The Cuomology of State Aid (or Tales from Lake Flaccid)
Posted on May 1, 2014
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We’ve heard much bluster over time about school funding in New York State, and specifically how money certainly has no role in the policy debate over how to fix New York State schools, unless it has to do with providing more money to charter schools, or decrying the fact that district schools statewide are substantially over-funded. See for example, this wonderfully absurd rant from DFER.
Here’s a recap of other posts I’ve written in recent years on NY school finance:
- On how New York State crafted a low-ball estimate of what districts needed to achieve adequate outcomes and then still completely failed to fund it.
- On how New York State maintains one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation.
- On how New York State’s systemic, persistent underfunding of high need districts has led to significant increases of numbers of children attending school with excessively large class sizes.
- On how New York State officials crafted a completely bogus, racially and economically disparate school classification scheme in order to justify intervening in the very schools they have most deprived over time.
I also recently wrote about this interesting trend in NY state school finance and NY state outcome standards- specifically that the state continues to raise the bar on outcomes while lowering the funding target intended to be sufficient for meeting those outcomes.
As I previously explained, regarding outcome standards:
Put simply, higher student outcome standards cost more to achieve, not less. As explained above, the New York State school finance formula is built on an underlying basic cost estimate of what it would take for a low need (no additional student needs) district to achieve adequate educational outcomes as measured on state assessments. The current formula is built on average spending estimates dating back several years now and based on prior outcome standards, tied to a goal of achieving 80% proficient or higher. More than once in the past several years, the state has substantively increased the measured outcome standards.
For 2010, the Regents adjusted the assessment cut scores to address the inflation issue, and as one might expect proficiency rates adjusted accordingly. The following figure shows the rates of The Cuomology of State Aid (or Tales from Lake Flaccid) | School Finance 101: