Usually, city preschool measures get funded through a dedicated city tax. For example, Denver and San Antonio have expanded access to pre-K through revenues from sales tax. Seattle does so through a property tax, while Philadelphia uses a tax on sodas. In San Francisco and Wake County, North Carolina, local leaders dedicated funding from the city or county’s general revenues to pre-K programs.
State spending on K-12 education rose over the past year despite lackluster tax collections, as budgets continue to tick upward from the abyss of the Great Recession. Funding in the states for education increased by 4 percent in fiscal 2017, a bump from 2.9 percent a year before, according to a report released today by the National Association of State Budget Officers.
Arizona’s 35-year-old school-funding formula was created before charter schools and other school choice options were part of the equation. As those options were added, the formula was not overhauled. Instead, it was tweaked to squeeze them in.
Proposed changes to the federal tax code unveiled by Republican lawmakers at the start of this month would affect teachers’ tax burden, private and charter schools, and significant amounts of funding for public schools.
The trend has persisted. One recent report found that, since 2002, state support for higher education in Michigan has declined 30 percent, when adjusted for inflation. The university, like nearly every other state school in the nation, leaned on tuition to make up the difference. In-state tuition rose, but university leaders also focused on another, more lucrative, funding stream: out-of-state students — many of them elite students from wealthy families who couldn’t get into the Ivy League. Michigan was the next best thing.
In its annual survey of four-year colleges and universities, the credit rating agency said private institutions project net tuition revenue — the money earned from students after colleges provide financial aid — will climb about 2.4 percent in fiscal 2018. Meanwhile, public universities anticipate a 2 percent growth rate during that period due to pricing constraints and shifting demographics. Moody’s polled a total of 280 of the colleges and universities it rates for the survey.
Two years ago, Folsom Lake College began a partnership with the city of Rancho Cordova to provide a fee waiver for residents who were recent high school graduates. Funding comes from a half-cent sales tax levied by the city. The program, still in its first cohort of students, is overwhelmingly popular, Robinson said, and student success rates are up as well.
In all, 28.5 percent of America’s schools are rural, and 48 percent of those rural students are from low-income families, the report said. Those are significant numbers, and so are these — we don’t spend nearly as much money on rural schools as we do in other areas. Only 17 percent of education funding goes to rural schools. On average, $6,067 is spent per year on each student in rural schools. Compare that to the national average of $11,841 spent per student each year.
Federal lawmakers have agreed to relatively small spending increases for Title I programs to districts and for special education, as part of a budget deal covering the rest of fiscal 2017 through the end of September.