ARLINGTON 189,351
BARNSTABLE 552,173
BELMONT 5,971
BOYLSTON 20,044
BROOKLINE 62,443
BURLINGTON 153,157
CAMBRIDGE 414,483
CANTON 13,641
CARLISLE 695
CHELMSFORD 523,363
CHESTERFIELD 5,865
CONCORD 50,348
DANVERS 321,492
DEDHAM 156,437
EASTHAM 19,022
EDGARTOWN 5,868
FALMOUTH 443,523
FLORIDA 12,446
GLOUCESTER 87,980
GREENFIELD 44,265
HADLEY 43,248
HARWICH 66,823
HOLDEN 567
HOLLAND 14,051
HOLLISTON 603,497
IPSWICH 130,348
LEE 137,656
LONGMEADOW 172,460
MARION 1,113
MATTAPOISETT 41,349
MILTON 73,760
NAHANT 27,615
NATICK 42,643
NORTH ANDOVER 15,383
NORTHBOROUGH 172,453
NORWOOD 89,359
ORLEANS 20,278
PLYMOUTH 1,399,359
PLYMPTON 80,275
QUINCY 782,431
ROCKLAND 409,246
ROCKPORT 119,265
SAUGUS 231,004
SHUTESBURY 21,247
STONEHAM 95,291
SWAMPSCOTT 73,408
SWANSEA 257,008
TISBURY 7,650
TRURO 14,567
TYRINGHAM 2,668
WAKEFIELD 330,697
WALES 43,662
WALTHAM 267,825
WATERTOWN 1,842
WAYLAND 16,385
WELLFLEET 3,879
WEST BRIDGEWATER 172,010
WILLIAMSBURG 25,382
WINDSOR 67
WOBURN 237,885
CONCORD CARLISLE 3,699
DOVER SHERBORN 95,656
GATEWAY 280,397
MANCHESTER ESSEX 74,619
NASHOBA 163,525
ASSABET VALLEY 282,648
SOUTH MIDDLESEX 263,980
WHITTIER 66,856
I am not sure if I follow the argument. Are you saying the state should ditch the formula that puts more money into poorer towns and instead give more money to the wealthy towns?
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Putting $10.5 Million into the statewide formula would
not give that money to these towns. It would go through the formula.
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If you want to ditch the formula, say that.
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On a larger point, what does FY03 have to do with anything. That seems like a random comparison used only to fit your argument. Why not compare to last year?
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Can we go back to health care costs from FY03?
Can we go back to public safety costs from FY03?
etc
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of course not.
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Resources are limited. Also the fact is poorer towns are going to recieve more money in a statewide formula than the richest towns.
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But you wont see me crying for Arlington or Swampscott because their Ch.70 aid has gone down.
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It went down for a reason that is serving a statewide purpose. I support that. Sorry Brookline.
These formulas are so arbitrary. For example, there are two equally well-off towns where I live, right next to each other: Swampscott and Marblehead. In the past, Swampscott used to get a good chunk more in state aid than Marblehead for all sorts of obscure reasons I couldn’t explain – however, both towns are just as well off. Recently, because of equally obscure factoids I can’t explain, Marblehead has recieved significantly more aid. Again, both towns are equally well off (maybe even Marblehead more so).
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Just because a town is wealthy doesn’t mean it’s more fit to pay on its own – other things factor in too. For example, age of population, businesses in the town, etc. etc. etc. all factor in. For example, Swampscott is a wealthy town, but has almost no business base and a very old population – a population with little to no interest in keeping the budgets up with inflation (ie passing overrides). Consequently, Swampscott gets a pittance in state aid and is shortchanging its students.
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Let’s get this striaght right now – students are the ones who suffer when stuff like that happens.
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I would argue the state should do several things to pay for school systems. First, let’s ditch the formulas and start paying directly toward needed services. For example, let’s let the state pay for all special education. It could be, under that metric, that towns would even end up paying more. I just don’t know. However, it wouldn’t be as unpredictable as special ed as currently constituted(and you just don’t know when someone with a LOT of special needs is going to move in) and would make a lot of sense. Then, since inner city students and students from especially poor areas will need added funding, we can directly fund programs at the state level that they need – be it after school, extra curricular, etc. etc. etc.
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Furthermore, I think we should look at county education instead of town education. It could allow us to save money and make sure funds are more evenly distributed throughout the state. It would make it so cities and towns with lots of businesses don’t have such a huge advantage over those with little to none. A lot – maybe even most – states do it this way, including states that almost do as well as we do academically. I’m not saying this is 100% the way to go, but it should be looked at.
The target local share formula is intended to do two things – direct aid to towns based on ability to pay, and balance aid across the state so comparable towns receive comparable levels of aid.
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The status quo is that there are large differences in state aid and required spending between comparable towns, based on the historical formula’s quirks and twists. Aid and spending requirements have traditionally been adjusted incrementally, based on Prop 2.5 limits and a number of other judgement calls ; the target local share reform moves spending requirements and aid towards a target number calculated based on each town’s current ability to pay and the local school burden.
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We’re accustomed to comparing increases of aid from the previous year’s baseline to figure out who the winners and losers are in each year’s aid allocations. So you might think a town that got a 25% increase of aid last year was a winner compared with a town that got a 2% increase of aid. But by the target local share formula, you can see that the real winner was the town that only got a 2% increase of aid, because that town already has its aid allocation at or in many cases even above its target local share. Whereas the towns getting additional aid under target local share are places where the historical aid allocation has been lower than comparable locales.
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Where would your prefer to live, from a tax neutrality and schools standpoint – a place which has been getting more aid than it should, and will continue to do so, even though it is seeing smaller increases in aid now; or a place that has been getting a lot less aid than it should, which is seeing fairly substantial increases, and where a correction of this shortfall of aid depends on rising state revenue and the whims of politics?
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I’m not a big proponent of doing a fix to the FY03 aid level. It would make a medium size difference for my small town, but fixing the regional school allocation formula so that required spending is aligned with ability to pay and with other town’s required spending would bring five times as much relief to our town.
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There is some logic to support a FY03 fix, though. In FY03, aid was slashed by 20% across the board; but the state has a “hold harmless” policy that aid should never be cut from one year to the next. So, it is reasonable to ask why the formulas for aid allocation since the bottom dropped out of state revenue in FY 2004 have left behind sixty towns, while many other comparable locales have fully recovered from the FY04 debacle.
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A fix that holds these towns harmless to FY03 while also moving their numbers in the direction of target local share honors the normally inviolable hold harmless principle, and every penny of the fix moves towards the numbers the state calculates as appropriate.
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Also, in a year when the governor wants to scale back target local share reform by $50 Million to save money, a $10 Million increment from the governor’s target is a relatively small potatoes.
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PS to Ryepower12 – yes, by target local share, Swampscott is due for a correction towards the level of aid that Marblehead has been getting, according to target local share. The preliminary state spreadsheet does not show this happening, in part because Swampscott’s required spending has not yet fallen enough to move the formulas , and in another part . If the legislature follows through on its stated intention of phasing towards target local share by 40% rather than the governor’s suggested 30%, and they keep the “downpayment aid” formula working so it allocates additional aid uniformly across the state, I believe Swampscott should see an increase of aid this year at least comparable to what Marblehead receives.
I get the impression the foundation budget took conditions in 1993 and simply adjusted them every year based on things like the amount of new growth, etc., that occurs in a city or town. Is that correct? If so, it’s easy to see how things could be ripe for a wholesale correction, like when you get a 3% raise every year for 10 years, and then realize that you’re being paid less than people who were hired after you were because the market has changed.
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In some ways that is like the implementation of Proposition 2.5 nearly 25 years ago — not all towns started at the same level. If town A was collecting $10m in property tax levy and town B was collecting $15m in property tax levy, then each town was allowed to raise its tax levy at 2.5% per year (without respect for new growth and overrides). The starting position did not take into account need or efficiency of local government. If town B was able to charge less tax because it was better run, without overrides, it will not be able to catch up to town A because both have the same governor on the accelerator.
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Perhaps this is related to the seeming disparates. Chapter 70 is tied to the amount of property tax that a town is collecting. Maybe in the above example, Marblehead was paying less towards education than Swampscott, and the state figured it should be paying more so it gave less aid. Or it’s also possible that because Marblehead was spending less on education, that the state gave it more aid.
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I’m tending to believe that maybe the state should give cities and towns more flexibility in raising revenue, and then only step in when a city or town is truly unable to raise enough revenue, rather than force cities and towns to rely on property values as their sole source of local revenue.
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Also, is this post even relevant? The numbers quoted are gross total Chapter 70 aid; isn’t aid based on enrollment? If a town is down by 300 students, and if they get $3k per student from the state, that comes to $900k less. Shouldn’t this comparison be done on a state-aid-per-pupil basis? And even then, since Chapter 70 relies on demographics, if a town shed 100 low-income families in lieu of 100 high-income families (which I’m sure is probably happening given the growing housing prices in the East), that would result in a lower foundation budget, and therefore lower Chapter 70 money.
The Chapter 70 formula is complex and mistakes in calculations were made that have carried forward to this day. There are towns with very similar demographics (average salary, average property value, etc.) to Stoneham that receive almost 3 times as much per pupil. The town has been pleading its case on Beacon Hill for 10 years. In every meeting its agreed that Stoneham is getting shortchanged but nothing is done about it. As a result, our teachers are underpaid in comparison to those in our surrounding communities, many are leaving for higher paying jobs or getting laid off, and many programs (yes, including the athletic program) are no facing the axe.
Hi MassParent,
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In 2003, Brookline spent $62 million on K-12 (local funds and state funds)
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In 2007, Brookline spent $78 million on K-12.
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That’s a decent rise without much enrollment change.
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I assume they were able to do that because their property values soared, and therefore so did the property tax revenues.
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How did total spending turn out in your small town? I realize it may be that prop values in your town didn’t change that much, and therefore prop tax revenues didn’t change much, either.
Increases in property values do not increase tax revenues! I am astonished that someone as well-informed as you does not know that.
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Property taxes are capped, remember, which means that when property values rise across the board the tax rate drops so that the levy limit stays within the cap (which is a lot less than inflation).
How did Brookline real estate tax receipts rise to $123 million in 2006 from $108 million in 2003? Almost all of Brookline property (>80%) is residential.
Prop 2.5 allows the ceiling for property taxes to grow by 2.5%, plus 2.5% of new construction, and no town can tax at a rate higher than 2.5% of valuation, if I recall correctly.
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When you’ve got any new growth, particularly when property values are high, adding 2.5% of that new valuation can push the tax ceiling up quite a bit. The statewide average last year was an increase in the levy limit of 4.69%, according to a valuation calculated for the chapter 70 allocation spreadsheet which is called “Municipal Revenue Growth Factor”. The school allocation formulas need to know this, because they need to know how much the state can require a town to increase its school spending without the potential of pushing the town past its capped levy limit and forcing an override.
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If Brookline has had an MRGF of 4.69% for four years running, that would imply capacity to grow the property tax ceiling by 20%, give or take a smidgeon. Your actual increase is 123/108 or about 14% – among the smaller increases in the state, I believe. Ours have gone up about 50% in five years.
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It’s likely that Brookline had to increase local revenues after 2003 because FY04 was the year the state slashed local aid. That immediately followed after the income tax rate cut from 5.6% down to 5.3%, plus the cyclical slowdown. School aid was cut almost uniformly across the state by 20%, and some lottery aid was diverted.
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I believe regional school transportation aid was also cut at the same time; the state had promised a lot of towns that regional school transportation would be covered by the state, because the state wants to encourage consolidation of school districts. But then the promise was broken, because the state was broke.
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At any rate, it is quite likely that Brookline had some slack in its Prop 2.5 ceiling in 2003, and had to use up the slack to cover for the state shortfall in subsequent years.
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MRGF is one of the complicating factors the state has to deal with when figuring out school aid. The state can’t force localities that are constrained by local tax levy limits to increase spending beyond their levy limit. Since the beginning of ed reform, the state’s primary goal has been assuring every town can spend enough on schools to reach what is called the “foundation budget”, which is a level calculated as the minimum adequate school budget across the state, adjusted for local factors. MRGF is the tool that has been used to grow the capacity of towns to support their schools, and the state has filled in from the level each town can support up to the foundation budget, with an explicit “hold harmless” agreement that the state won’t ever reduce aid (FY 2004 notwithstanding) to any town even if its capacity grows enough that it no longer requires as much subsidy to reach foundation.
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But the state wasn’t paying much attention to the towns that had exceeded their goal, except for the vague idea that it was a good thing if schools spent more than the rock bottom minimum. So two things happened, as best I can tell (I’m fairly weak on the history). One, the state’s calculated spending growth – which drives the “minimum required contribution” – went unchecked, even when the foundation goal was exceeded by a lot. Provincetown, two years ago, had hit 300% of foundation, prior to the beginning of “target local share” reform. And also, the localities that exceeded foundation did not receive as much additional state aid, meaning that they often (but not always) fell behind some other fairly similar localities in the percentage of foundation budget covered by aid.
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So, you’ve got two groups of towns across the state. One group, a bit over half, has grown their local contribution past the foundation target local share. The second group still has not reached the target share.
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Every town in the second group receives AT LEAST its target share of aid allocation, so all of the aid shortfalls are within the group that spends beyond its target, by definition.
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Sorting the list of towns across the state on the basis of which are “over effort” by how much, there’s a cluster of places like Cambridge, Brookline, and some Cape towns way over target. But after that group, the distribution seems fairly random across the state in terms of wealth.
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For example, two of the seven school districts that are going into fifth year sanctions under No Child Left Behind, Pittsfield and Chicopee, are significantly behind their aid target – so their total school spending barely hits foundation level, even though both urban, low income cities are taxed above the rate the state calculates as their target. Pittsfield is $4.6 million short of aid, and Chicopee $6.7 million short. I ran correlation coefficients on the total distribution, and there seemed to be a small positive correlation with wealth as calculated imperfectly by target local share (as well as some eyeballing by median income and poverty rates), but if you remove the headliners, it seemed pretty clear to me that towns of comparable wealth or lack thereof could land on either list.
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What was the question again? Time for my coffee.
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Are you sure there hasn’t been much enrollment change? There’s been lots of murmuring about exploding kindergarten enrollment…
Our town’s basic challenge the past four years has been a formula that equalizes required spending across school districts, called disparity reduction.
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Disparity reduction sounds like a reasonable reform, but it resulted in a huge shift (about 25% of local school budget) from our local elementary to the regional upper school. This pattern has been replicated in many regional schools across the state, usually for one or two towns out of four or five.
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If disparity reduction had been completed after correcting “target local share”, most of the shift of funds would never have occured. We’re currently slated for a 25.2% reduction in our regional assessment, when the state is able to phase in target local share.
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A reform I’m proposing to our state rep is to cut back the cap on excess effort, which was set at 150% of target last year, to something like 110% to 120% of target this year. This allows the state to give a lot of regulatory relief without requiring a lot of new state dollars. I’ve modeled a slightly modified cap that would allow the state to cut out more than half of the remaining “excess effort” at a cost of only about $12 million, which is about one-third the cost to reduce only 30% of excess effort in the governor’s slimmed down budget proposal.
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If, indeed, the state is heading into a fiscal crunch, this would be a way for the state to save money while still “giving cities and towns a bit more latitude to manage their affairs”. It puts regional school members on a fairly equal footing, and lets them manage total spending based on their contract obligations plus their democratic willingness to spend above foundation rather than on an arbitrary formula that can assess similar towns at up to a 50% different rate compared with their target share.
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I suspect our new governor, who I heartily supported last fall, has not considered regulatory relief as a means of giving cities and towns lattitude, but this is an easy way to meet one campaign pledge, concern from some who favor keeping excess mandated spending by towns beyond what is calculated as reasonable and affordable in place even if easing the regulations has no cost to the state notwithstanding. I’m a supporter of generous ed funding, but think the burden has to be fairly distributed.
Spending is regulated – towns have to make at least a “required minimum” contribution to schools, and currently, comparable towns do not have comparable required minimum spending levels.
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The target local share reform works by making this required spending more uniform across the state, by reducing mandated spending for those towns currently above target down to their target. The target for each town is based on its ability to pay.
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There is a total of $500 million of excess mandated spending, spread out unevenly in about 140 towns across the state. When all of that spending mandate is eliminated, it will trigger an additional $243 million of chapter 70 school aid, also spread out unevenly among those same towns. Note that cutting spending mandates does not cut spending. It only cuts state regulation; spending choices above the state mandate are in the hands of school committees and town meetings.
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The trick to bring additional regulatory relief without current year cost in state aid is to figure out how to reduce only the portion of excess required spending that doesn’t trigger additional local school aid from the state. I’ll save the details for another day, and just say it is possible to do this, using variations on caps on excess contributions.
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The biggest direct regulatory benefit is for some regional school members where assessments currently are up to 55% over target. Nearly every regional school district across the state has at least one member town over-assessed by 10% or more. Many towns are over-assessed by at least 25%. There is also regulatory language involved which supercedes regional founding contracts, but the basic problem for towns is in the assessments themselves.
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So, figuring out how to get the most relief of excess mandatory spending with the available state funds seems like the way to go. The original plan to phase in target local share relief relies on rising state revenues, but a significant part of the relief can be achieved even if the state can’t afford to make good on the increased aid side of the equation in the next year or two.
MassParent, your comments in this thread are amazing…
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I’d love for you to write a diary on “chapter 70 for dummies” and some of you ideas to help address the large problem of costs for both wealthiest towns and poorest cities. Some of what you had to say went slightly over my head, but I learned a lot and think this subject is both very important and something a lot of people could learn from… and you seem to know a lot about it.
Sorry I didn’t notice your post till now.
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You can find some background information at the DOE website, here is a background paper for the concept of target share reform.
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The basic concept since the beginning of ed reform in 1993 has been that the state will fill in with “foundation aid” to bring every school district up to the foundation budget level, with the foundation defined as minimal adequate budget. The state regulates towns’ spending, and has historically grown spending using a formula called Municipal Revenue Growth Factor, or MRGF. MRGF is the Prop 2.5 ceiling for a town, and it grows by 2.5% per year plus new growth added at the town’s current tax rate (I misquoted that in another post). If they didn’t regulate spending, they couldn’t know how much aid to allocate, or how much different members of regional schools had to contribute, and they wouldn’t be assuring foundation budget level is achieved. But the formulas got a bit carried away for some locales. Provincetown, till last year, was required to spend about $20K per student. Cambridge, about $15K. Zounds!
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The foundation budget level is adjusted each year for inflation, and occaisionally has different weightings or factors applied. Also, different regions have different wage scales.
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For rural regions, there is a curious problem. The foundation budget assumes at least 300 students per principal. Many towns only have one or two hundred. The state’s answer was to regionalize and consolidate. So some regions have seven towns, and a couple or three elementary schools, spread out over a gazillion square miles. A couple of these are losing population, and lots of familes with kids choice the kids out because the schools are perceived as in crisis. They’re contemplating which villages will no longer have local schools. The wage scale out here means the calculated foundation budget is a lot lower than in the urban locales. Hmm, but it seems we really ought to be able to keep local elementary schools with only 150 students open, even though we can’t hire half a principal. Anyone who values small, local elementary schools in rural areas, who also thinks George Will is a smart guy, ought to ask him how they can keep 65% of spending in the classroom and still keep their schools open. For all our commonwealth’s ed faults, at least we don’t have George Will running our schools.
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Early on in ed reform, it was enough for the state simply to strive to bring every district’s spending up to the foundation level. But with that goal accomplished (at least, if you agree the foundation level is an acceptable education – many argue it has not even kept pace with the true rate of ed inflation, and that it has never been adjusted to reflect the higher demands of MCAS and No Child Left Behind, and curriculum requirements), with that goal accomplished, many, especially those in locales receiving very little aid or facing very high required contributions, think it’s time to address equity. But some others don’t really want equity addressed, neither by cutting back on excessive spending, nor by realligning aid allocations, as they have other priorities with the money.
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Each quarter point of foundation budget is $20 million bucks, and the state has to cover a big chunk of that any time the foundation level rises, to keep locales spending at foundation. Some might think the foundation has to rise by 10% or more, I don’t know the numbers here, but think most locales spend that much beyond foundation voluntarily. Suppose six percent of that had to be covered by the state, that would be close to $500 million bucks of new aid. The annual increments of the past two years – just over $200 million – allocate about half of that to baseline inflation (that is, mandatory filling in of foundation aid) – but that gives less than half of locales any aid increase. So real inflation alone is more like $200 million. Adding $500 million would require, well, gee, I guess if they can spend $80 billion a year in Iraq, the feds ought to stop that silliness and send the money back to the states, and Mass ought to receive a couple $Billion of that, so there we go, never mind that we have to borrow it from China! But $500 million isn’t likely to drop out of any money trees around here any time soon. Particularly not if inflation overruns Prop 2.5 limits.
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I’m starting to ramble rambling. Good luck!