Follow state money to individual schools

Consider the following riddle. A school district in Suffolk County on Long Island spends $30,200 per student on average, nearly three times higher than the national average. Yet 50% of the schools in the district rank at the bottom academically compared to all schools in the state.

What accounts for the disparities within the district?

Arguments over the equitable distribution of education funding in New York have traditionally focused on district-level funding. In a 1993 court case called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, New York City parents and other stakeholders filed a lawsuit against the state arguing that a lack of funding to schools in poorer districts violated the constitutionally mandated standard to provide a “sound basic education.”

In response, the state convened an expert panel that determined that New York City schools needed an additional $1.9 billion from city, state and federal sources to provide a sound basic education. The court accepted the findings, and the lawsuit was resolved. Since then, the additional $1.9 billion has been funded several times over.

Later, a new education aid formula called Foundation Aid was created under Gov. Eliot Spitzer. That formula was an attempt to fix the funding disparities in poor schools, but it simply layered significantly more money on top of the problem without regard for economic conditions. Then the economic bottom fell out when the Great Recession hit and exposed the unsustainability of the Spitzer formula.

Upon Gov. Cuomo taking office, the state Legislature passed into law a new funding formula for annual education increases that are equitably distributed based on need and on economic factors. During the past seven years, state budgets — which I helped negotiate — often exceeded the new formula and provided more funding to districts that needed it the most.

The annual education budget dance is much like the story of Goldilocks, where some say there is too much spending and others say there isn’t enough.

But we’re missing the forest for the trees.

New York spends more per pupil than any state in the nation — almost double the national average, and it keeps growing. Education spending by the state has risen 35% over the past seven years, from $19.5 billion to $26.4 billion — 10% greater than the statutory education formula cap level.

We need to look harder, and in far more detail, at how that money is spent within districts.

Broadly speaking, the state spends school aid in a progressive way, with more than 72% of the annual increases going to those poor districts that need it the most. Whether that percentage should be higher is an important debate and one we should continue to have.

But however much we spend overall, there are real problems with the education formula. In a report by my organization, the Rockefeller Institute of Government, we created a definition of low-performing schools (the bottom 20% academically across the state) and then measured it against available spending and poverty indicators in an attempt to find potential funding disparity issues within districts. We found that many of the state’s 860 poor-performing schools are located in districts that also have high-achieving schools or that already have high levels of state funding.

For instance, in Buffalo, which receives more than $762 million per year in state aid, we found that 73% of schools are poor-performing. New York City, which receives $10.5 billion, has two-thirds of all low-performing schools in the state, many of which are in poorer communities of color.

There have been some targeted programs, like the state’s community school programs, which directly give money to these poorperforming schools that are oftentimes found in low-income minority communities. However, under the current education funding system, a lion’s share of the state funding goes directly to school districts, which then distribute the funds among schools.

As a result, there is little required transparency or clear apples-to-apples analysis of how districts distribute aid. We only know how much the state funds and how much districts receive. We do not know the answer to the most relevant question, which is how local school districts fund their schools.

To successfully attack savage inequities that are rife throughout our state, we need to find out.