Where that Kentucky school funding really comes from

It’s always interesting to hear what people defending positions on public policy have to say during live interviews. Some of the “stuff” that comes out is just isn’t right.

A case in point is provided by yesterday’s Kentucky Tonight show. The show featured a discussion on school choice and the current bill, House Bill 563 which passed early this year, that will bring choice to the state’s many parents and students of modest means once the current court case delays are finished.

During the discussion (about 36 minutes and 27 seconds into the video), Tom Shelton, spokesman for the Council for Better Education and former head of the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents, provided a case in point. He said that the big increase in spending after the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 came along was locally generated tax revenue from things like real estate taxes and not from state sources.

Really?

I put together this table of education revenue source data using a long series of annual reports created annually by the US Census Bureau.

As you can see, there was a very slight increase in the contribution to overall education spending made by local tax sources, but it was a very small increase. Even as of the latest data available, local tax dollars overall only account for something less than 11% of the total education picture, and while it has indeed reduced somewhat, the state funding share remains a clear majority of the overall funding. The difference was not made up by local taxes, however. It came from notable increases in federal education spending.

To be very clear about this, the figures in the table are for overall state education revenue. Looking at the Kentucky Department of Education’s Revenue and Expenditures Report for 2019, the situation does look different for a handful of school districts, but not many.

In the case of 18 out of the 173 districts that were reporting finances in 2018-19 (Highlighted in yellow in the next table), the state did provide less than half of the total education revenue per pupil. Only two of those districts, Anchorage Independent School District and the Fayette County School District, however, actually provided more than half of their total education revenue from local sources.

For the massive proportion of school districts in Kentucky, 155 out of the 173, the state contribution to the total education revenue in the district was more than half of the total revenue in 2018-19, the last school term before COVID threw everything into chaos, including creating massive federal bailout funding for schools.

So, unless you live in the Anchorage Independent School District or are part of the Fayette County system, forget what Shelton said. It isn’t true for your schools.