Why Should Delaware Care?
The Public Education Funding Commission is slated to submit its first set of recommendations on Oct. 1, 2025. A wide array of Democratic and Republican states like Maryland and Tennessee have already made substantial changes to their public education funding formulas that could guide how Delaware proceeds.
After a major lawsuit challenging whether the state adequately funds public schools, legislators approved an overhaul of how education is funded, adding up to $1 billion in new spending — in Tennessee.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Delaware is currently debating the same scenario that was approved by the Republican-dominated Volunteer State two years ago.
And Tennessee was just the latest of 38 states to move toward what’s known as a student-based or weighted funding formula.
Their experiences could provide a game plan for Delaware legislators seeking to better understand the seismic change in K-12 funding and, perhaps most importantly, how to pay for it.
For generations, Delaware has utilized a unit-count system for providing state funding to local school districts, providing the bulwark of its annual budgets. At its essence, Delaware takes an annual school enrollment count of students and computes how many teachers, support personnel and administrators are needed to serve them.
However, that formula doesn’t differentiate students with particular needs, such as those from low-income backgrounds, with learning disabilities or those who need to learn English. That has led many states in recent decades to ditch a unit-count system in favor of a weighted funding system, which would give greater funding support to the students who most need it.
Earlier this year, the state legislature formed the Public Education Funding Commission to study the question and provide a recommendation for how incoming Gov. Matt Meyer should address the question of education funding.
Where does Delaware stand now?
Five years after Delaware was sued on claims of failing disadvantaged students, the state’s Department of Education says it now is fully in line with a subsequent settlement obligation that required it to invest $25 million in Opportunity Funding, and to eventually reach $60 million by the 2024-2025 school year. The state reached $63 million this school year.
At its core, the state’s “Opportunity Fund” intends to reduce educational disparities by providing additional dollars for students who are low-income or whose first language is not English, said Kim Klein, the Delaware Department of Education’s associate secretary of operations, during a Dec. 6 Equity in Education event.
The event, sponsored by the Vision Coalition of Delaware , a public-private partnership of stakeholders seeking to improve public education, is part of the Equity in Education series and featured national experts from states where the public education funding formula has undergone extensive changes.
As a result of the settlement, Delaware now allocates an average of $987.52 toward educating each low-income student and or English language learners. That’s more than triple what it funded low-income students in 2020, and almost double the English language-learner allocation.
Despite the increase in funding, education advocates and Governor-elect Matt Meyer have pushed for the state to increase spending by as much as $1 billion to meet its 2030 educational proficiency goals, an amount recommended by an independent study from the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, commissioned as part of the settlement.
During the Dec. 6 event, a panel of national public education funding advocates and experts shared how their states transitioned to foundation formulas — or weighted funding — while stressing the importance of community involvement in the decision-making process.
Maryland’s Blueprint came from community
Delaware’s decision to reform the way it pays for schooling may come from the Public Education Funding Commission – a body created by state lawmakers – in its final recommendations due late next year.
In recent years, a similar commission in Maryland made a similar recommendation that is sending $3.8 billion more dollars to its schools over the course of a decade. The funding system known as – known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future – has three components that go into its funding formula: a base per-pupil amount, weighted amounts and program amounts.
Maryland is pouring an additional $131 million into the Blueprint plan beginning this year, primarily by increasing its taxes on tobacco products.
The commission that led to the Blueprint’s implementation was comprised of education advocates, district representatives, legislators and other experts.
For Delaware’s own version to be successful, it may need support from grassroots organizations. That’s how the Maryland system found success, said Riya Gupta, the interim executive director of Strong Schools Maryland, an organization advocating for educational equity.
“Communities must be their own advocates. They must be talking about their own experiences because that’s what legislators are going to listen to,” Gupta said during the Dec. 6 event. “[Legislators] love when students and parents come to your door and tell you what’s going on in their school system, that’s what matters and it must be a factor in any success.”
Delaware’s Public Education Funding Commission was also criticized for its lack of student voices during this month’s Equity in Education event.
State Senator and Commission Chair Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred) said student involvement in the commission was a “double-edged sword.” Although she made note of including student voices when the commission is reappointed in January, Sturgeon said it has already faced criticism over its size, and over discussions about pushing back the timeline for recommendations.
“Do we want to move quickly? Do we want to be able to take our time and make sure everyone fully understands so they can make good decisions when it comes time to vote? Are we going this way or are we going this way? You know, we have to vote on recommendations,” she said.
Tennessee made change after lawsuit
Like Delaware, Tennessee found itself in a lawsuit over funding equities in recent years.
It was filed in 2015 by the state’s largest district, Memphis-Shelby County. Five years later, a coalition of 87 smaller districts signed on as intervening plaintiffs.
Since 1992, the state had been using its Basic Education Program (BEP), which mainly allocated money to districts based on staffing positions and student-teacher ratios.
But several of the state’s research groups acknowledged the BEP formula didn’t allocate enough money to adequately staff classrooms, pay teachers a competitive salary or provide schools with enough nurses, counselors and other positions.
In 2022, Tennessee changed its public education funding system for the first time in 30 years.
The new program, known as the Tennessee Improvement in Student Achievement (TISA) plan, replaced BEP during the 2023-24 school year along with an investment of an additional recurring state investment of $1 billion for the state’s public schools.
The new program gave more money to schools with higher numbers of disadvantaged students – because it employed a weighted system. That led to some districts seeing less support from the state, however, the TISA plan required local district taxes to keep pace, forcing dozens of school districts to raise taxes.
Still, Tennessee today on average provides fewer dollars to schools per student than Delaware.
Like Maryland, Tennessee’s funding system change was pushed by community members, including superintendents from rural districts and the disability community.
Inequity in Pennsylvania’s schools too
Delaware is often compared to its larger northern neighbor, Pennsylvania.
In 2015, the Keystone State shifted to its “fair funding formula,” which divides the total amount of money sent down by the legislature to districts based on their “share of the student population.”
In 2023, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled that the state’s public education funding formula was inequitable and unconstitutional. The court found that students living in districts with low property values and incomes do not get the same resources as those in high-income districts.
That could be because Pennsylvania’s funding system allowed districts to increase their school taxes without voter approval.
At the Equity in Education event, Michael Griffith, senior researcher and policy analyst at the Learning Policy Institute, warned Delaware’s state leaders against using this tax system.
He said that wealthy parts of Pennsylvania were able to raise a “tremendous amount of money” while poorer areas could not. That left the state with what he called “the greatest inequity from lowest spending to highest spending school districts in the country.”
“You don’t want to create that, but you do want to create some flexibility, some ability to raise extra dollars, and again, to keep pace with inflation,” he said.
In response to the 2023 lawsuit, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro added $1 billion to the current fiscal year budget to try to bridge the need gaps, drawing from the state’s $14 billion budget surplus. Pennsylvania state legislators are still debating how to reform the education funding system overall – much like their southern neighbors.
Narrowing gaps in Massachusetts
Although Massachusetts is known for being one of the top states for education, it still faces challenges seen by most states. Fewer than one in three Black and Latino 4th graders are on grade level in reading, or half the rate of the state’s white students.
The state’s foundation budget formula — known as Chapter 70 — was established in 1993 and last updated in 2019.
The funding formula is based on three steps: calculating a “foundation budget” for each district, determining the “required local contribution” based on property and income values, and calculating state aid.
But districts said there was a gap between the formula and reality. For example, teaching a special education student was often more expensive than the formula’s calculations, said Jennie Williamson, the state director for Education Trust in Massachusetts.
In 2019, the state decided to update the formula to provide additional funding for low-income students, English language learners (ELL) and students with disabilities.
“It’s been raised a couple of times about the need to address districts with higher concentrations of poverty. We established a [rating system], so that districts with certain concentrations of [low-income students] would end up receiving more resources for their low-income students than those with lower rates,” Williamson said.
There was a “powerful alliance” between the teachers’ union, local municipal officials and district leaders who went to legislators and called for change, she said.
While Delaware’s educators and advocates have made similar efforts, there has been frustration over who is appointed to be involved in groups like the Public Education Funding Commission, which has 30 members. They include legislators, Cabinet leaders, teachers, principals, support professionals and community advocates.
But after 48% of commission survey respondents said they were neutral, not sure or needed more information about Delaware’s public education funding system, some community members expressed concern that some commission members lack the understanding necessary to decide on the state’s public education funding system.
During the Equity in Education event this month, Monica Moriak, a Christina School District board member, suggested the commission have more community voices, including students, to better inform the greater community who would be affected.
“I have to say, I was somewhat concerned about people not necessarily knowing what unit count was because they’re not really spending much time in education,” she said.
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