For nearly 30 years, Alabama has used an “antiquated” method to fund its schools, according to a state senator.
Now, policymakers are finally considering whether it’s time to change, which could have big implications in the state, particularly for schools with large populations of students facing poverty and other challenges.
Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, who chairs the Senate Education Budget committee, told a group of lawmakers and experts this month that it’s time to assess whether some schools and classrooms should get more money based on those challenges.
Forty-six states have chosen to move to a student-weighted funding formula, with Mississippi making the move last spring. In April, Alabama lawmakers set the stage for discussions to change the state’s Foundation Program, which has been in place since 1995.
Jennifer Scheiss, senior partner with Bellwether Education Partners, told lawmakers Alabama’s funding formula doesn’t provide schools as much money as neighboring states and hasn’t kept pace with inflation.
“It doesn’t really sufficiently address student needs,” she added.
Schools are funded through multiple buckets of money – local, state and federal – and budgets have been high in recent years, thanks to billions of federal COVID relief aid. But that infusion of cash is about to run out.
Orr said lawmakers are in the “discovery phase” of potential changes. He said any new funding formula will have to meet four “ground rules:”
- Funding needs to align with student needs.
- All districts would get an increase in per pupil funding.
- Schools get more flexibility.
- Local dollars will not shift from one district to another.
“We think that looking at student needs and a student based funding rate, that we can help our local school systems address particular populations that have particular needs, bringing more flexibility to the process,” Orr said, “but we are the ones that will decide how that gets done. That’s if we want to do anything, and doing nothing is an option if that’s what this group wants to do.”
Whether additional tax revenue would be needed to support changes, and how much – was touched on only indirectly at the meeting.
House Education Budget Chairman Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, who along with Orr serves as chairs of the committee, criticized recent comments State Superintendent Eric Mackey made regarding needing a tax increase to make a new funding formula work, characterizing them as “misinformation.”
Calling Mackey to the podium, Garrett said, “I would like to understand why you said what you said.”
Mackey said the remarks were made in the context of looking at the 2015 effort to revamp the state’s formula, adding that when he met with Bellwether’s experts in December, there was a discussion of the need for more revenue to make a new funding formula work.
Garrett said Mackey’s comments were “very disruptive to a good faith process,” and asked Mackey if he supports the legislature continuing to explore a new formula. Mackey said he does support the process and apologized, saying he was not trying to be disruptive.
How much funding should schools get?
The state portion of per pupil spending has risen year over year since taking a hit during the Great Recession, but when inflation is taken into account, it is at about the same level as it was in 2012.
In 2023, the state portion of per pupil spending was $7,732. That is nearly the same amount that the state funded in 2012. In 2012, the actual state portion was $5,667 according to state documents, which when adjusted for inflation is $7,781.
The chart below shows the state portion of school funding per student year over year in both current and real dollars. Click here if you’re unable to see the chart.
Based on federal data, Alabama schools spent an average of $12,476 per student in the 2022-23 school year, the latest year data is available.
Federal money bolstered by three rounds of pandemic relief made up $2,500, or 20% of that total, nearly double the $1,400 per student amount and an increase from 14% of the total in 2018-19, the last school year before COVID hit.
Here’s a look at the breakdown of federal, state and local funding of the state average spent per student over a 10-year period. Click here if you’re unable to see the table below.
Didn’t COVID relief money help?
Alabama K-12 schools received $3 billion in federal pandemic relief money since 2020. That funding was distributed based on how many students in poverty were enrolled in a district. Across the state, 62% of students are economically disadvantaged, the education term for meeting one of a number of measures of poverty.
For some districts, when broken down by a per student amount, that meant double, triple and even nearly four times the amount of federal funding they received in pre-pandemic years.
For example, Perry County, where 92% of students – or more than 9 of every 10 students – are in poverty, the federal per student amount rose from $2400 in 2019 to $8100 in 2023.
Research looking at whether the infusion of billions of dollars of federal pandemic money improved outcomes for students over the past few years is still underway, with early studies showing the additional spending did improve student test scores.
Alabama’s standardized test scores have shown marked improvement overall since 2021, according to data released this month.
Bellwether’s experts walked lawmakers through the various ways they could go about setting a base amount for every student and how weights for student-centered factors might look.
The weights, Alex Spurrier said, could be based on many different factors impacting a student’s learning. It could be a child’s disability, poverty status, whether the child is still learning the English language or if the child attends a rural school. Lawmakers will determine those weights, he said.
Will funding changes improve student outcomes?
Orr said if lawmakers increase funding to schools, he expects student outcomes will rise, too.
“The accountability portion, to me personally, is quite important,” Orr said. “Because what we don’t want to do, or what I don’t want to do, is give districts more money and get the same old outputs and the same old results that we have been seeing for decades.”
A+ Education Partnership is a founding member of the Every Child Alabama coalition, a group of two dozen organizations pushing for a better school funding formula.
“We think that [a student-weighted formula] would work much better for students in our state,” President Mark Dixon said. “It’s been a while since we have made any adjustments to the formulas – it’s been 30 years, and so it’s definitely time that we take a look at this.”
Sen. Jabo Waggoner, R-Vestavia Hills, was a lawmaker in 1995, when the state Foundation Program was adopted. “Based on what I heard, I’m impressed,” he told AL.com. “I think it may be time.”
Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, said he’s glad the committee is doing this work, and he could see how this kind of system would work, but he’s still concerned that higher-need schools will not get what they need to improve.
“We need to do it in such a fashion that we don’t put a band aid on,” he said. “That we actually put the resources there.”
Smitherman complimented Gov. Kay Ivey’s Turnaround Schools Initiative, which has focused $10 million yearly on 15 struggling schools, and some schools are seeing real progress in student achievement.
“We have a model,” Smitherman said, “and now we can take that model and hopefully spread it over the whole state.”
After the 90-minute meeting ended, Orr told reporters this is still the beginning of the process. “This is a long term process,” he said. “It will not happen in just one year.”
“We want to get feedback from those that were here today,” he said, “on what they think, whether this is something we need to take another step forward on, or whether it scares the dickens out of them and they’re like, let’s just stay with the world we know.”
