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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to asbo international's school business insider. I'm your host, john brucato. Each week on School Business Insider, I sit down with school business officials and industry experts from around the world to share their stories and explore the topics that matter most to you. Find out what it means to be a school business official and get your insider pass on all things school business. Hello everyone, and welcome back to School Business Insider. Today's episode dives deep into one of the most important and often misunderstood topics in education, school finance, adequacy and equity. I am joined today by Dr. Bruce Baker, one of the nation's leading experts on education finance, and to discuss his latest report, the Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems. We'll explore what the data tells us about how states fund education, why money matters more than ever, and how concepts like adequacy, equity, and fiscal effort directly impact students, districts, and decisions school business officials make every day. Dr. Baker, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you.
- [01:17]
B
Thanks for having me, John. And it's good to be here to talk school finance.
- [01:21]
A
Absolutely. I'm excited to kind of shed some light on your most recent co authored report. So it really looks at adequacy and fairness across all states in the U.S. so at a high level, can you just let our listeners know what are some of your biggest takeaways as part of your research?
- [01:38]
B
So one of the big takeaways that we've been seeing over the last several years is that some states are trying, some states aren't trying, some states are trying much harder than others. And we've got a number of states that are significantly just reducing the effort that they put into funding public schools over the last decade, like ever since, more than a decade now, ever since the Great Recession. So we call this the great divergence across states. And the other issue that's problematic, and it keeps resurfacing, is that even among those states that are trying harder and more generally adequately funding their schools, and there remain these persistent inequity problems, these equal educational opportunity problems where some districts are just left out. So you've got some, you know, a number of states have kind of really driven their education systems into the ground. Other states have funded their systems, on average, reasonably well. But many school districts, and kind of the same school districts year after year after year are persistently and chronically underfunded.
- [02:46]
A
I'm curious, on those states that have driven their programs into the ground, is there a common thread that explains why that is or is there just a multitude of reasons, state by state, why they may not be prioritizing education over maybe their neighboring states?
- [03:01]
B
It's interesting. I mean, it's not, for example, a simple red state, blue state contrast. One of the things that's interesting in my line of work is that every state has some constitutional requirements about what their legislature is supposed to provide in terms of the adequacy and equity of school funding. But only in some states have courts really enforced that on their legislatures. And almost regardless of the strength of the language that might exist in a state constitution. And that's what creates some of the split between. There are states like Florida and Arizona have been in a race to the bottom. You know, interestingly, Florida has about the strongest and most recently adopted constitutional requirements. I mean, the voters ratified in 1998 and 2002 very strong requirements about the legislature's obligation to provide for an excellent system of public schooling. The state courts in Florida in 2019 basically declared that unenforceable. An interesting contrast, though, is Colorado and Kansas, where Colorado has been persistently kind of near the bottom and not doing well, in part because their voters ratified a constitutional amendment that protects against this taxpayer bill of rights from the early 90s, which conflicts with the constitutional requirement to provide education. And the Kansas being a red state, Colorado being a purple state, Kansas courts have been repeatedly involved in enforcing legislative obligations, and it's kept the. The conversation on school funding on the table and as an annual thing in Kansas, that makes Kansas less bad than some other states have become over time. So it's not, to an extent, southern states and states like Arizona, Florida being really the two in a race to the bottom, are more headed downward. And other states like Massachusetts, New Jersey have stayed strong. But there are some interesting contrast across
- [05:08]
A
the country and in your research and your findings, is there any direct correlation between the amount of funding driven towards education and student outcomes? I mean, is it easy to take a investment per student and say that, well, if you're putting the most money towards education, likely you're going to get the strongest outcomes? Or is that just too simple of a way of maybe attacking it?
- [05:31]
B
Well, the trick there, and I think this comes up maybe later in our conversation too, about how we construct our indices. It's really important when looking at the relationship between spending and outcomes to carefully construct a model that addresses all of the different factors that affect the value of a school dollar toward achieving a given level of. Of outcomes. And when we do that, when we appropriately correct for the value of a dollar In Vermont versus Wyoming versus Florida, the value of a dollar in a tiny remote school district in western Kansas versus the Kansas City area, and the value of that dollar toward achieving the same outcomes in high poverty settings, settings with large shares of English learners, settings with large shares of children with disabilities. Once we or even the differences in labor cost from one space to another, once we address all of those things, the relationship between how much money you have and what outcomes you get becomes quite clear. And in fact, we have a, we have a tool on the School Finance indicators website@schoolfinancedata.org that lets you look at the, look at the district level adequacy and outcomes in the context of your state to see, to see those patterns that there are districts that have less than they would need to achieve a given outcome and districts that have more than they would spend more than is predicted to be needed to achieve a given outcome. And there are relationships to the outcomes. If you have more adequate funding, your outcomes are more adequate, you have less adequate funding, your outcomes are less adequate. It costs more to achieve more, costs less to achieve less. And there's also a large body of literature out there that we summarize in a separate report on how and why money matters, also@schoolofinancedata.org and at the Shanker Institute that shows there are vast number of studies over the decades and a flurry of really strong studies over the past decade that show that investments in schooling lead to better outcomes. Doesn't matter whether those investments come from a court order or just legislative action. The money matters whether it's going up or down. You know, when the money is going up, the outcomes get better when the money's going down. There were a number of great restart, great studies about the Great Recession effects on student outcomes. And you know, when the money, when the money was cut and cut dramatically, student outcomes went down. That's why we see the NAEP scores starting to drop from, from 2015 forward, where actually the downward trajectory and the national assessment scores from 15 to 17 and 17 to 19 is about the same as it was during the COVID years. So the COVID years are really just an extension of damage that was already being caused as a function of the Great Recession. And we also know that money matters more for some kids than others. There are a number of studies that show a very strong effect, in one case, 20 times greater effect when the money goes into previously lower spending and higher poverty settings, as opposed to when additional money is into lower poverty and lower poverty and previously higher Spending settings. A sociologist from Brown University, Emily Rauscher, she has very strong effects. So Money Matters. And there is in our analyses a relationship between the dollar spent and the outcomes achieved. When you use a model that addresses all those different costs, you can't do as, as some others out there do, just make a graph of the per pupil spending and test scores. And it's easy to do that and make the argument that, see, we've got some that spend a lot and get nothing. We got some that spend nothing and get a lot of. That's a very deceptive, if not outright deceitful method for making that argument, especially given what we know. I mean, it's hard for someone not to know that that's deceitful when they make that graph.
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A
Right. The moniker of Money Matters, I think will resonate well with the audience of school business officials when they tune into
- [10:02]
B
this
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A
kind of a direct correlation there. But I'm also curious. You know, money is obviously a very important factor in terms of bolstering our education system, but could you also tell me why it may be important to move beyond just what districts are spending?
- [10:18]
B
Well, again, even when we look at the, when we look at the, those kind of cost adjusted spending figures or even just spending figures in general and the studies that show, you know, what spending does, you know, as it increases, I mean, school business officials would know that. I mean when, when you get more money over time, that is very likely going into either or both more competitive wages for your staff and maybe hiring more staff, being able to reduce class sizes and, or being able to provide more competitive wages with other surrounding districts or with the provider prevailing labor market around you, knowing what people with a bachelor's or master's degree in mathematics might be able to make if they weren't teaching. So you know, and you know, there's a lot of talk among those who wish to decry that that money doesn't matter matter, but it matters how you spend it. But when we look at the general patterns of where new money goes, it goes into the two things that matter. You know, more teachers and better paid teachers, smaller classes and more competitive wages for teachers to bring in a higher quality teacher workforce. And you know that that also then translates to the fact that when you have a much higher need student population, you may need even more staff with more specialized skills and you may even have to pay the same quality teacher, a teacher of the same qualifications more to come into a high poverty majority minority school district in a particular metropolitan area. Then they might, then you might have to pay them to work in a, in a more affluent suburb. So you know, those are kind of the underlying factors that drive the costs and they follow logically from the way we look at spending in our report, which is not just to look at a dollar value per pupil, but try to address what that dollar, what value that dollar has per student in different settings.
- [12:31]
A
I wonder too, with at least teaching staff, it seems to be increasingly challenging to find qualified staff. I feel that there's less teachers coming into the profession and as a result districts are having to maybe open up contracts and renegotiate and offer more competitive salaries. But in a scarcity model like that, where the supply is out running the demand, districts are now kind of hiring from each other. Do you find that or anticipate there be some kind of inequity to student outcomes? If districts are in this, trying to survive by, by stealing from one another qualified teaching staff, I mean, who, who really gets the short end in that scenario?
- [13:15]
B
So there are two parts to this that are critical. I mean we've been seeing, right, that there is that the labor pool of the teachers we would want to hire seems to be diminishing. So right, the district officials are kind of, we're chasing after the same decreasing pool. Now that is a function of the fact that there's a long term trend of teacher pay relative to similarly educated non teaching professionals that has been in a long run decline that teacher pay. And there's a report from the Economic Policy Institute that's called the Teaching Penalty Report by Sylvia Allegretto and colleagues. And we also have an indicator in our system that tracks this. And it's not surprising that the pool of applicants to teaching, just as a function of the competitiveness of wages dropping dramatically over the last three decades. You know that that's going to limit who chooses to go into teaching. Throw into that the way we've been treating teachers and it's, it's just again, it's just not surprising that the pool has become thinner and thinner. Now back to kind of the relationship in our report. If, if local public school districts in a labor market space in a certain kind of metropolitan area, for example, are chasing after the same teachers, if they all had similar capacity to pay those teachers, then the affluent suburban advantage districts are going to be the ones that benefit. And the higher poverty settings, the urban districts, the interurban fringe districts that, that tend to be often the most resource deprived and highest in poverty, they're going to have the hardest time recruiting teachers into their settings. So that's one of the reasons why those districts need substantially more money to be able to compete, because they might have to pay a higher wage, substantially higher wage to get the same teacher to work in their setting. But the overall trend is what's creating the tightness of the labor market in general that then creates more of that competition among districts in a given space.
- [15:37]
A
So you've also mentioned the two key concepts in your report and in this conversation, adequacy and equity. Can you define each in the context of school finance? And why do both matter?
- [15:51]
B
So we, so we define adequacy and equity in a way that's kind of new and different from. From previous reports. A lot of, you know, previous reports of our own and done by others that are out there. Try to look at adequacy just in terms of the overall spending. Like what's the average per people spending? Maybe they'll adjust it for the differences in labor costs from one state or region to another. And equity, Kind of the old school ways of looking at equity were either to just look at the, the similarity of the per pupil spending across districts or even the progressivity of it. Is there somewhat more money and higher poverty than lower poverty districts? The problem with looking at equity just in terms of the. Just in terms of whether there's more or less in higher versus lower poverty districts, when we know, I mean, it should be that the higher poverty districts need and have more than lower poverty districts in a system that's progressive or equitable, and that the fund the spending should be higher for it to be more adequate. The problem with those methods is that they don't tell us how much higher does the spending need to be adequate and what is adequate and how much more spending might be needed in a higher poverty district than the lower poverty district for the children in the higher poverty district to have equal educational opportunity. And for that matter, what the heck do we mean by equal educational opportunity?
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A
Right.
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B
So we draw on. I draw heavily on work that was shared with me and an author who created much of the body of work in this area, a guy named Bill Duncan, who passed a number of years ago, wonderful mentor who was one of the leading scholars developing this cost modeling approach that we take and more. So he was very kind of focused, he and his colleagues, Johnny Yinger and others, and there are other groups who were doing similar work. They were focused on the fact that equity and adequacy really need to be viewed in terms of the outcome goals. Right. That we have to think about what are the outcomes that we want children to be able to achieve. And we should have a common outcome expectation for all. I mean, in fact, our state accountability systems are based on that, right? Like every, all these school business officials know that, you know, we're going to be, our feet are going to be held to the fire over whether or not our kids pass these same tests that every other kid's got to pass, right. Graduate at same rates as all these other kids. It's really about providing enough money, providing the level of funding needed to achieve those outcome goals. That's adequacy in general. Is the, you know, is the money enough to achieve a given outcome target? And then the equity part, which we frame as equal educational opportunity is, is that money different enough? Is the money more enough in the higher poverty settings versus the lower poverty settings so that the children in those higher poverty settings have equal opportunity to achieve that same outcome goal? In fact, again, like one of the things that's so kind of egregiously unfair, I don't have to tell business officials this or superintendents about the accountability systems, is that we're telling you achieve these outcomes, we're not going to bother to figure out whether the money we've given you is appropriate to achieve those outcomes or whether it's appropriate to achieve those outcomes with the student population you serve in the setting in which you serve that population. We're just going to penalize you after the fact when you don't achieve those things outcomes. So it's, it's important that we consider the outcomes and we build kind of a big data model to evaluate whether the spending is enough on average to achieve those outcomes. That's our kind of adequacy metric. And whether the spending is enough by district and district type and students served is are the differences enough so that all kids have equal opportunity to achieve those outcome goals? That's how a well designed, equitable and adequate kind of equal opportunity system would be designed.
- [20:16]
A
I also wonder too, the source of funds and any requirements attached to them. And what I mean by that is higher needs. Districts oftentimes are more reliant on larger state sources or grants, maybe something in between. However, a lot of the time those funds are categorized in a certain way in terms of how districts are allowed to spend what they can spend them on. Are you finding any relation to these kind of restricted buckets in terms of hampering outcomes for, for districts? And I'm getting at is is local control of how the education is administered more important than a governing body? At the state telling districts how to do it, because each district has its own nuances, its own culture, its own differences. Is the source of funds and how they're intended to be spent a limiting
- [21:09]
B
factor in terms of student outcomes by the research? Yes, it is. And it's. I work with colleagues Jesse Levin and Drew Atchison. We develop these models where we will estimate the spending kind of model I was just describing, where we'll estimate the spending that's needed to achieve whatever level of outcomes. The usually we're working with state policymakers and they'll say, you know, we want to know the cost to achieve these levels of outcomes, and we'll estimate this model based on the existing spending data to achieve those levels of outcomes, given the students served and all that. And we advocate providing the flexibility to local school administrators in how they use that money, because, again, the reality is that we know that most of the difference in funding in a higher poverty district that may be, you know, let's say, you know, 80% state aid, you know, 20%, 10%, 10% local and 10% federal, that really what they need to be able to do is provide smaller classes and better pay for teachers. They don't need to be going through an exercise of proving that somehow they've allocated these specific program dollars to a program that serves this specific student population that has been identified as a need population or used as a weight in the formula that the general aid should be provided so that smaller classes and better pay and additional support services in general can help a student population in a high need setting achieve better outcomes more comparable to those in a lower need setting. And there's actually empirical research that shows by the. One of the guys I just mentioned, Bill Duncombe and Johnny Yinger, did a piece on California a number of years ago that showed before California moved to its LCFF formula, they had a heavy A formula that was based on a lot of categorical grants. And Duncan and Yinger showed that the use of the categorical grants induced a great deal of inefficiency in the production of outcomes because it kind of. It does handcuff you in how you organize your budget to deliver programs and services. And then on top of that, that, the time you spend trying to. Trying to document that in a way that's compliant with the fund sources. So, yeah, it induces inefficiency to use categoricals. I definitely support granting local control, but I also accept that some localities might do better or worse than others in efficient budgetary planning.
- [24:03]
A
Some guardrails aren't so bad.
- [24:06]
B
Maybe not guide rails as much as guidance. Right. We can, through the analytic process, we can actually look at districts in our model and say, well, now that we know the cost of getting these outcomes, we still have variation among districts and schools and how they're spending, maybe districts with similar cost structures getting different outcomes. And we can look into what's going on in resource allocation in districts that fall in different places on our cost curve per se, and maybe derive some guidance for others on things they might do. What we found so far in doing that is it still comes down to more competitive pay and smaller classes. I think there's a. There's a section of a report we did for the state of Colorado that has that efficiency analysis as a. As an approach to kind of guidance. But I would never take it to the point of mandate because we just don't really know with great confidence what's the best way for you to allocate your money in your community to achieve these outcomes. Anyone who says they know otherwise, we can bring them back and we can converse about that.
- [25:28]
A
It's interesting, your anecdote about California. I'm in the state of New York, and we have a bunch of categorical aids. And as you. As you were kind of explaining the transition away from that, it really made me think again that, you know, some of the financial decisions we make are based on those categorical aids, and we are financially incentivized to use certain aspects of our educational program over others because we know that we'll get certain money back the following year if we use some bucket rather than another, when maybe that's not the best outcome or plan of attack for education, but when times are tough and budgets are tight fiscally, it makes the most sense.
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B
Right. And. Yeah, and New York is a state that I've spent a lot of time on over the years, and I'm still actively engaged in working mostly these days, with the organization of small city school districts.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lot going on in New York right now?
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B
Well, a lot or maybe nothing going on in New York. I mean, we've been. You know, there's a.
- [26:28]
A
Well, actually, it's clear a lot of headlines. I can't say a lot of progress, but yeah, yeah.
- [26:35]
B
Well, that's one of the things we find. I. I would say that that are one of the. Yeah. The approach we take in our report of trying to do this cost modeling to measure, you know, identify what's the spending level needed in every district in the country to achieve some given level of outcome. And then compare their current spending against that. It's a better approach than had been used in the past because we can better describe adequacy against an outcome goal and equal opportunity against an outcome goal. But it's an approach that has problems when applied to certain states. And New York State is not well represented in these analyses for a few reasons. One is that the outcome data. The outcome data set from the Stanford Education Data Archive does not have updated New York State outcome data from 2015 forward. And there are. We use a national spending database from the US Department of Education that I know frustrates a lot of school district admins around the country because as much as it's kind of declared to be the 1 nationally comparable data set, those measures really aren't comparable. They're not perfect, and they overstate the expenditures in New York State in a way that makes New York State look like it spends a lot more than it does relative to other states. And there are some kind of specific examples of how you can kind of look at and illustrate that, that it's no way that every western tier along the Pennsylvania border, New York district, substantially outspends every Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania district immediately next to it. Right. And at the same time, systematically under form, underperforms. Right. So. So I empathize with the New York folks, and I find that our data don't do a particularly great job at characterizing what's going on in New York. So I think we've. We've got over in the national data set, we have overstated spending.
- [28:42]
A
Sure.
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B
And understated outcomes.
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A
Sure. So you had mentioned this kind of at the. At the top of the episode, but I find it really fascinating that states are investing less in education than they did before the Great Recession. And you had mentioned that Covid really was just kind of an extension of that and just having gone through it. And I think most educators just kind of bucket Covid in its own thing, in its own unique experience. But you're saying that this has just really been an extension since 2008. What's really driving all of that need and why are states really putting less forward since then?
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B
It's, you know, some of it, I think is ideological, and some of it was kind of ideology enabled by the. Enabled by the Great Recession. I mean, certainly the ideological underpinnings of this and kind of the association with kind of partisan politics has shifted over time. The Great Recession happened to coincide with a period where there was really a kind of a bipartisan view that that school choice was a substitute for funding adequacy. Right. That all you needed to do was expand the number of charter schools, give kids more options to get out of that school. So that was actually kind of the. The moderate Democratic we need to expand charter schools. We need to rate, rank, and fire teachers based on test scores. We don't need to spend more money. This is the new normal. In fact, that was the phrase coined by Arne Duncan at the time. So. So that led to really every state legislature being kind of encouraged or enabled to think about, you know, to kind of reiterate those arguments that nobody needs more money. We. We just need to tighten our belts and do better with what we have. We poured all this money into, you know, public schooling. Over time, it does turn out that 2008 was probably the best year of public school finance overall. But there was a bipartisan encouragement in that. And we had, you know, we had, you know, governors across the board echoing that. I mean, certainly Andrew Cuomo was. Was not the most friendly to. To the school of finance formula in. In New York state, which is so
- [31:08]
A
funny because now that has reversed, as well as appr. Scoring and teacher reviews and in performance. It's just right.
- [31:18]
B
Yeah, well, there was. There was a, you know, the whole crowd pushing, you know, charter schools versus Voucher expansion, you know, kind of using this choice as a substitute for adequacy, which was an argument that really. And the new normal which carried us from, say, you know, 2011 to 2015, then shifts when we enter a new ERA of the U.S. department of Education under the first Trump administration, where people had to kind of pick teams on that. Right. So those who had been in the. In the moderate Dem camp, pushing, pushing both charters and in some cases voucher expansion, had to pick and choose because voucher expansion was taking on a new tone. And that's where I think we start to see this divide between the pulling back on the new normal era. Moderate Democratic policies in states that had gone down that road, including New Jersey, didn't go far down that road. But New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and states that really wanted to push vouchers from a more ideological standpoint, including pushing the expansion and promotion of religious schooling like Arizona and Florida. Right. So we get a new kind of divide ideologically occurring starting in 2016 forward and then escalating when we get to. When we get to 2024. But we don't pick that up yet in our analyses. It'll be interesting to see what the next few years start to show in terms of that great divergence Right.
- [32:50]
A
Your report also highlights disparities, not just across districts like we've been talking about, but really across student populations. What. What stood out most to you in your research?
- [32:59]
B
Well, this is something that, that almost caught us off guard a few years ago when we were, when we started looking at the racial disparities and the extent to which certain populations by race were more disadvantaged than others. And, you know, one of the kind of the top line findings here is that the typical African American. African American student is twice as likely as a white student to be in an underfunded district and 3.5 times more likely to be in a chronically underfunded district. I had also found in a number of earlier reports and in a few kind of published academic articles that one of the strongest predictors of being a systematically underfunded district was that the district was predominantly Hispanic or Latino. And that is certainly a driving factor in, say, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. That there's a common set of districts that are systematically underfunded. Poughkeepsie and Utica in New York or in Connecticut, Bridgeport, Waterbury, New Britain in Massachusetts, Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Holyoke, Springfield, all these very substantially Latino communities that have been systematically underfunded over time. And the reasons for that are slightly different than the, than the high rates of majority black districts being underfunded. But it is a persistent pattern that states have failed to resolve.
- [34:38]
A
And when we talk about equal opportunity, what does that actually look like in a school finance system?
- [34:46]
B
Well, almost every school finance system across all the states would have to provide substantially more funding than they presently are to districts serving student populations that have much higher concentrations of child poverty, English learners, and so on. States have weights and adjustments in their formulas to do that. But a system that provides equal educational opportunity to begin with, the foundation level of funding, the base level of funding provided, needs to be high enough so that even the. So that the lowest need districts can achieve the desired outcomes. And then the adjustments for student populations and other costs need to be large enough for. To provide those higher need districts with enough money to give their kids equal opportunity to give the kids in Poughkeepsie equal opportunity to achieve the desired outcomes of the kids in Scarsdale. Yeah, yeah. So. And there are two ways that the formulas fail. Different formulas fail in different ways. Like New York's formula fails by just setting a basic level of funding that's so low that nobody would ever spend that little. And then they can relate, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they provide. They provide a reasonably strong student need adjustment. But so you can, in my report, you can picture this, you set this foundation level that's so low that nobody would ever, ever spend that. And then you provide these cost adjustments that appear aggressive, but they're attached to that low base level. So the formula funding itself is almost irrelevant across the board because everyone has to spend above that to begin with. Now if you raise the basic level of funding in New York to the minimum level of what's needed to achieve the desired outcomes, which is maybe going to put it closer to 20,000 rather than. And then you put the weight on that that's needed, you know, in higher need settings that would be a system providing equal educational opportunity. Other state formulas fail in different ways, but that is, that's the way in which New York State's formula fails. And it's, I think probably three or four other states. I could model the same way.
- [37:25]
A
Right? Yeah. There's not that I want to focus on New York too much, but it's what I know best. But there's been some progress, I guess you could call it as of late. Rockefeller study came out, identified some issues in terms of some data points that are being used in the state's formula. The legislature has made some incremental changes to data points using more current data than, you know, 2010, which has been positive. But to your point, you know, the, the, the really underlying foundational issue is just the baseline amount per student is just woefully too low for, for the needs of. Across the state. But I guess we're not. New York's not alone in that. In that.
- [38:05]
B
No, New York's not. I mean, some states actually will have a more robust basic level of funding but don't have big enough weights. I mean, that's where the contrast could be drawn with the, with New Jersey that their base level funding also is not sufficient to the task, but their base level of funding is, is much higher than, than New York's.
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A
Right.
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B
But their adjustments for student needs are lower than they would need to be. I actually have a report on New York that dissects all that on my own website and reports with njpp.org and New Jersey that talk about New Jersey's failures in their own different regard. Then Connecticut just fails in other massive ways.
- [38:50]
A
I have so much to talk to offline because I've been in New York most of my life, but I live in Connecticut now and still work in New York and I'm just fascinated to learn what isn't going well.
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B
Connecticut doesn't even try
- [39:04]
A
so in our final minutes here, I want you to just share if and leave our school business officials tuning in today. What would be one key takeaway from this report that you, that you could report. Excuse me, Share out to. To our listeners.
- [39:18]
B
I, I think, you know, it's, it's hard. Like school district officials and business officials have, have long just been in this position. You know, you take what you get, you figure out how to make the best of it. I do think these are issues that can only be solved at the state level with state legislative action, every state. And I think your listeners from each state know that there are maybe one or two key individuals in your legislature. I got a little pad over here where I got their names listed who actually know how the school funding formula works and their colleagues are the ones who lean on them to understand it and figure out what to support. I think we need more collective action among school district officials and I would ideally argue not entirely self interested action, not just looking out for the interests of maybe who your closest peer districts are, but trying to look out for the interests of everyone in coming up with a unified plan for an equitable and adequate school funding formula which may, and I would argue in New York State that's a plan that would have the greatest benefits to a district like, you know, Utica, Syracuse, and maybe lesser benefits to Armonk, if any. But I would, I would love to see the collective effort across entities, especially having worked in states where again, New York being unique, that New York City seems to, you know, primarily, you know, argue its own.
- [41:12]
A
It's like a whole nother state when
- [41:14]
B
it comes to school finance. There are all these different factions in New York state, one or two people in the legislature who, who have a handle on what needs to be done. But there needs to be unified messaging and I think that's true across most states. I think the report can help to understand the problems, whether the problems are primarily about the overall level of funding like in Florida or Arizona, and the trajectory of that funding over time, or whether the problems are more about some districts simply being left out, as would be argued in, in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, which are three of the least equitable but reasonably high spending states in the country. I think actually California provides a pretty good example of the gains that can be made from reforms implemented about 10 years ago where one of the analyses I've done recently, I think I posted it on Blue sky and X was to contrast the trajectory of California and Florida, perhaps much to the dismay of my governor and given their governor so that collective lobbying for better formula for all, especially in an era where we see such divergence across states, I think is critical to the future. And I think, you know, states like New York have the capacity to do so much better. So does Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and, you know, Illinois, Pennsylvania. A lot of states can do, can do better than they are on equity, have reasonably robust kind of funding overall. Other states are going to need a stronger kick to change the direction they're going to. I'm living in one right now, and I'm trying to provide the ammunition for that.
- [43:16]
A
Right, right. Swinging that leg. Yeah. So we've spent the whole episode talking about what isn't going well. I would like to end on a positive note, if at all possible. So that being the case, what gives you optimism, if anything, about the future of school finance?
- [43:35]
B
Things do tend to be cyclical. Cyclical. I think, you know, again, on school finance nationally, we, we reached, we reached our high point. Different states reach their high point at different times, but 2008 was kind of the overall high point. Some states in the earlier 2000s, we can get back there. I, I think maybe, you know, in, in response or reaction to where we're at now, some states will take the lead on that. I keep hoping that New York will be, will be one of them, but it's going to take, it's going to take that interstate pressure. California has made some significant steps. California was stuck for a long time, mainly due to property tax restrictions from the late 1970s, Proposition 13, and they've started to really dig out of that. So California is a model of moving the right direction. And the other thing that gives me hope is that we've had the opportunity to, with my, my colleagues Jesse Levin and Drew Atchison. We've worked with a number of state legislatures to help them through this process of trying to figure out the costs of what they need and want to do. It's not to say that that's actually led to substantial change in their formulas, but I see a positive in their interest in making the connections between school spending and the desired outcomes and developing the understanding that if we really want higher outcomes, it may cost us more and we need to find out what those costs are. So there's been significant increase interest in that regard and again, some. Some shining lights in state policy changes. So we're not out of the game yet. It's not over yet. Yeah.
- [45:33]
A
Still, still a lot of work to do. Well, Dr. Baker, thank you so much for the insightful conversation and joining me today on School Business Insider. I really, really enjoyed it.
- [45:46]
B
Well, thank you for having me. This is always fun to have the chance to ramble about school funding for an hour or so.
- [45:52]
A
Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll have you back on soon.
- [45:55]
B
All right, Thanks a lot.
- [45:58]
A
Thank you for tuning in to School Business Insider. Make sure to check back each week for your favorite topics on school business.
- [46:11]
B
Sam.