On March 7, the state Senate and House of Representatives combined education committees held a joint legislative briefing to dig into the independent assessment of Delaware’s school funding system conducted by American Institutes for Research (AIR).

The AIR assessment, which was released in December and highlighted several areas of improvement for Delaware’s funding formula (read our recap here), served as the backdrop to a conversation that saw local and national experts field questions from local lawmakers. Speakers included Drew Atchison, a senior researcher at AIR, Bruce Baker, a professor and chair of the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami, and Kenneth Shores, an assistant professor specializing in education policy in the School of Education at the University of Delaware.

Here are five top takeaways from the briefing.

1. Delaware’s current system is inflexible and needs recalibration to better serve student needs.

Experts and lawmakers discussed ways to increase flexibility and transparency of the current funding formula. As the AIR assessment points out:

Increasing transparency and flexibility would allow schools and school leaders to better respond to their own school population’s needs and would bring more advocates to the table including communities and students.

Another key recommendation is to distribute more resources according to student need. From the assessment:

Compared to neighboring states, Delaware has higher rates of multilingual learners and low-income students. Yet the state doesn’t distribute resources in a targeted way towards those populations.

Ensuring we are distributing resources more equitably will allow schools and districts to target funding to our populations with the highest needs and provide the necessary supports for these students.

2. Delaware’s funding formula is atypical—and not in a good way.

Delaware’s funding formula is unique in several ways.

We are one of six states that still use a resource based formula, in which funding is distributed by the staffing “unit” based on a school’s enrollment. But even within that umbrella, we are atypical.

Delaware’s state funding formula exists largely independently of local capacity, which leads to significant inequity at the local level and for taxpayers. A lot can be improved simply by fixing how Delaware allocates revenues. Delaware is the only state in the nation that does not redistribute state funding to offset inequities at the local level. Equalization is the portion of the formula that is intended to redistribute state revenues to offset local capacity, and the state is looking to re-evaluate this formula and make updates.

Most states set an allowable limit that districts can raise locally each year, leaving Delaware as the only state that requires districts to go to referendum for almost every needed increase to local revenue.

The below graph shows local revenues on the left, and state revenues on the right. In most states, state revenues make up for the fact that local revenues mostly go to non-low-income children by targeting funds at low income children. Per Dr. Kenneth Shores:

3. All districts would see increased funding with a new formula.

The report recommended a funding base and additional weights for a student-centered or “foundation” formula for Delaware to adopt. Along with this new formula and investment level (anywhere from $590 million to $1 billion total), every district would see increases in funding and increased flexibility with that funding.

4. Where and how much money makes a difference: Research concludes more money matters.

Drs. Baker and Shores both shared decades of research that demonstrates that when schools and districts receive additional funds, they use them for evidence-based practices that benefit students. That includes increased staffing, investing in high-quality staff and professional development, and smaller class sizes.

These investments are demonstrably tied to improvements in outcomes including:

• Increases in test scores
• Increases in NAEP scores
• Improved graduation rates
• Lowered suspension rates
• Higher teacher retention rates

5. Change is possible—and Delaware is in the minority of states that have not made major change in the last three decades.

Thirty-eight states, spanning the political spectrum, have recently made changes to increase funding in their funding formulas and have found ways to fund the increased investment.

These methods include increases to property taxes, sales tax, implementing a statewide property tax, income tax or other solutions. While tax increases are never politically popular, none of these solutions involve taking revenue from other areas like health care, transportation, or other investments.

On average, these states increased investments at the rate of $1,000 per student per year, and made plans to sustain these investments. Currently Delaware is increasing investments at the rate of $1,000 per student every 10 years.

As we wrote last month, Delaware is positioned at a unique crossroad with its school funding system. Long in need of updates, the topic has gained significant renewed attention and interest in the wake of the independent assessment conducted by American Institutes for Research (AIR).

Meanwhile, state officials have consistently done more than is required by the high-stakes lawsuit that settled several years ago, and the community has become increasingly engaged in the conversation on how to best serve our students.

Legislative Interest

Last legislative session, lawmakers enacted key pieces of legislation and budget decisions to push the state toward streamlining and modernizing the way it funds its public schools.

Updating Delaware’s property values emerged as a key component in the lawsuit. Local property tax is a critical part of any school district’s budget, and prior to the lawsuit, home values hadn’t been updated in decades. HB 62, signed into law in August 2023, implements rolling property reassessment every five years, ensuring schools will receive the most accurate amounts of local funding.

HS 1 for HB 33, which aligns special education pre-school “unit count” funding ratios to those in K-12, was also passed, bringing Delaware closer to providing its youngest learners with the services they need.

The Public Education Compensation Committee (PECC), established by SB 100 in 2022, presented its recommendations to a joint House and Senate education committee on January 11. These recommendations include increasing teacher salaries over four years to reach a $60,000 base salary, and increases for administrators, secretaries, custodians, food service employees, paraprofessionals, bus drivers and IT employees.

As the News Journal reported, Governor John Carney’s annual recommended budget closely aligned to PECC’s recommendations.

Gov. Carney’s Opportunity Funding—a version of weighted student funding that funnels extra money to schools based on their population of low-income and multilingual learners—has continued to increase, even above the required amount by the lawsuit. Currently, the bucket of Opportunity Funding sits at $53 million, $3 million above the required amount. For fiscal year 2025, the required amount raises to $60 million.

Coalition Efforts

The Vision Coalition of Delaware hosted a series of events throughout the last year, bringing the community together to engage in learning and conversation about Equity in Education with national and local experts.

Throughout the series, attendees learned about not only how Delaware’s funding system works, but how it compares to other states.

National education experts underscored the research-backed notion that money truly does matter in education funding, especially when additional funds are targeted to address student needs. Increased funding is shown to significantly impact student outcomes in the classroom and in other areas including lifetime earnings, years of education, and other metrics.

Not only does the amount of money matter, but how money is distributed matters as well. Local educators Margie Lopez Waite (CEO of Las Américas ASPIRA Academy) and Dorrell Green (superintendent of Red Clay Consolidated School District) shared that Opportunity Funding has been essential to getting more targeted funds to students with higher needs, including multilingual learners and students from low-income backgrounds. Most of these funds have been invested in additional support staff, out of school and wrap around programming and additional learning time, which are all supported by strong evidence.

The Vision Coalition also co-hosted a session with the Department of Education to release the funding assessment from the American Institutes of Research. To learn more about the details of the report, read our recent blog here.

Teacher Pay and Local Revenue

Teacher pay is another central component to school funding, and the combined efforts of Gov. Carney, the General Assembly, and the Public Education Compensation Committee will lead to salary increases over the next several years.

Several states have maintained robust salary schedules for teachers alongside a student-based funding formula.

Concerns about Local Share

A large part of education funding is acquired through local share, roughly 28 percent. As operating costs continue to grow, there are concerns about being able to keep up without districts having to go to referendum. Other states do not rely on referendum the way we do and allow districts to levy taxes as needed to meet target funding numbers, only requiring referendum to raise funds above that amount.

Moving Forward

While advocates will continue to learn and explore ways to modernize Delaware’s funding formula through events and engagements, formal action can’t happen without lawmakers leading the way.

On March 4, Delawareans for Educational Opportunity and ACLU Delaware will co-host a discussion on the AIR report and potential next steps.

On March 7, the state Senate and House of Representatives combined education committees will hold a joint legislative briefing to dig into the AIR report and its recommendations. Community members and advocates are encouraged to join the discussion and share their thoughts with their legislators and candidates for office.

Property value reassessment continues to unfold through the three counties, and the results are starting to come in: Kent County results were released earlier this month, while New Castle and Sussex counties are expected in 2025.

Educators, researchers, and advocates have long agreed Delaware’s school funding formula is in need of updates and modernization.

Per the lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Delaware and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) were contracted by the Department of Education to carry out an independent assessment of the Delaware school funding formula. AIR’s charge included conducting a full analysis of Delaware’s current system, presenting a comparison of Delaware’s system to that of similar states, and providing recommendations on how to improve Delaware’s funding formula to make it more equitable to all students.

In December 2023, the Delaware Department of Education in partnership with the Vision Coalition hosted an event for AIR to present its findings. The event, held at the Dover campus of Delaware Technical Community College, brought over 150 educators, students, parents and other Delawareans together to hear the results of the research. Watch a recording of the event here.

Explore the full report here.

Findings

AIR’s report examined Delaware’s system from several angles, including equity, adequacy, transparency, and flexibility.

Delaware spends marginally more on schools serving higher populations of low-income students; however, this positive relationship is largely achieved through higher spending for students with disabilities.

Overall, Delaware’s current formula does not do enough to support low-income students and multilingual learners. Delaware provides fewer financial resources and experienced teachers in schools with higher low-income and multilingual learner populations.

Delaware also has a higher relative concentration of low-income and multilingual learners compared to our neighboring states. Consequently, we will need to spend more than our neighbors to meet the same educational levels they achieve.

Delaware’s state funding formula largely inhibits local contributions to school funding. State funds, which make up the vast majority of overall education funding, aren’t enough to make up for the difference in local funding streams.

More flexibility and transparency is needed in the system. While the basic concept of Delaware’s unit-count system is fairly easy to understand, there are many layers of additional formulas, grants, and other funding streams that add complexity and inflexibility to the system.

How Does Delaware Compare to Other States?

The report compares Delaware’s school funding system to Maryland’s, New Jersey’s, Virginia’s and Pennsylvania’s. All of these states utilize foundation formulas that begin with a base per-pupil amount, then add multipliers for low-income, special education, or multilingual students.

All of the comparison states except for Virginia spend more on public education than Delaware. And all of them outperform Delaware on fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading benchmarks.

Methodology and Recommendations

AIR researchers utilized two different models to determine their goalposts for things like “adequacy” and “equity.” The Education Cost Model approach utilizes a formula combining a set of empirical factors to determine target per-pupil costs. The other approach is the Professional Judgment model, wherein experts estimated values of various cost factors and added them up to get a per-pupil cost. AIR utilized both methods (shortened to ECM and PJP) to create their recommendations.

(Read more about the group’s methodologies on pages five through seven here.)

Using these models, AIR researchers determined the financial bases and weights for a potential student-centered funding formula.

When viewed by district, the per-pupil increases recommended by the AIR report looks like this:

The report included eight key recommendations.

1. Increase investment in Delaware’s public education
   1. Delaware would need to invest an additional $600 million to $1 billion to meet the recommended adequacy standards.
2. Distribute more resources according to student need
   1. To bring all students up to the recommended adequacy standards, resources need to be distributed more equitably, specifically for students from low-income backgrounds and multilingual learners.
3. Improve funding transparency
4. Allow for more flexibility in how districts use funds
5. Account for local capacity and address tax inequity
6. Regularly reassess property values
   1. HB 62, signed into law in August 2023, implements rolling property reassessment every five years.
7. Simplify the calculation of local share provided to charter schools
8. Implement a weighted student funded (or foundation) formula

Stay up to date on resources and analysis collected by the Vision Coalition here.

Back in 2021, President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, the third federal stimulus package launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, provided $350 billion for states, local governments, territories and tribal governments, with around $125 billion nationally earmarked for K-12 schools through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding stream.

Out of the $125 billion dollars in the ESSER I-III pots, Delaware received approximately $411 million. As written in the federal law, 10 percent of Delaware’s funding went to the state Department of Education (DDOE), and the remaining 90 percent went directly to Local Education Agencies (LEAs), otherwise known as districts and charter schools.

Two years later, it’s important to ask: Where did that money go?

Both the DDOE and LEAs were required to submit plans for spending the money (which in turn were required to be posted publicly). DDOE’s plan had to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education.

Here are a few key areas where the state of Delaware, districts and schools invested:

Broadband and digital learning. The pandemic underlined the importance of reliable internet connectivity for digital learning. In response, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act supplied funding dedicated to Connect Delaware, an initiative that brought free broadband connections to low-income households. Just last month, Gov. John Carney announced the ambitious goal of making Delaware the first state in the country to connect every home and business to high-speed internet.

 Delaware also saw statewide adoption among districts of an online learning management system called Schoology that allows students and families to stay plugged into classroom news and assignments—and a new online platform for quality teaching materials (Digital DE), plus access to an online reading platform, Sora, where kids can read from over 1 million books.

Updating aging school facilities. In 2020, DDOE reported an estimated $1.5 billion in deferred maintenance for public schools—from moldy buildings, to leaky roofs, and more. ESSER funding enabled the state to address many of those issues with over $13 million in renovations.

High-quality classroom materials. Since the pandemic, funding has enabled 76 percent of our schools to adopt high-quality instructional materials in English and math (up from 32 percent in 2019) and train staff to deliver them. To be considered “high-quality,” these materials must be vetted, and must be rigorous and knowledge-rich to guide instruction toward high standards.

For its efforts in this arena, Delaware received kudos and recognition from the Council of Chief State School Officers and Knowledge Matters.

Professional learning to support literacy. Literacy emerged as a critical focus area during and after the pandemic, especially in light of local and national data detailing COVID’s devastating toll on learning loss. Emergency funding will help provide all K-3 teachers with training in a certified body of literacy evidence known as the science of reading.

Renewed focus on summer programming. Keeping kids active and curious over summer helps accelerate learning, which has been especially important since the pandemic. DDOE works with districts, charter schools, Delaware agencies and community partners to develop initiatives and resources that keep students from falling further behind during this critical period. One example of how Delaware has come together to further empower students across the state is the Governor’s Summer Fellowship, which since 2022 has provided high school juniors and seniors with hands-on, paid work opportunities at summer camps in each county, on-site mentoring and also networking opportunities with state leaders. Students are gaining on-the-job experience, remaining active while school is on break and developing a deeper understanding of education, government and their communities.

Delaware’s other biggest spending categories include:

• Education technology, including devices for students and online learning platforms: $57.6 million
• Summer learning and learning loss, such as out of school time and tutoring with a focus on early literacy: $144.5 million
• Mental health, such as additional staff and programming supports for students and staff: $8.9 million

Many of these efforts incorporated a braided-funding approach as needed to allow for program sustainability, ensuring the work would continue once federal funding receded. Strong partnerships with community-based organizations across the state have allowed funding to be used in new and innovative ways.

We still have plenty of work to do to support our students, teachers, and families, but we should be proud of the inroads we’ve made before, during, and after trying times.