CBPP on Kansas schools and taxes, part 2

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From Kansas Policy Institute.

Debunking CBPP on tax reform and school funding — Part 2

By Dave Trabert

We continue our debunking of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) latest report entitled “Lessons for Other States from Kansas’ Massive Tax Cuts.” Part 1 dealt with state revenues. Today we debunk their claims on school funding and other state services.

CBPP claim #2 — School funding is 17 percent below pre-recession levels and funding for other services is way down and declining.

This is simply an outright fabrication — and not the first time that CBPP has done so. CBPP shows a graph of how they calculate what they claim is a reduction in school funding but, true to form, they provide no supporting data. The only source provided says “CBPP analysis of state budget documents and Kansas Governor’s Budget Reports.” CBPP routinely plays this game and they have refused to give us their data every time we requested it. I’ll get to school funding shortly but let’s start debunking this claim with a total spending review.

Here are the facts from the Governor’s Budget Reports cited by CBPP.[1] General Fund spending would decline a mere 1.8 percent this year (FY 2014) but it is still 6.3% higher than just three years ago. Next year, Kansas will set a new record for General Fund spending without even counting the education money that was just added to next year’s budget. Fiscal year 2013 was the highest level of General Fund spending on record.

The next table breaks total spending down into the primary functions listed in the Governor’s Budget Reports.

Of course, Kansas should have reduced spending last year and this year rather than spend down reserves but the fact remains that spending is not “way down and declining” as claimed by CBPP.

Their bogus claim on school funding may be grounded in an earlier collection of falsehoods published last year — and thoroughly debunked on this blog. CBPP often makes unsubstantiated claims which they attribute to their “analysis of data” but the data is not made available for review — even when requested.

The first thing to understand is that CBPP deliberately misleads readers by only talking about state funding of schools while ignoring the fact that Kansas, like many states, has a foundational funding formula that provides multiple funding sources, including local money that does not flow through the state budget.

But that is just the beginning of the deception. Their statement that “Kansas is still cutting school funding” on page four of their report is an outright lie.

This data provided by the Kansas Department of Education shows that State funding of public education has increased for four consecutive years.[2]  As CBPP is fully aware, one cannot get the full picture of school funding in state budget documents; the money reported as Local funding is provided on state authority but doesn’t run through the state budget.[3] Property taxes (including the 20 mills mandated by the Legislature) are sent directly to school districts by county treasurers.[4] Even the Kansas Supreme Court acknowledged (three weeks before CBPP’s report) that “… funds from all available resources, including grants and federal assistance, should be considered” when evaluating school funding.[5]

The following inflation comparisons are based on total school funding from the adjacent chart and shown on a per-pupil basis to also account for enrollment changes. The first comparison shows that actual school funding continues to run well ahead of inflation. Per-pupil funding increased from $6,985 per-pupil in 1998 to $12,781 in 2013; 1998 funding adjusted for inflation would be only $9,768. (Funding for the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System was not included in KSDE calculations of school funding until 2005; they provided the data for prior years and we adjusted spending accordingly.)


CBPP claims that school funding has not kept up with inflation since 2008 but that is misleading at best. Again, they provided no data to support their claim but we’ll lay it all out here.

Note that every chart shown above references “spending” instead of “funding.” KSDE arrives at their Local number each by subtracting State and Federal aid from districts’ reports of total expenditures. Total expenditures is different from total funding because districts report on a cash-basis fund accounting method and those figures do not reflect any aid received that was not spent. That information can be obtained by comparing the change in ending unencumbered cash balances of districts’ operating funds (excluding capital and debt).[6]

The above table shows that total inflation-adjusted spending between 2008 and 2013 was $85.3 million greater than actual spending, but districts could have spent $345.9 million more if they had used all of the aid provided during those years.

It should also be noted that school spending is not based on what schools need to meet required outcomes while also making efficient use of taxpayer money. To this day, not a single superintendent, legislator, KSDE employee, policy analyst or judge can identify that amount because no such analysis has been performed in Kansas. The cost study upon which previous court rulings were made was found to be deliberately skewed so as to provide the courts with inflated numbers.[7] The Kansas Supreme Court also recently abandoned the “actual cost” method of determining adequate funding in Gannon and substituted new standards (Rose), against which no cost or funding measurement has been conducted.[8]

In conclusion, CBPP’s claims about school funding in particular and state funding of services in general are merely a collection of false, misleading and inconsequential statements.

Kansas does need to reduce spending a bit in the coming years in preparation for the next tranche of tax reduction but there is ample ability to do so without reducing current services. There are tax transfers out of the General Fund that should be reconsidered and there are also multiple opportunities to significantly reduce the cost of providing current services.

The opportunities are there, and we’ll cover them separately in the coming months. The only question is whether Governor Brownback and a majority of legislators will stand up to the bureaucracy and special interests.
Stay tuned for Part 3.


[1] Kansas Division of the Budget, Governor’s Budget Report for FY 2015 published January, 2014, page 22 at http://budget.ks.gov/publications/FY2015/FY2015_GBR_Vol1–UPDATED–01-28-2014.pdf
[2] Kansas Department of Education; school years 2003-04 through 2012-13 located at http://www.ksde.org/Portals/0/School%20Finance/data_warehouse/total_expenditures/d0Stateexp.pdf. All other years provided by KSDE via email; copies in author’s possession.
[3] CBPP published a response to my September 13, 2013 blog post that provided this explanation. http://www.offthechartsblog.org/the-price-of-kansas-costly-tax-cuts/
[4] Explanation of property tax distribution with a quote from Dale Dennis at http://www.kansaspolicy.org/KPIBlog/Default.aspx?min=2013-01-01&max=2014-01-01.
[5] Gannon v. State of Kansas, page 77 at http://www.kscourts.org/Cases-and-Opinions/opinions/SupCt/2014/20140307/109335.pdf
[6] See KSDE explanation at the link for Endnote #2.
[7] Caleb Stegall, “Analysis of Montoy v. State of Kansas” published by Kansas Policy Institute in 2009 at http://www.kansaspolicy.org/ResearchCenters/Education/Studies/d65168.aspx?type=view
[8] Ibid, pages 76 and 77.

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