A move by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to fully fund a three-percent pay raise for public school teachers and administrators generated the headlines in today’s newspapers, but it isn’t likely to prove terribly controversial. The General Assembly had already recommended the three-percent raise but just hadn’t funded it. With an anticipated $500 million surplus anticipated next year, lawmakers shouldn’t have much trouble finding the $64 million needed.

Of greater interest are Gov. Kaine’s early childhood initiatives, as reported by Michael Hardy with the Times-Dispatch:

• Allocate $4.1 million to provide assistance for eligible first- and second-graders who are having trouble reading.
• Add $3.9 million to extend the algebra readiness program to sixth-graders.
• Earmark $4.6 million for new pilot programs to gauge implementation practices for expanding current pre-kindergarten through public-private partnerships.

I don’t have any problem with the initiatives per se. I just don’t see why they can’t be funded out of the existing K-12 budget. It’s not as if schools have been getting short-shrifted. The FY 2005 budget contained $4.7 billion in state aid to public education. The FY 2008 budget will contain $5.9 billion — an increase of 25.5 percent in four years.

The problem, I suspect, lies in the inflexibility of the state-aid-to-public-education formula and the Standards of Quality that drive it. The SOQs, as I have argued on this blog before, are a mindless automoton that drives education spending ever higher, redistributing massive wealth from affluent school districts to poor ones, and making it difficult to reallocate resources within school budgets to new priorities. End result: To do anything new, as the Governor wants, requires supplemental funds.