Education leaders and policy experts are continuing to digest Gov. Kathy Hochul's proposal to update the Foundation Aid formula for New York's schools.

“We’re beginning the process of taking targeted steps to modernize the state’s outdated Foundation Aid formula,” Hochul said during her budget address Tuesday.

The updates were highly anticipated among educators after last year’s budget commissioned a study of the formula, culminating in a report containing recommendations for how the state should make adjustments. The study was completed in December by the Rockefeller Institute. 

Budget officials told Spectrum News 1 that as she finalized her budget proposal, the governor was looking at three options: Do nothing at all and leave it up to the legislature to initiate any changes proposed in the report; completely reconstruct the formula; or take a measured approach, implementing only some tweaks. She decided to strike the middle ground, proposing two data changes among other minor adjustments.

Jeff Smink, deputy director at EdTrust-New York, took issue with the concept of picking and choosing recommendations from the report.

“The problem is that if it’s done in isolation without any of the other changes that we at EdTrust-NY and the Rockefeller Institute have proposed, it’s not going to meaningfully change the Foundation Aid formula,” he said.

The governor chose to update 25-year-old Census data to numbers from 2020, and to change the way the state calculates how many low-income students a district has.

The current proposal also drives more aid to low-wealth districts, but EdTrust argued that another recommendation from the Rockefeller Institute accounting for concentrations of poverty was an important piece of the puzzle that is missing.

Smink also pointed out that multiple recommendations that would have accounted for the evolving needs of school districts weren't included.

“Without that, just kind of doing little changes here and there is not going to be enough,” he said.

On the other hand, Melinda Person, president of NYS United Teachers, countered that the Rockefeller Institute made a wide range of recommendations, and that implementing them over time makes sense.

“We as a state should try to tackle them one at a time, and this year, the governor has already started by talking about these poverty measurements,” she said. “I think we should bring in other conversations about these other elements. We don’t expect that all of this is going to happen at once.”

Person made clear, though, that she wants to see the governor and the legislature continue to phase in those other recommendations in coming budget cycles to ensure that the final version of the formula reflects the myriad of challenges that modern school districts face.

“We have to talk about regional cost adjustments, how we fund special education in this state, how we account for English language learners,” she said.

Education experts had expressed concern that small tweaks to the formula could have unintended consequences, and budget officials were forced to include an additional provision after a run of the updated version generated no aid for 311 school districts.

Now each district will receive at least a 2% increase in aid, seemingly an about-face after the governor went after Hold Harmless last year. Hold Harmless ensures that districts don’t see a drop in funding, even if they lose population and was central to the debate that prompted the study.

For her part, Hochul has confirmed that she isn’t considering this year’s proposal to be a new, perfectly functioning formula.

“We’re going to continue adjusting the formula. This is not the end. We’re not finished with it yet,” she told reporters Tuesday.

We reached out to the Rockefeller Institute for comment. President Robert Megna indicated to Spectrum News 1 that the report is being used as intended.

“We intended for our report to include a menu of policy options for the governor and lawmakers to consider as they update the State's Foundation Aid education funding formula,” he said in a statement. “The Executive Budget includes several of these recommended changes and we'll be watching with interest as lawmakers in the assembly and senate assemble their one-house budgets.”