Massachusetts

FUNDING PRIORITIES FOR P-20

The projected revenue for P-12 education during Fiscal Year 2018 (FY 2018) is $5,324,136,000. This amount constitutes 75% of the total estimated allocation for education expenditures, which also includes allocations for higher education, pre-school education, colleges and universities, and the Massachusetts State Education Department. And estimated $4,746,954,000 of the projected revenue for P-12 education will be allocated to Chapter 70 funding – the state's foundation formula, which seeks to establish a per pupil funding base of support for individual school districts.

For FY 2017, the state legislature preserved considerable levels of funding cuts that Governor Charles Baker imposed during the summer, and increased Chapter 70 funding by a modest 2.6% over the appropriation during FY 2016.

Higher Education (HE) funding continues to decline precipitously in Massachusetts by 14% in FY 2017. When this is compared to its base year of FY 2001, it has declined by 31% when spending is adjusted for inflation using FY 2017 as the base year. HE funding has been slashed due to a declining reliance on the sales tax originating between 1998 and 2002 and has continued declining in the years during and subsequent to the Great Recession of 2008. The effect of this precipitous decline has been a sharp increase in tuition payments when the actual cost of tuition has been doubled in 2017 to the cost of these payments in 2001. Since the actual budgeted state aid for HE is $1.6 billion, which is $14.5 million (or 1.2%) below what this aid was during FY 2016, the shifted burden onto students via higher tuition payments will continue.

CHANGES TO FUNDING FORMULA FOR P-20

There is no substantive change in the operating funding formula for P-12 education for the appropriations during the FY 2017 or during the estimated appropriation for FY 2018. Nevertheless, Chapter 70 will have a stronger measure of classifying at-risk students since it will rely on an automated system of counting free-and-reduced students interfacing a number of existing inter-state data sets of identifying 'economically disadvantaged students' and scrapping the traditional methods from the federal application. The tallied numbers of at-risk students using the traditional application have been lower than what schools are actually able to report because older public school students tend not to complete the federal application for fear of perceived public exposure and embarrassment about their family's socio-economic status. The automatic system's reported increase in the at-risk count will invariably position the randomly selected highneed public school to receive more state and federal school-aid.

While there are no fundamental changes to the formula for HE funding, reductions in specific grants have been enacted for FY 2017, and these will be discussed in the next section.

PRESSING STATE ISSUES AFFECTING P-20

While there is no fundamental change in the funding formula for K-12 public schools, constituents in the state legislature, such as Sonia Chang-Diaz and the Foundation Budget Review Commission have intensified their criticism of current Chapter 70 funding, and insist that the level of these appropriations continues to constitute a gap of support when compared to the level of Chapter 70 funding prior to the Great Recession of 2008. Moreover, state legislators and the Review Commission maintain that these operating-aid appropriations and estimates ignore the evidence based recommendations that the Review Commission recommended in their 2015 report regarding the required level of funding for public schools to have sufficient funding to meet the state's formidable curricular expectations. With respects to Pre-K funding, the actual state-aid allocation for FY 2017 reports an elimination of Kindergarten Expansion Grants, which amounts to a reduction of $18.6 million off of this state-aid during FY 2016.

Against the backdrop of a state referendum outcome where voters voted against raising the cap on the creation of new charter schools, actual charter school reimbursement aid in Massachusetts is below levels that were approved by the state legislature, and is 37% below the amount funded in FY 2016. Secondly, the total...