Thursday, Apr. 24, 2008

Are senators finally ready to tackle school funding formula?

THINGS TEND to get a little bizarre toward the end of budget debate in the Senate. But last week, it felt like we had entered a parallel universe.

There was Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, who’s never met a power he didn’t want to strip from local governments, complaining that it just wasn’t fair that Charleston schools would get less EFA money next year than this year since the Legislature had capped their ability to raise property taxes to make up for the shortfall. (This is the same Sen. McConnell who wants to add a spending cap on top of that tax cap and who, yes, supported the passage of that tax cap.)

There was Sen. Greg Ryberg, who never met a spending program that wasn’t wasteful, bemoaning the need for more money for radios for prison guards and a whole list of other projects that desperately needed more funding — or at least that needed money more than those Charleston County schools did.

In an afternoon that was supposed to be an easy, quiet ending to the budget debate, the Senate nearly imploded over how to spend a tiny pot of left-over money that might not even materialize, as senators argued over “the formula” — a complicated, too-many-times-tweaked mathematical formula that considers such things as number of students, property wealth and tax rates in each district to determine how to divvy up tax dollars among the state’s 85 districts.

In the end, everybody joined hands, sang “Kumbaya” and agreed that the formula is broken and must be fixed. They agreed unanimously that it would be fixed before next year’s budget debate, and they introduced legislation that would make it theoretically possible that it could be fixed — by taking the decision out of the hands of elected officials.

There are three important points to be made of all this:

1. They’re right; the education funding formulas are broken.

2. They’ve been saying this for more years than I can count, and in fact, a special Senate panel has been wrestling over it for nearly two years, and a special House committee started work earlier this month.

3. They haven’t fixed anything because everybody has a different idea of just what is “broken,” and so everybody has a different idea of what it means to “fix” things.

To Sen. McConnell, broken means the Education Finance Act funding formula penalizes Charleston schools because the school tax rate there is much lower than it is in the rest of the state; that is, a Charlestonian with a $10,000 car pays far less in school taxes than someone with a like-priced car in Columbia or Greenville or Jasper County.

To Sen. John Matthews, fixed might mean penalizing Charleston even more if it refuses to ask as much of its people as the poor rural districts he represents do.

It’s not that the solution is difficult to figure out: The state should just provide all the funding for schools. But as long as it won’t do that, what it needs to do is make it seem that way, by making up the difference between the funding a local district is able to provide and what the state determines is needed.

The problem is that unless there’s a huge incease in revenue, school funding is a zero-sum game: If one district gets more state money, another gets less (or at least less than it had expected). And legislators all wear blinders that prevent them from considering how school funding policy affects the state. Hence, Mr. McConnell becomes the great defender of school districts’ prerogatives, and Mr. Ryberg is cast as defender of more general government spending — if that’s what it takes to defeat a plan that he knows ultimately would take money away from his Aiken County districts.

Even those who usually look at the big picture get blurry-eyed when someone hands them a chart that shows how their Pollyanna proposal would hurt their local district. And yes, the charts that are passed out during tax and spending debates always show how the change would affect each individual district.

The EFA funding formula is indeed broken, because, as with our tax policy, legislators have layered change upon change atop it, usually without realizing that their actions even affected it. And that’s only part of the problem with school funding: The formula has never truly reflected the extra amount of effort (read: money) that is required to teach poor children who live in poor districts; and the state doles money out in too many pots, each with its own convoluted set of requirements, some at odds with each other.

But the principle behind the formula is inherently sound: It uses what’s called the “index of taxpaying ability” to determine what each district can reasonably be expected to pay toward a state-defined minimum level per student, and then the state makes up the difference. If a district doesn’t do its share, its state funding still will only make up the difference between what it should be able to provide and what the Legislature says is needed everywhere.

Mr. McConnell and his coastal allies have been upset for years because that formula essentially penalizes their local districts for setting the tax rate much lower than the tax rate in the rest of the state. This year, some other senators are upset because — after getting a windfall last year when the Revenue Department miscalculated some numbers and gave them money that was supposed to go to other districts — they’re not getting that same windfall again this year. Seriously.

It’s hard to see how anything can ever get fixed as long as legislators can make such a complaint with a straight face. But it has to. And if recognizing that you have a problem is the first step toward solving it, then the Senate unanimously took its first step toward recovery last week.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.