The 'Black Box' and education funding

For all of the sound and fury during this year's General Assembly session over guns, illegal immigration and abuser fees, what could amount to a sea change in Virginia's finances has gone largely unnoticed.

The debate is embedded in the fight over the state budget, and it is a fight only a policy wonk could love: a change in the formula used to "re-benchmark" the state's "Standards of Quality" for education every two years.

Better known as the SOQs, the standards are the yardstick the state uses to determine how much money it is constitutionally obligated to hand out to local school systems each year. The Department of Education gives it a revamp every two years, and like clockwork, it goes up by about $1 billion or so.

Just what the two sides are fighting over is tough to explain.

I spent some time here in the Cheap Seats trying to understand the SOQs and the re-benchmarking process myself over the past couple of weeks. After a while, I came to the same place astronaut Dave Bowman found himself in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" when he finally looked into the monolith.

"My God. It's full of stars."

There's good reason to be confused, according to policy watcher and blogger Jim Bacon, who wrote about the SOQs here:

The SOQ formula is arcane, almost Kabbalistic, in its complexity. Only a handful of people in the state really understand how it works. But somewhere in that black box is a feedback loop that ratchets state spending on K-12 education every higher with each rebenchmarking.

As a result, the SOQs absorb every spare educational dollar the state has to spend. The formula is bigger than the legislature, more powerful than the governor. It's largely due to the SOQs that, in a budget that shows K-12 spending increases in multiples of hundreds of millions of dollars every two years, Gov. [Timothy M.] Kaine can't find a few tens of millions for the signature initiative of his administration, a modest expansion of the pre-K program."

That's part of what makes the ongoing budget negotiations so important. House Republicans want to, in a sense, break that "feedback loop" and gain some control over how and when education spending rises. They want the elected legislature, not a mathematical formula, to set the ground rules for determining costs.

Democrats have decried the measure as being detrimental to schools in the long run, accusing the GOP of substituting legislative fiat for a real estimation of how much the actual costs of education have changed over the previous two years. As such, they claim it's just another way to short change education.

Both sides have been engaging in a war of press releases lately, but the final product remains to be seen. But the mere fact that House Republicans were willing to touch the somewhat-sacrosanct SOQs at all is indicative of just how different things have been on Capitol Square this year.

Regardless of the outcome, we'll all be paying for it, one way or another.