I'm at a two-day symposium in New York City put on by the Campaign for Educational Equity that's examining whether the stimulus funds have been spent and used equitably to help improve achievement, especially among at-risk students.
Sam Dillon did a piece previewing the papers being presented, in which he focused on the funding cliff that the stimulus is creating. Since we've already written a lot about the funding cliff, I thought the more interesting part of these papers, and the symposium itself, was the warning flags being raised about some of the long-term consequences of the stimulus package.
Although I'll have a more complete story soon, here's what I'm talking about:
- Since the stimulus law required roughly $48 billion in State Fiscal Stabilization Funds to be distributed through a state's primary funding formula, the "maintenance of effort" provision that required a state to maintain its own funding only applied to this formula. But this ignores the fact that in many states, there are smaller categorical funds that make up total state aid, but aren't given out to school districts by a formula. This paper, by David Sciarra