Afton Partners

On Tuesday, Colorado voters will decide whether to give the state $1.6 billion in additional taxes to increase school funding. It’s a request they’ve rejected twice before, and this time it faces a higher bar — Amendment 73 will need 55 percent of the vote to pass. “Everything is at stake,” said Alison Corbett, a teacher at High Tech Early College in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood.. “We are increasingly demanding results from teachers — as we should be — particularly from our teachers who teach low-income kids, but we are not providing the resources to meet their needs. So many of our schools are not doing what we set out to do. We can’t demand equity of results without providing equity of funding.”

A chart on the newest edition of the Texas government publication called “Fiscal Size-Up: 2018-19 Biennium” tracks what local, state and federal taxpayers have been contributing to public education in Texas over the past decade. Spoiler: The load has steadily shifted to local property taxpayers. Texas is spending 6.3 percent less per student, in constant dollars (stated in 2010 dollars, adjusted for inflation and population), than it was spending in 2010. If you applied 2008’s shares of the public education load to today’s numbers, the system would need $6 billion less from local school districts, about $5.5 billion more from the state, and about $438 million from the federal government. Those are one-year numbers, and it’s a running problem — not a one-time fix. To keep the state and local shares at about 45 percent each, state lawmakers would have to find $9 billion for the next two-year budget.

The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability said that more than 89 percent of the new education money in last year’s state budget went to districts designated at Tier 1 schools – those that were furthest away from their adequacy targets. Another nearly 10 percent went to districts designated as Tier 2, which are considered slightly better off financially and slightly closer to meeting adequacy targets. “In other words, in its first year, the (new formula) has begun to reverse Illinois’ ignoble tradition of inequitably funding public education,” the report said. “However, there is much work to be done.” The report said that 83 percent of the state’s 707 school districts remain below their adequacy levels, something the new formula is intended to eventually eliminate.

California’s redesigned school funding formula, as well as updated standards and assessments, are pushing the state’s education system in the right direction, according to a comprehensive package of studies released Monday. But Getting Down to Facts II — a follow-up to an influential policy report released more than 10 years ago — also concludes that large achievement gaps remain, young children are already behind when they enter kindergarten, and changes to the finance system have failed to address funding issues such as employee pensions, special education and school facilities. While the state’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) — the result of a ballot initiative in 2012 — helped districts recover from the recession, per-pupil funding is still below the national average at just more than $12,000 per student, compared to $13,701 nationally.