I've gotten tired of waiting for the backup material on the proposed school funding formula promised by Deputy Commissioner David Abbott, so I've sent the following e-mail to the Brown professor who developed it. I'll post any reply, and update the spreadsheet on GoogleDocs (I have numbers in all the columns, but I just can't make them work...)

From: John McDaid
Date: March 5, 2010 9:57:40 AM EST
To: Kenneth_Wong@brown.edu
Subject: Request for information

Hi, Dr. Wong...
I'm a reporter for a Portsmouth-based hyperlocal news blog, and have been covering the proposed state funding formula you developed and hope you can help me.

While I have spoke personally with Deputy Commissioner David Abbott and asked for backup information on how to calculate the values to plug into the quadratic function, he has not yet been able to provide those.

I'm trying to understand why the values I've obtained from official sources do not seem to work when plugged into the formula, and I'm hoping you can provide information or pointers that would help in my analysis.

I have all the numbers I've been able to obtain plugged into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsipYS4xgQESdEVuWm5FTHctMHN3OV9...

Thanks very much for any help or information you can provide.

Best Regards.
-John G. McDaid
harddeadlines.com