Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools
The eternal question in state school funding is how much is enough. Two days before Thanksgiving, Massachusetts addressed this question directly when Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, signed the new school funding bill sent to him by the state’s Democratic-majority legislature.
State legislatures have to balance their investment of tax dollars across K-12 education, state colleges and universities, Medicaid, transportation, incarceration, and a range of other services and functions. And legislators have to build the public’s will to pay the taxes which make government possible. In the 2008 recession, tax revenues collapsed in many places, and political leaders across many states have been preaching tax cutting as some kind of solution to a lagging economy—even though it never seems to work. Again and again, from state to state, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has described “a punishing decade for school funding.” Striking RedforEd teachers have been demonstrating what all this means for our children: Staffing across America’s public schools has dropped below the barest minimum in too many school districts—no nurse, no librarian, no guidance counselor, no music or art, and class size hovering around forty students per teacher.
Massachusetts’ investment in public education did not drop as low as many states. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported that between 2008 and 2015, while (adjusted for inflation) Arizona’s state investment in K-12 public education fell by 36.6 percent and Florida’s state school funding dropped by 22 percent, Massachusetts managed to increase its funding for schools—barely—by .3 percent. But its citizens just demonstrated they expect far more for their children.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker went to The CONTINUE READING: Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools | janresseger
