Education funding should be the top topic in the upcoming campaign for governor because, as AP writer John Hanna points out, 52 percent of the state budget is devoted to the public schools and another 12-14 percent goes to higher education. The first step in balancing the state budget is to provide enough revenue to keep all of those school doors open.
How much is enough will be part of the discussion.
In October, a group of 70 school districts plans to file a lawsuit against the state for failing to provide enough state aid to give students “an adequate education,” as the constitution insists it must.
Sam Brownback, the presumptive Republican nominee, told Hanna he would not “lay out a school finance formula, because that needs to be a debate and a discussion that the state has. What I’m going to push is that we engage in this debate and this discussion rather than in litigation.”
State Sen. Tom Holland of Baldwin City, the likely Democratic candidate, said he sees no need to rewrite the formula for distributing school aid, but emphasizes the need to provide adequate funding. He didn’t define adequate.
More than eight years ago, the state contracted with Augenblick & Myers, a Colorado consulting firm, to make a thorough study of public education in Kansas to determine if it were adequately financed. Seven months later, A&M delivered its report. It said large funding increases would be necessary to meet the goal of providing an adequate eduation for Kansas youngsters.
Perhaps it was that report which led the Kansas Supreme Court to agree, a few years later, that the state was underfunding the schools and should up the ante. It went to the courts because the Legislature found itself unable, unwilling, or both, to translate A&M’s findings into action.
Now, the fact that it took a consulting firm seven months to make a study of public education in our state and come up with proposals for change should be all the proof that is necessary that “a public debate and discussion” on so complex a subject which involves such voluminous detail simply cannot be had.
It was precisely because funding more than 300 school districts ranging from huge metropolitan districts to the sparsely populated districts in the west presented so many puzzles that an outside firm of experts was hired to do the job. The lawmakers realized the task was beyond their abilities.
IT PROBABLY isn’t necessary to repeat a statewide study in such detail so soon. The work done by A&M provided a base from which good extrapolations can be made. What is necessary, however, is that Kansas reaffirm its commitment to education.
That reaffirmation should include a determination to encourage every Kansas student to stay in school long enough to prepare himself or herself to succeed in today’s knowledge-based society and to convince every Kansas family of the critical importance of education to their children’s future — and to the future of Kansas.
If the candidates insist, here is how a debate on an education policy for Kansas should proceed: First, decide upon the goal: a superior education for Kansas youngsters, from preschool through graduate school. Next, agree that educators, the experts in the field, are the only ones qualified to determine how to achieve that goal. Then, put their plan into action.
If the goal is a good and proper one, which it clearly is, then the cost must be seen as appropriate and affordable and the required money should be raised.
—Emerson Lynn, jr.
