“Discretion is the better part of valor.” – proverb often attributed to William Shakespeare

Alabama has been no stranger to taking some big steps in education policy in the last few years.

The Alabama Literacy Act and last year’s CHOOSE Act that allowed parents to access some public funding toward private or homeschool education are a couple of prominent examples.

This year the main priority of the state legislators who are in charge of the education budget is the formula for how the state provides funding to public school districts.

Currently, Alabama is one of seven states to provide funding to school systems based almost completely on the number of students enrolled in a school district, according to Bellwether – an organization consulting the legislature’s education budget committees. The average amount the state spends per student is $7,700 for the current fiscal year.

Bellwether reports a majority of states use a different funding formula that provides a base amount of funding for each student but then awards a significant amount of funding to school districts through other characteristics determined by the state.

These characteristics vary but often include more money for school districts with a higher number of students requiring special education, learning English as a second language, or living in poverty. Districts located in rural areas are also often included as eligible to receive more funding.

Committing to a new funding plan that will change the way hundreds of millions of dollars will be distributed over a few years can cause a little heartburn for elected officials. So it looks like they may try to dip their toes into the water this year to see how well this change goes.

Public policy scholars call this incrementalism where instead of going full steam ahead with a new policy, funding increases on an incremental basis as long as the policy is showing positive results.

This is done to prevent policy supporters from getting quite as much egg on their faces should the policy fail as compared to supporters putting all their chips on the table to fund a new policy and then rolling snake eyes.

AL.com’s Rebecca Griesbach has done some excellent reporting on the issue, and it appears an incremental option may have the most juice among the legislators she interviewed, though conditions could easily change before this legislative session ends.

The legislature’s incremental option would begin by taking money from the Education Trust Fund for this year only and adding it in on top of the funding plan the state currently uses where distribution is determined almost fully by the number of students in a school district.

More permanent and sustainable funding changes could follow later if the results are positive.

Griesbach reported Gov. Kay Ivey threw her support behind this option. She recommended the legislature take $100 million from an education reserve fund to do this.

The $100 million would be split up to provide an additional $40 million for high-poverty schools, $40 million for schools with a large number of students with special needs and $20 million for rural schools under Ivey’s plan.

The plan’s supporters are quick to point out that no funds going to any school district would be cut from its current levels under a new formula. The new formula would provide more funding to districts that are considered to have a higher need as state revenues to fund education continue to grow.

It is hard to judge if this will be a good plan until more details about what a new funding formula would look like are finalized. I generally support the state kicking more money toward school districts that face greater challenges, but it sounds like legislators still have work to do to reach a consensus on what priority areas will be provided additional funding.

The research used by the Bellwether consultants to support the funding overhaul relies heavily on a study that says increasing school funding across the board but weighting funding increases more heavily on low-income school districts should increase overall education outcomes in low-income districts.

There is not strong direction from Bellwether about how to spend the additional funding, however, and there does not yet appear to be broad agreement among legislators on specifics about how more funding should be used. With so many unknowns, the incremental plan is probably the right way to go this year.

But with the CHOOSE Act now ramping up to send a significant amount of state funds to private schools and economic conditions that can change at the drop of the hat, local school districts better keep their fingers crossed the money to enact this plan on a more permanent basis will still be there next year.