When Republican Mississippi lawmakers first started talking about revamping the state’s funding formula for its K-12 public schools, the suspicion was this was an attempt to reduce funding.
After all, the Legislature had done a poor job of living up to its past promises, only fully funding the current formula twice since it was adopted in 1997.
But the legislation the House passed this week, by a large bipartisan margin, would appear to refute the skeptics. Instead, after several improvements were made to the original proposal, what was adopted would seem to be an improvement on the current formula, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.
As with MAEP, there would be no obligation on the Legislature to fully fund the figure prescribed by the new formula, which goes by the acronym INSPIRE. Backers of the new formula say, however, that they expect to put nearly as much money into INSPIRE for its first year as MAEP would produce fully funded.
However large that pot of money is, though, what’s most important about INSPIRE is that it would distribute the allocation in a way that takes into account the socioeconomic background of the students each school district serves. Districts that have large concentrations of poverty or large numbers of students who have special needs or are learning English as a second language would receive additional funding. As a result, districts in poor regions such as the Delta would receive more state money per student than those in affluent areas, such as DeSoto County and the Jackson suburbs.
INSPIRE, in other words, appears to have the same goal as MAEP — to equalize funding between property-poor and property-rich school districts — but does it better by putting a larger responsibility on the property-rich districts to foot locally the cost of operating their schools.
Legislation like this is going to be complex, and there may be some downsides in the details that have not come to light yet. Education advocates will be studying it closely, as will the Senate, which wants to tweak MAEP rather than abandon it.
The skeptics of INSPIRE may still be skeptical. Indeed, a day after passing the House bill by a 95-13 margin, the number of lawmakers in opposition rose to 36 when given a second chance to cast a vote. The switch apparently came over concerns that Republicans pushing for the new formula may be fudging the numbers.
Still, the House’s intentions seem genuine: to create a fairer funding mechanism for public schools and not to underfund them. Until proven otherwise, it should be given the benefit of the doubt.
