Tennessee’s school funding formula hasn’t been meaningfully changed in the last 30 years, but in late February, Gov. Bill Lee and Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn released a proposal that will focus funding on students.
The Tennessee state director for the Education Trust and Nashville school board member, Gini Pupo-Walker, says that the current formula used to calculate education spending isn’t working.
“The way our money is distributed right now, it’s not really designed to support districts and schools as they need it,” Pupo-Walker tells This Is Nashville host Khalil Ekulona.
While the current formula focuses on staff salaries and classroom materials, the new Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement works to shift the emphasis directly on the student. As it stands, Tennessee is 44th in the nation for per-pupil spending.
The proposed legislation still has a long way to go as it makes its way through both chambers and onto the governor’s desk. But, WPLN Education Reporter Juliana Kim tells This Is Nashville, the $9 billion funding formula stands to redirect the way schools are currently supporting students.
“The best way that I can explain the difference is that in this new formula, the main character is the student,” Kim says. “And in our current or older formula, the main character is staff salaries and materials for classrooms. So it’s a complete kind of mental shift in how to approach funding.”
Find out more in the transcript below about what these changes may look like for students, schools and districts across Tennessee.
Khalil Ekulona: Gov. Bill Lee recently unveiled a new $9 billion funding formula for public education. Last fall, education officials held town halls across Tennessee to get community input as they drafted this new funding formula for public education.
Jackie Pope from Pulaski: When we say the money follows the child, I don’t know where that’s happening, but it’s not in Tennessee. So I would urge this committee to No.1: look at funding before we look at how we’re going to divide the pie. Because right now, we just have a part of a pie. There’s a whole pie out there that we still need.
So, were Jackie’s concerns addressed? Let’s find out. I’m joined now by WPLN Education Reporter Juliana Kim and Gini Pupo-Walker, the Education Trust state director for Tennessee. Gini, I want to start with you. What is this funding formula, and were Jackie’s concerns addressed?
Gini Pupo-Walker: Thank you so much for inviting me. You know, I think that Jackie’s concerns are probably what’s top of mind for most Tennesseans, which is really the amount of money that Tennessee puts into K-12 education. We are currently 44th in the country in terms of the amount we spend per pupil in education, and so there’s a long way for us to go to even reach the median midpoint in the country. And so Gov. Bill Lee, in his State of the State a few weeks ago, announced that he’s putting another $750 million in recurring money into state education, which I think is a huge step forward. So I think he certainly is attempting to address what we would call an adequacy problem, meaning: is there enough money in the pie? Is the pie big enough? And then the next question really was resolved last week in terms of how the governor and Commissioner Schwinn want to distribute this money. And so that’s really the big question happening now at Legislative Plaza, actually where I am today, up on the hill today talking about this bill.
KE: Julianna, explain why this is a big deal for Tennessee.
Juliana Kim: Yeah, I mean — first, hi, Gini, good hearing your voice — I mean, this is a major moment for Tennessee public schools. I think a lot of folks can agree on that. What’s being discussed is a completely new way to distribute billions of state dollars to school districts. And for a long time, people have been saying our current formula isn’t working. You know, it’s not calculating the right amount of funding for districts to actually meet the needs of their students. So this is an opportunity to change that.
KE: Is this like a super major important, huge upgrade to what we’ve been doing?
JK: I’d say so. I mean, our current formula is something known as resource-based, and I won’t get into the weeds of that. But this is something known as student-based, which a majority of states in the country actually use. And it’s a little complicated. But the idea is that this formula calculates how much money Tennessee should give each school by looking at what each individual student needs. And the best way that I can explain the difference is that in this new formula, the main character is the student. And in our current or older formula, the main character is staff salaries and materials for classrooms. So it’s a complete kind of mental shift in how to approach funding.
KE: Focus on the actual student learning rather than the resources around them. I like that a lot. Now, Gini, you’ve been advocating for this for the past few years. Tell us why.
GPW: Well, you know, the work that the Education Trust does and has done for the past 25 years is really to advocate on addressing the real gaps in opportunity and outcomes and achievement for primarily students of color, students from low income backgrounds, English learners, students with disabilities and also we’ve been in Tennessee advocating on rural student needs. And so when we think about the way that our — as Juliana so well explained — the way our money is distributed right now, it’s not really designed to support districts and schools as they need it. I think any superintendent will tell you that as the Trust began to think about advocating on this issue, we knew that this is one of the most complicated school policy issues there is. And most folks are just unwilling to tackle school finance. They feel like they don’t have the skills or the chops or the background, so we spent the last two years helping train folks and helping lead conversations around how school finance works. Where do we have issues? Where can we find solutions? And that really got us to where we are today.
KE: Now, will students receive extra funding for specific needs they may have?
GPW: Well, so the way that this draft formula — right, this is still a bill — is designed today is that there is a really large chunk of money that will be distributed according to students’ — what we call — “characteristics.” So if a student qualifies, for example, for a free lunch or for SNAP or food benefits, they would get, in this formula, almost double the amount of money that they would be getting under the BEP, the current formula. And so we also see additional money given to students with disabilities on a whole range and from low levels of support, whether maybe it’s a learning disability, all the way up to students that require just one-on-one staff time in particular, have a particular health need. So this bill will actually deliver more money based on students’ traits. The other one that’s important to note here is that there’s a weight, as we call it, for rural students. If you are in a district based on the number of students per square mile, you get additional money. So they’ve really thought about sort of what we know to be national best practices around distributing money based on student need.
KE: So this is like a statewide proposal. But Gini, what would be the impact on our local public schools here?
GPW: Well, so that is, you know, the old statement: the devil is in the details. What we know is that the state released a spreadsheet with what each district in Tennessee would receive. And part of that formula, that we create, so what the state has said and what the state has always done is they fund a certain percentage of public education in the local county, then has to match based on what we call their “local fiscal capacity,” meaning how much revenue they generate based on property taxes. And so a city like Nashville generates a lot more wealth and has a higher fiscal burden to pay than a distressed rural county where there’s very little revenue. So Nashville in particular, may come out not as well as other districts, simply because we have more revenue that we generate that we have to cover in terms of the balance of the formula. There is still a lot to be learned. There’s a lot of undefined sort of characteristics and what these what we call “weights” will look like, how much they will be, how much what we call the “base.” And I’m getting into the details here. Juliana knows we released a whole template yesterday, a report, a tool on this issue, but we don’t know a lot about how the calculations will happen yet. So I know there’s concern in Nashville about how it’s going to play out for us. Every district in Tennessee will be looking closely at what this will look like for them.
KE: Now, Juliana, Gini mentioned a little bit earlier talking about, like, how rural areas and rural schools are really going to be funded. How would that work? You know, this historic lack of funding that rural schools have had? What are the limitations and barriers to really setting something like that up with this program?
JK: I think when it comes to defining a student who lives in a rural area, it’s really tough. And we saw that during these past few months. As you know, state leaders were crafting, you know, crafting the formula. There’s a lot of nuance, especially in Tennessee, right? We have this kind of vast landscape of mountains and rivers. So geographically, there are challenges with defining rural. There’s a rural and small districts subcommittee that helped create this kind of a definition of who should be included in this extra weight. And they said it themselves that rural areas in Tennessee can differ in population, density, geographic size, proximity to cities. So as they’ve been looking for examples, there hasn’t been one definition that’s one size fits all. I think even the definition that’s been proposed in this legislation, surprisingly to me, didn’t include all of that nuance. It was mainly based on, you know, number of students. So I’m curious to see and I’m still working on finding out what the reactions are from rural stakeholders.
KE: OK, now I think a lot of parents are going to have a lot of questions about how this will impact them and their children. What happens next? Like, what will you be monitoring as you continue to report on this?
JK: Well, you know, for all the work that’s been put into this, there’s still a pretty long road ahead, and there’s some hesitation or worry that it might not get passed this year because right now it still has to get signed off by the General Assembly and governor. And we know that the bill is going to go through at least seven committees. It’s going to be vetted by seven committees, at least, before it goes on, gets voted on and goes to the governor’s desk. So there’s a lot of different moving parts. So we’ll just be, you know, we’ll have a lot of coverage on how likely this bill will pass this year, and we’re also going to do a lot of deep dives on how this is going to meet students with unique needs.
KE: That is WPLN’s education reporter, Juliana Kim, and Gini Pupo-Walker from Tennessee’s Education Trust. Thank you both for joining us.
This conversation is just part of the March 2 episode of This Is Nashville. Listen to the whole show here.
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