Here’s a great column from the Hutch News.

“I suppose it is politically useful to pretend there is a magic formula out there which will provide a better system of education at a reduced price. It is the same approach as pretending one can lower taxes and collect more revenue, that one can remove large sums of money from the highway budget and not affect road quality, that the number of prison guards can be reduced and not affect safety or performance, or that we can fix KPERS on the cheap by borrowing a lot of money.

“The reality is that formulas for distributing funds fairly and knowing the adequacy of the funds are two different things. The current basic formula is not sacred but has served for many years, has been tweaked on occasion to better reflect changing conditions and has withstood multiple attacks in the courts. It has been deemed constitutional as a system of distributing funds. It is not the formula that is currently under legal attack. It is the amount of funding being provided.

“Admittedly, the public education funding system is complex. It is necessarily so to accommodate the wide variables in our state in terms of geography, population and student characteristics. I realize many in the Legislature, and apparently many in the administration, do not fully understand the system. But to pretend the cost of education can be reduced simply by creating a new formula is extremely misleading. Slicing the pie differently doesn’t change the size of the pie.”

http://www.hutchnews.com/opinion/columnists/looking-for-a-magic-education-funding-formula/article_65e3eb74-c95a-5344-b218-e141660eb86d.html