Education Week - October 12, 2016 - 8

Kan. Governor: Tax Hike Needed If State Loses Funding Case
State's high court
weighing 'adequacy'
By Daarel Burnette II
Republican Gov. Sam Brownback,
known for his famous 2012 experiment to slash away at taxes, said
Kansas would have to raise taxes if
it loses an education funding fight in
the state supreme court.
The court heard oral arguments
last month in Gannon v. Kansas,
in which four of the state's poorest
districts argue that Kansas doesn't
adequately support their school systems. Based on several studies, the
districts argue that they need $800
million to $900 million more from
the state in order to provide students with the services necessary to
meet the state's academic standards.
"You'd have to look at major tax increases to do that," Brownback told
The Wichita Eagle late last month.
After a series of income-tax cuts in
2012 and 2013-reductions Brownback pushed for-the state has
fallen far short of its revenue projections. It faces a $45 million budget
shortfall in October alone, according
to local reports.
The Sunflower State lost a separate part of the school funding case
dealing with equity earlier this
year and was ordered to provide

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its poor districts with $38 million
more. The state answered that ruling by taking money from other
state agencies and handing it to
poorer districts. The state spends
around $6 billion a year on K-12
education.
If Kansas loses the other part
of the case, the adequacy ruling,
it would require the state to provide more money to all its districts.
The justices are expected to issue
a ruling in late November, after
Election Day. At least five of the
justices are up for re-election.
Kansas' supreme court justices
last week expressed deep concern
with the amount of money the state
has provided its public school districts, as the state sought to challenge a lower-court decision that
found the state's funding system
inadequate, according to the Associated Press.

Funding and Test Scores
During the hearing that took
place in September, the plaintiffs
used the state's learning standards
and test scores to show judges that
budget cuts have directly affected
academic results.
That's a legal maneuver used by a
growing number of lawyers for districts across the country with overwhelmingly large populations of
black, Hispanic, and poor students.

While the argument got mixed results before 2001, the No Child Left
Behind Act provided district lawyers with reams of test-score data.
Separately, state legislatures in recent decades adopted statewide academic standards-in Kansas, they
are known as the Rose Standards.
In essence, states are being beaten
with their own weapons.
Kansas' Solicitor General Stephen McAllister told justices during the equity hearing that there
is not necessarily a correlation between test scores and funding and
that "perfection" shouldn't be the
goal, a position the justices openly
scoffed at.
"I don't think you really should
worry about the input if the output
is doing well," said McAllister.
Justice Dan Biles indicated that
he may push to have the legislature
provide more money only for those
students whose academic struggles
are significant, about a third of the
state's students.

Other State Action
The state also regularly cited a
recent ruling out of Texas where its
elected supreme-court justices said
that while the state's public school
system was clearly in need of deep
reform, it wasn't the court's role to
tell the legislators how much they
should spend on education.

Meanwhile, in Washington state,
Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, who
is running for another term, said
last week that his office has tried
its hardest to respond to a state
supreme court ruling there that ordered the state to provide millions
more in funding. The court last year
imposed a $100,000-a-day fine until
the state's school funding formula is
overhauled.
The Washington state legislature,
during its last session, approved a
"plan for a plan" to have a new funding formula in place by next spring.
Educators have said that the governor and legislature have acted
too slowly to respond to the ruling
and last month asked the court to
amp up its threats to get the state
to move faster.
Last week, the state's supreme
court gave the state another legislative session to come up with a
way to increase school employees'
salaries, a process that will likely
require tax increases.
"If we design our lives based on
wishes, yeah, I wished that we'd
solved everything an hour after I
took, you know, my oath of office in
2013," Inslee said, according to The
Seattle Times. "But these are challenging issues."

I don't think you
really should
worry about the
input if the output
is doing well."
STEPHEN MCALLISTER
Kansas Solicitor General

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and trends on this issue.
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Education Week - October 12, 2016

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