I woke up way too early this morning, and should have known better than to start reading.  Joe Sullivan over at Metro Pulse finally got around to covering the Oct. 23 BEP Review Committee meeting, and the bias is overwhelming.

The committee of the state Board of Education mandated to make recommendations for rectifying inequities in the state’s public-school funding formula has failed to do so.

Indeed, instead of making progress toward such a recommendation by a statutory deadline of Nov. 1, the committee has regressed by backing away from a recommendation it made a year ago that would have benefited Knox County schools and many other county school systems.

Actually, the “recommendation made a year ago” would hurt far more school systems than it helped — causing 62% to lose funding in order to boost the coffers for the four largest cities.

At the BEP Review Committee’s Oct. 23 meeting, highly respected state Comptroller John Morgan dismissed the Peabody model as one that “reduces funding to counties that are among the poorest in the state while advantaging systems that are already relatively better off.” In a meeting room laden with envoys from municipal school systems, the TACIR model got short shrift as well. And over the objections of Sen. Jamie Woodson and a few other members, the committee voted to defer making any recommendation on a more equitable funding formula.

The rationale for that vote, provided by the SBE’s chairman, Fielding Rolston, was that the committee needed to address the adequacy of state school funding before deciding how to distribute it more equitably. And Morgan weighed in with the observation that, “We haven’t collectively reached a vision of what we expect our education system to achieve, and until we have a sense of that it’s very difficult to talk about what it’s going to take to do it.”

What Sullivan doesn’t mention is that the committee spent a large part of the meeting talking about the need to define and achieve ADEQUACY in education funding; if all school systems are adequately funded, the question of equity is essentially resolved.

Fielding Rolston, Chair of the State Board of Education, gets it.  It’s more important to do this right, than to do it now.

At the meeting on November 21, Comptroller John Morgan will present the plan he developed about a year ago — one which addresses both adequacy and equity, but which Sullivan dismisses as “political non-starters.”

Doing the right thing is seldom the easiest.  If it were, Knox County would have raised property tax levels to a rate comparable to that paid by residents of Oak Ridge, which would make their per-pupil spending equivalent as well.

I agree that there needs to be a change in the funding formula, but am adamant that such change should not penalize those who have already chosen to do the right thing — difficult though it is — in supporting education through local property taxes in the absence of adequate state funding.