Lawmakers look to boost ed $$
Two camps propose bills to ‘fix the broken formula’
Two pieces of legislation, one from the state House and Senate and another from the corner office, seem to address the same problem — the state’s outdated education funding formula.
State Sen. Sonia ChangDiaz (D-Boston) filed a bill along with state Reps. Aaron Vega (D-Holyoke) and Mary Keefe (D-Worcester) and called for it to become law before the next school year in a press conference Tuesday. The bill would update the state’s education funding formula, which hasn’t been touched since 1993, including equity provisions for low-income and English learner students.
The bill, called the Education PROMISE Act, would implement all five recommendations of the bipartisan Foundation Budget Review Commission, which found that in 2015, Massachusetts schools were underfunded by between $1 billion and $2 billion.
Gov. Charlie Baker said during his auguration he would be filing legislation of his own to address the same issue.
“I’ve now been in this building for 10 years as a senator and I can tell you without hesitation that where there’s a will there’s a way, so no, I don’t worry about that,” Chang-Diaz said of the competing bills. “We’re going to have a healthy ‘small d’ democratic debate about this.”
Chang-Diaz added that it has been about 8 years since the work to get the budget review commission first started “in earnest,” and it has been three years since that “bipartisan commission gave us, the Legislature, a very clear road map of how to fix the broken formula.”
The 2015 commission of experts found that the state has underestimated the resources necessary to close achievement gaps and failed to update the formula to keep up with rising health care and special education costs.
Spokesman Brendan Moss said Baker will propose updates to the school funding formula later this month.
“The administration looks forward to working with the Legislature to significantly increase Chapter 70 funding to address deficiencies and provide new resources for practices and programs that are proven to accelerate learning and close achievement gaps, especially in the commonwealth’s lowest performing districts,” Moss said.
Last session, the House and Senate both passed education funding reform bills — but were unable to negotiate a final education funding reform package with limited time at the end of the session.