Our Position Statement on the Governor's Executive Budget

Governor Hochul’s executive budget proposal for 2025-2026 is more generous than many expected. However, it ignores many of the urgent needs of New York’s schools and school districts and does nothing to advance the development of a fair school funding formula that will meet all students’ educational needs this year and in years to come.

The governor recommends increasing Foundation Aid by $1.5 billion (5.9%) and guarantees every low-wealth district at least a 2% aid increase, instead of reducing hold harmless aid for low-income districts with declining enrollments, as she had proposed last year. She also adopted the Rockefeller Institute’s recommendation that the Foundation Aid formula’s outdated means of counting students in poverty (which is currently based on data from 2000 census and free- and reduced-price lunch rates) be replaced by more recent census data.

Significantly, however, she ignored the other 31 recommendations for updating the Foundation Aid formula in the Rockefeller Institute report. That report examined all the basic components of the current Foundation Aid formula in detail and found every one of them inadequate and/or out of date.

Furthermore, the executive budget proposal does not provide any relief to school districts from the huge financial impact on their schools of unfunded state mandates like the requirements for shifting to zero emission buses by 2035 and the immediate reduction of class sizes in all New York City schools. Nor did the governor address the urgent need for responding to the statewide crisis in student mental health.

Governor Hochul’s approach, although providing basic maintenance funding for next year, ignores the pressing inadequacies and inequities of the hopelessly outdated, now 19-year-old Foundation Aid formula. Essentially, rather than facing the challenges now when the state has surplus revenues to work with, she is kicking the can down the road.

Legislative action is urgently needed to develop a new school funding formula for New York State. The Center for Educational Equity/AIR’s Adequate, Constitutional, Equitable (ACE) School Funding Project has begun the analytic work necessary to develop a new formula by next fall. The governor and the legislature should promptly establish a process to continue this work under state auspices and be prepared to adopt a comprehensive constitutional new school funding formula next year.