[Editor’s note: I recently wondered aloud if Sen. Lewis would be as passionate an advocate for the FBRC recommendations as Sen. Chang-Diaz, whom he replaces on the committee. Here he makes his case. After the fold, I’ve added a paragraph from his post on his site.
So the question remains: If the substance of the bill shall remain the same, why did Sen. President Spilka switch out the personnel? – Charley]
After I was appointed last week to serve as the Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Education, I’ve been thinking hard about the various achievement gaps in Massachusetts public schools. I shared these thoughts on my Facebook page and Twitter, but I wanted to also offer my thoughts to the BMG community. I’d also encourage you to read my recent op-ed column on education funding!
While we should celebrate the Commonwealth’s national leadership in student performance and educational excellence, we must also redouble our efforts to address unacceptable achievement and opportunity gaps that plague our low-income students, students of color, and English language learners. It is both a moral and economic imperative that we address these fundamental inequities.
Ensuring that all of our schools receive adequate and equitable funding, particularly in low-income communities, was the issue that originally motivated me to run for the state legislature. I have a longstanding commitment to fixing our school funding formula, including filing the legislation that created the Foundation Budget Review Commission.
I’m excited to work with my Senate and House colleagues, the Baker administration, and all education stakeholders to achieve the policy and funding reforms we need to ensure that every student in Massachusetts can thrive.
Jason Lewis is the state senator for the 5th Middlesex district, which includes Malden, Melrose, Reading, Stoneham, Wakefield, and precincts 1, 2, 3, and 8 of Winchester. Like State Senator Lewis on Facebook and follow him on Twitter.
[From Lewis’s column:]
Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz has re-filed legislation known as the Education PROMISE Act, and I’m proud to co-sponsor and help champion the passage of this bill. It would fully implement all the recommendations of the FBRC, which would lead to major improvements in the adequacy and equity of school funding in the Commonwealth. In addition to passing the Education PROMISE Act, we will also need to raise additional funding to enable the state to fully meet its obligations. This is why I’m committed to leading the effort to pass the Fair Share Amendment or millionaire’s tax in Massachusetts (more on this initiative in a future column).
I did that. It hasn’t answered my question.
My question is this: Where and how, precisely, do the House and Senate differ on implementing the recommendations of the FBRC? We are told that this is the point of impasse. We are not told how or where or on what specific matters do the Senate and House differ. Where do they disagree? Why?
My rep (Garballey) told me that the Senate version didn’t pay for it. I don’t know enough to gauge the accuracy of that statement.
So… the objection out of the House is — now — “revenue before reform”??
Too cute.
I certainly hope that the state will pass clean version of this bill. The research is clear that funding struggling communities to their needs is the best way to close the achievement gap. Experience is clear that many special interests see this as an opportunity to increase privatization and decrease democratic governance in public education.
It is understandable why you might talk about working with Charlie Baker and many other forces on Beacon Hill. It is also likely that you’ll have to work against them to give communities and children the help they were promised long ago. Good luck,
When we allow education to drive property values, we have failed. It is a symptom that we are rationing education across the state – people are paying a lot more for their houses to gain access to the education quality that they desire.
Schools are the #1 factor in property values. It has become a feedback loop, creating economic segregation. Poor families can’t get into the communities with good schools. middle-class families have to stretch to get into those towns, spending a far higher percentage of their income on housing than they should. And for what reason? To avoid certain school districts, usually the ones with the most housing and infrastructure to support population, i.e. the larger urban areas.
If you could wave a wand and make all of the urban district schools “great”, it would dramatically change this state for the better. Traffic problems would evaporate as people move into more central locations. Services would get cheaper as they become more consolidated and gain efficiencies of scale. Companies would be attracted to larger concentrations of population in central locations.
Racism would even diminish, as people move out of their enclaves and start to interact with people who are not exactly like them.
We might even increase our state’s population, since many people currently leave the state because they can’t find a job that matches the cost of housing that they want.
Think about that when thinking about the impact of education funding.
Indeed,
No magic wands are needed.
What is needed, instead, is greatly increased tax revenue from the wealthy and very wealthy so that education is funded by federal and state, rather than town, revenue.
At this point., we probably need to go even further. The issue is that different children have different levels of need for education. This is highly correlated to income. That likely means that it will cost a lot more per student in a poor district than in a wealthy district.
That will likely mean dramatically improving the aid formula, to the point where wealthy communities say “hey, it probably makes sense to bring in some low-income students, because the amount of state aid attached to them is overwhelmingly more attractive than any perceived negative associated with them.
And yes, it will need to be done at the state level.
But what never made sense to me is that Title I funding was tied to number of students eligible for free lunch. It certainly seems possible to me that well off students need academic support and vice versa.
Yes, I agree with you that some well-off students need help, and I’m not trying to suggest that they don’t. However I think the evidence is overwhelming that in general, kids from low-income families need substantially more help. They need light-years more help. I don’t think there is a single low-income school district in the country where students perform as well as their high-income peers. In fact, it’s so highly correlated that if students in low-income districts perform better than they “should”, this is a signal to investigate the school or district for cheating.
I know that this issue has been constantly framed as “schools in low-income districts failing”, as if those districts just inherently suck, as if the teachers are all bad, as if the administration is awful, and as if the actual buildings are somehow making the kids fail.
That’s not the right frame. Reality is that different students have different needs, generally correlated to family income but also tied to the families in general, their structure, their own performance, how they value education.
That’s why wealthy school districts don’t want any poor kids in their schools, even when they receive the same dollar value that the sending district is spending, which is usually more than they are spending on their own kids. It’s essentially free money because taking in a few more students rarely increases overall costs, but free money is still not enough for those towns to do it.
One other thing which I don’t think very many people realize: Schools today demand heavy parental involvement. Look at charter schools, it is all the rage to require this of parents. There was an article on the Washington Post that touched on this, it mentioned that on average, American parents spend 2 hours per week with their kids on homework. While that is certainly admirable, it means that schools are not serving as the “great equalizer” – because if you need your parents help to succeed, and your parents can’t or won’t help you, you will likely fail.
This is such a good comment.
The term ‘low income’ literally means the dual burden of fewer daily calories (or greater caloric intake of poor, cheap, food) and greater daily stress. And, when everybody around you is in the same situation, you tend to accept it more and your ability and or willingness to fight against it correspondingly decreases.
Stress increases with the absence of parents. If you are lucky enough to have two parents they may be so overworked they can’t help. If you only have one parent and who works two, or three jobs, while requiring you to help care for siblings…. well, It’s a wonder any schoolwork is done, never mind done well…
Poverty, as has been said before, really is violence.
After all that, swizzling ‘low income’ kids in a class of 30 with one teacher and expecting any one of them to perform at the level of a well-fed kid who’s never had to watch the thermostat, in a three-car family with two parents and a grandpa who lives in the ‘in-law’ apartment upstairs, is actually kinda cruel.
Well, from being on the teaching side I can definitely affirm that parental involvement is a net plus most of the time, though there’s also the occasional parent who is a bit too involved.