Massachusetts School Funding

One of the many things I do not understand about Massachusetts is the re-distribution of tax money to local cities and towns as chapter 70 funding. I understand why the cities and towns need the money, but the Chapter 70 implementation appears to be broken. For example I have always been puzzled at the disparity between Pentucket and Triton districts Chapter 70 receipts. My gut feeling was always that Pentucket receives far too much money back based on its demographics.

My uninformed view on the general affluence of towns in each district would be something like this: West Newbury, Newbury, Rowley, Merrimack, Groveland, Salisbury.
Yet if you look at the amount of money received in Chapter 70 aid, there is a huge gap.

I scavanged around for publicly available information about; schools, town budgets from 2008, basic town demographic information, and available funding information.

The following table (click on it to get a readable version) provides an overview of town data for area communities. I aggregated the relevant data from the sending towns for regional schools to essentially create towns that mirror the school districts. The information is all based on 2008 data unless otherwise indicated.

The data seems to confirm my view that the funding isn't based on any clear equitable pattern. What surprises me the most (if the numbers are correct) is that Pentucket is closer to Lawrence in the amount of money it receives per capita than it is to Triton. The city of Amesbury receives almost 200 dollars less per citizen for schools than the combined towns of West Newbury, Groveland and Merrimac (the Pentucket sending towns).

The city with the biggest gripe might be Haverhill, they get the same amount of money per person as Newburyport and Ipswich.


If I look just at Triton vs Pentucket nothing makes sense. The combined population of the Triton district towns is larger than that of Pentucket. The average incomes for each district are roughly equivalent and the total town budgets are relatively aligned, but Pentucket receives close to 50% more aid than Triton.

This graph shows the average income per person in a district on a bar chart. The color of the bars indicates what percentage of the town's budget is paid for from Chapter 70 aid. The width of the bar represents the average income.



















This graph shows the same towns by the percentage of their operating budgets that comes from chapter 70 aid. The width and color both illustrate the average revenue per person in each district. The color and width are using the same criteria, but it helps reinforce the view.

Definitions:
Chapter 70 per person: this illustrates the Chapter 70 funding that went to a district based on the total population of that district (not student population but total population).

Chapter 70 as a % of operating budget: this shows what percentage of the districts total budget (not school budget) is comprised of Chapter 70 aid.

Budget per population: this is simply the districts total operating budget (not schools but total town budgets) per person in the district. How much is spent per person to run the city or town. .

Income per population: this measures the average revenue per person in each district.

The rest of the columns reflect the baseline data where I aggregated for sending towns to create regional aggregates.
Data sources: the data all came from various places on mass.gov
Chapter 70 is 2007 data
Income data is 1999 data (most recent)
town budget data is 2008 operating budgets
town population data is based on 2007 data