Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn tried to put a good face on explaining their failure to craft a legislative proposal by deadline for their much-ballyhooed rewriting of the state’s education-funding formula.
Time, they said in a joint statement, was never really the issue. They said they remain committed to revising how the state spends the largest portion of its general fund budget.
What’s become clear in the past few months is that Reeves and Gunn underestimated how difficult this project would be.
From the delayed release of the consultant’s recommendations to the abandoned strategy of getting so-called “placeholder bills” approved (with details to be filled in later), there has been nothing smooth about the effort to tackle an issue of perennial concern and debate: how much to appropriate to K-12 education, and how to divvy up that amount.
For three decades, the Legislature has had a guideline, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, but lawmakers have failed most years to fully adhere to what it says.
Calling MAEP flawed — and still miffed by a unsuccessful citizens’ initiative to make the Legislature follow the formula — Reeves and Gunn said there had to be a better way, and they hired EdBuild, a New Jersey-based education consulting firm, to help them find it.
Problem was that EdBuild delivered more than Gunn and Reeves bargained for: a sensible idea to shift some of the cost of education funding on property-rich districts that have been getting off relatively lightly. Gunn and Reeves tried to hide that outcome, refusing to release how individual districts would be impacted by EdBuild’s proposal. The Associated Press took the initiative and did the calculations itself, showing most of the districts that would have to pony up are in Republican strongholds.
Once those numbers came out, the junk hit the fan. GOP lawmakers pledged that no district would have to raise tax rates. Taking the tax shift off the table, however, increased the state’s price tag for implementing the rest of EdBuild’s proposal. Instead of $70 million more than the Legislature is presently appropriating to K-12 schools, it would take an estimated $145 million a year extra. With state tax revenues still sluggish and more mid-year spending cuts possible, this created a whole new problem.
Thus, the pause button.
The delay is a good thing. An education funding formula is complicated. MAEP took a couple of years to fashion. It was naive of Gunn and Reeves to think they could replace it in the course of several weeks.
If MAEP is as flawed as they contend, then they need to take the time to be sure what comes next is, in fact, better. Trying to jam a rewrite through conference negotiations, or even putting it into a possible special session, is a bad idea.
Whatever the eventual proposal, lawmakers, school officials and taxpayers need to have time to digest it and gauge its impact before the new formula is enacted.
The 2018 regular session would be plenty soon enough.
