Missouri's school funding raises challenges

Unless you have a job -- bookkeeper, accountant, financial planner, budget director -- that requires you to work with figures every day, you probably face the same math challenges as many Americans who find balancing a checkbook to be a chore and can't even comprehend their telephones bills.

(OK. Nobody understands phone bills. But you get the point.)

Perhaps the most complicated bit of math that affects, in one way or another, just about every Missouri family is the budgetary mystery officially knows as the School Foundation Formula. Even if you don't have children in public schools that rely on state funding, you are paying taxes that go into the school funding formula and get sent back to local districts.

If every district got the same amount per pupil from the state, there would be no need for a formula. But that's not how it works. As a result, few people understand the formula, including the legislators who must appropriate billions of dollars each year for elementary and secondary education.

Why is the school funding formula so complicated?

There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is an attempt to be fair and equitable. The problem is that what one district considers fair is often thought to be inequitable in another district. In addition, there are all kinds of exceptions and special provisions that affect how much money the state sends to each of the 524 public school districts.

Bottom line: the gap between what the state's richest and poorest districts spend per pupil is enormous -- and, according to State Auditor Claire McCaskill and others, is growing even wider.

A decade ago, the situation was so bad that a lawsuit prompted the state legislature to write a new formula. That overall education plan included one of the largest tax increases in Missouri's history. The theory then was that more money -- lots more money -- would not only improve public education, it would silence the whiners who complained about inequitable state funding.

In 1992, the gap between the richest and poorest school districts was $6,000 -- measured in total per-pupil spending. In 2002, the spread had increased to $9,000, despite the 1993 Outstanding Schools Act that was supposed to take care of spending inequities.

Now legislators, including many who were involved in the 1993 rewrite, say the school funding formula needs to be addressed again. This comes at a time when state spending proposals exceed revenue by as much as $1 billion. If the plan is to solve this dilemma again by throwing more money at schools, there will have to be one heckuva tax increase to pay for it. And the mood for huge state tax increases right now is gloomy.

Now there is talk of new lawsuits to challenge the school funding formula. There is no time left in this legislative session to tackle the enormous task of rewriting the formula. Legislators, educators and taxpayers should be concerned that courts will wind up writing the formula, a situation that has occurred in other states with disastrous results.

Everyone concerned about school funding who believes the funding scheme is broken should also accept another reality: There's a limited pot of money. This time, the fix should not assume that more money will make the problem go away.