After two tumultuous years of school-based budgeting, the city’s Department of Education has abandoned the formula it created to allocate money fairly.

When Mayor Bloomberg took over the school system, the department eliminated the old budgeting system, under which community school districts handed out funds, giving some schools disproportionately more money and some less. In its place, the department created a financing formula based on the number of students and the average teacher salary.

In the past two school years, the department brought the schools by degrees closer to their “ideal” budget allocation. This year, school budgets, which were released yesterday, are no longer formula-based. They are based instead on last year’s budgets, although changes in enrollment or faculty are accommodated.

“Our feeling is that we are going to rely on additional resources from the state to bring the schools up,” the education department’s chief financial officer, Bruce Feig, said. “To shift resources from schools to other schools isn’t the best way to go.”

Mr. Feig said the department would wait to even out the funds until Albany complies with a recent court order in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case and allocates as much as $5.6 billion a year in additional education aid to the city.

The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said: “When you try to make everything new and your presumption is that you’re going to throw everything that’s old out, there are things that you throw out that you have to quietly resuscitate, and the school formula, I think, is one of those things.”

The department told principals yesterday that it would spend $800 million more in the coming year. But only about $60 million of that is going directly into individual schools, and it is solely to pay the extra costs of special education. The money will finance schools for the number of special-education classes, instead of the number of special-education students – the previous method, which critics said made it hard to pay for appropriate numbers of teachers.

Most of the extra education spending will pay central costs, including increased pension and debt-service expenditures as well as the mayor’s pet projects, such as new schools and early-childhood education.

Ms. Weingarten said the department should have allocated more money directly to schools but praised the department for avoiding the “stealth budget cuts” of last year.

The principals’ union president, Jill Levy, said the early budget would “allow our members to plan effectively for the upcoming school year.”