Jack Lessenberry: Revise school formula?

Jack Lessenberry

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Jack Lessenberry Special to the Record-Eagle

September 4, 2011

By Jack Lessenberry, Columnist ---- The Record Eagle Wed Mar 14, 2012, 02:01 PM EDT

DETROIT — Is it time to drastically change “Proposal A,” which has been the law of school funding in Michigan for a generation?

Nobody, it seems, is happy with public education in the state — how it is working or what it costs. Those trying to run school systems are bitter over continuing state budget cuts — at the same time they are being held to higher standards and being asked to do more.

To them, the Legislature seems almost in a “punishment mode,” as one school official put it, seemingly more concerned with reducing teachers’ pensions and benefits than in education itself.

Some school officials honestly believe there is a conspiracy in the Legislature to destroy public education and replace it with a system of charter schools and vouchers.

Lawmakers, or at least the GOP majority, talk as if the schools are in trouble because their employees are still getting “Cadillac benefits” that they can no longer afford in the post-automotive age.

And members of the public are baffled.

“Wasn’t Proposal A supposed to fix all this?” said Janet, a middle-aged woman standing in line at a pizza carryout in the Detroit suburb of Berkley.

“What happened?”

Proposal A was, indeed, supposed to “fix” the problem of education funding in Michigan. In a historic shift, voters in March 1994 opted to replace the traditional way of funding public schools mainly through locally approved millages.

Instead, Proposal A shifted much of the burden to the state, which then funded the schools mainly by a “per-pupil” foundation grant, currently $6,846, the lowest in seven years.

This was supposed to gradually equalize the difference between the richest and the poorest districts, and prevent districts like Kalkaska, whose voters simply refused to approve new millages, from running out of money and shutting down early.

Proposal A seemed to work, at least for awhile, especially for the weakest districts. So why are the schools in trouble now?

The simplest answer is that in recent years, lawmakers have sharply reduced the money paid for each pupil. Under the rules that went into effect with Proposal A, local districts are now no longer allowed to make up the difference themselves.

Politicians also began playing with the school aid fund, meant exclusively for elementary and high school education. Gov. Jennifer Granholm “borrowed” from it. Rick Snyder this year got legislative approval to transfer a large chunk of money from it to the states’ community colleges. That irked a lot of school administrators.

Mike DeVault, who has been superintendent of the Macomb Intermediate School District for two decades, was frustrated by that.

“There wasn’t a person in the state who voted for Proposal A who thought that money would be used for community colleges,” he said.

“Proposal A worked fine for a long time,” he said, until “they began violating the original intent.”

But now a new study from the state’s most respected public policy research organization, the Citizens’ Research Council (CRC) of Michigan, suggests Proposal A may be a big part of the problem.

First published this week on the CRC’s website, the almost book-length report (“Distribution of State Aid to Michigan Schools,”) strongly suggests that it is time for a major re-examination and perhaps reworking of the school funding formula.

Part of the problem is that Proposal A forbids local school districts from raising new revenues to supplement those provided by the state — even if a district’s voters are willing to do so.

“Does it make sense to prevent higher revenue districts from raising additional (money) to support more spending?” it asked.

Proposal A has other problems, too, the Citizens‘ Research Council found. It shifted the burden for contributions to the employees’ retirement system to the school districts.

The cost has grown faster than the amount of money the districts got from the state, even before the “Great Recession.”

Additionally, while Proposal A did divert greater amounts of funding to districts where the citizens had previously spent the least on schools, those weren‘t necessarily the poorest ones.

“Districts with high concentrations of minority students, which also suffer academically, did not receive the greatest percentage increases under Proposal A,” the CRC reported.

What’s worse, many of these districts have lost students — but still need to keep up their infrastructure.

The CRC study suggests schools may need to be funded on more than a per-pupil basis.

Taken as a whole, the Citizens’ Research Council document is a fairly damning indictment of Proposal A. But will the lawmakers now do anything about it? The realistic answer seems to be: Not yet.

“School finance reform is unlikely to occur on its own; rather, it is likely to be paired with a much broader education agenda,” the study concludes.

What it doesn’t ask is whether Gov. Snyder, who says he wants to “reinvent Michigan,” may look at this as well.

Jack Lessenberry’s email address is bucca@aol.com.