A school funding report presents a bipartisan surprise. What’s next, Kansas?

Republican-chosen researchers submitted a school-finance report to the Kansas Legislature that the GOP found error-ridden and not to its liking. Democrats, expected to brush off the report as partisan, expressed surprise and supported the findings.

So goes the latest chapter of Kansas’ school finance crisis. Almost too comical to be true.

Lawmakers are in a corner, and nobody put them there but themselves.

We’re almost to the six-month anniversary of the Kansas Supreme Court ruling that said Kansas’ funding of K-12 education is unconstitutional, failing to support school districts adequately or equitably. The Court, in its most recent ruling on the 2010 Gannon case brought by four school districts, gave the 2018 Legislature two deadlines: April 30 for submitting a new finance formula and June 30 for lawmakers to prove that the formula suitably corrects funding to public schools.

We’re 43 days from April 30. How’s it going so far?

The statehouse waited while Texas A&M researcher Lori Taylor and others prepared the 164-page report that was delivered to legislative leaders last week. Maybe leaders thought a report would magically deliver a solution to an enormous problem of finding hundreds of millions (at least) for public education while satisfactorily funding other parts of state government hurting from years of cuts.

Or more accurately, maybe GOP leaders thought the report would say funding is already adequate and equitable or close, and use the report to show the Court it had outside research come up with a lower number.

But that wasn’t the message. The report listed three five-year paths for improving student achievement. One stayed in the millions – $451 million in additional funding – an increase of about 10 percent but no forecast of improvement on standardized tests, only graduation rates.

The two more-expensive options, which predicted better graduation rates and standardized test scores – were $1.7 billion and $2 billion.

The report didn’t suggest how the Legislature should find funding.

More conservative Republicans at Friday’s joint meeting of the Senate and House committees on education funding were shocked. Senate president Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, said increasing school funding would require a large tax increase or cuts elsewhere in the state budget.

But we didn’t need consultants to tell us that. Even with $505 million coming to Kansas over three years because of federal tax changes, fixing the school-funding formula to the Court’s liking was going to take hundreds of millions, minimum. Conservative Republicans hoped this report would refute that.

Instead it was Democrats nodding their heads and moderate Republicans acknowledging public education is being underfunded.

The report’s authors are to appear before lawmakers Monday with a corrected version of the report. The funding numbers may change some, but the result doesn’t – meeting the Court’s demands will take a solution and hundreds of millions in new funding.

Lawmakers find themselves right where they were in October. They’ve known funding K-12 education to the state Supreme Court’s liking is going to take an expensive, long-term solution, and have waited for a consultant’s report to bail them out.

Back to the drawing board.

This story was originally published March 16, 2018 at 6:50 PM with the headline "A school funding report presents a bipartisan surprise. What’s next, Kansas?."