"Why Don't We Riot?"

I came across a blog post today by 'Public School Mama', a blogger and parent who lives in Boston. She mostly blogs about the Boston Public School system but today's post, titled 'Why Don't We Riot?', struck a chord with me. In turn, I'm writing this longer-than-usual post on a similar theme.

The writer, pondering an example from her law school days about the 'show' of a deliberative process in the absence of the reality of it in a essentially hopeless court case, talks about 'normative legitimacy.'

This professor argued to me that I was missing the point. Allowing Mr. Kelly to participate gave the proceedings a normative legitimacy and people who were allowed to participate in the process had better feelings about the procedure and it’s adverse outcomes if they were given the chance to be heard.

She was writing about the Boston Public School Committee but it got me thinking about the Commonwealth's Legislature and the apparent sham of a process that we all went through with the Legislature's own Foundation Budget Review Commission, tasked with reviewing and updating out of date elements in the Commonwealth's formula for funding local school districts.

Established by an Act of the Legislature in 2014, the Commission was created to “review the way foundation budgets are calculated and to make recommendations for potential changes in those calculations as the commission deems appropriate.”

"Chapter 70" is a shortcut term for the aid that the Commonwealth sends to local and regional school districts to support local public K-12 education. At the heart of Chapter 70 aid is a complex formula that yields an amount of school aid for each district. The formula makes a number of assumptions and applies them uniformly to each district. These include assumptions about health care costs, special education rates, and other factors.

It's no secret among our legislators and the administrators at the MA Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) that the formula's assumptions are outdated and generate flawed results. That is precisely why the Legislature enabled the Foundation Budget Review Commission.

How bad has the formula worked for Amesbury? Check out this graph, which tracks Chapter 70 aid to Amesbury in relation to the total Amesbury Public School budget, 1993 to 2016.[Thanks, School Committee member Rob Chamberlain, for the graphic]

You can see that while our total APS costs have gone up dramatically (red line), our amount of Chapter 70 assistance has not (yellow line). In fact, we receive over $300,000 LESS in Chapter 70 aid than we did in 2000 and that is NOT adjusted for inflation. At the same time, from 2000 to 2016, the total pool of Chapter 70 funding has gone up by 69% (or by a whooping $1.6 BILLION dollars). We are one of only six communities in the Commonwealth receiving LESS Chapter 70 aid than in 2000.

The GAP between those two lines is the difference that has been faithfully made up by the Amesbury taxpayers year after year in increased tax levies on property. [Click HERE for more info.]

That sounds terrible! Can't we do anything about that?

This is my third term on the City Council and for years I've heard Mayors and fellow Councilors bemoan the reality of the steadily rising school costs that have slowly cannibalized other parts of the municipal budget; it now comprises over half of our operating budget. And for years, I've heard that we need to direct our attention to the Governor and the Legislature, because the Chapter 70 framework is not working for Amesbury.

A number of us have done just that. State Reps and Senators have been contacted and letters written.

And when the Foundation Budget Review Commission was established in 2014, we leaped at the opportunity to follow its work and testify. Indeed, in the winter of 2014/15, a number of us presented testimony to the Commission at a regional hearing in Danvers, as well as presented a letter describing the local impact of the flaws in the formula, a letter signed by dozens and dozens of Amesbury residents. [READ the letter HERE.] A few residents even attended other regional hearings and worked closely with Commission staff to get a clear picture of where the Commission was headed. [Read more about the Amesbury School Coalition HERE.]  Make our local voices heard at the state level? Mission (perhaps) accomplished!! Warm fuzzies all around.

That's great! So, what did that Foundation Budget Review Commission do? What did it recommend?

The Commission published its report in late 2015. You can read it HERE. In the end, the Commission recognized that tackling the many flaws in the formula would cost quite a lot of money (say, if health care escalation cost assumptions actually connected with reality) and it made only 2 recommendations, to change 2 elements of the formula only very slightly and over a few years.

OK, dialed back and realistic recommendations, sounds promising, this might provide some real relief to Amesbury. Then what?

Then it was up to the Legislature and the Governor to act, primarily in the form of building the Commission's reforms into proposed FY17 budgets.

Governor Baker's budget did not fund any changes to the formula.

There were several opportunities for the House and Senate to fund the Commission's recommendations this year. Foremost among them was a bill by Rep. Rogers from Norwood. His bill rather simply enacted the Commission's recommendations to make minor but meaningful adjustments to the formula.

Over 100 School Committees, City Councils, and Boards of Selectmen across the Commonwealth passed resolutions this Spring calling on the Legislature and the Governor to implement the Commission's recommendations. Both the Amesbury School Committee and City Council unanimously passed this resolution, with copies sent to our local legislators and the Governor.

Our State Senator, Kathleen O'Connor-Ives signed on to Rep. Rogers' bill as Co-Sponsor. Our State Representative, James Kelcourse, did not. A few of us met with Rep. Kelcourse to discuss this issue and urge him to support adopting the Commission's recommendations but to no avail. The Representative was candid about his rationale: his leadership did not support the bill and thus neither did he. We also debated about how the changes would be paid for but I argued that by NOT acting, the Amesbury taxpayers were ALREADY paying for the formula's inadequacies (see chart above) and will continue to do so until its flaws are addressed. NOT changing the formula is continuing to transfer costs down to the Amesbury property taxpayer.

Another possible path for making changes to the formula is through the RISE Act that was passed by the Senate earlier this Spring. It is complex legislation but among its features was a full enactment of the Commission's recommendations. The House has shown little interest in taking the RISE Act up, however.

Where does that leave us?

Right now, we have Commission recommendations that appear to be Dead On Arrival at the doorstep of the very body that established the Commission in the first place. And that brings me full circle back to Public School Mama. I feel like the gentleman in the court case that she discusses. Our having been given the pretense of being heard "gave the proceedings a normative legitimacy and people who were allowed to participate in the process had better feelings about the procedure and it’s adverse outcomes if they were given the chance to be heard." Unfortunately, the warm fuzzies generated by putting in a lot of time and energy in to making our voices heard at the state level - as we've always been advised to do on the issue of school funding - have been short-lived...and the status quo remains firmly in place.

2016 seems to be a year when a lot of folks are feeling that the process of being heard in a democracy is more the performance of legitimacy and participation, than the reality of it. Changing Public School Mama's closing just a bit, I can't help but feel like that at the end of the day, the only purpose for the Foundation Budget Review Commission was to keep us from rioting, rather than to make any impact. School advocates in Amesbury and around the state will have to think of what hope there is of improving the formula, if even the Legislature doesn't have the nerve to take it's own advice.