least it did, for a little while.

Annemarie Schuetz contributed reporting to this story.

Foundation Aid Formula, Cuomo, New York State funding

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here