Michigan and the Kindergarten Budget Seesaw

Last August, the Michigan legislature passed a new education funding law designed to encourage school districts to offer full-day kindergarten. Currently, half-day and full-day kindergarten programs get the same amount of per-pupil funding. Beginning in 2010, full-day kindergarten will continue to get the full amount, while half-day programs will get half their current funding.

Encouraging full-day kindergarten is a good move: research shows that attending full-day kindergarten (as opposed to half-day kindergarten) helps narrow developmental and literacy gaps, especially among low-income children. All children benefit from academically-rich full-day kindergarten because for most children with working parents, the alternative for those afternoon hours is a lower-quality daycare.

Yet in Michigan, this move is forcing school districts to revisit their balance books and do some real number crunching and spending cuts. That is because this new law has changed the balance of two key budget seesaws:

The first is the kindergarten funding balance. Currently, the state's funding formula provides a disincentive for districts to provide full-day kindergarten, because it provides school districts the same amount of funding per kindergartener regardless of whether children attend kindergarten for a half or full-day. In effect, districts that choose to offer only half-day kindergarten get twice as much money per student served. The new law eliminates this disincentive but it means that districts keep half-day classes will loose significant funding. Districts that move to full-day programs won't see any funding cut, but they also won't receive any additional funding to cover the extra costs associated with moving to full-day kindergarten, including hiring new teachers, finding space for the extra classes, and buying additional supplies.

There is also a K-12 balance at play. Michigan's state school funding formula provides school districts with $7,316 per pupil enrolled, regardless of what grade students are in. But students in some grades, such as high school, are more costly to educate than others. Because kindergarteners attending half day programs cost less to educate than the full per-pupil amount districts currently receive for them, many districts chose to use the extra money to cross-subsidize other grades. With the new law, districts will no longer be able to cross-subsidize more costly grades in this way. These trade-offs have prompted some parents in Michigan to wonder if the push for full-day kindergarten is really worth it.

With this new funding formula, Michigan joins seven other states that truly encourage full-day kindergarten by providing a financial incentive for full-day programs that is greater than half-day programs. It is an important step, and a much better alternative than making parents pay for full-day kindergarten, which is the practice in many districts across the country.

Yet as school districts in Michigan now realize, as funding for kindergarten goes up, funding for other students may inadvertently go down. States that decide to recalibrate their funding formulas to encourage full-day kindergarten need to make sure that the move takes them off the budget seesaw by considering how shifting funds will affect other parts of districts' funding. Michigan hasn't done that. The state is facing a budget crunch, and the move to reduce state per-pupil allocations for half-day kindergartens, while ultimately sound policy, seems to be at least as much about finding ways to cut the overall K-12 budget as to incentivize full-day kindergarten. Ideally, states that take this step should incorporate counter measures to "make school districts whole" either by boosting total K-12 funding or eliminating inefficiencies in the funding system. Playing with seesaws is a lot more fun on the playground than they are on the balance sheet.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user swhsu, used under the Creative Commons license.