Can Delaware’s Next Governor Fix a Jim Crow-Era Funding Formula?

In 2000, Delaware education advocates began pushing to reform the state’s school funding system — a relic of the Jim Crow era that baked profound inequities into district budgets. Since then, half a dozen marquee tasks forces and commissions have chimed in, unanimously calling for a wholesale overhaul.

This quarter-century of broad agreement notwithstanding, Delaware’s next governor will inherit the problem, a rising price tag for the fix and, critics complain, no clear political roadmap.

Six candidates are running. Democrats Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long; Matt Meyer, county executive of New Castle, the state’s largest county; and Collin O’Mara, World Wildlife Federation CEO and a former Delaware environmental official, will face Republicans Mike Ramone, who is minority leader of the state House of Representatives; retired 9/11 first responder Jerry Price; and businessman Bobby Williamson.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The state’s last Republican governor left office in 1993, and this year’s polls again strongly favor Democrats. The current contest, then, will likely be decided by the Sept. 10 primary, in which Hall-Long and Meyer are the front-runners.

Whoever wins, a recent court case and subsequent legislation commit them to take action. In 2020, outgoing Gov. John Carney settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the Delaware NAACP and a coalition called Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, in part by agreeing to a small boost in aid for a mushrooming population of disadvantaged students.

The settlement also required the state to commission an American Institutes for Research study to determine exactly how underfunded Delaware’s schools are. Earlier this year, the researchers reported that fixing the problems would cost $500 million to $1 billion.

“An alarmingly clear and negative relationship exists between the percentage of low-income students served by schools and the outcomes they achieve for students,” the report declared.

After the report’s release, lawmakers created a planning commission to figure out how to raise revenue and right inequities, with an eye toward releasing recommendations in October 2025 for a new funding system to take effect in 2027.

“The time has come for us to stop kicking this can down the road and start working on real systemic reforms,” said state Sen. Laura Sturgeon, one of the Democrats leading the charge.

But others are decrying the appointment of yet one more panel to study what they say is a well-understood problem. ACLU of Delaware Legal Director Dwayne Bensing isn’t convinced that the 2027 timeline — seven years after his organization’s suit was settled and almost a decade after it was filed — does not, in fact, just create more delay.

Reports by a succession of commissions packed with a Who’s Who of Delaware education advocates, philanthropies and state and local officials were released in 2001, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2015, 2017 and 2021. The only real difference in the new American Institutes for Research report, released this past March, was the price tag.

Related

Will Fallout from COVID Recession Fix Delaware’s Jim Crow-Era School Funding?

A central issue identified over and over: With a few, narrow exceptions, Delaware does not include financial supplements to offset the cost of services needed by children with disabilities, those from impoverished households or English learners. Its unusual “unit-based” funding formula is actually set up to send more money to wealthy school systems than to impoverished ones.

The state tallies the number of teachers a district employs, their years of seniority and other credentials and then sends money to pay for enough educators — at a salary level corresponding to their presumed qualifications — to reach a staff-to-student ratio, or “unit,” spelled out in the law. The staffing ratios apply statewide, but school systems with higher salaries receive more money for each unit.

Because this means wealthy districts automatically receive more money, those with the most property tax revenue have been able to hire and retain the most sought-after teachers, while struggling, property-poor school systems have no way of competing for faculty or offsetting the costs of poverty.

All three Democratic candidates and two of the Republicans recently attended an education forum moderated by Marcus Wright, who serves on the board of Seaford School District, an impoverished school system in the southern part of the state. Wright came away concerned about the lack of a plan for moving the reform forward.

“I thought that there were very broad ideas, but not a roadmap or a game plan,” he says. “I’ll just say that I expected more.”

Four of the six candidates agree the school finance formula needs fixing, with Republican Ramone calling for a “bipartisan approach” to the overhaul. The two candidates that do not mention the reform are GOPers Price, who favors expanded parents’ rights and career education, and Williamson, who calls for “individual student allotment” vouchers.

The platforms of all three Democrats tick lots of boxes on educator wish lists, with Hall-Long’s proposals perhaps the most traditional. Funding reform is near the end of her published roster of priorities, which is topped by expanded early childhood education, universal free school meals, spending on student mental health, higher pay for teachers and smaller class sizes.

Carney, who is term-limited, left Hall-Long with a mixed record. Under the settlement with the ACLU, he immediately increased supplemental funding for the state’s most vulnerable students by an amount starting at $25 million in a year in 2020, rising to $60 million annually starting in 2025. It’s a start, critics concede, but a pittance compared to the $500 million to 1$ billion called for in the AIR report.

Hall-Long’s candidacy has been dogged by several ethics scandals — including complaints about payments she may have made to her husband, who has served as her campaign treasurer since she entered electoral politics in 2016.

Her closest competitor, Meyer, is a former math teacher who in 2016 was elected New Castle county executive. New Castle is Delaware’s deep-blue northernmost county, home to 60% of the state’s population, 57% of its voters and the city of Wilmington, where school funding inequities are perhaps the largest.

Meyer started as a Teach for America corps member at an all-boys charter school in Wilmington, where almost every student was impoverished. The school struggled — in part because of the uneven playing field Delaware’s various commissions have noted. It closed years after Meyer left.

As county executive, Meyer was also a defendant in the ACLU suit, which challenged decades of delays in updating the property valuations used to finance local school aid in Delaware’s three counties. His 18-page education platform is the most detailed of all the candidates’, including specifics on reforming both the state funding system and county-level taxes.

“Funding cannot change overnight but must increase with urgency,” the document asserts, pledging to “Better align our state’s funding system with the AIR report’s recommendation of an additional increase of $3,400 to $6,400 per pupil.”

Because of the inequities with county and property development taxes, some districts are able to send four times as much funding to schools as their neighbors. Any new state aid formula must account for this, Meyer says in his plan.

The third Democrat, O’Mara, is a former Delaware secretary of natural resources and environmental control. His education platform commits to fully implementing the recommendations in the AIR report, suggesting that one way to fix the system would be to leave the basic “per-unit” calculation alone and add more funding for challenged students.

So how will the next governor achieve his or her vision? At the time the state settled the ACLU suit, proponents of the agreement said they thought shifts in state demographics and the composition of the General Assembly might help cement the political will to raise taxes and change the way the money is distributed. One of these shifts is the rapid demographic change in Delaware’s student population.

For decades, inadequate and inequitable funding was a problem of the state’s blue, urban districts. But more recently, education gaps in Sussex — the state’s southernmost, red-leaning county — have widened as the area’s large poultry processing industry has drawn an influx of Spanish-speaking migrants. Advocates had hoped the shift would drive home the notion that inadequate school resources are not just an urban problem.

Simultaneously, the 2018 election of a wave of younger, more diverse, left-leaning lawmakers — among them several people of color who sought elected office to advocate for equity in education — was supposed to buoy efforts to reform the system. In 2021, spearheaded by the new lawmakers, a bipartisan swath of the General Assembly passed a resolution committing to overhaul the funding formula. This year, some of the same legislative leaders sponsored the bill that created the latest commission.

The sponsor and co-sponsor of the 2024 legislation, Sturgeon and state Sen. Elizabeth Lockman, declined to be interviewed for this story; Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha did not return emails requesting comment, though he did speak at length for a 2021 74 Million piece on the urgency the pandemic’s academic losses would supposedly lend to efforts to reform the funding system.

Some are optimistic the new effort will succeed. Zahava Stadler, project director of New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative and an expert on Delaware’s school funding system, says she understands advocates’ concerns but is less skeptical than some that the commission announced in July will come up with meaningful reforms.

“Just because the AIR report made specific recommendations doesn’t mean the political system won’t have to hash them out,” she says. “Sometimes these reports sit on a shelf and go nowhere, and sometimes they get results.”

Some of the wonkier shifts are already underway, she notes. Property values for local tax purposes, until recently frozen at 1970s and ‘80s levels, are now being reassessed every five years — a significant change, if not a widely understood one. That will raise revenue, she explains, but the state needs to follow up with a system for more equitably redistributing this money so tax-poor districts aren’t locked out of the gains.

For his part, Bensing, the ACLU director, worries that a general agreement that the system needs fixing without new specifics means more delays. “It’s not politically convenient for our elected leaders to tell voters they are going to increase taxes,” he says. “But that is the right thing to do.”

He wonders whether a new court challenge would add a fresh sense of urgency — or give recalcitrant elected officials the political cover of a legal threat or edict to blame for changes to the tax system.

Wright has more confidence that in the long run there will be change, but decries the impact of the incremental pace on students.

“How can we compete? How can we fill out classrooms with teachers, with paraprofessionals, with all the people it takes to run a school district?” he asks. “Our kids don’t deserve any less than any other kids.”