MOVING MOUNTAINS: Six things to consider when updating your K-12 school finance formulas.

• Author: Thatcher, Daniel
• Position: SCHOOL FINANCE

Twenty-five. That's the average age of states' education funding formulas--the complex math used by states to determine how much money each school district gets to spend on teachers, textbooks and the like for the school year. Yet, while much changes in 25 years--demographics, educational priorities, state economies, the cost of living, what's hot on the Top 40--it may be easier to move a mountain than to update, let alone replace, a funding formula. Many states have tried in recent years. Only a few have succeeded.

What obstacles did they face? And what lessons can other states draw from their experiences?

We're Talking Big Amounts

To appreciate the difficulty of changing education funding systems is to appreciate the scale of the endeavor. For the 2018-19 school year, legislatures appropriated more than $345 billion for K-12 education, by far every state's largest budget item. Local governments, for their part, raised an estimated $332 billion. Federal revenue added another $53 billion, for a grand total of $730 billion. For comparison, that's $44 billion more than the entire U.S. Department of Defense budget in FY 2019.

Owing to the magnitude of states' education spending, any legislative proposal calling for a funding increase can incite sticker shock.

The California Legislature, for instance, increased its spending by an estimated $18 billion over eight years to replace its 40-year-old funding formula in 2013. And in Illinois, lawmakers committed $336 million in new state money to make changes in the state's funding formula for the 2017-18 school year.

The potential cost of replacing a funding formula is just the beginning. (There may also be a price tag attached to the status quo. See the sidebar: "The Cost of Education.") The next hurdle comes with the politically fraught division of state revenue across school districts. The call for a new funding formula, after all, often comes from school districts agitated by either a perceived lack of fairness in the existing formula or an inability to raise additional revenue from their own sources.

Regardless of the amounts, there remains the compelling quest to ensure that all money, be it from state or local sources, is working where it is most needed to benefit all students. So how did these two states, and others, move mountains? They took different paths, but the initial pressures and conditions compelling them to move are remarkably similar. Six themes are highlighted here.

1. The Locals Have It. The localized nature of education politics is one common pressure. Attending public schools gives most Americans their first and most intimate...