What’s the problem with school finance in Connecticut?

School finance in Connecticut is broken. The state’s main vehicle of support to public schools, the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant, sends $2 billion to local districts each year with the goal of equalizing the ability of communities to fund public education. Unfortunately, years of legislative tinkering with the ECS formula left Connecticut with a Byzantine approach to funding schools that takes more than 16 pages to explain. On top of this labyrinthine system, non-traditional public schools (including magnet, charter, vocational/technical, and agriscience schools) are funded under entirely separate mechanisms.