Every year the legislature meets, and invariably in spite of unfunded mandate limitations, there are dozens of education bills passed that add layers of bureaucracy and cost to the burden of education districts and charter schools. So many of these are feel good bills that legislators can’t resist, or bills that address problems of a very few students, but, as unintended consequence, they impact the many. In isolation these bills may seem innacuous, but in aggregate they have created much of the bloat of staffing and LEA budgets that the legislature is upset about.

Now the legislature has created a committee to make recommendations for streamlining the state’s commitment to public school funding. I agree wholeheartedly, no doubt that the decades old MFP is due a far delayed overhaul.

That being said a quality overhaul of the MFP must be in accord with one maxim, does it improve education outcomes for the vast majority of students. Especially in light of our increasingly improved outcomes, a blind surgical approach to funding revision, one ignoring our fundemental principle, would be a tragedy. Yet what has been discussed as the basis for the review committee deals with budgets without the linkage to outcomes.

If this is to be a legitimate review of state funding, it must be preceeded by a review for efficacy and efficiency of statutory mandates. In practice the committee should solicit from school leaders a compilation of mandates that have the most impact on staffing and spending, with an eye to sunsetting those not serving to enhance educational outcomes for the mass of students.

The legislature has a duty to assure taxpayers that waste and bloat are minimized, but that duty does not occur in isolation from its other duty to educate the children of our state. A glut of legislative mandates, many of limited benefit, is a fundemental cause for what the legislature suspects to be bloated spending. We must review state funding practices, but we must not ignore statutory factors that cause so much of the spending. Not addressing spending mandates may allow the legislature to reduce funding, but, as significantly effective policies will have to be underfunded, it will do great harm to outcomes.

Fix the MFP, but not in isolation to cleaning up the statues.