Education funding is the talk of the Tennessean, with two legislator guest columnists and an editorial on the topic today.

The main editorial opines that the rural schools’ funding woes have been satisfactorily addressed, or at least so sayeth the court, but that urban systems have fallen behind with their greater proportion of expensive-to-educate (at-risk and ELL — kids who don’t speak English).  They close with the easy point:

The state should not have to see another lengthy legal battle to bring fairness to the urban schools. But it should be clear that there are flaws in the current formula. The heart of the matter is the needs of the students in those urban districts. The General Assembly should address those needs in K-12 school funding. The formula should be revisited.

Rep. Gary Odom’s piece calls for a system that is more “simple and fair.”  Notably, he points out that all school systems have high risk and ELL students… and they do.  While it may indeed be true that the urban schools have greater numbers of ELL students, it’s not necessarily true that they have greater percentages — and it’s certainly true that they see more benefits from an economy of scale.

Smaller systems with a small number of ELL students still have to provide extra teachers (and often, extra instruction) to those students, even if there are only five spread across elementary, middle, and high school.  That gets expensive in a hurry.

Rep. Jason Mumpower points out some of the flaws in the current system, but also the glaring flaws of what he terms the “lead replacement plan” — the system-level model put forth by TACIR, which I have written critically of so many times in the past.  However, he also questions whether Tennesseans are seeing value for the additional dollars poured into education over the past decade, and calls for a system that goes beyond funding alone to ensure measurable results.

Everybody wants a system that is “fair,” but only Mumpower points out the gross unfairness of the direction to date:

However, the front-running replacement plan actually double-counts the tax bases of cities and counties, according to the BEP Review Committee, and creates huge winners and losers in terms of funding distribution.

The principle behind the BEP was that local governments with large tax bases should bear a greater share of the burden for their school systems, while those with meager revenue sources need additional help from the state.  It was a Robin Hood plan from the beginning, but any system that provides substantially equal opportunity would have to be thus.

Taxation is, quite simply, a pooling of resources.

What none of today’s writers dared say is that to provide an increase in education funding for anyone, and to do so fairly, will require a net increase in education funding overall.

While there will always be differences in the relative wealth of local governments across the state, what I would like to see examined is a system that shows the following:

1. If every local government had the same property and sales tax rates, and
2. If every local government allocated the same percentage of tax collections to education,
3. The amount of augmented funding needed based upon the true ability of the local government to fund schools, not their willingness.

I suspect that for some of the urban schools, part of the problem is simply allocation of resources to projects other than education.