State Budget Redux

With Race to the Top and other federal funding initiatives winding down this academic year, state policy makers and school leaders are grappling with the challenge of sustaining this work with declining resources.  So, we were interested to see how the Governor’s FY15 budget proposal might address this dilemma.  Unfortunately, despite the Governor’s unquestioned commitment to high quality education, the budget proposal looks a lot like last year’s.

According to the budget statement, “This proposal will fully fund all schools at foundation levels, will include all students that currently receive pre-kindergarten services and will provide a minimum $25 per pupil increase.”   As we said last year, increasing funds may satisfy the political need to respond to school districts’ fiscal struggles, but unless the state targets additional funding to programs and intiatives with demonstrated results, there is no guarantee these funds will achieve their purpose of “investing to close achievement gaps”.

And, once again, we applaud additional targeted support for early childhood education and for higher education, where great strides have been made to link funding to performance.    After implementing a new funding formula for Community Colleges this year that links “state appropriations to institutional performance toward statewide goals and priorities identified in the Vision Project“, the Department of Higher Ed is going to develop a similar formula for Massachusetts State Universities “in order to continue progress linking higher education funding to the statewide priorities of educational and workforce development and align funding with individual campus demographic factors such as population and campus-level financial aid needs.”    In addition, the Department of Higher Education is leading a group of 9 states developing measures for what students learn in college based on course work rather than standardized tests.  The goal is to establish a recognized and reliable standard for what a diploma represents that can be compared across states.

We hope the Legislature will use the higher ed model for the K-12 budget as well.   Increased funding should bring with it the responsibility to continue to make progress on the Race to the Top goals and an expectation of a return on this investment for our kids.