After spending well over an hour walking his audience through a 204-page report filled with recommendations to overhaul Delaware’s archaic school funding system, Drew Atchison, the document’s primary author, concluded with an unexpectedly understated summation.
The report, he told a gathering in Dover of more than 100 educators, parents, students and advocates last week, was “not groundbreaking or earth-shattering.”
But that doesn’t diminish its importance.
“I can’t say any of the conclusions come as big surprises, but it’s very helpful to have an objective authority say some of the things that [Delaware] educators have been saying for a long time,” said state Sen. Laura V. Sturgeon, D-Brandywine Hundred, a retired teacher who chairs the Senate Education Committee.
While lacking in surprises, the $700,000 report, prepared by the nonprofit American Institutes for Research, laid out in granular detail how Delaware’s current system shortchanges programming for students who have the greatest needs and offered broad recommendations for creating a school finance structure that would be student-centered, more easily understood by the public and direct greater percentages of funds to schools that serve higher percentages of low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities.
It also put a price tag on providing programming that would enable all students to reach the learning goals established for them by state education officials: an additional $600 million to $1.1 billion per year. That translates to increases of 27 to 46 percent above current per-pupil spending levels. Spending on public education now accounts for nearly $2 billion of the state’s $5.6 billion budget for the current fiscal year.
In addition to increased spending, key recommendations in the report are:
- Distributing more resources according to student needs. While Delaware does allocate more funds to schools with greater percentages of high-need students (low-income, English learners, students with disabilities), those additional funds are not enough to meet all the needs of those students.
“Delaware is not making the same concerted effort” as other states, said Qubilah Huddleston, policy lead for equitable school funding at the Education Trust, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Maryland doubles its per-student allocation for English learners and economically disadvantaged students, while Pennsylvania and New Jersey provide 50 percent supplements, she said.
- Improving funding transparency. The current system uses a variety of formulas to distribute different pots of money to districts and charter schools, making it harder for those not schooled in education finance to understand how money is spent. A system that enables more people to understand how resources are distributed, the report says, should make educators more accountable and make it easier for families and community members to become more effective advocates.
- Implementing a weighted student formula for state education funding. The current unit system is weighted by staffing; having teachers with more experience and more degrees brings a school more funding than schools with less experienced teachers, which are often the schools with the most high-need students. A formula based on students would send the same amount of money to a school that has the same number of similar students. Weights based on the additional needs of certain types of students would increase the funding directed to the schools that serve them. Thus, a weighted student formula would direct specified dollar amounts to schools, rather than assigning a specific number of teaching or administrative positions, and this would give schools more flexibility in determining how to use the money available to them.
The report also recommends:
- Allowing more flexibility in how districts use resources.
- Accounting for local capacity and address inequity in property taxation.
- Regularly reassessing property values. (This work is already in progress.)
- Simplifying the calculation of local funds provided to charter schools.
What’s next
The next steps rest largely in the hands of Gov. John Carney, entering the last year of his second and final term in office, and members of the General Assembly, as they consider how to deal with the recommendations, the costs, and how to improve the performance of a public school system whose students’ performance trails outcomes in the neighboring states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Since discussing and implementing reforms is likely to be a phased process, the report could become a hot election-year topic for candidates hoping to succeed Carney and contenders for seats in the General Assembly.
“Education spending and governance go hand in hand. They should be at the forefront” of campaign issues, said state Senate Majority Whip Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman, D-Wilmington,
Why the report was prepared
The state commissioned the report as part of the settlement to a suit filed in 2018 by Delawareans for Educational Opportunity and the Delaware NAACP. The settlement, reached in October 2020, has already resulted in some additional spending for high-need students and reassessments of real estate values in all three counties, a process that will be completed in 2025.
“The General Assembly has to act. There is no need to delay any further. We now have a path forward... This report will be Exhibit A of the next lawsuit if the state fails to act."Dwayne Bensing, legal director of ACLU Delaware
Dwayne Bensing, legal director of the Delaware chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which assisted the plaintiffs in the suit, was pleased that the report estimated what it would cost for the state to meet its “constitutional obligations” to provide an adequate education for all its students. “The General Assembly has to act. There is no need to delay any further,” he said. “We now have a path forward.”
Bensing added an ominous warning, should there be no progress on finance reform. “This report will be Exhibit A of the next lawsuit if the state fails to act,” he said.
“This is a multi-faceted issue. There are a lot of ways we can go, but we have leaders in the General Assembly who care about public education…. Now we have the opportunity to move on this with knowledge and confidence,” said Lockman, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Education Committee and co-chair of the state’s Redding Consortium for Education Equity, which is tasked with spearheading the search for ways to improve outcomes for students in Wilmington and northern New Castle County. Many of the report’s recommendations align with proposals considered or made by the Redding Consortium, Lockman said.
When will changes come?
With Bensing warning that the state should not be “kicking the can down the road,” Lockman anticipates that education advocates in the legislature and throughout the state will press for action soon after the General Assembly returns to action in January. She said she would “hesitate to predict” how Carney would propose dealing with the report.
While Carney has taken a cautious approach to increasing state spending over the past seven years, Lockman said “we all know that education is a big priority for him and he is proud of the ways he has improved on where we stood five years ago.” Carney’s office has made no public comment on the report in the week since it was issued.
Acknowledging that she hasn’t discussed options with fellow lawmakers, Lockman said a two-step plan is one possibility – with structural reforms to the funding system being resolved first, followed by infusions of new spending. Such an approach could take two years, possibly more, to complete, she said.
The ACLU’s Bensing acknowledged as much. “From a litigation perspective and understanding the context, it’s a slow-moving process,” he said. “It’s going to take additional time” to implement reforms and boost funding by $600 million or more, he added.
A new formula, or fixing the old one?
Indeed, even lawmakers who see the need for increased funding to better serve high-need students are not convinced that the state’s long-standing unit count system has to be replaced with a formula characterized by assigning different financial weights to students with differing needs.
“I’m agnostic on that,” said Sturgeon, noting that many in the education community consider the unit system “stable and predictable” in year-to-year budgeting. Reducing the number of students to generate a unit would address what she considers one of the system’s greatest needs – putting more teachers in classrooms.
A weighted funding system, she said, offers different advantages, including increased flexibility, which should then lead to greater transparency and accountability.
Secretary of Education Mark Holodick, speaking at last week’s rollout of the report, stressed that however the state moves, “the system has to be student-centered, and we have to keep equity in the forefront.”
Concerns were expressed during the program that any realignment of state education funding could create “winners and losers” among school districts, with some receiving more funding than previously and others receiving less.
Several factors come into play in this discussion.
One is that some districts have considerably more wealth per student (in terms of local property values) than others, and some of these wealthy districts have fewer high-need students than the poorer districts. One equitable approach to this issue, the report states, is to establish an expected cost per student and how much of this amount a district could reasonably raise through property taxes. For example, if the average cost per student is $15,000 and a wealthy district could raise $5,000 per student through property taxes and a poorer district $2,000, then the state would send $10,000 per student to the wealthy district and $13,000 per student to the poorer one.
A related issue is what might happen if a new formula resulted in a district suddenly receiving less money than it did the year before. One remedy used in other states is a “hold harmless” clause which would prevent cuts to a district for one year, or several years, as the state transitions to a new formula.
Pennsylvania, however, the report notes, “provides a good example of what not to do when transitioning to a new formula.” Holodick described that state’s approach as a “perpetual hold harmless.”
In essence, when Pennsylvania adopted its new formula, it based its new weights on what districts had received during the 2013-14 school year. As a result, the report stated, no district saw a reduction in funding and, as of 2022, only 13 percent of the additional funding was distributed through the formula.
Moving forward
Paul Herdman, president and CEO of Rodel, the education-centric nonprofit, and a leader of the Vision Coalition of Delaware, which sponsored last week’s event, said the report delivered much of what leaders in Delaware’s education community anticipated.
“They did a good job of threading the needle between the benefits of our current system and the need for change,” he said.
“It’s going to take some time to process the recommendations and I think it will be a great opportunity for whoever our next governor is to focus on this in the first year of their administration.”Paul Herdman, president and CEO of Rodel and a leader of the Vision Coalition of Delaware
The challenges of reforming a school finance system cannot be underestimated, said Jennifer O. Schiess, policy and evaluation practice leader at Bellwether, a nonprofit education consulting firm with offices in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. “A lot of political capital will need to be spent to get this done…. You need a political champion who has the power and influence to lead the conversation,” she said.
That champion remains to be identified, but the Vision Coalition has been at the forefront of school reform initiatives for nearly 20 years and its leaders represent a cross-section of the state’s education, business, government, nonprofit and community stakeholders.
“It’s going to take some time to process the recommendations,” Herdman said, “and I think it will be a great opportunity for whoever our next governor is to focus on this in the first year of their administration.”
Read the State Education Funding report's executive summary:
