Forget ‘full funding’ for Ky schools. What would ‘adequate’ funding look like?

Last month, while the Kentucky House of Representatives debated the state budget, the chair of the committee that helped write it posed a seemingly simple question: What, he asked, is full funding for education?

It’s something that state leaders and educators alike routinely debate, especially when budget decisions are being made. Finding a single, unifying answer, however, is elusive. The chairman said the consensus among those he had spoken with was that full funding is “everything you can give us.”

As the General Assembly’s only active K-12 teacher, I certainly understand why many say that, because the needs easily outpace the resources. If full funding is always over the horizon, though, the dream of “adequate funding” is well within our grasp.

We could, for example, strive to reach the same per-pupil spending levels we saw in the early 1990s, during the first years of the landmark Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). If the state had just kept up with inflation since then, the $4,000 we spend now annually on each student would be at $4,700 instead.

We could also pledge to bring the percentage of education spending back to where it was just a decade ago. Then, 58 cents of every state tax dollar was tied in some way to our schools, colleges, and universities. Today, even with steep increases in funding for teacher retirement, that number has dropped to 52 cents.

We could also come up with a more comprehensive plan to tackle the ever-growing need for newer facilities, better equipment, additional staff, more training, and higher salaries. Beyond that, there is also ample research showing the benefits of stretching the concept of public education to include universal preschool and at least two years of postsecondary education.

If there is one area where educators and state leaders do agree, it is that we still have a long way to go to meet those attainable goals. Indeed, a dozen years of near-stagnant appropriations, and the sudden and sizable impact of COVID-19 during the past 13 months, threaten the loss of three decades’ worth of hard-fought gains in the classroom.

In the days after the chairman’s remarks, I reached out to about 20 educators and researchers to see how they might respond to his question.

Their insights were both invaluable and, I hope, a strong starting point for the General Assembly’s newly created task force that will review ways to improve school funding in the months ahead.

Several of those I contacted said Kentucky needs to recommit itself to the 1989 Kentucky Supreme Court opinion that was the catalyst for KERA the next year. The Rose decision, as it is generally known, said the legislature is constitutionally bound to make sure our public schools are “adequately funded” and “substantially uniform.” In other words, no matter where a student lives, his or her school should roughly offer the same high level of learning and services.

Dr. Lu Young, who chairs the Kentucky Board of Education, said studies back common sense when it comes to funding. “Plain and simple, states with the highest academic outcomes tend to have above-average spending and states with the lowest academic outcomes tend to have below-average spending,” she said. In education as in life, you really do get what you pay for.

My boss, Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio, pointed to another study showing what a 10 percent increase in per-pupil funding could do for students over a 12-year period. Wages went up seven percent for those students, and there was a 3.2 percent decline in poverty.

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a non-profit that has played an outsized role in education reform, has a viable plan to spend an extra $1 billion over the next five years. That would enable the state to cover the full, rather than half, cost of all-day kindergarten, something the General Assembly is thankfully doing this fall for the first time – and will hopefully continue doing in the years ahead.

Other uses for that $1 billion include making it possible for more four-year-olds to attend preschool; paying all school transportation costs rather than just 60 percent; and expanding the College Access Program grants so that 18,000 more eligible Kentuckians can have an easier time affording the sky-rocketing costs of a postsecondary degree.

These are not unreasonable goals, and the results are highly and consistently verifiable using national benchmarks. More innately, we know this works because, quite frankly, we’ve successfully traveled this path before.

The $2-plus billion dollars our schools are getting in federal stimulus money is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to kick-start this work, and it will make a profound difference. But that alone will not get us where we need to be.

There are many who would say the state is giving all it can during these difficult days and that now is not the time to ask for more. Others and I might be more sympathetic to this argument if we did not just see the General Assembly approve hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives and another $25 million to benefit private schools in our largest counties and other private educational expenses.

So perhaps the question we need to ask is whether it is time to revisit KERA to ensure that we are meeting our Constitutional duty to provide an efficient system of common schools for every child in the state.

Tina Bojanowski represents District 32 in the Kentucky House of Representatives. She is also a special education teacher for Jefferson County Public Schools.