At the end of a year of tracking the state's school aid formula, Greg Hayden believes it's time to scrap the complex tangle and just start over.
DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, July 26, 2007 7:00 pm
It takes a diagram that looks like nuclear doomsday to chart the state’s school aid formula.
And 138 pages to translate the behemoth into an algebraic expression.
At the end of a year of tracking the beast, Greg Hayden believes it’s time to scrap the complex tangle and just start over.
“We need to get better measures of need,” says the University of Nebraska-Lincoln economics professor.
For the last 50 years, economists have demonstrated the No. 1 determinant of a country’s economic growth and welfare is educational prowess and achievement, Hayden says.
“We’ve got to adequately educate all our students,” he says.
“We need to find out the financing needs (and) seek fiscal equity.”
What the state relies on now is a formula cobbled together over the past three or four decades.
Within it, Hayden says, are components, or sets of components, repeated in many different places and many different ways.
“The same component, or set of components, may be added, subtracted, summed with components of other districts, serve in a numerator, serve in a denominator, and serve as a multiplier or multiplicand in different places in the formula,” Hayden says.
Whoa! Time out. Multiplicand: the number that is, or is to be, multiplied by another.
Today’s complexity “inhibits understanding, discussion and deliberation,” Hayden says.
The best way to overcome that probably is to begin anew, he says.
State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, chairman of the Legislature’s Education Committee, says he’s open to change, but only if it results in improvement.
“If it’s cumbersome now, what is something that is better?” he asks.
“As I read (Hayden’s work), there is no effort to make a positive contribution. I would hope to see something useful policywise, but I don’t see it. It seems sort of cynical to me.”
Much of the detail that has been added to the basic equalization structure of the state aid formula was included “mainly in an effort to try to be fair,” Raikes says.
“If short is good,” he says, “I suppose we could simply divide the money by the number of schools.”
Tim Kemper, director of finance for Lincoln Public Schools, says the formula’s complexity reflects the challenge of “achieving a policy goal that might be complex to achieve.”
However, Kemper says, “scrutiny should be welcome (and) if we could redesign it to make it work better, we all should be interested.”
School aid may be simple in concept, he says, but it’s not simple to measure needs or achieve equity or balance policy goals with political realities.
“So many dynamics,” Kemper says.
In addition, he says, “things change,” and the aid formula has been modified over the years to reflect that reality.
State aid to schools was first approved by the Legislature in 1967. Tears filled the eyes of Sen. Jerome Warner of Waverly as the program he had championed for four years finally gained 39-7 approval 40 years ago last week.
The aid formula has undergone a myriad of changes over the years, many of them enacted since Warner’s death in 1997. Raikes was appointed to fill Warner’s seat in the Legislature and promptly picked up the challenge of shepherding the school aid program through a period of dynamic change.
Many of the alterations since 1967, Hayden says, were designed to “turn this knot or adjust this screw.”
The cumulative result, he says, has been “a tremendous differentiation and elaboration of the state aid formula,” especially during the last 30 years.
In the late 1970s, Hayden translated the school aid formula into an algebraic expression in less than a single page. The 2006-2007 formula covers 600 pages when fully expressed, 138 pages in Hayden’s abridged version.
What has emerged over time is a system of “beliefs and values used to make decisions and fight about,” Hayden says.
His study draws no conclusions on whether the distribution formula is fair.
Starting over allows “those kind of questions to be asked,” Hayden says.
“You can’t look at equity until you look at the formula.”
No doubt some school districts are gaming the system now, he says, gaining additional state aid through assertive application of a formula that gives more weight to factors like school district wealth and parental poverty and students with limited English proficiency.
The Omaha and Lincoln school districts presumably may be best at that because they hire professional staff to assist in identifying, measuring and counting a range of factors, Hayden says.
“We need to simplify the system so the state can answer questions of equity and fairness,” he says.
Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.