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Testimony to the Idaho Senate Education Committee
February 13, 2025
Terry Ryan, Board chair of Idaho Charter School Network
& CEO of Bluum
Chairman Lent, Vice-Chair Cook, and members of the committee.
For the record, I am Terry Ryan and I am speaking today to you in my role as board chair of the Idaho Charter School Network and as leader of the education-nonprofit Bluum. I want to thank you for taking up Senate Bill 1096.
I speak to you today as a sort of metaphorical Ghost of Christmas Past. In 2017, I penned a Guest Column for the Post Register entitled “Idaho needs new school funding formula.” I wrote then, “Idaho’s current K-12 public school funding formula is archaic. It was adopted in 1994, and needs an upgrade to better serve the needs of our students today and into the future. Fortunately, Idaho’s lawmakers understand the challenge and seem poised to make necessary improvements. Their efforts to modernize school funding should be supported and encouraged by parents, taxpayers and everyone interested in the future of Idaho and its children.”
As it turned out my optimism for change to the state school funding system in 2017 was premature and wide of the mark. Eight years later, and with more gray hair and a few extra pounds, I return to testify in support of moving Idaho’s school funding formula to the future. Back in 2017, the school finance expert Marguerite Roza told the Idaho Public School Funding Formula Committee that “the current formula fuels inequity across schools, limits flexibility for educators, impedes innovation within schools, inhibits local accountability for results, and is overly complicated and lacks transparency.” Despite the injection of hundreds of millions of dollars in new state spending in recent years this is still true.
What also remains true is that the current funding formula simply does not provide the flexibility needed by educators to improve learning for all students. Nor does it do anything to really encourage innovation in our schools and classrooms. It is one-size fits all funding formula that largely dictates how schools are supposed to manage themselves through central decision making by state officials in Boise.
I’ll say now, as I said in 2017, Kudos to state officials that work to move the decision making on what works best for children and education closer to the schoolhouse and to the classroom. This is why I stand here today in support of Senate Bill 1096.
Note, and this is painful because these numbers reflect our children’s knowledge and skills, despite investing hundreds of millions of dollars more into our schools over the last eight years our state’s student achievement in 4th and 8th grade reading and math has been static. Flatlined (see date below).
We should all support moving forward with a new school funding formula that focuses on flexibility, local control and student outcomes. This was true in 2017 and it is even more obvious in 2025.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today.
