The debate over this year’s $641 budget shortfall may be a mere prelude to a bigger budget wrangle next year over education spending. Timothy M. Kaine has stumped all over the state for a modest expansion of pre-K programs in Virginia, but that’s chump change compared to the real driver of educational spending: the Standards of Quality.
Hints of the debate to come can be gleaned from a recent letter from House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong, D-Martinsville, to House Speaker William J. Howell.
“Next year,” Armstrong wrote, “we will have to re-benchmark the Standards of Quality to ensure that our primary and secondary schools remain fully funded. Prominent members of your caucus have said they are opposed to the re-benchmarking of the SOQs, which would significantly jeopardize our schools and childrens’ future.”
Later in the letter, he wrote: “I am asking that you pledge that we do not shortchange our children’s future by cutting primary and secondary education and that we will fully fund our schools.”
Refresher course: The SOQs, or standards of quality, are the auto-pilot mechanism by which the standards for educational inputs (student-teacher ratios, number of guidance counselors, that sort of thing) are relentlessly ratcheted higher, and also by which $5.8 billion in state aid to K-12 education program is used to redistribute wealth from Virginia’s wealthy municipalities to its poorer municipalities. (See my treatment of this cost driver in “The ABCs of SOQs.”
Each “re-benchmarking” according to the dictates of an all-but-indecipherable formula raises the mandated level of funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. Supporters of the educational status quo run around squealing that schools aren’t “fully funded” and that “the children” are being short-changed, creating political pressure for ever-higher, and utterly unaccountable spending.
Any increase in K-12 funding next year should be tied to a reform of the funding system. Lil Tuttle with the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, has argued for a new, transparent formula for allocating state aid to public education. The state would provide one “Student Funding Allotment” (SFA) for each student, weighting the allotments for special needs, as follows:
1.9 SFA for severely disabled
1.2 SFA for poverty
1.2 for limited English
1.2 for learning disabled
Such a system would help local school systems cope with lots of poor, disabled and foreign-language kids without the auto-escalator effect of the current formula. What’s more, it’s so transparent that anyone can understand it. That’s precisely why the political class will never change the formula. But it’s nice to know that some one in the General Assembly appears to be taking a closer look.