hard deadlines

Here's a letter I sent to local papers on the proposed RIDE funding formula. The Sakonnet Times ran it this week (where it's already picked up 1,800 views online), and the Newport Daily News asked for tightening, so I hope they'll run it too.

To The Editor:
While it is long past time for Rhode Island to join the rest of the states in providing a stable funding formula for education, the plan recently proposed by the RI Department of Education (RIDE) does not meet the tests of fairness, transparency, and workability, and our state legislators need to modify or reject it.

First, fairness. According to a RI Public Expenditures Research Council report, our state ranks 45th in the nation in the percentage of total education revenues provided by the state for local schools, at just 36% (compared to a national average of 48%). That means regressive local property taxes — and taxpayers — are shouldering the majority of these costs. Under the new formula, this number would become a staggering 90% for a town like Portsmouth. I've posted RIDE's figures in a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs — http://bit.ly/aTgOUj — see for yourself.

Then there is the issue of transparency. RIDE brought in a consultant to produce a "core instruction" cost based on arithmetic averages of New England states, and this magic number, $8,295, is the baseline for state funding. The actual per-pupil cost for Portsmouth, third-lowest in the state, is $11,299, and we have been through a Caruolo action and a performance audit to testify to the efficiency of district operations. RIDE acknowledges their number does not cover the actual cost of putting a student in a classroom — it doesn't include transportation, utilities, food service, or out-of-district tuition, for example -- and yet they plan to reimburse for only a fraction (in Portsmouth's case, just 13%). It is puzzling to me that RIDE began with the assumption that the current funding level was appropriate and worked backward from there. If you tell a consultant to start with a target, of course they can create formulas to make the numbers work, whether or not they have any relationship to the facts on the ground.

And RIDE does not seem to have considered the implications for communities. Their formula would pull $18 million out of the East Bay, shifting that burden to municipalities already strapped for cash and constrained by the S3050 cap on the tax levy. While the RIDE proposal would phase the changes in over time, towns like Portsmouth would still lose $280K next year — an unsustainable cut. I personally asked Commissioner Gist if this meant that S3050 needed to be modified, and she said that RIDE would push for that change, but this is small comfort. The root questions — why the state is contributing so little, and whether the formula reflects the true cost of educating our children — have gone unaddressed.

Our legislature needs to step up here. For too long, enacting a funding formula has been considered tricky politically, and it is into this vacuum that the Board of Regents moved. But our elected representatives are the ones responsible for tax policy and budgeting, not bureaucrats at RIDE. I hope you'll join me in calling on our legislators to take this opportunity to finally make some tough decisions. The news may not be good for all communities. East Bay towns may lose some money. Maybe a lot of money. But the state share needs to be examined and justified. And it needs to be done openly and transparently -- by our elected representatives — and in a way that allows our districts to continue meet the needs of students as we move to the new normal. The proposal from RIDE fails on all of these criteria.