Jackson Free Press

Clarion-Ledger columnist Sid Salter again pulled no punches in his Sunday column about funding of public education. Importantly, he shot down the funding myths being spread by the governor and his agents in the Senate. Sid, again, gets the columnist's gold star for this column:

Let's set the record straight on K-12 education funding in Mississippi. The conventional wisdom is that Mississippi has been throwing money at education. Bull.

The usual suspect numbers used to support that contention is the fact that Mississippi spends 62.44 percent of the state's total General Fund appropriations on education. That's true, but it's not true in terms of K-12 education alone.

That 62.44 figure represents all state education spending — kindergarten through graduate school, including community colleges, institutions of higher learning and the state's agricultural education units as well.

What Mississippi has been doing is trying to catch up, trying to keep pace and trying to give our children a chance to compete on a global level. There's nothing wrong with those pursuits. They represent what Mississippi should have been doing all along. [...]

Mississippi is supposed to be keeping pace through adherence to the state Adequate Education Program funding formula. To do less threatens federally mandated standards of education equity and adequacy for all state students — regardless of the economic conditions in their school districts.

The state has tried to head off education equity funding lawsuits by instituting MAEP, but consistently failing to fully fund it makes it a paper tiger and threatens kids and teachers in the state's poorest districts.