Expert: student-based funding will force policy choices on tuition, transportation and CTE

Professor Colby, an education finance consultant presenting to the House Ways & Means Committee, told lawmakers that moving to a student-based funding formula will require several policy choices including how to treat transportation grants, how tuitioned students carry funding, whether career and technical education (CTE) should have a separate base, and how to index the base for inflation.

Colby said a state could avoid tying dollars to disability placement by developing a needs-based weighting framework that does not rely on disability categories, but warned that would be a major undertaking and that there is no evidence yet that needs-based weights would be more accurate or equitable than disability-category weights. "If the State wanted to do that, you would have to invest in developing a different set of measures for student need and develop cost estimates for that. That's not a small undertaking," Colby said.

Why it matters: the choices the committee makes about what sits inside the base spending amount and how weights are applied determine which dollars follow a child, how much the state must appropriate each…