Hillary & Bernie Gagged on K-12 Education Policy Discussions by Unions?
December 1, 2015What’s the Purpose of a Federal Education Law Anyway?
December 2, 2015N.J.’s School Funding Formula Is Broken, and Not Just for Children with Disabilities
New Jersey’s legislated school funding formula, the 2008 School Funding Reform Act, is a hot mess. In fact, many people would concede (at least behind closed doors) that this pre-recession and quixotic state aid allocation system desperately needs reform, birthed as it was from former Gov. Jon Corzine’s understandable desire to receive a reprieve from the 1990’s Court-ordered Abbott district funding that, 25 years later, treats districts like now-chic Hoboken and Jersey City as if they were Camden or Newark and maintains line items like Adjustment Aid that Jeff Bennett calls “legalized aid hoarding.”
Often one can look at the world of special education as a kind of canary in the coalmine. Everything is bigger there: achievement disparities, cost per pupil, the urgency of action. So it’s significant that a New Jersey State Task Force has formally admitted that, in the case of special education, SFRA is indeed broken.
From coverage today by NJ Spotlight:
Maybe the most significant recommendation made by the 17-member panel of educators, special-needs advocates and others is that lawmakers significantly rewrite the state’s funding law to better distribute special-education aid to school districts.
The 28-page report says the state’s current method of funding special education – based on a statewide average count of students, a so-called “census-based” method – is ineffective and does little to lower special-needs classification rates in the state, one of the aims of the task force’s study.
The report suggested the state go back to providing aid to students based on their individual needs and disabilities.
“This (current) approach has been proven to be misplaced and inappropriate,” the report concludes.
I’ve written about the problems with census-based aid distribution. Four years ago the NJ DOE hired a consulting firm after the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network filed a lawsuit against the state for underfunding education for special needs kids. The report from the consultants confirmed what we all knew: that a census-based distribution of special education aid, encoded in SFRA, was far inferior to our old system of allotting aid based on actual disability and student place of residence.
Now, almost half a decade later, a Task Force has said the same thing.
SFRA doesn’t work in the world of disabilities. And the canary in the coalmine is tweeting that it doesn’t work in the general education population either.
NJ senators and assembly members have just started to concede this. Maybe this new report will push them them to actually commit to rewriting a state school funding formula that is divorced from fiscal reality and student need.
1 Comment
I'm perplexed and disappointed by the recommendations on state aid.
First, sped classification is very subjective and the percentage of kids with special needs is random. For instance, the district w/ the highest sped percentage in Essex County is Essex Fells (DFG J), at 18% classified; the lowest is Irvington (DFG A) at 8% classified.
In Bergen County Saddle River has 20% of students classified (DFG J). Dover (DFG A) has 9% of kids classified.
Under the task force's proposed changes, Essex Fells would be a big gainer in aid until other districts start increasing their own classification rates.
I suppose the state could devise some way to actually measuring the costs of a child's special education classification but this would generate very expensive compliance costs for districts as districts document what services each child is getting and then high supervision costs for the DOE as it attempts to verify what districts are spending.
Morever, the task force writes about SFRA as it were actually an operating law. “2) SFRA is now in its 7th year of enactment and the Task Force has concluded that this funding method is clearly not working to reduce the proportion of classified students in districts overall.”
Umm, doesn't the task force know that SFRA is underfunded by $2 billion for K-12 and that there are over 350 districts getting less than SFRA recommends, including 118 who get not even 50% of SFRA's recommendation?
What difference does it make to an underaided district like Manchester Regional, Bound Brook, Prospect Park, Clifton, that is getting thousands of dollars less per pupil than it is supposed to be getting if SFRA's formula for sped is changed? The district is ripped off as it is because there is not enough money to fully fund SFRA and the Adjustment Aid locks up hundreds of millions in excess aid. Changing the formula for sped won't matter unless the formula can be fully funded or if some consistent prorating of aid is carried out.