May 12, 2025
Chair Lewis, Chair Gordon, and Members of the Joint Committee on Education:
My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group fighting for a more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic commonwealth.
We urge you to give a favorable report to H.678/S.388: An Act to fix the Chapter 70 inflation adjustment and S.345: An Act eliminating education funding inflation gap.
Back in 2019, your chambers took the necessary step of updating our state’s funding formula for aid to public school districts with the passage of the Student Opportunity Act. It was an important and overdue victory.
However, our public schools are losing out on the full benefits of the increased funding promised due to a glitch in how the Chapter 70 formula treats inflation.
The funding formula caps inflation in calculating year-to-year funding increases at 4.5%. However, we have seen several years of high inflation. The costs for our schools are rising, but the state’s support is not keeping pace. Indeed, the gap in funding schools faced in FY 2025 was $465 million. Cuts mean fewer teachers, fewer counselors, and fewer classroom resources, and they mean lost opportunities for our students to learn and grow.
This growing gap is occurring at a time when our public schools are already under attack from the Trump administration, and because of outdated policies like Proposition 2 1/2 , our cities and towns face severe, state-imposed roadblocks in filling the gaps themselves.
Moreover, this wasn’t how the formula was originally designed. When it was first passed in the early 1990s, the state would catch up with funding in low-inflation years to account for this discrepancy in high-inflation years. Our cities and towns could plan better, and our students could get what they need. But a technical change made a decade later eliminated that common-sense arrangement.
H.678 and S.388 would undo that misguided technical change that is costing our public schools resources and our students the present and future they deserve. S.345 would eliminate the arbitrary 4.5% inflation cap and calculate inflation by comparing it to the same period two years prior.
Massachusetts prides ourselves in our commitment to public education, and we must recommit to that with real resources. Our commonwealth has a higher GDP than Sweden: the resources are there; we just need the commitment.
In the budget hearing earlier this spring, students came to testify to talk about the impact of cuts on their schools, highlighting what that meant for them in terms of lost supports and lost opportunities. These students were praised and cheered by legislators. We ask that you accompany that praise with listening and action.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Cohn
Policy Director
Progressive Massachusetts
