Center for Educational Equity Announces Constitutional School Funding Project to Develop a New Foundation Aid Formula for NY State

On July 16th, the Center announced that we will begin developing a new foundation aid formula to replace New York State’s outdated, 17-year-old school-funding formula, Foundation Aid. The Center will retain the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to undertake the technical analyses for this project.

The foundation aid formula was enacted in 2007, as a result of CFE (Campaign for Fiscal Equity) v. State of New York, a landmark educational rights case brought by Michael A. Rebell, now the Center’s Executive Director, and State Senator Robert Jackson, who was then the President of Community School Board 6 in upper Manhattan, on behalf of New York City public school students. The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest Court, held in that case that all children in the State of New York have a right under Article XI of the state constitution to a meaningful opportunity for a sound basic education.

Since the formula was adopted in 2007, there have been substantial changes in educational needs and educational practices. Major new education policies like universal pre-K have expanded, and poverty rates have increased throughout the state. There have been substantial enrollment declines, especially since the pandemic, and many districts are dealing with the needs of migrant children, many of whom have never attended school. In addition, the pandemic has had a profound impact on long-term student learning and student mental health.

A new formula that fully considers the full range of current student needs must be developed. In fact, the Court of Appeals in CFE required that this be done. It specifically said that the State must determine the “actual cost of providing a sound basic education” and it must establish a fair, need-based funding system that would ensure that “every school … would have the resources necessary for providing the opportunity for [such an] education.” The current outdated formula is no longer based on “the actual cost of providing a sound basic education” and it no longer provides all schools the resources they need to provide their students their constitutional right to such an opportunity.

Two years ago, the Center called for the governor and the legislature to appoint an independent commission to develop a constitutional new formula. The governor and the legislature rejected that approach. Last year, the State Education Department (SED) proposed a reasonable plan for developing a new formula, which we supported, as did most of the education community and both houses of the legislature—but the governor essentially vetoed the funding for that approach.

Instead, the governor convinced the legislature to authorize the Rockefeller Institute to undertake a study of “modifications” to the existing formula. But modifications and tweaks to an outdated 17-year old formula are not sufficient, and this limited effort does not comply with constitutional requirements.

It is for that reason that the Center has retained AIR to work with us to begin the development of a new foundation aid formula. More information about the Center’s constitutional funding compliance project and AIR’s role in it is available in the testimony Michael Rebell provided yesterday at a New York hearing sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute.

For nearly two decades, AIR researchers have conducted increasingly sophisticated evaluations of school funding in the state of New York and elsewhere. Jesse Levin, Ph.D., now Principal Research Economist at AIR, conducted the original New York adequacy study as part of the remedial phase of the CFE litigation. Levin has collaborated within and outside of AIR to conduct over half a dozen state-level school finance studies, as well as studies of resource allocation, funding, and spending associated with major federal programs, including special education services supported by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and compensatory education supported by the Title I program.

The American Institutes for Research® (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance to solve some of the most urgent challenges in the U.S. and around the world. For more information, visit: https://www.air.org/our-work/education/school-finance