Say you want to renovate your kitchen. If you want to budget the renovation properly, you get estimates for the materials and labor. That is roughly how the West Virginia education budget is calculated—based on the costs of materials (textbooks, facilities, transportation, other operating costs) and the labor (teacher salaries and benefits), which in turn is based on enrollment. That would be reasonable if educating children were like renovating a kitchen. It’s not. If you want to budget the education of children properly, you have to account for an additional factor: the children!
West Virginia is among a small minority of states that use a resource-based school funding formula that insufficiently accounts for the needs of all children, low-income, at-risk, gifted, special needs. But that is not even the most perplexing aspect of the school funding formula. The most head-scratching—no, head-against-the-wall—aspect of the formula is that this resource-based calculation for each county (called the “foundation allowance”) lacks any basis in educational research.
Indeed, there has never been a comprehensive, nonpartisan, research-based study of the actual costs of providing a constitutionally adequate education to all West Virginia children.
Such adequacy costs studies have been around since at least the early 90s. And over 100 of them have been commissioned in 41 states and DC, including all of our neighboring states.
Not West Virginia.
This is what has been lost in all of the debate and consternation about the omnibus bill and frankly even in the teacher strike victory a year ago: Our $1 billion+ education budget is not based on the actual costs of educating the diverse needs of children so that all have an opportunity to achieve the educational outcomes mandated by our state constitution.
So while we fight over a $20 million cost here or a $60 million investment there, this billion dollar+ question goes unanswered year after year. We can’t keep burying our heads in the sand and expect different results. An adequacy cost study would allow the state’s education policymakers to make better, more informed decisions about budget priorities and allocations.
And such a study is what the West Virginia Constitution demands of the Legislature and the State Board of Education, to fulfill their obligations to provide a thorough and efficient education. The West Virginia Supreme Court said as much in 1988, just as the research methodologies for these cost studies were being developed.
The court was ahead of its time then, just as it was forty years ago this year, in Pauley v. Kelly, when the court recognized children’s fundamental right to an adequate and equitable education and deemed public education the “Prime function of our State government.”
We don’t fulfill that function by rushing bills written by outside groups through the legislative process on a nearly party-line vote. But we also don’t fulfill that function by demanding “more money” without knowing for sure how much we actually need and where it will best be spent.
We can do better. But before we can educate our children properly, we need to educate ourselves. Please read: Long Overdue An Adequacy Cost Study in West Virginia