Leaders of the state Legislature and Gov. Mike Pence all say “school funding equality” ranks No. 1 on their to-do list for 2015.
But when it gets down to details, they have a hard time explaining what they mean.
In two weeks of talking with legislators and school superintendents, our reporter found difficulty defining the issue.
We set out to discover:
1. How unequal our school funding really is;
2. How it got that way; and
3. How legislators intend to fix it.
None of those questions has a simple answer. The easiest might be No. 2.
For decades, each school district paid for itself through local property taxes. Every district’s funding level was different.
Over time, state money began to play a role. A few years back, the state completely took over school operating expenses and paid for them with a sales tax increase.
The state started working toward funding equality, which involved unpopular cuts for some districts.
Creating more complications, the state gives districts extra money if they have high levels of poverty.
As for question No. 1, just getting accurate numbers on what each school district receives turned out to be a maddening task.
We learned the state already has been moving toward equality for the past few years. But absolute equality may not be in the cards.
Most leaders seem to agree that districts with high poverty rates should continue to receive extra money. But they are likely to disagree about how much help is appropriate.
Finding an answer to question No. 3 proved nearly impossible, because no one seems to be talking about specifics yet.
At a meeting of local school leaders and legislators last week, state Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, said (partly in jest) that only a dozen people in Indiana really understand our school funding system. That’s scary, since we have 150 legislators.
Kruse, who chairs the Senate committee on education, made a couple of surprising statements.
“I think we have gone a little too far overall in reducing our income in the past several years,” he said at one point. Stated more simply, he means legislators might have cut taxes too deeply.
Kruse said he hopes Indiana’s economy will improve, so our present tax rates will raise enough money. If they don’t, Kruse said the best way for school districts to boost their budgets would be a new local option income tax for education.
But a local tax for education seems like an idea heading in the wrong direction. Voters in a few school districts might be willing to pay higher taxes for education. It seems a safe bet that many districts would say “no.”
The end result of an optional local tax for education could be more inequality, the exact opposite of the goal.
It seems obvious that no Hoosier child in our public schools deserves a better education than any other. How we get to that point does not seem obvious at all.