A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system - Wait What?:
A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system
In testimony before the Connecticut General Assembly’s Education Committee yesterday, the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding [CCJEF] explained why a cost study is so critically important to the development of a fair and comprehensive school funding formula. CCJEF explained:
Why an Education Adequacy Cost Study for Connecticut?
For too long Connecticut has developed education funding policy backwards and without hard data. For too long our State has let budget politics, special interests and perceived fiscal “realities” determine how much to spend on K-12 public education. State government time and time again has backed into an education funding amount and then corrupted the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula and other funding programs to deliver a target spending amount. This has been the harsh reality since the inception of the ECS grant. Since 2013 we have not even maintained the fiction of using the ECS formula.
An education adequacy cost study is the necessary prerequisite to developing a new, rational and constitutional education finance system in Connecticut. Unlike the arbitrary, budget-driven efforts of the past and present, an education adequacy cost study would provide hard, real-world data on student needs and what resources are necessary to meet our state constitutional responsibility to deliver an adequate and equitable educational opportunity for every K-12 public school student in our state.
Connecticut’s shame is to tolerate some of the most economically and racially segregated school districts in the nation.
