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GARDENSTATE COALITION OF SCHOOLS/GSCS
11-30-07 EMAILNET FYI
NEW SCHOOL FUNDING FORMULA EMERGING
On the GSCS website homepage today at: www.gscschools.org
11-30-07 School Funding Formula proposal being unveiled piecemeal
Yesterday legislators were given an overview of the concepts involved in the Governor's new funding proposal for schools. "...But most of the lawmakers briefed yesterday said they are withholding final judgment until they see how it plays out in actual state aid awards. "I don't think any of us have enough detail to have a good conceptual grasp of what the formula is," said Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), who was also among those briefed yesterday... (Star Ledger, 11-30-07)"
Today education stakeholders and mayors are invited to hear from Commissioner Davy on the plan concepts (Governor Corzine is expected to visit in with these groups). It has been stated that district data listings will not be available for another couple of weeks. Hard analysis is required to understand the impact of a new formula on regular operating districts. To do that, district data listings -which literally show the impact of the new formula on each school community and municipality - are required. We are told that this data will not be available for a few weeks. GSCS is particularly focused on how special education aid is proposed to be handled. It is our understanding that there are new approaches being embedded in special education funding and services overall. All this requires full explanation of the whats, whys and how-to's. We are also hearing that some portion of that aid is to be wealth-equalized, some to remain categorical: the devil is in the details.
GSCS will keep you informed. Click on More for early news coverage...
More...
New York Times: November 30, 2007
Corzine Is Set to Revamp School Aid Formula
By WINNIE HU and DAVID W. CHEN
After more than a year of review, Gov. Jon S. Corzine will propose a new school financing formula as early as next week that would give at least $400 million in new state money to poor and disadvantaged children who live outside traditional inner-city school districts, according to officials familiar with the plan.
The new formula would replace a two-tiered system that concentrates education spending on 31 districts in historically poor cities like Newark, Camden and Paterson.
The current arrangement, known as the Abbott system, has been widely criticized as shortchanging the other 584 districts in largely suburban and rural areas, some of which serve children just as needy. The new approach would apportion money to schools based on the characteristics of the students, including income, language ability and special academic needs.
The president of the State Senate, Richard J. Codey, who was briefed on the plan this week, said yesterday that the new formula would require an additional $400 million to $500 million in overall state aid in next year’s budget, a figure that was confirmed by members of the Corzine administration. Mr. Codey said that funds would not be reduced for any Abbott districts and that some Abbott districts might even receive slightly more.
The majority of the new money, however, is intended to benefit poor and disadvantaged students in non-Abbott districts, most of which have not received significant state aid increases since 2000. In what now appears to have been a step toward the new formula, Governor Corzine added $66.8 million in this year’s budget for more than 200 non-Abbott districts with large numbers of poor and disadvantaged students.
Since taking office in 2006, Governor Corzine has made school financing a priority in his efforts to reduce property taxes, and he has made no secret of his dislike of the current system, which he has described as having “no rational basis of explanation.” He told local officials this month that “the current method leaves too many children out of luck simply because they live in the wrong ZIP code.”
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Corzine talked about the broader goals of the new financing formula but declined to discuss the specifics. “It needs to be done in a way that is competent not only educationally but also financially from an efficiency standpoint,” he said.
The state anticipates a $3 billion budget deficit for 2008, and the governor has suffered several recent setbacks, including voters’ resounding defeat of his stem-cell initiative earlier this month.
Yesterday, the school aid plan was already stirring controversy. David G. Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which represents children in the Abbott districts, said the new financing formula “would be devastating for urban school children” because their schools would get little or no increase this year and were likely to get less aid in future years.
“The effect would be to dismantle the unprecedented success that we’ve been making in improving student achievement in our high-poverty urban schools,” he said.
Mr. Sciarra noted that the governor’s plan to change the Abbott system required court approval, and he said his group would vigorously oppose it.
The move to a formula tied to individual student needs is a sharp departure from the way schools have been financed in the past, and would be the first use of the approach on so large a scale.
In recent years, Hawaii and a handful of school districts from New York City to Seattle have experimented with similar strategies. In most cases, they have used a weighted formula based on student characteristics to calculate the amount of state, federal or city aid to a school.
This approach has won popularity among educators and parents at a time of growing frustration over rising school taxes and what many see as a lack of transparency in school budgets.
One group that supports the approach is the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a conservative-leaning education policy group in Washington, which began a nationwide campaign in 2006 called Fund the Child. The campaign has been endorsed by prominent educators and policymakers including William J. Bennett, former secretary of education in the Reagan administration, and John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and now chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research center.
Such supporters say that a student-based financing method can simplify the school budget process and can even cut inexplicable disparities in financing between schools. Advocacy groups have also argued that the approach is a way to ensure that spending designated to help poor children actually reaches the schools, instead of being used at the district level to pay for teacher salaries and specialty programs like art and music that benefit all schools.
“A lot of states have set aside money for poor and disadvantaged children, but it does not always make it to the schools with the greatest need,” said Ross Wiener, vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust, a research group.
The Education Department in New York City began using a new weighted formula this year to divide up city education money among its 1,456 schools.
The formula assigns a basic amount for each child by grade level (middle school students start out with the highest amount), and extra dollars are allotted for factors like low family income, poor achievement, limited English or special education needs. The department’s Web site shows how the exact amount for each school was calculated.
In New Jersey, the Abbott districts serve about one-fifth of the state’s students but receive more than half of all state aid; since 1997, they have received more than $35 billion. The Abbott districts grew out of a 1981 lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, that led to a court-ordered effort to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students, whites and minorities. In a series of decisions that set a precedent for school equality cases nationwide, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the poorest urban districts should be given the resources to spend as much on their students as the wealthiest suburban districts.
The fact that the amount of money given to Abbott districts is so much more than what goes to non-Abbott districts has long angered parents and teachers and aroused fierce suburban and rural opposition. Those communities have repeatedly raised taxes and slashed school budgets to offset their own dwindling share of state aid.
Many critics point out that some Abbott districts, like Hoboken and Long Branch along the shore, are no longer so poor because rapid development has attracted affluent newcomers.
While the new financing formula is not expected to be officially unveiled for at least another week, the broad outlines have been divulged in closed-door meetings with legislators and educators in the last few days. These officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were told about the plan in confidence, said the details of who stands to gain or lose would not be available for a while.
The officials said the governor was considering capping the increases to encourage districts to use the new money more prudently. Also under consideration is basing special education financing partly on a community’s wealth instead of the current system, which allocates a fixed amount of money per student regardless of where the student lives.
Governor Corzine’s plan would also increase overall special education spending for students with severe disabilities, the officials said, and the governor is discussing the possibility of increasing financing for charter schools and expanding preschool and full-day kindergarten programs across the state.
Governor Corzine is pushing legislators to pass his proposal in the current lame-duck session, the officials said, before the new session begins in January. That schedule may be too optimistic for a complex issue with so many stakeholders, they cautioned. Previous governors, most recently James E. McGreevey, have tried unsuccessfully to revamp the school financing formula.
Several legislators said yesterday that they expected poor and blue-collar regions — for example, Belleville and Bloomfield in Essex County, and Roselle in Union County — to fare better under the new formula than in the past. But wealthy suburban areas, which receive little state aid now, might not benefit at all under the new system.
“In order for this to be successful, it’s up to us that we produce a formula that’s going to protect all districts and make increases where it’s needed,” said Assemblyman Craig A. Stanley, of Irvington, who is chairman of the Education Committee. “I thought initially it sounded good, but it’s the details where we have to pay attention.”
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Corzine plan to distribute school aid cuts some special ed funds Friday, November 30, 2007 BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL Star-Ledger Staff Gov. Jon Corzine's new plan for distributing state school aid will include $450 million in additional funding, but could cut special education aid to some of the state's wealthier towns, according to lawmakers briefed yesterday. Lawmakers who attended the 90-minute briefing in the governor's office said they were disappointed they left without a key piece of information: a town-by-town listing of how $8 billion in state school aid would be distributed. But they said they expect that information in two weeks, and key lawmakers still hope to adopt a new formula before the current legislative session ends Jan. 8. "Our aim is to get this done in lame duck," said Senate President Dick Codey (D-Essex). "The school districts need to know what they should expect in funding." Joseph Donnelly, spokesman for Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts (D-Camden), said the Assembly leadership also hopes to pass a new school funding formula this session. Lawmakers have been discussing a new formula for doling out school aid for more than a year. According to those involved in yesterday's briefings, Corzine's new plan would tie the distribution of state aid to the economic status of communities and of the individual students in every school district. Districts with high numbers of "at-risk" students, defined as those qualifying for the federal government's free or reduced-cost school lunch program and students for whom English is a second language, would be entitled to higher amounts of aid. The formula would guarantee no community sees a decline in state aid next year, and would prevent any district from seeing a state aid windfall by capping any increase at 20 percent. Communities already spending more than the level considered "adequate" for educating their students would not be allowed to get an increase of more than 10 percent. That provision would limit the plan's benefits in the state's wealthiest communities. A preliminary assessment of school spending released last year showed that among the 128 wealthiest communities in the state, all but 35 were spending at rates above the level a consultant deemed "adequate." Among the 143 poorest communities, only 28 were spending above that level. Corzine's new plan would also alter the way the state distributes $1 billion in special education aid. Currently the aid is distributed to school districts based on the population of special needs students they include, regardless of the district's wealth. The new formula would factor in wealth for distributing a portion of that aid, potentially taking aid away from wealthier towns. The governor is also proposing a new provision to allow more communities to qualify for special assistance for school security. Devising a new school aid formula has become one of the Legislature's most pressing issues, since aid to most communities has been frozen for six years. Corzine told lawmakers he hopes his plan will boost state aid to middle- and low-income communities while preserving benefits to the 31 communities receiving special state aid under the Supreme Court's Abbott vs. Burke school funding lawsuit. But most of the lawmakers briefed yesterday said they are withholding final judgment until they see how it plays out in actual state aid awards. "I don't think any of us have enough detail to have a good conceptual grasp of what the formula is," said Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), who was also among those briefed yesterday. | |
Gannett News Bureau - Asbury Park Press - November 29, 2007
New school formula ends 'Abbott' designation; aid may rise $500M
By JONATHAN TAMARI
GANNETT STATE BUREAU
TRENTON -- Schools across the state can expect to share a state aid increase of $400 million to $500 million next year under a new school funding plan being crafted by the Corzine administration, Senate President Richard J. Codey, D--Essex, said Thursday.
The new formula will also do away with the controversial designation of certain districts as "Abbott" schools that automatically qualify for enhanced education aid, said an administration source. The 31 mostly poor, urban districts currently receive more than half of all state education aid.
Officials in other suburban and rural areas have complained that they have been short-changed for years while Abbott aid has grown as a result of the Abbott v. Burke Supreme Court case that ordered the state to put more money toward education in poor cities.
The Abbott districts will not lose money in the coming year, however, and many are likely to continue receiving large amounts of state aid in the new formula, which will give out dollars based on factors such as a district's wealth, its number of low-income students, special education enrollment and pupils needing instruction in English as a second language.
The aid increase would come on top of $8 billion in direct school aid already in the state budget, accounting for nearly $1 of every $4 the state spends.
Lawmakers were learning details of the long-awaited school funding plan this afternoon in Trenton. The proposal is expected to be formally rolled out shortly. Legislative leaders have called for a vote on the new formula during the so-called lame-duck legislative session that ends Jan. 8.
Additional aid from the state is aimed at taking the pressure off of property taxes, which are used to pick up the remaining costs of public education. State aid to most
school districts had been held nearly flat for five years before the current budget, putting more strain on local property taxpayers.
