Afton Partners

A lower court ruling in New Mexico that deemed the state’s school finance system unconstitutional has pitted the many candidates running for state office against each other over how to provide more money to its schools. A state district court judge ruled late last week that the state pays its teachers too little, provides its schools out-of-date textbooks and technology and, through its unique teacher evaluation system, removes incentives for its best-performing teachers to work at its worst-performing schools. That amounts to a system in which the state’s public schools don’t do enough to provide its students a constitutionally adequate education, the court ruled.

How—or whether—to pour more money into public school coffers has emerged as one of the most divisive issues for states in this year’s midterm elections.  In at least nine states, voters this fall will consider ambitious ballot measures that seek to increase, or in some cases curtail, how much legislatures distribute to schools.  “Legislatures are having a really difficult time,” said Michael Griffith, a senior school finance analyst for the Education Commission of the States. “Taxpayers are not willing to be taxed much more. The types of taxes we have are antiquated. It’s based on an industrial economy, not a service economy. Even though the economy is fairly stable, perhaps, it’s not manifested in district spending.”

Leaders of the Invest in Education campaign delivered more than 270,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office last week in a move that will likely place the proposal increasing funding for public schools by $690 million before the voters in November. The initiative comes after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a budget in May in response to a #RedForEd walkout that already includes $400 million in additional funding for Arizona schools — the most significant amount of education spending in recent Arizona history. If the Invest in Education Act qualifies for the ballot and taxpayers approve it, proponents say that 60% of the money will go for raises to teachers and other employment-related expenses, while the other 40% will go toward increases for support staff members, class-size reduction, dropout prevention programs, and full-day kindergarten. However, critics argue that the act would do lasting harm to the state’s economy and would not really solve the problems in the long run.

The 25 percent of school districts with the highest amounts of student poverty received 3.4 percent fewer funds per child than the 25 percent wealthiest districts during the 2014-15 school year. That’s a national funding gap of $449 per student. “It’s a temporary step backward,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, explaining that states ran out of money after the 2008 recession, allowing rich communities to spend more and curbing extra funds to poor districts. But with the economic recovery, many states are moving back toward funding schools more equitably, Roza said. “We’ve generally seen an enormous effort by states to raise the base for the poorest students,” Roza said. “Thirty to 40 years ago, in the poorest districts, you’d have 30 to 40 kids in a class and no extracurriculars. You don’t see that anymore.”