Things are heating up in the House Select Committee on School Finance. After several days of hearings on the House school finance plan, the Committee is closer to taking final action to move the plan out. First, however, the Committee will hold hearings and work a proposed constitutional amendment that would re-enforce the power of the legislature to control the state’s purse-strings. The Kansas Constitution currently provides that no money shall be drawn from the state treasury except through an appropriation made by law. At least one prior Kansas Supreme Court decision ruled that the constitutional provision represented an insurmountable barrier to the courts forcing an appropriation – that is, until the current Supreme Court ordered the legislature last year to appropriate a specific additional sum of money for schools under threat of school closures. While most agree the Kansas Constitution does not allow for such a court order, the proposed amendment would re-enforce the power of the legislature to control the expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

The Senate has now rolled out an initial plan, similar in scope to the House plan. The Senate plan would apparently increase funding by $480M over 3-years and would, in addition, require another $180M in local effort, that is, local property taxes. These are not new taxes but rather a shift of local option budget dollars to state funding dollars. Even though both the House & Senate plans include components for increases over 3 years, recently released state budget profiles show that the funding is not there in the second and third years, so look for both plans to end up being a year-to-year plan. There is a good deal of support for the notion that with last year’s investment of $289.5M in new funds, we should measure the results of that investment plus this year’s investment before deciding what is needed in years 2 and 3.

Support for that position was provided late last week with the release of yet another study of school finance, this one the Standard & Poor’s Kansas Education Resource Management Study, commissioned by the governor to help the state improve the “return” on its educational investment. As expected, the study confirmed that there is no demonstrable correlation between amounts of monies spent on school funding and performance outcomes. The Supreme Court has bought into Plaintiff’s argument that more money is needed to reach mandated outcomes but the S&P study found that highly resource-efficient districts were actually reaching mandated outcomes and spending less per student than the state average. S&P noted that Kansas already devotes more of its budget to education than to any other funding category and that prior to the 2005 court order Kansas was already spending an average of nearly $7500 per student. They found that highly resource efficient districts were getting the job done for just under $7000 per student. S&P noted that Kansas could not afford to simply spend its way to 100% student proficiency in the required subjects and that districts needed to find ways, as the highly resource-efficient districts had, to increase the rate of return on their educational investments.

The study should put the damper on the rhetoric the School Finance Committee has been hearing from the education establishment that it is all about needing more money. Needless to say, we will add additional funding for schools again this year, but look for there to be accountability provisions that require districts that are not performing up to par to reallocate existing resources to address those deficiencies.