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Updates to New York’s main school funding formula. Seed money to start making changes to high school graduation requirements. A study on gaps in arts education across the state.
Those were some of the priorities outlined Monday by the Board of Regents in its annual budget proposal. The blueprint called for a roughly $2 billion increase in state aid for the 2025-26 school year, among other investments. That proposal would see the state provide New York schools with about $37.6 billion.
The proposal comes just a month before lawmakers return to Albany for the next legislative session, offering a set of budget recommendations to Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature.
Hochul is expected to issue her own budget proposal in January, and will ask lawmakers to approve a 2025-26 fiscal budget later in the spring.
For years, state education officials have sought to revamp New York’s high school graduation requirements. For example, students will no longer be required to pass Regents exams to earn a diploma beginning in the 2027-28 school year, according to a proposed timeline from state officials.
This effort to overhaul graduation requirements would receive $2.3 million under the Regents’ proposal, state officials said Monday.
Meanwhile, the state formula that sends roughly $24.9 billion to school districts — including more than $9.5 billion to New York City schools — relies on decades-old data to calculate district needs. Known as Foundation Aid and first implemented in 2007, it’s been repeatedly criticized by education advocates, state officials, and others.
The Regents’ suggestions for updating the formula come just one week after the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a public policy think tank based at SUNY, issued a more than 300-page report on Foundation Aid. That report, which was commissioned as part of a budget agreement between state lawmakers and Hochul earlier this year, included a set of 20 recommendations for how to update the formula.
State education officials noted Monday they were still assessing the implications of the report’s recommendations, noting the Rockefeller Institute did not produce models to demonstrate the potential impacts of its suggestions.
“Recommendations are just that: recommendations,” said State Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa. “It stops short of the modeling, and we’ve got to be crystal clear on this: The devil’s in the details of the modeling.”
Here’s a look at some of the Regents’ top education priorities for the 2025-26 school year.
State education officials want several Foundation Aid updates
The Regents called for policymakers to implement a set of initial updates to the Foundation Aid formula, which together would result in an additional more than $200 million for the state’s schools — with Foundation Aid overall increasing by about $1.6 billion from the prior year.
Those proposed updates include modernizing the data used to account for different regional costs and to calculate student poverty. (The former comes from 2006, while the latter is sourced from the 2000 census.)
Other tweaks proposed by the Regents would see the formula stop using federal free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility as a basis for measuring student need, instead switching to broader “economically disadvantaged” student counts. The Regents also suggested eliminating a limit on how much additional aid can be allocated to districts based on the formula’s Income Wealth Index.
Still, state education officials acknowledged further research is needed to develop more significant overhauls to the formula — as well as to understand the possible ramifications of the Rockefeller Institute’s recommendations. Officials from the state’s Education Department noted they would work to develop models demonstrating the impacts of those recommendations, adding they could do so without additional resources.
Money sought to implement new graduation mandates
State education officials also requested $2.3 million to support Education Department staff members who could begin the process of implementing a commission’s recommendations for updating high school graduation requirements.
Rosa described the budget item as “seed money” to support a “planning year,” adding further funding would be required later in the implementation process.
“We hope to come back to our legislators and our governor to say, ‘This is a huge initiative that will make a difference in the lives of our children, but we need investments and commitment,’” she said.
Last month, state officials said the Education Department plans to spend about $11.5 million for staff and other support within the department over the next five years to develop and roll out the new graduation measures.
Budget plan includes arts study, data infrastructure boost
At the Monday meeting, Regents and state education officials also discussed a proposal to commit $300,000 toward studying gaps in arts education.
Regent Roger Tilles of Nassau County said the study was “absolutely needed.”
“We’ve been derelict in not doing it for about 20 years,” he said. “There’s such a disparity in what districts and what students can get in terms of arts education.”
Other requests included $4.8 million to continue updating the state’s data infrastructure; $65.4 million to provide Free and Appropriate Education to students with disabilities until age 22; $16.9 million for programs that promote equity in access to higher education; and the development of a “growth aid” formula that would send additional support to districts experiencing rapid enrollment growth.
See a full description of the Regents’ legislative and budget priorities here.
Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.
