hard deadlines

Here's a letter I sent to local papers on the proposed RIDE funding formula. The Sakonnet Times ran it this week (where it's already picked up 1,800 views online), and the Newport Daily News asked for tightening, so I hope they'll run it too.

To The Editor:
While it is long past time for Rhode Island to join the rest of the states in providing a stable funding formula for education, the plan recently proposed by the RI Department of Education (RIDE) does not meet the tests of fairness, transparency, and workability, and our state legislators need to modify or reject it.

First, fairness. According to a RI Public Expenditures Research Council report, our state ranks 45th in the nation in the percentage of total education revenues provided by the state for local schools, at just 36% (compared to a national average of 48%). That means regressive local property taxes — and taxpayers — are shouldering the majority of these costs. Under the new formula, this number would become a staggering 90% for a town like Portsmouth. I've posted RIDE's figures in a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs — http://bit.ly/aTgOUj — see for yourself.

Then there is the issue of transparency. RIDE brought in a consultant to produce a "core instruction" cost based on arithmetic averages of New England states, and this magic number, $8,295, is the baseline for state funding. The actual per-pupil cost for Portsmouth, third-lowest in the state, is $11,299, and we have been through a Caruolo action and a performance audit to testify to the efficiency of district operations. RIDE acknowledges their number does not cover the actual cost of putting a student in a classroom — it doesn't include transportation, utilities, food service, or out-of-district tuition, for example -- and yet they plan to reimburse for only a fraction (in Portsmouth's case, just 13%). It is puzzling to me that RIDE began with the assumption that the current funding level was appropriate and worked backward from there. If you tell a consultant to start with a target, of course they can create formulas to make the numbers work, whether or not they have any relationship to the facts on the ground.

And RIDE does not seem to have considered the implications for communities. Their formula would pull $18 million out of the East Bay, shifting that burden to municipalities already strapped for cash and constrained by the S3050 cap on the tax levy. While the RIDE proposal would phase the changes in over time, towns like Portsmouth would still lose $280K next year — an unsustainable cut. I personally asked Commissioner Gist if this meant that S3050 needed to be modified, and she said that RIDE would push for that change, but this is small comfort. The root questions — why the state is contributing so little, and whether the formula reflects the true cost of educating our children — have gone unaddressed.

Our legislature needs to step up here. For too long, enacting a funding formula has been considered tricky politically, and it is into this vacuum that the Board of Regents moved. But our elected representatives are the ones responsible for tax policy and budgeting, not bureaucrats at RIDE. I hope you'll join me in calling on our legislators to take this opportunity to finally make some tough decisions. The news may not be good for all communities. East Bay towns may lose some money. Maybe a lot of money. But the state share needs to be examined and justified. And it needs to be done openly and transparently -- by our elected representatives — and in a way that allows our districts to continue meet the needs of students as we move to the new normal. The proposal from RIDE fails on all of these criteria.

According to the Providence Business News, the folks at the free local news site Newport Now have bought the paper Newport This Week from East Bay Newspapers.

Congratulations and best wishes for great online-hardcopy synergies!

Alert reader davidc (THANKS!) pointed out that RIDE has posted backup documents to a new education funding formula page here, and I'm happy to report that we now have enough information to calculate the state share (I've updated the GoogleDocs spreadsheet with this info, and will be using references to that worksheet as I go through the explanation below.

But first, a couple of comments. Although I had sent an e-mail to Deputy Commissioner David Abbott (cc'ing Commissioner GIst) asking for the information, they did not have the courtesy of replying to let me know this had been posted. And while I don't know when the page went live, forensic examination of the supporting data PDF shows that it was created Thursday morning. (Line 1513 for those geeks playing along at home: /CreationDate(D:20100304155512Z)/Author(Beardsley, Andrew)/Creator(MicrosoftÆ Office Word 2007)/Producer(MicrosoftÆ Office Word 2007)/ModDate(D:20100304113952-05'00')

Second, I can't help but point out the glaring error in their document. On page 2, the total adjusted assessed value state-wide is this:

But on the following page, this is the number given:

Now I know that a single digit off on a hundred-billion-dollar number is insignificant. But if my son handed that in to his math teacher, Mrs. Warner, she'd circle it, and with good reason. If you want people to trust your math, getting the little things right — like having the same number on two successive pages — is kind of important. I mean, really. What would Arne Duncan say.

Third, and this is a subtle methodological point, but I question the amount of rounding that occurs in the RIDE calculations. Because both the percentage of students on Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) and the Student Share Ratio for the Community (SSRC) get squared in the formula, small changes get magnified. They also appear to have rounded the final State Share number. I've included columns in the spreadsheet indicating the differences between calculated values and RIDE's rounding. It's mostly in the tenths-of-a-percent, but when we're talking about allocating taxpayer dollars, it doesn't cost RIDE any extra to use a couple of decimal places.

At a high level, the formula is fairly straightforward. RIDE's consultant at Brown developed a "core instructional amount" based on an average of four New England states (RI, MA, CT, and NH). This value, $8,295, includes instructional costs designated by the Basic Education Program (BEP). It does NOT, however, represent the cost of actually educating students, since RIDE acknowledges that it does not include teacher retirement, group home aid, food service, transportation, safety, building upkeep, utilities, maintenance, debt service, capital projects, out of district tuition and transportation, and non-public textbooks.

In other words, this number represents only some theoretical ideal, not the actual cost of opening the doors of a school building. Let's just be very clear on that.

Now, let's see how much of this number RIDE considers the state should be providing. To get there, we need to multiply $8,295 by the number of students in the district, which is referred to as the Resident Average Daily Membership (RADM). To that number, we need to add an adjustment for the number of students in the district who are receiving Free or Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) which RIDE is using as a proxy for the percentage of the population who are economically challenged. RIDE assumes that these students will need extra help, so they add a factor of 40% of the core $8295 for each FRPL student.

So the total amount the district "should" be spending is RADM * 8,295 + (FRPL * (8,295 *.4))

If we put in the numbers for Portsmouth, with a RADM of 2,657, we get a result of $22,879,269. The obvious question — how to reconcile this with our current school budget of $35,746,286 — does not seem to enter into RIDE's calculations. They are not talking about the cost of putting the teacher in front of a room that has heat, light, and buses to get the kid there. But wait, it gets better.

The heart of the state funding formula is a quadratic mean, which weights the community's ability to pay (the State Share Ratio for the Community, or SSRC) and the percentage of students on FRPL.

To get the value to plug into SSRC, we need to do some further math with a number called the Equalized Weighted Assessed Valuation, or EWAV, divided by the number of students in the district.

So for Portsmouth, SSRC = 1-(0.5 * ($4,549,808,726/2,657)/(141,599,970,284/139,934) or 15.39% (That's cell S40 in the spreadsheet, RIDE rounds this.) Now, we plug that into the quadratic mean. Since Portsmouth has 1,270 K-6 students of which 122 receive FRPL, our percentage is 9.61 (another one of the things that RIDE rounds).

Therefore, state share equals the square root of (15.39^2 + 9.61^2 / 2) or 12.98% (cell U40).

Now, we can use that percentage, with the "core" cost and we'll find that the state would contribute $2,968,986. I won't make you do the math: that means local taxpayers need to pony up $32,777,300.

So you take a hypothetical number (which acknowledges that it does not represent the full cost of educating a child) and then jump through a series of mathematical hoops, rounding here and there, and come up with a percentage that bears no relationship with the actual per-pupil costs in a district. I hope that RIDE can forgive me if I seem unconvinced of the "fairness" of this.

Note: A reader suggested calculating the percentage of the total cost the state would be picking up: 9.06%.

I've gotten tired of waiting for the backup material on the proposed school funding formula promised by Deputy Commissioner David Abbott, so I've sent the following e-mail to the Brown professor who developed it. I'll post any reply, and update the spreadsheet on GoogleDocs (I have numbers in all the columns, but I just can't make them work...)

From: John McDaid
Date: March 5, 2010 9:57:40 AM EST
To: Kenneth_Wong@brown.edu
Subject: Request for information

Hi, Dr. Wong...
I'm a reporter for a Portsmouth-based hyperlocal news blog, and have been covering the proposed state funding formula you developed and hope you can help me.

While I have spoke personally with Deputy Commissioner David Abbott and asked for backup information on how to calculate the values to plug into the quadratic function, he has not yet been able to provide those.

I'm trying to understand why the values I've obtained from official sources do not seem to work when plugged into the formula, and I'm hoping you can provide information or pointers that would help in my analysis.

I have all the numbers I've been able to obtain plugged into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsipYS4xgQESdEVuWm5FTHctMHN3OV9...

Thanks very much for any help or information you can provide.

Best Regards.
-John G. McDaid
harddeadlines.com

Okay, it's not just me, according to today's Providence Journal, which reports that many members of the legislature can't figure out the formula as provided by the RI Dept. of Education:

It didn’t matter that many didn’t understand the quadratic equation behind the funding formula produced by the state Department of Education and endorsed later in the day by the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education.
— ProJo

Last time I checked, the legislature are the people who are responsible for taxes and budgets. I'm not sure why RIDE seems unable to provide enough information for them to understand this formula.

Going on two days now since I asked Deputy Commissioner David Abbott for the backup he promised on Tuesday night, and I still haven't had a response to my e-mail. So I guess I'm in good company.

The US Department of Education announced the states selected as finalists in the first round of Race To The Top funding, and Rhode Island was one of the 16 chosen. Representatives from each of the finalists will travel to Washington this month for sessions with the review teams, and the winners will be announced in April.

Today's Providence Journal featured an article on the proposed education funding formula written without any balance. I'm the first one to admit that every journalist has a perspective — I put it right in my masthead — but if you are going to actually use the dog-whistle phrase "supporters say," you bloody well better wrassle up someone to offer the other side. I've sent the e-mail below to the ProJo.

From: John McDaid
Date: March 4, 2010 9:05:52 AM EST
To: jjordan@projo.com
Cc: editor@projo.com
Subject: Feedback on your article on funding formula

Hi, Ms. Jordan...
While I do thank you for your ongoing coverage of education issues in Rhode Island, I have to query today's story on the proposed RI funding formula for its lack of alternate perspective.

I am not a fan of what press critic Jay Rosen derides as "he said, she said" reporting, but if you are going to use the phrase "Supporters...say," journalistic ethics would indicate that you owe your readers at least an acknowledgement that not everyone agrees.

Also, unless you have more information than RIDE made public (or provided to the Board of Regents in their packets for today) I'd like to know if you have actually been able to use the formula to calculate the amount for any town? You might ask Deputy Commissioner Abbott to provide the necessary backup (I did).

And did you ask Commissioner Gist about the implications for towns at cap under S3050? I did, and broke the news that she will be supporting changes to the tax cap.

I've been covering this all week, so if you're having trouble locating someone for a counterpoint quote, please feel free to put me in your Rolodex.

Best Regards.
--John G. McDaid
harddeadlines.com