After 11 years of litigation, Judge Thomas Moukawsher issued a seismic decision in the CCJEF school finance lawsuit. In the decision, Moukawsher not only eviscerated Connecticut’s school finance system, he also detailed flaws in the state’s approach to teacher evaluation, teacher compensation, the lack of clear definitions of success in elementary and secondary education, and gave the state 180 days to come up with a solution to all of it.
The CT Mirror reports that Governor Malloy and Democratic legislators struck a budget deal that would allow two new charter schools to open as well as supporting the growth of existing charter schools.1 On paper, this charter growth will cost the state $12.4 million in FY16, but it actually took an additional $23.5 million increase in FY16 ECS funding to make it happen. In other words, for every $1 in new funding to support growth in charter schools, legislators insisted that $2 went to support traditional public schools via ECS grants.
There are few people in Connecticut defending the current system of distributing Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grants. Sure, there’s a formula that is supposed to guide annual appropriations, but there are two big problems. To start, the legislature hasn’t ever appropriated the level of funding the formula calls for. Given the economic tumult of the past decade and Connecticut’s somewhat anemic growth rate, it’s not hard to understand why this is the case.
The Growth of School Choice in Connecticut, 1995-2015 For years, families in Connecticut demanded more public school options for their children. Over the last two decades, state funding for magnet and charter schools grew significantly. Even with this level of growth, thousands still end up unable to attend magnet schools or charter schools due to limited capacity. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable that lawmakers would work to expand the number of public school options available to families?
What would happen if we actually followed the ECS formula? There are two significant flaws in Connecticut’s current school funding formula, known as ECS (Education Cost Sharing): It does not reflect the actual needs of towns and students. It does not treat the thousands of students accessing school choice equitably. I plan on addressing those concerns in subsequent posts, but for a moment, let’s take ECS at face value and assume that the underpinnings of the formula are correct.
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.