The funding monster

Despite more than a dozen attempts, no state has been able to identify and fund services it considers essential to a proper primary and secondary education. Maine is the latest state taking a run at it, with some highly encouraging signs from a committee established to identify essential services for schools. But now comes the hard part.

In a report to the Legislature’s Education Committee last week a Board of Education committee outlined for lawmakers what resources they considered essential in the eight subject areas covered by the Learning Results, the state’s academic standards. The essential covered seven areas: staff, supplies, special education, special student populations, sevices such as co-curricular activities and technology, district services and a category for funding adjustments based on school size and staff seniority.

The idea behind the essential-services project is sound. If Maine can nail down the resources necessary to provide students with a solid education, as judged by the Learning results, and then identify the costs associated with those resources, it can produce a fair and equitable method for funding schools. The committee seems to have done a thorough job bringing Maine up to the funding portion of the project.

But this is where things get more difficult. Disagreements over course content and pedagogy can be intense among educators, but are a kindergarten’s naptime compared with school-district battles over state funding. How much the essential services will cost must be a large question for all committee members. And what happens if the total cost comes in substantially higher than the current budget? Does the committee decide that what was essential once is no longer?

That is just the warm up for tricky questions about accounting for added per-pupil costs at small schools and higher staff costs for schools that have attracted more senior teachers. And then the largest question: Once the committee has established the price of needed services, how does it share the funding burden with municipalities?

These are difficult but necessary questions, and state educators deserve credit for putting these tough choices before the public. The growing disparity in funding between the haves and the have-nots in Maine needs to be answered at the state level. The essential-services committee is an excellent means to address it.