For several years, Republican leaders in the Mississippi Legislature have wanted to re-examine the funding formula the state has used since 1997 to allocate money to public education.
This week, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn announced their plan to rewrite the formula with the help of an outside consulting firm.
Such an examination is worth doing as long as the desire is to truly get a better bang for the buck rather than using it as cover to cut education funding, as some fear.
The problem with the Mississippi Adequate Education Program has been mostly the Legislature’s failure to live up to its promise. In only two years out of about 20 have lawmakers followed through with allocating the amount the formula dictates. This year, they shorted MAEP by $172 million; the shortfall has been about $2 billion over less than a decade.
Frustrations over that repeated failure led to an unsuccessful citizen-led attempt in 2015 to pass an initiative to require full funding, plus an ongoing lawsuit filed by several shorted districts.
MAEP is a complicated formula designed to ensure that students in property-poor school districts receive an adequate education. It doesn’t guarantee the classroom results in these districts will match those in property-rich districts, but it attempts to remove the excuse that lack of money is the reason for whatever disparities exist. MAEP also has been successful in keeping Mississippi out of the courts, unlike in other states which have had their funding decisions dictated by the judiciary because a prolonged funding gap between rich and poor districts.
Besides being tired of being blamed for underfunding education in general, Republicans in the state Legislature have contended that too much of the MAEP funding is going to bloated administration. Reeves cited a legislative watchdog group’s report that found administrative spending increasing by 8 percent in recent years while classroom spending decreased by a like amount.
State Auditor Stacey Pickering has been making the same point for several years, plus claiming that the formula has developed some flaws over time that were not foreseen when it was adopted. For instance, so-called “at risk” districts get an additional bump in MAEP funding based on the percentage of their students who receive free lunches. About five years ago, however, the federal government changed the rules of the food program to allow school districts in high-poverty communities to provide free lunches to all of their students, including those who would not have qualified under the previous rules. That change has skewed the at-risk portion of MAEP.
In summary, there is good reason for trying to tweak the formula to produce its stated and legally necessary intent: equitable funding. If the tweaking can move more funding into classrooms and less into administration, that’s likewise a worthy goal.
But whatever is done, lawmakers should come up with a formula they will follow most years, not just when they feel like it or when they are especially worried about their re-election.
