Delaware is quickly approaching Gov. Matt Meyer’s desired deadline of finalizing a new education funding framework by the end of June, but education experts are raising concerns over the new proposal.
The Public Education Funding Commission’s (PEFC) next meeting is this Monday June 2, and the body has been tweaking a new "hybrid" approach over the past several weeks.
The proposed hybrid framework combines the state’s current unit count system with more local spending flexibility, as well as targeted weighted funding to high-need student populations like low-income and multi-language learners.
Zahava Stadler, the project director of the Education Funding Equity initiative at New America, believes there are four key ways the current Delaware education funding formula is out of step with national best practices.
First is that it is a resource-based formula, which largely allocates based on educator salaries rather than on student need, which Stadler and several advocates argue makes the system inequitable at its core.
Her second concern is that Delaware calculates how much money they provide for a teacher based on the state salary schedule, which means state funding matches elements of a teacher's training and experience level. She explains this system provides an automatic benefit to districts that have the easiest time attracting and retaining experienced teachers, creating a built-in disadvantage for low-income districts.
Third, Delaware does not use a weighted student funding model, meaning aside from special education students, students with intensive needs like those who are multi-language learners or low-income do not receive more resources to support their education.
While Delaware implemented "opportunity funding" in recent years to help address these concerns after the state was sued over the funding formula's inequities, Stadler argues this system requires constant manual adjustment and legislative attention and is still not comprehensive enough.
Finally, she expressed concern with how the First State handles district equalization.
"In most states, what you have is a 'fair share requirement,' where responsibility for funding schools will be split between the state and the district in some kind of fair share way based on local wealth levels," she explained. “What Delaware has is what I might call a ‘flat share requirement.’ They just kind of expect everybody to cover 30 percent of personnel costs with very little adjustment for how much money the district actually has access to.”
The PEFC has noted it intends to dig deeper into the equalization part of the formula once property reassessments in each county are finalized.
But that stipulation aside, Stadler believes the new hybrid approach only addresses one of these concerns — weighted student funding.
University of Delaware’s Ken Shores, an associate professor specializing in education policy, also commends the proposed hybrid model's incorporation of weighted student funding, but he believes the model remains inequitable at its foundation if it remains a resource-based approach.
"When your teacher follows [high-needs] kids into the classroom, if the teacher with 25 years of experience and two masters degrees goes into the low-income class, she's going to cost $90,000 and then the one that has one year, two years experience and fresh out of college, they're going to cost $35,000. So all that inequity gets baked into how teachers move across schools, even though the resource model is giving them .25 extra teachers," Shores said. "So the weights are good in that they give more resources to these kinds of populations, but the inequity then coming from the staffing costs isn't getting resolved at all. And so I think advocates and school finance experts for a long time have just kind of thought that there's really no reason to do that — that we can just use money to hire teachers and then let the money follow the student."
Stadler and Shores agree that a student-based model is the most equitable way to approach education funding, but Stadler believes even if Delaware retains its unit count system, there are better ways to tweak it to create equal opportunity.
"I'd love to see a more robust, truly student-based formula here, and I do think that that is worth pushing for, for the purposes of transparency, flexibility, for recentering the conversation around student needs and equity. I will say though, that even in other states that use teacher unit-based formulas, they do not necessarily do this specific weird thing where the teacher unit is valued based on the teacher salary," she explained. "[Other states] use teacher salary averages, either for teachers generally, or for the particular position in question, rather than actually targeting it to the individual in the position, which is a much clearer, more equitable way of doing things. So even if you are really dedicated to a hybrid model, even if you desperately wanted to retain teacher units, even though it's really not the national standard anymore, you could do it in a way that align things less with community wealth and more with student need."
Stadler isn't alone in her desire to see a student-based model in Delaware. Some members of the PEFC have requested a student-based model be presented in addition to the hybrid model.
Chair and State Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Woodbrook) told commission members at its last meeting that either way the First State would be adopting a hybrid approach, but she didn't rule out a student-based model as the base.
“We're going to end up with a hybrid. We can either start with what we do now and add flexibility and freedom, which is what we've done with the hybrid that we're looking at now, or we can start with a pure weighted student funding system that has zero guardrails, and we could build in a sufficient amount of guardrails," she said at the commission's May 5 meeting.
According to the PEFC's June 2 agenda, the commission will only be reviewing and voting on the proposed resource-based hybrid framework.
If the commission votes to approve it, the framework will then be filed as legislation and sent to the full General Assembly for approval with just three weeks until the end of the legislative session.
If approved by the legislature, the PEFC will continue meeting to fully flesh out a funding formula for the state, which could still take several months to develop and then a year or more to implement.
The Delaware legislature will also be working to pass the state's fiscal year 2026 budget, as well as several other major pieces of legislation, including an expected change to Delaware's personal income tax brackets.
