In Ed Funding, Some States Much Worse Off Than Others

A storm that “left a broad – but far from uniform — trail of wreckage.” That’s how Ed Week is describing the recession’s impact on education budgets last year. The words came in the release of the annual Quality Counts report yesterday, which grades each state on a variety of education policy and performance measures.

This year’s report focuses on the effect of the recession on K-12 education budgets. The report, published by the EPE Research Center, shows that the states that suffered worst from the foreclosure crisis in the housing market, such as Florida and Nevada, suffered badly from lost property-tax revenues. On the flip side, some agrarian states, such as Nebraska, were less effected by the recession and suffered less in their education budgets.

Though the recession is officially over, Quality Counts finds that states are still struggling with education budget shortfalls in the fiscal year 2011.

How is pre-k faring by comparison? Though states are suffering, this year’s “Votes Count” report from Pre-K Now found that total state funding for pre-k increased slightly this year, from $5.3 billion to $5.4 billion. Yet just as with K-12 funding, it varies widely by state. Funding for children through age 5 is on the chopping block in some states, according to Ed Week: California, for example, chose to hold its pre-k funding steady in fiscal year 2011 but cut $256 million from the state’s child-care program. This cut will eliminate up to 80,000 slots, the report says.

In the K-12 world, the cuts are taking their toll. A couple highlights form Quality Counts:

• A number of districts in Nevada have moved to four-day school weeks in an effort to save on costs.
• Virginia cut $341 million in state funding in FY2010 for school support-staff members.
• Missouri cut its K-12 transportation funding roughly in half.

In addition to looking at state budgets, the report assigns “grades” to states based on several areas of policy and performance, including “Transitions and Alignment” between children’s pre-kindergarten years, K-12, and higher ed. “Transitions and Alignment” takes into account factors such as how states determine school readiness, and whether kindergarten standards are aligned with the other early grades. This year, the nation as a whole earned a C+ in this area, with A grades going to Arkansas, Maryland, Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia.

More information on Quality Counts is available here. There are also plenty of extras to look at on Ed Week’s website, including this map with state-by-state data, and this graph that tracks education stimulus funding for education alongside other economic indicators (such as the Dow Jones industrial average).