DATA DETECTIVE Ed Moscovitch has just solved a mystery for us.
For years, those who follow education reform have heard stories about schools that lacked supplies or were using out-of-date books or cutting programs. How could that be possible, what with the large investment the state has made in education since the landmark 1993 education reform law?
The folks at the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education had the same question.
“We wanted to find out why school districts are so strapped when the state has kept its funding obligation,’’ said Linda Noonan, MBAE’s executive director. So they secured funding from the Boston Foundation and hired Moscovitch, a former state budgeteer and economist who was instrumental in developing the education reform funding formula.
And now we have an answer: Because the new state dollars have increasingly been devoured by health care costs — so much so that since 2000, we’ve lost much of the ground we’d gained in trying to provide poor students with a solid education. What’s more, as health care costs have soared, districts have cut spending on teacher training and books. The obvious question is, what can be done?
At a Boston Foundation forum yesterday, President Paul Grogan minced no words: Policymakers can’t claim to be serious about supporting education reform if they aren’t willing to give municipalities the same powers of health care plan design the state has, plus the option to join the state’s Group Insurance Commission, the agency that provides health-insurance plans for state employees.
From 2001 to 2007, the GIC held health care increases for state workers to about 8 percent a year, while health care costs for municipal employees went up by more than 13 percent a year. The principal reason for the higher local increase is that the local plans are far more generous, and thus more costly, than either state or private-sector plans. Currently, any changes to those plans must bargained. Local unions, meanwhile, have a de facto veto over their town’s ability to join the GIC.
Michael Widmer, president of Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, was every bit as adamant as Grogan, saying that if Massachusetts is to keep its first-in-the-nation status on education, it has to confront the issue. As a short-term reform, giving cities and towns plan design/GIC-joining authority dwarfs anything else that can be done, said Widmer, who predicted local health care savings would reach $100 million in year one and compound to the billion-dollar range over a decade.
But Governor Deval Patrick and the Democratic Legislature have shown little if any appetite for such bold reform. Indeed, though Secretary of Education Paul Reville portrayed his boss as focused on finding a workable solution, “reluctant’’ or “half-hearted’’ would be more apt descriptions of Patrick’s approach.
So will this report finally spur Beacon Hill’s union-allied Democrats into action? Grogan, who has made his foundation a leading progressive prod to reform, thinks so.
“If the governor and the Legislature aren’t willing to act on this now, it is just unfathomable,’’ says Grogan. “I don’t see how they can tolerate a situation where it is literally impossible to put more money into actual education because it all goes to health care costs.’’ But while the plan design/GIC option would be a solid start, it’s not a be-all-and-end-all, says Moscovitch, who offered me a panoramic, polymathic tour of possibilities for policy makers to pursue.
On health care, he said, the state needs to move to a “global payments’’ system, which would pay providers a set per patient amount for care rather than reimburse for each test and procedure. Plus, Massachusetts could discourage excessive medical tests by offering doctors protection from malpractice lawsuits if they follow an established medical protocol in treating their patients.
Finally, he says, Massachusetts needs an aggressive effort to promote regionalization. If parents in small districts prove resistant to regionalizing the schools themselves, the state should at least push for consolidated management of functions like transportation, building operation and maintenance, and school meals.
Moscovitch’s report is a must-read, its data as insistent as an alarm clock. With more budget problems looming, Beacon Hill can’t afford to hit the snooze button yet again.
Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com. 
