Serious education money …

The half cent off the sales tax is now a given. The nickel added to the gas tax is in trouble. Legislators are making a big deal this session about saving taxpayers $15 a year here or $25 a year there. But only a few so far have been willing to stand up and refuse to stick property taxpayers with a $155 million education bill that will arrive if Augusta, once again, underfunds the system.

General Purpose Aid to Education, at approximately $590 million this year, is the single biggest program that state government funds, or is supposed to fund. But year after year it slides a portion of its share onto municipalities, then grandly announces it has some proposal that sends essentially loose change back to constituents. Unless lawmakers this session approve a plan to fully and fairly pay for education — even one that takes three or four years to fully implement — they will again pass on the biggest unfunded mandate of them all to local property taxpayers. The public must not accept this.

The problem of the lack of school funding comes in two parts. State government not only fails to contribute its proper share of funding — it is supposed to provide at least 55 percent; it actually provides 44 percent. It also has badly distorted the formula through which the state does contribute money so that, more than ever, it favors wealthy communities over poor ones.

The failure of Maine’s school-funding system was neatly outlined by Education Week not long ago. The national publication annually prints its Quality Counts Report, which grades states on education performance. Two of these grades are important in the funding debate:

On the amount of money spent per-student, Maine received an A, among the best in the nation; on equity — the measure of how well a state distributes the funding — Maine received a C-, ranking it 37th among states. The grade is a half step above the D that New Hampshire and Vermont received, a relevant bit of information because not only are those two states Maine’s neighbors but because one is under court order to address the lack of equity in their school funding and the other soon could be. Maine is right behind them.

Maine’s top grade for per-student funding comes largely through the efforts of property taxpayers, who year after year have had to make up the shortfall left by the state. The result is that Maine’s poorest communities have been forced to raise tax rates to a level that would cause a revolt in the wealthier enclaves of the state’s southerly section. And despite this effort by poorer towns, Maine’s funding is far from equitable: by property valuation, the richest fifth of Maine communities spend 7.8 mills on schools to produce $6,200 per pupil; the bottom fifth spend 12 mills to produce $4,700 per pupil.

That simply is not the way anyone intended the formula to work when it became a national model in the 1980s. It is no wonder that the basic unfairnesses that have been built into the forumula since that time have driven school boards, superintendents and the teacher’s union — frequently opponents over the years — to schedule a rally on this issue Thursday in the Hall of Flags in the State House.

Two problems: money and the way it is distributed. The money part is a matter of will; lawmakers could fully fund the system if they put in just the same effort, as a percentage of the General Fund, that they did until the early 1990s. Changing the formula is more difficult, but this too depends on putting in enough money to ensure that regions of the state that would lose under reform still get enough in new funding to keep their legislators from opposing the changes.

Lawmakers cannot begin to solve these problems, however, until they stop fretting about nickels and dimes and start focusing on the serious money in school funding.