Massachusetts has some of the best public schools in the world. If you look at our test scores, Massachusetts consistently ranks at or near the top of national rankings. This success is a testament to terrific teachers, staff, and administrators who dedicate their careers to caring for our children and teaching them the skills they need to succeed in our economy and society.
Unfortunately, Massachusetts also has some of the worst racial, geographic, and socioeconomic disparities in the country. These disparities are caused — in large measure — by underinvestment of state resources combined with an outdated funding formula.
Twenty-five years ago, Massachusetts made a significant policy change, setting a budget floor for funding school districts across Massachusetts. It was a critical step — and one that hasn’t been updated since.
The budget calculation underestimates the cost of educating students by more than $2 billion, according to one estimate. It fails to account for demographic changes and inflation. It fails to provide the resources necessary for students with special needs, English language learners, and challenges students face in their communities that affect their readiness to learn. This broken funding formula has caused unnecessary hardship for many schools across the Commonwealth, who must make painful choices to account for funding shortfalls.
Cash-strapped schools have to make too many hard choices, from cutting teachers to scaling back art, music, and civics programs. Students in the poorest neighborhoods pay the biggest price. It’s not what the legislature intended, and it’s not right.
We can do better. Budgets are about values. The budgets we give our schools should show just how much value we place on our children’s future.
Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz’s Act to Modernize the Foundation Budget— which recently received a unanimous vote on the Senate floor — would implement the recommendations of a bipartisan commission on how to update these Chapter 70 calculations. The House should pass it, and the Governor should sign it. We should also pass the Fair Share Amendment this November to give Massachusetts more resources to invest in our public schools and in our children’s future.
Quentin Palfrey is a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts who has been endorsed by the Massachusetts Democratic Party. More information about his campaign is available here: www.quentinpalfrey.com
Quentin Palfrey on Education and Inequality
I shared a few words on inequality in our education system while speaking with the Groton Democratic Town Committee. In Massachusetts, we have some of the best schools in the country, but we also have some of the worst disparities. Thank you Groton for the opportunity to speak with you about investing in our students!
Posted by Quentin Palfrey on Tuesday, March 27, 2018
John Tehan says
Hi Quentin! One more area where the current formula fails students is in the cost of transportation – regional school districts in my area are spending a lot more on transporting students than the formula allows, yet another area where the reimbursements have failed to keep pace with inflation.
I’m working for Tom Merolli, he’s running to replace Ryan Fattman in the state senate, and reworking the school funding formula is a key piece of Tom’s campaign. Once the primary is over, I’ll be looking forward to canvassing for both you and Tom in the run-up to election day. See you soon!
johntmay says
In Franklin, where I live, there is an add on fee for kids in public school that starts (I think) in Junior High and costs families hundreds of dollars extra per year to send their kids to school This has to stop as well.
Christopher says
Are you referring to bus transportation?
mrigney says
John, the Legislature’s repeated failure to meet its promise to reimburse regional districts 100% of their transportation costs is shameful. My only reservation about full implementation of the FBRC recommendations is what will happen to regional transportation and Circuit Breaker payments and anything else “subject to appropriation.” Future reforms of the school funding mechanisms in Massachusetts should remove that language, making it clear what the Legislature will and will not support without any weasel room.
johntmay says
Well said Quentin and it goes along with what I tell people every time I hear someone say “Our Public Schools are Failing”. Our Public Schools are NOT failing, however, many of our communities and all things within those communities including public school are failing.
nopolitician says
This is an inconvenient truth. I suggest that people familiarize themselves with “tranching”, or the practice of dividing up something (classically, financial securities) into parts – because that is what we have done with our school system.
Tranching became popular just prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Some Really Smart People figured out that if you take, say, 10,000 mortgages that are deemed high-risk (subprime), a known statistically percentage of them will actually default (though you can’t identify which ones), so you can “artificially create” a percentage of low-risk securities out of that group of high-risk securities. Voila – maybe 10% of the group is now considered “gold”. We know how that turned out.
Our school districts have evolved with the same concept. In pursuit of Great Schools, we have set up various constructs to make sure that we divert Great Students (and Great Parents) into certain tranches (which we call school districts). This is primarily done via economics – again, statistically speaking, if you look at the children of minimum-wage parents versus those of high-professional parents, in general, the children of minimum-wage parents will not perform as good as the children of high-professionals.
So if you want your community’s schools to perform well, doesn’t it make a lot of sense to do things which keeps out the minimum wage parents? Communities drove up the cost of housing within their borders (largely by restricting supply), and resisted any attempts to bring minimum-wage parent students into their schools. And magically, their schools began to perform better! But at the same time, the districts that didn’t do this got worse.
Our school districts are no longer interchangeable. You think busing was bad in the 1960s? Can you imagine how much worse it would be now, if some students from Wellesley or Weston were transferred to the Brockton Public Schools? Absolutely zero of them would go, and I bet a non-trivial amount of parents would literally take up arms against the government. Why? Because the parents in those communities have paid a huge premium for those poverty-free school homogenous systems. They literally purchased those MCAS scores, those Exceeds Expectations grades.
This Cherry Picking has immense hidden costs. As this migration happened, the amount of money spent did not shift as dramatically as the population. Think hard about that. Cheaper-to-educate students were shifted into some districts, more-expensive-to-educate students were shifted out. Spending did not decrease in the first group, and spending did not dramatically increase in the second group.
Yes, Lawrence spends $14,027 per student and Quincy spends $15,518, but the student breakdown in those districts is very different. Only 36% of the students in Quincy are categorized as Economically Disadvantaged, but 64% of Lawrence’s students are rated as such.
Quincy doesn’t even perform at the top either. The top districts can spend upwards of $18-20k per student. It should be obvious that if it takes a spending level of $18-20k to get a cheaper-to-educate student to perform _really_ well, that it will take a lot more than that to get a more-expensive-to-educate student to just perform well.
That is going to be a huge sticker shock, I think. Can you imagine the pushback if the state were to boost spending to $30k per student in Lawrence so those students could compete with the $22-25k/student in Weston or Dover? It will never be permitted.
That is why I think we need to approach this problem differently. We need to stop the tranching. Of course, that will be as hard, if not harder than raising state taxes to spend $30k on kids in Lawrence or Brockton, but I think it will ultimately have a more positive impact, and will cost less (because concentrating poor kids just makes them exponentially harder to educate).
jconway says
Amen to no politician! For the record, I currently teach in a charter but voted No on 2 in 2016. That said, the voting percentage by town on that question is a good proxy for how our public schools are doing. Places like Salem, Lynn, Lawrence, New Bedford and large swaths of urban Boston embraced charter expansion while places like Lynnfield and Sudbury opposed it.
We should be tripling our investment in underperforming districts. It’s simply passive racism that my nephew in Wakefield gets one to one chrome books all integrated into google classroom while we fight with our colleagues over the two laptop carts that serve our building.
The architect of Ed Reform was on Radio Boston this week and agreed that his formula undercounted the cost of healthcare, pension, and special needs increases and our failure to update it has shortchanged our schools $2 billion a year. He also said increasing funds did not do enough to raise scores and I agree we need to increase teacher prep programs and teacher coaching.
Right now there are less than 10 apprenticeship programs in the state that provide stipends and cover costs for the year of mentorship. BTR is the only one I know of in a public district, and they only stipend for STEM and ELA. Investing in that will ensure a pipeline of high quality teachers can continue to make strides in our schools.