Our friends in Rhode Island have provided a model of how states can make the concept of greater funding equity into a reality. Their new plan has a number of features that make it more likely money will flow to the students who need it the most:

- shifting a greater share of the funding to the state level and away from local contributions;

- setting a base level of adequate funding based on real dollar costs for educational inputs adjusted for cost of living;

- adding extra investment onto that base level for students with special needs and the districts in which they're concentrated;

- and taking district wealth and capacity into account when determining state level spending

Such a thoughtful approach takes us away from the blunt instrument of counting noses, which too often results in a low-level parity where all students suffer under the same inadequate amount of spending. (Although truthfully, not even suffering is distributed equally in such a scenario. We know that disadvantaged kids, who need schools most, tend to fall further behind in low investment schools, while their more advantaged peers can often succeed in spite of poor conditions.) Instead, formulas that distribute limited funds based on a state commitment to adequacy, plus an assessment of district capacity and students’ needs move us closer to the spirit of true equity.

By offsetting transportation costs between districts for students, Rhode Island has also taken a critically important step to promote economic and racial desegregation. More states should follow their lead.

Perhaps these and other progressive changes can serve as an equity roadmap to future reform. To second Bob Peterson, below, we could see enormous benefits for generations if future rounds of federal competitive grant priorities encouraged states to change outdated formulas and instead target scarce resources to the kids who need it most. And rather than stop at competitive grants, where only a few states will win, Congress could do permanent good by making a demonstration of funding equity a condition of receiving federal aid in the reauthorized ESEA.

Other equity-focused conditions might include:

- Universal access to pre-k, or at least a commitment and plan to get there, just as we’re requiring around the data systems.

- A commitment to community schools models that provide wraparound services that meet the needs of all students and their communities, from nighttime English classes for adults to health clinics and internship placement for students.

- A rigorous process for ensuring the quality of charters and holding them accountable to meeting all students’ needs. Such a process might involve screening new applicants by asking whether they’d had success with similar populations of students as those in the new host community and requiring that they have the capacity to serve a wide range of students. It might also entail protections against operators out to game the system for profit and a plan to guarantee a return on the district’s investment, by requiring charters to feed best practices back into the wider public system. The covenants that charter schools make with communities could be modeled on community benefits agreements negotiated when private entities benefit from public resources.

- A process for community voice and engagement in reforming schools. Such a process might involve a parental, staff and community vote on which reform methods were most appropriate and an educational impact statement projecting how each turnaround option would impact vulnerable communities and students.

- A fair discipline process that bans corporal punishment and zero tolerance policies that disproportionately disadvantage boys, students of color and special needs students. Instead, a policy that improves school climate and keeps kids in school would be rewarded.

- A plan to strengthen and diversify the teaching workforce, starting with changes to education schools and continuing with strong supports for teachers and school leaders – again targeted most heavily to the schools and teachers serving the neediest students.

To meet the President’s goal of leading the world in the share of citizens with post-secondary training, we must apply a laser-like focus to K-12 students who had previously fallen through the cracks. By targeting investment and energy to improve schools for our neediest students, we can revolutionize the entire system for everyone.

Reading the posts this week as someone who knows a lot about education but little about education funding, I’m left with the deep conviction that the solutions we seek in this area, if they can be found at all, must come from something much simpler than what we’re attempting at the moment.

Education is complicated. And it appears to me now that education funding is even more so. But does it have to be? Is there a simpler organizing principle available to us that might make our discussions about funding less rancorous and help us work together toward meaningful reforms?

What I’m looking for is some kind of “educational denominator”, a simple ratio that would express a school funding model in terms as simple as “learning achieved over dollars spent.”

I think Mr. Sciarra puts it well when he says that funding formulas should be “driven by research-based determinations of the actual cost for students and schools to achieve that state’s content and performance standards.”

I don’t want to mischaracterize Mr. Sciarra’s statement, but this sounds a lot like “learning over dollars” to me.

The appeal here for people like me who aren’t education funding experts is that an “educational denominator” would be easy to understand and keep track of over time. If the ratio goes up, things are probably getting better. If the ratio goes down, things are probably getting worse—at least in so far as the bang for our educational buck is concerned.

A simple ratio, even if it had more complex math behind it, would probably also make it easier to improve systematically on the quality of educational spending. As it stands now, someone seems to hail each new batch of equations as a courageous victory for educational equity while someone else says exactly the opposite. For most of us, however, it's impossible to tell what’s true and what’s not. I suspect that even the people who create the funding formulas themselves aren’t sure either. A dense fog of politics multiplied by scary math contributes, I suspect, to a fair amount of cynicism when tax time rolls around. Even a little transparency might go a long way.

My complaint in my original post was that our nation lacked a theory of education funding. If such a theory could be developed, and if that theory contained something as straightforward as an “educational denominator”, public financial support for education might be easier to secure. I don’t think taxpayers would need or even want to see every state and district line item (schools boards can do that if they want to). But if people had a way merely to see that all their dollars were being spent a little better from year to year, we might be able to encourage more thoughtful spending and harness more public enthusiasm for reform at the same time.

Commissioner Gist’s reply underscores why the new Rhode Island funding formula is “run of the mill,” at best.

First, it is now widely accepted that a needs-driven funding formula is one based on research to ascertain the actual costs for students to achieve state academic and performance standards. The new Pennsylvania and New Jersey formulas rest on this essential building block. The Rhode Island formula does not.

The Rhode Island foundation cost is derived from 2006-07 NCES data – in highly selective spending categories -- from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire. By including a low spending, non-neighboring state – New Hampshire – the cost drops almost $300 per pupil. The cost would go up if higher spending Vermont, rather than New Hampshire, was included in the data pool. Indeed, Rhode Island students would be better off if State officials used 2007-08 NCES spending data -- not 2006-07 -- from Rhode Island itself. If they had, the foundation cost would be $8551 per pupil, instead of the $8259 in the formula.

The assertion that the unique needs of English language learners can be met through an already deflated foundation amount is highly suspect, and not supported by current education cost research. Nor is the decision to use a single 40% weight to address student poverty, concentrated school poverty and whatever extra programs might be needed for English language learners. These critical issues demand a rigorous approach, grounded in solid research on the actual needs of Rhode Island's at-risk students and high poverty schools for extra educational and educationally-related programs and services.

It is also clear that the State made no attempt to "cost out” high quality early education programs and then ensure the delivery of adequate funds to, at the very least, enroll all three and four year olds in Rhode Island's high poverty communities.

Most telling is that it appears the formula requires no appreciable increase in state aid from the Legislature this year, and it’s not clear whether it will in future years. And the formula does not increase the State’s paltry share – now around 37% -- of support for public education.

There are other concerns as well, raised by Rhode Island advocates for fair funding during the formula's deliberation.

Hopefully, this new formula is an advance over past practice, and actually improves the level and distribution of resources relative to student poverty and other needs. But a state funding formula is not “student centered,” as is claimed here, unless it is driven by research-based determinations of the actual cost for students and schools to achieve that state's content and performance standards.

In my brief blog entry, I obviously did not explain every facet of the new Rhode Island funding formula, but I want to emphasize a few points that Mr. Sciarra completely misconstrues:

1. Our core instructional amount was based on national research, using data from the NCES, is sufficient to fund the requirements of the Rhode Island Basic Education Program, and it in no way focused on states with low per-pupil expenditures. In fact, we looked particularly carefully at our neighboring states, which have some of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation, and we included only those states that have an organizational structure and staffing patterns similar to ours.

2. Our state-share ratio is determined through use of a quadratic equation specifically designed to direct additional aid to districts with high concentrations of students living in poverty and with less local capacity to support education, or both.

3. Our formula includes additional categorical aid for high-cost programs for students with disabilities, early-childhood education, and certain transportation and career-and-technical costs.

4. Though our formula does not include specific funding for English-language learners, our core instructional amount includes the full cost of education of English-language learners in its base. Our research shows that using poverty levels as an index will certainly direct additional aid to districts with high numbers of English-language learners – without providing the perverse incentive that might encourage districts to overidentify ELLs or keep students in ELL programs beyond their need.

Those interested in understanding our new funding formula at a more technical level may refer to our Web site, at: http://www.ride.ri.gov/Finance/Funding/FundingFormula/

If the students in my fifth grade classroom on Milwaukee’s north side were born two miles farther north, several thousand dollars more per student per year would be spent on their education.

Thanks to recent budget cuts my students have no gym teacher, no music teacher, and no paraprofessionals. That’s not the case with students in the schools two miles north.

Yet for many years, the Wisconsin state legislature – whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats – have refused to restructure the school finance system to make it fair and adequate.

It’s a simple matter of priorities. In Wisconsin, school finance reform would mean spending more money on students whose skin is darker than most state legislators. It might mean increasing taxes on the wealthy contributors who support legislators’ political campaigns.

So what can be done?

Arne Duncan and President Obama could have a huge impact on fixing this fundamental inequity that fuels most other inequalities that bedevil our schools.

They shrewdly pushed states to lift caps on charter schools and to remove barriers that prevented teacher evaluation from being tied to student test score performance. They used their bully pulpits and made clear that to win Race to the Top Funds, states would have to change laws that Duncan and President Obama disliked.

Why don’t they use the same tactics to push school finance reform? Why not require states to pass laws that ensure adequate and equitable school finance systems in order to be eligible for competitive grants? It wouldn’t cost the federal government a dime.

My fifth grade students would benefit from such bold leadership, as would hundreds of thousands of other students who are doing their best in severely under-resourced schools.

Arne Duncan and President Obama, do it for all the students who don’t live two miles north.

Back when we were discussing the Obama blueprint, I argued that it could not be evaluated as an approach to education reform because it lacked a vision of the new form education should take. I argued similarly that the motley set of programs it proposed indicated that we also lacked a theory of education policy. Now I would say we lack yet another critical component of reform: a theory of funding.

Funding varies even more widely than I thought. In an article I read today, I found this paragraph about wide disparities in the state of New York:

“The lowest-spending district in the state is General Brown Central Schools in Jefferson County, with a $10,781 cost per pupil. The district with the highest spending is the Fire Island Union Free School District on Long Island, with a per-pupil cost of $90,146.”

(I guess it's true what they say: "Free is always the most expensive way to go.")

The same article listed the range of per-pupil spending among states nationwide as follows:

“States and state equivalents that came close to New York’s spending per student in 2007-08 were New Jersey ($16,491), Alaska ($14,630) and the District of Columbia ($14,594), the Census Bureau found. The lowest spenders were Utah ($5,765), Idaho ($6,931), Arizona ($7,608), Oklahoma ($7,685) and Tennessee ($7,739).”

I suspect there’s even more variation than our Census Bureau statistics reveal because I don’t think these numbers include the amortized costs of the buildings in which our children learn. I’m sure we’ve all seen shocking inequities in this regard, even within the same neighborhoods in the same school districts.

We know why school funding varies so much. It’s the same reason things cost more in some places and less in others. The Law of Supply and Demand, and intense concentrations of wealth in our country, are formidable forces, seemingly immune to formulaic manipulation.

There are many ways to equalize funding, I suppose, but I sense from our discussion here, and from what I can glean of the new Rhode Island plan, that equalization isn’t exactly what we’re talking about.

Just like variations in real estate and school spending, there are variations in what it costs to educate individual kids. Most of the people I talk to about this seem to accept it on a local level within their own schools and districts. My wife and I know, for example, that the roughly $4000 a year we pay in county taxes, much of it toward our district’s budget, is not parceled out in identical chunks to the roughly 20,000 kids our district attempts to educate.

Our little town of Carrboro (population less than the 20,000 kids who attend our district’s schools) has the highest tax rate in our state, and we kinda like it that way. We’re part of the vaunted Chapel Hill-Carborro City Schools and, to show our support for education, we proudly puff out our chests, pull out our checkbooks, and pour out extra tax dollars above and beyond what our county and state require of us.

I’m not sure how I feel about this; I just pay the bill and try to volunteer a lot in our schools. I know the folks who run the other district that shares our county aren’t happy though. They’ve been pushing for years to merge our two districts and redistribute the funds. We are, I think, the only county in our state that is allowed to have two separate school districts. I wonder how hard we must have lobbied to retain the embarrassing privilege of this sacred division?

Having lived here less than a decade, I still don’t understand the peculiarities of our “Us vs. Them” issues. But this particular brand of separatism seems to me to lie at the heart of the school funding issue. If Tip O’Neill had been a school superintendent, he surely would have said that “All education is local.” But our collective educational ideals are national, if not global. Wider and more insidious than the achievement gap is the gap between “our kids” and “all our kids”. This is the paradigm shift we must catalyze to discover and implement better ways of funding our schools.

Despite our community’s wealth and generosity, we have an uncomfortable problem here: one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation. Depending on how it is calculated, the gap in academic performance between the White and Asian student population and the Black and Hispanic student population is probably somewhere between 40% and 60%, maybe more in some years. I’m hedging with the word “probably” in this case because there are just too many ways to calculate the gap, and not enough transparency from our state or district to sort things out in a definitive way. Besides, as you can imagine, we don’t like to talk about it.

Our situation would be shocking anywhere in America. But here in such a prosperous community, it seems to me practically obscene. Not only do we have extraordinary financial resources, we also have a major university up the street with a large School of Education, good public policy shops, many fine educational product and service providers, a tech sector that, if such a title existed, might win us the reputation of being the Silicon Valley of the South, and a generous philanthropic community.

I'll bet we have as much or more per-pupil funding than any other district in our state—and we could get even more than that if we made a few phone calls. We have some the nicest school buildings I have ever seen, and one of the nastiest educational equity problems I can imagine. At the same time, families regularly relocate to our happy little hamlet “primarily for the schools.”

Money is not the culprit here, not by a long shot. This leads me to wonder if any type of funding formula would help in our situation. Obviously, any redistributive change in our state’s model would likely take money away from the district that already spends more per pupil than any other. And yet, we probably have the largest achievement gap in the state, so how would that figure in? Even though the number of kids who struggle at the bottom of that chasm is perhaps just 15%-20% of our total, the problem still seems significant to me—and even more urgent because it has persisted for so many decades.

I’m not saying that poor districts don’t deserve more money than most are getting nowadays. But no district is made up of kids with identical needs, and kids with greater needs cost more to educate. So perhaps we should follow Rhode Island and switch to a funding formula where money follows kids closer than it follows property values. But a lot of money already follows the kids in our district—or at least it’s there somewhere in close proximity.

To me, funding is not the issue; use of funding is. Many children even in our poorest schools and districts may be deserving of $25,000 worth of annual services or even more. (Even the occasional Fire Island lad with a reading problem is probably worth a hundred large). But writing that check, and even resurrecting the ghost of Ed McMahon to deliver it in person, won’t get us what we so desperately need.

We know the school funding system is broken in our country. It probably never worked in the first place. All the more reason to rethink it from scratch. What we need more than money is a theory of how it can best be raised, distributed, spent, and sustained. We have a country full of big-brained economists and number crunching educational experts. I’m sure several of them could develop a broad menu of better approaches to the problem. But if we don’t know what we’re trying to buy, how can we ask someone to figure out how we should pay for it?

Without a vision of the new form we would like school to take, and without a theory of education policy to help us get there, virtually all approaches to school funding seem unlikely to accomplish much more than moving from one place to another in support of programs that may or may not be effective. Some people may consider this a victory, at least in an historic or symbolic sense. But we can’t educate kids with pomp and precedents.

Everyone is working hard these days to make education better in America. Reform is in full flower and reformers aren’t even doing most of the serious gardening. Teachers, principals, parents, and the many other people who work in and for our schools are tending to the bulk of the backbreaking work. As we reformers tinker at the margins, making minor adjustments to dubious structures, our kids and their caregivers are telling us that fundamental changes—and not just new formulas—are required.

We need three things: (1) A vision of the new form we want school to take; (2) A theory of education policy; and (3) A theory of funding.

As our nation hangs on tenterhooks waiting to see if Strasburg will make the All-Star team, allow me to close with a baseball metaphor. Our failures in the areas of vision, policy, and funding represent three strikes against us. It’s time to stop arguing with the umpire about whether or not that last pitch was an inch or two one way or the other and get some heavy hitters up to the plate so they can spark a rally.

The school funding questions are framed incorrectly, to my way of thinking. The issue should not be about the amount of money the state pays for education and the amount of money local school districts pay. The issue is how to ensure that the right amount of money is available to educate students to meet and exceed state academic standards.

School funding debates are often confusing because some talk about taxes and revenue and some talk about how to spend dollars. To be sure, where a state draws its money from is important. But the driver of the discussion ought to be how to calculate and deliver education dollars in amounts and in a way that supports and compels student academic achievement.

Because student needs vary widely and predictably along family incomes and resources, school finance models need to account for those differences, providing additional dollars for disadvantaged students. And because community property values vary widely and predictably along family incomes and resources, school finance models need to address how resource-poor schools and districts will get enough revenue to meet the needs of disadvantaged students who arrive at the schoolhouse door with lots of challenges that inhibit learning.

In Ohio, we recently revamped our school funding system to an evidence-based model and are phasing that in over time. In this model, which is also in place in Wyoming and Arkansas, the state looks to research and best practices of high-performing schools, figures out how those schools deployed their resources, and then costs out and funds that amount from state and local resources.

The logic here is that the state is putting money behind activities that are closely linked to better student achievement. If schools and districts are not performing to standards, then the discussion can rightly head towards how those schools and districts are deploying the resources they have – and presumably not just a discussion about needing more money. The model seems both effective and efficient in that it provides guidance on how schools and districts ought to deploy resources around professional development, staffing, class size, and so on to support student achievement.

Of course, getting this model into place takes time and new ways of thinking for school administrators. And Ohio, like most states, is cash-strapped and has to phase in the model over several years. But the potential for getting school funding right under the evidence-based model seems higher than with any other model Ohio has examined or tried.

Rhode Island clearly needs to do better in providing fair school funding. It lags behind Connecticut and Massachusetts in overall funding per pupil, and, importantly, the State does not allocate more funding to higher poverty districts and schools.

But it is far from clear whether the recently adopted formula will improve matters. And the formula is decidedly not “new.” It’s a garden variety foundation formula found in many states, with additional funding, expressed as a “weight,” for low-income students. This type of “weight” is also a feature in many state formulas.

What’s troubling is how State officials calculated the costs in the formula. The foundation cost is around $8,295 per- pupil, a figure not based on any study of the actual needs of Rhode Island students to achieve State academic standards. Instead, the number is based on spending levels in certain NCES “core instructional” categories in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By using selective NCES data and including New Hampshire – a state among the nation’s most regressive – the formula appears to back into a number that fits within what politicians are comfortable spending.

The weight for student poverty also lacks any basis in the actual needs of the state’s low-income students and, critically, the needs of schools serving high concentrations of those students. The weight apparently was arrived at through a literature search of cost studies done in other states – just another way to “pull a number out of the hat.” And, unlike the new state formulas in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, there is no sliding scale to increase the weight to address the effect of concentrated district and school poverty, nor to address the unique needs of English language learners.

The formula also does not address preschool, a research proven program critical to closing achievement gaps among student subgroups. Contrast this to New Jersey’s new formula which embeds the provision of adequate funding to ensure every three-and four-year old child in high need communities access to high quality preschool.

And finally, even if the formula contains the seeds of a more fair funding system for Rhode Island’s students, legislators and the governor have to actually fund it each year. Witness Kansas and New Jersey, where elected officials enacted transformational formulas, only to abandon them in short order when faced with economic stress. Or the struggle underway in Pennsylvania, where Governor Rendell is standing tall to secure the next $300 million to phase-in the state’s new, needs based, formula.

Rhode Island’s decision to fund schools uniformly based on student needs is a smart move, and one which has been adopted by several districts across the country, including New York City.

When Mayor Bloomberg and I took charge of the City’s public schools, the funding system was rife with inequities. Even after initial steps were taken to remedy the worst disparities, school budgets remained driven by arcane formulas that more often reflected long-ago political deals than the current needs of students. In fact, it was easy to find two schools serving a similar mix and number of students where the budgets diverged by several thousand dollars per pupil, or more than a million dollars overall. This was unacceptable.

In 2007, we took a huge step forward by implementing “Fair Student Funding,” a formula that awards budgets to schools based on the students they enroll. Every school receives an identical per pupil allocation, with additional “weighted” dollars assigned to students with extra needs, such as those who are learning English or who are performing below grade-level academically. This effort directed substantial new resources to schools that had historically been shortchanged.

Today, our school funding system is not only equitable, but also easy to understand. Principals have more control over spending and know that resources will be in place to support new students if their population grows or if their schools experience an influx of immigrants who require English language instruction. Families have real choices about where their children are educated because funding will follow those students wherever they attend school. Communities can feel assured that their schools are funded comparably to other similar schools across the City.

I congratulate Rhode Island for taking the common sense step of adopting a uniform funding formula that focuses resources on the people that matter most in education: the children.

This is a guest post by Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa.

I’m encouraged every time I see state legislators taking what are potentially politically risky steps to ensure the state’s economy is firing on all cylinders and providing a meaningful opportunity to learn for all of its students. In Pennsylvania, thanks to the leadership of Governor Rendell and some impressive organizing by Good Schools PA, we have arrived at a more equitable funding formula that is rooted in the true cost to educate all Pennsylvanian children to state standards. As more and more states grapple with the difficult, important, and politically charged worked of deciding how much money to invest in each child’s learning, we see it’s about time the federal government stepped up and had a leadership role. Much like the Common Core State Standards Initiative, the Federal government has a responsibility to coordinate, replicate, report and encourage positive state action. We have the chance now, in the reauthorization of ESEA, to find a balance between carrots and sticks, to promote, rather than stifle, student oriented innovation and courage, and to find ways to ensure all students have a meaningful opportunity to learn. I have introduced the Student Bill of Rights Act (which addresses resource equity between school districts) and the ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act (which addresses fiscal equity between schools) and will be working with both Chairman Miller and Chairman Harkin to include them in the reauthorization. We need to follow the lead of vanguard states and address BOTH the soft bigotry of low expectations AND the hard bigotry of inadequate and inequitable resources.

Earlier this month, the Rhode Island General Assembly took a historic step to transform education in Rhode Island.

For the past 15 years, Rhode Island has had no systematic, fair, and predictable way to distribute education aid from the state to local communities. In fact, Rhode Island has been the only state in the country without a funding formula for the distribution of education aid.

With the passage of this legislation, which the governor signed into law last week (June 23, 2010), Rhode Island has a funding formula that meets the needs of Rhode Island students.

Because it takes into account student needs and district capacity, our new funding formula will be fair to all school systems and it will provide adequate funding to educate all students in our state.

This funding formula is based on the principle that the money will follow the student. It is a dynamic system that will redistribute annual aid allocations as enrollment patterns, community wealth, and other factors change.

The formula recognizes where concentrations of poverty exist in our state, and it provides additional funds to support the needs of at-risk students and to close achievement gaps.

Under our new funding formula, the first step in calculating how much aid each school district will receive is determining the “core instructional amount,” that is, how much it costs, on average, to adequately fund student instruction. We used actual, audited expenditure data from other New England states and from the National Center for Education Statistics to determine the core instructional amount.

The core instructional amount includes expenditures for instruction, instruction support, some operating costs, all leadership costs, and all costs for services for educating students with disabilities and English-language learners, such as ELL teachers, reading coaches, and educational materials.

The second step in calculating how much aid to education each school district will receive is to create a “student-success factor,” which provides additional funding to support student needs beyond the core instructional amount.

Until better data become available in Rhode Island, we will derive the student-success factor from poverty data (i.e., number of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch). In Rhode Island, our research shows that there is a very strong correlation between English-language learner concentration and poverty concentration, and a regression analysis showed us that a student-success factor based on poverty data effectively directs funds to districts with high concentrations of students with disabilities.

In addition, objective federal income guidelines define the poverty data, so it would be difficult for districts to classify more students in a particular manner in order to draw increased funding.

Throughout the country, states are struggling with complex formulas that include numerous weights but do not necessarily lead to improvements in student achievement. As better data become available, we can adjust or add weighting factors to ensure that we allocate sufficient funds to educate all students, including English-language learners. It is important to note, however, that, in addition to the state funds allocated through the funding formula, federal funds from Title III and other programs support the instruction of English-language learners.

The core instructional amount and the student-success factor combine to determine the cost of our basic education program. A “state-share ratio” then determines how each school district shares the cost of education with the state.

The state-share ratio is a combination of two factors: community property values adjusted for median family income and the percent of students in kindergarten through grade 6 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch.

During deliberations on the legislation, the R.I. General Assembly revised the funding formula to raise the state share of education costs from the initially proposed 50 percent of the cost of instruction to 52.5 percent of the cost of instruction. This increase in the state share of instruction costs will help all communities and will be another step in alleviating the property-tax burden that all Rhode Islanders shoulder, and I believe that is an important goal.

Overall, our state contribution to all education costs (including school construction, transportation, pensions, and other noninstructional costs) is about 37 percent, which is relatively low among all states (35th, according to “NEA Rankings of the States 2009,” table F-10; 40th according to the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council “Results: Education in Rhode Island, 2010”). Our total per-pupil expense, however, is among the highest in the nation (1st state, according to “NEA Rankings,” H-1.1; 5th, according to “Results 2010”), so our state contribution must still be considered relatively large. I am thankful that Rhode Islanders for years have been generous in their support of public education.

Our new funding formula also includes special categorical funds to help alleviate the high cost of educating students with disabilities and some of the unique costs of career-and-technical education. Under the new funding formula, the state will assume the full cost of out-of-district nonpublic transportation and half the cost of transportation in the four regional school districts.

The funding formula, which will go into effect beginning with the 2011-12 school year, includes an innovative transition plan so that local districts have time to adjust to the revised distribution of funds. It will phase in the changes in funding allocations over 10 years, with aid increases to currently underfunded districts phasing in over four years.

Many legislators voted to support this formula, even though in some cases their home districts would not benefit directly (districts serving about 70 percent of our students will receive additional funding under this formula), and I am most grateful for their support.

We believe that this funding formula will take us from being the only state without a funding formula to being the state with the best funding formula in the country. Our formula provides funding for children, not systems. Under this new funding formula, 100 percent of the funding follows the child to his or her school of choice, and the formula provides additional funding to support the elimination of unacceptable achievement gaps in our state.

It takes state leadership to implement a school funding formula where 1) money follows the student, 2) low income students receive disproportionate funding, and 3) where funding is flexible and outcome oriented. These are some of the conclusions from the School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP)'s final report, Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools. This five year study unpacked the convoluted world of school finance. Researchers Jacob Adams, Marguerite Roza, and Paul Hill produced a guide for state policy makers.

Local control and reliance on local property taxes produced a system of school finance that reflected community wealth not student need. The 'all students to high standards' agenda demands that states reengineer school finance. This is politically difficult because it requires taking money from wealthy areas and/or adding lots of money to the system.

Funding schools based on student count and student need (rather than FTE formulas) and breaking lock-step pay schedules would give schools serving low income students the opportunity to pay more and hire more staff.

It seemed obvious that we needed to move away from a system predominantly based on local property taxes, but as many states are experiencing, a system that relies heavily on sales tax is also vulnerable to downturns. The bottom line is that education must be a state priority and state leaders need to focus on equitable outcomes not just equitable funding.

Charter schools, often robbed of local funding, deserve the same weighted funding as well as access to public facilities or facilities funding. And, with the expansion and improvement of online learning, it is vital that 'money follows the kid' be extended to the course level. New blends of online and onsite learning hold the potential to improve learning and operating productivity.

School finance is no one-time simple fix, it takes a continuous improvement mindset and real commitment by state policy makers.

Rhode Island has taken a bold step in attempting to create a school funding formula that recognizes what we have known for years- education costs can fluctuate widely based on students' needs. Students living in poverty, for example, may come to school far behind others in reading levels and language acquisition. The additional resources needed to put these students on par with their wealthier peers and keep them there cost more than students without the same challenges. In too many states, funding formulas fail to adequately address this fact. Districts serving high numbers of low-income children often actually end up with lower levels of funding due to their inability to generate higher revenues from property taxes. The Education Trust has documented that nationwide poorer districts received on average $825 less per pupil than wealthier districts. It makes no sense to provide less money to districts with students that cost more to educate and expect comparable results.

The new Rhode Island formula allocates state funding based on a "core" education cost and now, adjusts for students living in poverty. The formula also directly targets inequities created by differences in local contributions. A recent Public Impact report found that some Rhode Island schools were receiving as much as $20,000 per pupil from local sources while others received less than $3,000. The new formula calculates the state contribution by measuring both the total property value and the percentage of students living in poverty in a district. As mentioned, this will mean that some districts will receive more state funding than others. The alternative to increased state funding is maintenance of the status quo where we accept that students in some districts aren't receiving the resources they need to succeed.

Instead of complaining of "winners and losers," opponents of the new formula should recognize that everyone in the state benefits from the economic prosperity created by a highly educated population. The new formula does not appear too high a price to pay to ensure that children in poorer districts have a real chance at academic success.

We should applaud states for taking on this issue but not forget that many districts are also guilty of inequitably distributing state and local funds across schools. Districts often allocate more money to low-poverty schools that have faculties comprised of highly paid veteran teachers. District budgets conceal funding imbalances between schools by using average teacher salaries to calculate school-level expenditures. These policies again deprive high poverty schools of the resources they need to attract highly effective teachers and offer additional learning opportunities to students. The Obama administration and Congressman Chaka Fattah have proposed strengthening federal law to require districts to more fairly disperse state and local funds in order to receive federal funding. But districts could take the lead by reforming budgeting practices to calculate school-level costs using actual teacher salaries and provide equitable funding for schools even if they have lower staff expenditures.

We have, for too long, tolerated fiscal policies that deprive our most disadvantaged students of the funding their schools need to provide an excellent education. Many states, like Rhode Island, are enacting promising reforms regarding teachers, academic standards, and assessments that could finally begin to close the achievement gap. It's time that states realize that fiscal equity is an integral part of these reform efforts.