MASS Promise to Invest: School Funding for Every Child

See 2 PDFs at the bottom of this text for the amounts we are advocating for for each city, town and regional school district. If your town or city has a municipal school district, your district will appear in the first list. If your town or city has a regional school district, your district will appear on the second list. If your town or city has both a municipal and regional school district, it will appear on both lists with the amount for each district.

It is written into the Massachusetts constitution by our founding fathers and interpreted by our state’s highest court of law that “the Commonwealth (has) an enforceable duty to provide an education for all its children, rich and poor, in every city and town through the public schools.”

https://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/litigation/mcduffy-hancock.html

The short answer is yes.

The Commonwealth “Rainy Day” Fund had a balance of $8.831 billion as of August 9, 2024 and the millionaire’s tax came in $1 billion over the estimated amount (for a total of at least $2.2 billion). Half of this revenue is by intent of the fair share ballot question to be dedicated to education funding.

https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2024/08/13/massachusetts-collects-2-2b-from-millionaires-tax/108960/

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is one of the wealthiest states in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. If Massachusetts was a country, we would be the 5th wealthiest country in the world compared directly to other existing countries. There are many reasons too numerous to list here that suggest that our state government can afford to fund our schools better.

One detailed study of state by state comparisons of school funding gives us a “grade” of a D for funding level and a “grade” of C for funding distribution, suggesting that we both spend less as a percentage of our state’s GDP on K-12 education than many other states AND while we have a high average spending level per student on K-12 education, that amount reflects the much higher levels of funding in our wealthiest school districts (see figure 2a and 3a in the linked funding report).

https://edlawcenter.org/research/making-the-grade-2024/

Many advocacy groups also suggest that taxation in the state is regressive and that wealthy people in our state benefit from a lower tax burden than the middle or lower class. This article from the Mass Budget and Policy Center details just one of the regressive elements of taxation in the commonwealth.

https://massbudget.org/2022/11/01/62f-excess-as-mirage/

No, we are not opposed to charter schools or school choice. We question who should pay for the funding. The Commonwealth’s current funding policies place the burden of funding charter schools and school choice largely on cities and towns, particularly those with the least means and/ or the highest needs. When the legislature created charter schools they were to create additional options for public schools to serve as alternative educational models to reform and transform education in the state. But the state’s current funding system for these policies siphons money from public schools.

We are going to let the experts answer this question. The Massachusetts Teachers Association has a detailed FAQ on how charter schools affect public school funding. Please see their FAQ

https://massteacher.org/current-initiatives/charter-schools

The short answer is that

• For every family that sends a student to a charter school, the public funding for that student follows them to the charter school.
• For every family that sends a student to a different school district, a portion of the public funding for that student follows them to the new public school district.
• The student’s sending school district loses these funds while their costs to operate their school districts remain relatively unchanged.

The state assumes an automatic cost savings to a district for not having to educate that student, when in reality most of those costs are fixed and do not scale down unless there is a large decline in enrollment that allows for classrooms to be consolidated, a school to close or for two districts to regionalize. But charter school and school choice funding policies force these outcomes by continuously and incrementally reducing state aid to declining enrollment districts.

While the Student Opportunity Act was an extraordinary accomplishment by the legislature that provide large amounts of new funding to our largest urban low income school districts, the funding distribution remained largely the same and Massachusetts in state by state comparisons of school funding is in the bottom middle in terms of the equity of funding distribution. See figure 2a in the linked report.

https://edlawcenter.org/research/making-the-grade-2024/

There also remains the dual issues of charter school and school choice public funding which are the largest costs that are still mostly externalized from the state’s calculations for how much it costs a school district to educate a student.

The common logical fallacy that public officials fall back on is in assuming that if we fund public schools on a per pupil basis, that removing a student from a district to send them to a charter school or another public school district triggers an automatic cost savings to a district equal to the full per pupil foundation budget amount for that district. In actuality this fails to account for the reality that sending a student to a charter school or another public school district is DOUBLING fixed education costs for the school district without a change in the per pupil funding amount for the sending district.

State and local officials actively encourage and promote regionaliztion of public school districts because they acknowledge there is an undeniable cost savings associated with consolidating fixed costs of two or more public school districts. Introducing charter schools to a region in essence un-regionalizes that school district, splitting their fixed costs between two school districts with the local and state availability of funding existing for only one school district and per pupil funding assumptions being made for one school district, not two.

Former Amherst School Committee member Peter Demling outlines in detail the fallacy in the “cost savings” assumption in this article to the Amherst Current https://theamherstcurrent.org/2024/10/15/charter-school-funding-part-1-the-problem/ The highlight of the article is in examining districts opting into school choice

“The “School Choice” program also puts the cost/saving disconnect into sharp relief. Many public school districts (especially those in hold harmless like Amherst) opt-in to accept students from neighboring towns for a flat fee of $5K per year, as a cost-savings measure to top-off already-staffed classrooms with more students, using the extra revenue to help stave off deeper cuts to staff and services.

School finance directors under intense pressure to find every possible efficiency would not be engaging in this widespread practice if it wasn’t a net-add to their school budgets: that is, if $5K wasn’t comfortably more than the average cost to educate an additional student. In comparison, the median charter school cost per-student in MA Is $18K: so the charter formula overestimates a public school’s “savings” by at least $13K per student.”

Also see current Leverett Finance Committee member Nancy Grossman’s article breaking down the reality between the assumed cost savings and the actual financial impact of charter school sending tuition assessments https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/opinion/letters/2016/08/30/the-charter-school-drain-on/24739793007/

The 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform act recognized that education funding outcomes = educational outcomes. In an effort to meet the Commonwealth’s state constitutional obligation to provide a public education to every child rich or poor, the state legislature attempted to create a “progressive” education funding scheme.

There are two major distortions in this funding scheme that are “regressive”. One is charter school and school choice public funding which sees students and funding leave low income and/ or high needs public school districts for preferentially funded charter schools or wealthier public school districts.

The other major distortion in school funding that is “regressive” is a provision in the Chapter 70 school funding formula that sets a limit on the required contribution of municipalities equal to 82.5% of their education foundation budget. In simplest terms, poor cities pay 100% of their required contribution rate as a function of their wealth. Wealthy cities pay a reduced rate, that is less than 100% and is a flat percentage associated with their education funding costs rather than their wealth. Additionally they receive a flat percentage of 17.5% of their K-12 education funding from Chapter 70 school funding, regardless of the wealth of the city or town the district is in. Finally the required contribution rate for poor cities is inflated to cover the underpayment by wealthy cities.

With the exception of Cambridge, every wealthy public school district in the Commonwealth receives state local aid in excess of their sending tuition assessments while ALSO paying 60% or less of their required contribution as a function of their wealth. Cambridge joins a select group of school districts with unusually high per capita sending tuition assessments (With Boston being the highest payer per capita of sending tuition assessments), but Cambridge pays 30% or less in their required contribution as a function of their wealth.

School choice is in many ways more complicated than charter school public funding in that the funding benefit or burden on a district for having either a net positive or negative amount for school choice funding is not readily apparent. The non-funding benefit or burden is also hard to quantify.

Low income school districts that send more students to other school districts than they receive are still awarded chapter 70 funding for that student from the Commonwealth. Every district has a per pupil foundation budget amount in excess of $10,000 and school choice sending tuition is capped at $5,000. The lowest income districts receive most of their per pupil funding from the Commonwealth so when they pay $5,000 per pupil for school choice sending tuition, but receive more than $5,000 for that same student, this is essentially netting the low income district the difference while not having to educate that student.

The assumption here is that low income districts benefit from school choice in that it raises their per pupil funding amount. The reality is that parents choice students out of poorly funded schools, because most other public school districts provide local funding to their schools in excess of the required contribution amount. Districts that are net school choice negative are exclusively the lowest income districts in a given region. There is also a “self selection” bias in school choice students which leaves the sending district with the highest needs students while losing students to the receiving district that are likely to test better and come from more affluent families. Because districts in the lowest 10% for MCAS scores see an increase in cap on assessments for charter school sending tuition assessments, school choice directly impacts and amplifies the funding loss from charter schools for the lowest income districts.

https://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/enrollment/CapIncrease/

For the receiving districts that are school choice positive, a small amount of students from other districts can be absorbed without any significant cost burden and the additional funding over “level funding” for their district is even a boon. But when the school choice population represents a significant portion of the total student population, districts that are school choice positive are paying to educate students from another district. This is because the assumed per pupil foundation amount is well over $10,000, they are receiving only $5,000 and unlike low income districts, most of their per pupil funding is locally generated, with the state local aid amount being significantly less than $5,000.

If they lose any students to either charter schools or school choice and are also net school choice positive, they are cost burdened and underfunded all at once.

For all of these reasons we are opting instead to support declining enrollment districts and those districts with the largest per capita school choice sending tuition assessments by supporting senate bill 1237 and the Rural Schools Bill.

The Massachusetts Association of Regional schools has provided an estimate using FY25 data of this bill’s funding benefits. Here is a simplified version. The negative number indicates a reduction in your town’s required contribution amount that will be absorbed by the state budget if this bill passes. For this reason, the funding benefit goes to the town or city, not the school district, with the assumption the town or city would pass that funding benefit directly to the school district or districts. Note that this estimate does not factor in the hold harmless status of the school district or districts.

No, because the increase is calculated using the chapter 70 funding formula which has many provisions which make the funding effect from this bill different for every district. Collectively, Massachusetts towns are responsible for 59% of the required contribution for K-12 education statewide. Town by town percentage contributions vary greatly based on a number of factors.

You town or city is among the more affluent municipalities in the Commonwealth. As a result your community already benefits from provisions in the chapter 70 funding formula that reduce your community’s required contribution. You district is not among the target beneficiaries of this bill.

The lowest income districts already receive the majority of their funding from chapter 70 aid, as such, increasing the Commonwealth’s share of the foundation budget has a negligible impact on the lowest income districts. Additionally, the lowest income districts receive an additional subsidy to “bring them up” to their target required contribution share. Our support of charter school funding reform in the form of H 4439 is intended to provide new funding to the lowest income districts. Our support of this bill is intended to benefit the declining enrollment districts not supported by the funding formula, or the districts just above the lowest income districts.