By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Republican Sen. Renee Erickson wants the task force crafting a new state funding formula for K-12 public schools to be far enough along to present a draft in January to the Kansas Legislature, despite concern among some members the timeline was too aggressive.
The 2026 Legislature and the state’s next governor must come to agreement on financing education before expiration of the existing framework on June 30, 2027.
Stakes are high given previous Kansas Supreme Court decisions that funding formulas developed by lawmakers at the Capitol violated the state Constitution. A central issue in school-finance lawsuits has been whether spending on behalf of nearly 500,000 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade was constitutionally equitable and adequate.
Erickson, who chairs the bipartisan task force of legislators and educators, said her goal was to provide peers in the Legislature a glimpse of the funding strategy so the cycle of evaluation and revision could begin well before the final deadline.
“They’re going to have to start being familiar with what we are thinking. We need something in hand to vet,” Erickson said Tuesday during a task force meeting. “This is probably a process that we could spend five years really trying to get it just right.”
Rep. Nikki McDonald, an Olathe Democrat on the task force, said the project was monumental and potentially the most important work of legislators’ careers.
She said issuing the report as the 2026 Legislature convened in January — 18 months before the new formula had to be implemented — was “awfully aggressive and potentially unreasonable.”
“I worry if we rush into this we’re going to make mistakes,” McDonald said. “I want to make sure our formula is constitutional. I want to make sure we don’t fall back into a pattern of having lawsuits and wasting taxpayer dollars.”
Task force member Frank Harwood, a deputy commissioner of the Kansas Department of Education and supervising administrator of more than $6 billion in state and federal funds devoted to Kansas schools, said delivering recommendations on a revised formula in eight months could be relatively easy or profoundly difficult.
“If you’re making small changes, we have plenty of time,” he said. “If you’re starting from scratch, we probably don’t have enough time.”
Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican appointed to the task force, started a conversation about reading instruction that illustrated that reaching consensus on fundamental ideas could be challenging.
She pointed to reports showing improvements in reading among the general student population also raised scores for special-education students in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and other states.
“If we could just get our students to read, it looks like it’s going to impact everyone,” Williams said. “I just would love to see a formula that incentivizes outcomes so that we’re constantly moving in the right direction.”
Williams referenced the 2022 “Sold a Story” podcast that argued educators stuck with popular early-intervention literacy strategies despite research exposing flaws in methods that ignored the potential of phonics.
McDonald, the House Democrat, reminded the task force the 2025 Legislature approved a budget bill that didn’t deliver as promised an additional $10 million in funding to the Kansas Blueprint for Literacy. The literacy initiative was created last year by legislators to retool university instructional methods in reading and to retrain all elementary school teachers in the science of reading by 2030.
The blueprint’s goal was to have 90% of 3rd through 8th graders achieving at Level 2 on the state’s four-level assessment scale. An additional target was to have 50% of 3rd through 8th grade students reading at Level 3 or Level 4 on the assessment by 2033.
“A budget is a reflection of our priorities,” McDonald said. “We have missed that opportunity to amp up the number of teachers who are trained in the science of reading so we can close that gap.”
Erickson, the task force chair, said it would be inaccurate to blame politicians for shortcomings in reading skills that were the responsibility of educators or parents.
“I’m going to be very adamant about that,” the former teacher said. “By no means am I going to allow the Legislature to be the convenient villain in this reading scenario. It just defies logic.”
Task force member Scott Hill, an Abilene Republican in the Kansas House, said it was shocking the state’s school districts didn’t take prompt action to improve reading instruction when it was clear students were struggling statewide.
“I find it bordering on immoral that people would understand, which we all do, that we’ve been teaching kids wrong for a long time. And, to not change that teaching direction on their own without supplemental money is abhorrent,” he said.
The state Department of Education has been using federal funding to train teachers working in state-accredited public and private elementary schools in the Kansas Science of Reading Professional Learning Course. The literacy initiative — separate from the Kansas Blueprint for Literacy — was a response to disruption in student learning tied to remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harwood, the deputy commissioner with the Department of Education, urged the task force to appreciate the full historical context of reading theory in Kansas and to accept it was difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all program for students of different abilities.
He said the “whole language” method pilloried by some task force members was useful to many students.
“The problem wasn’t that whole language was not successful. It just wasn’t successful with everybody and it left people behind. Now we know better,” he said.
