Opinion: New York must stop shortchanging schools with yesterday’s data

New York City schoolkids are back in the classroom and hitting the books, and come January, it’ll be time for Albany to do the same by making sure schools are finally getting the funding they deserve.

For decades, the state relied on outdated metrics to determine how much money to send to school districts. That finally changed this past spring when the state updated the Foundation Aid formula to meet today’s standards. The revisions replaced obsolete 2000 Census data, outdated wage information and antiquated poverty measures with more modern and relevant indicators. These were meaningful steps toward a fair funding system, but they didn’t go far enough.

Foundation Aid is the state’s main funding formula, and it’s meant to account for the unique needs of each school district. It’s based on a complex formula that weighs various factors based on student needs. This includes criteria like the number of students in poverty, English Language Learners or students with disabilities. These all combine to determine how much funding each district should receive.

The new updates ultimately increased the amount of Foundation Aid for schools statewide, but  NYC schools were shortchanged by millions of dollars and actually received less than what they would have received under the old formula. So how did that happen?

The answer lies in two glaring omissions in the new Foundation Aid formula. For one, the Regional Cost Index for NYC and Long Island – which determines how much more it costs to educate students in higher-cost areas – is still outdated by over two decades. This metric needs to be recalibrated to more accurately reflect the economic realities of higher-cost districts.

The second reason is perhaps even more surprising: the number of students in foster care or experiencing homelessness is not even being considered at all in the new formula. That’s no small oversight, and it’s particularly disturbing given a recent report from Advocates for Children of New York showing more than 150,000 NYC students experienced homelessness last year. That means nearly 1 in every 7 students lived in shelters, hotels, motels or doubled-up with other families. These students face tremendous obstacles to success, including reading and math proficiency rates that are half of those of permanently housed kids, and drop-out rates three times as high as those of other students. Only 62% of them graduate high school on time.  

Moreover, 52% of kids in temporary housing and 67% of those in shelters are chronically absent. They are being robbed of valuable instructional and social-emotional learning time by their circumstances. They transfer schools three times as often as their peers, which exacerbates the trauma and emotional impacts of this lack of housing stability. Bus contracts that are 46 years old and poor bus service also add to the crisis in absenteeism, but the main culprit is the school funding formula. It doesn’t even recognize these kids.

That’s why we introduced two bills that make concrete, commonsense fixes to the Foundation Aid formula: S8125/A9049 will update the Regional Cost Index to better reflect the high-costs in NYC and Long Island, and S8139/A9048 will add a weight for students in foster care or experiencing homelessness. Both of these bills take an honest approach to school funding that has been overlooked for far too long.

With the White House weaponizing everything from education funding to infrastructure, New York can’t afford to miss dotting an “i” or crossing a “t.” Relying on outdated data and ignoring the needs of our most vulnerable students is a tremendous disservice to the future of our schoolkids. 

We must remember that the Foundation Aid formula itself arose from the promise of a “sound, basic education” for every child. This standard was enshrined by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which found that the state was underfunding our schools. Right now, we are missing the mark for too many students. To make that promise anything more than just words, we must update the formula and fund our schools to meet the needs of our schoolkids as they live today.