Biz Asks Commissioner to Ensure New Funds Follow Students

The substantial increase in school funding made in the 2020 budget, the largest increase in Chapter 70 and other state aid for education in over a decade, combined with two previous years of increases, amount to a significant “down payment” on the recommendations of the Foundation Budget Review Commission and therefore should be treated as such.

That’s why MBAE and our founding statewide business partners, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, this week called on the Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education to use existing authorities to require districts to produce plans to ensure money allocated in the 2020 budget to meet the needs of low-income and ELL students is spent to serve those students.

The state budget allocates an additional $268 million, the majority of which is intended to serve higher needs students, without any assurance that this money will be spent in the classrooms of those students and without plans or targets for how this money will close achievement and skills gaps.

In a letter to the Commissioner, MBAE and our partners wrote “School districts will be making important decisions about how to use new funding that will create obligations and expectations for how money will be used once an education reform bill is passed. If we do not lay a foundation for equitable, effective resource use this year, we may blunt the intended impact of education funding reform for years to come.”

The letter urges the Commissioner to use of existing powers to:

* Require districts create, and make public, a plan, with community input, that ensures money allocated for low-income and ELL students is spent to serve those students and on practices that will close achievement gaps;

* Set clear and aggressive statewide and district targets for closing achievement gaps; and

* Require an end-of-year reporting on the impact of new funding in closing those gaps.

“We believe that the use of current statutory tools that exist, at least on an interim basis until the legislature has the opportunity to determine what level of planning, reporting, and prescription should accompany a longer-term funding solution, is essential and a proper role for the Department to facilitate. Funding without additional reform and measurement of outcomes will not help the students we need to a better job of serving.”

Read the full letter here.