Ed Money Watch

Poor states, communities, and children persistently get the short end of the stick in school funding. Education spending policies at all levels-federal, state, and local-layer on inequities that disproportionately benefit high-wealth school districts and lead to large funding disparities between high- and low-poverty communities. A new report from Education Sector and the Center on Reinventing Public Education seeks to quantify the cumulative impacts of these inequities on local schools. The results are striking. Addressing these inequities should be a key priority for federal and state policymakers.

The Education Sector/Center on Reinventing Public Education report examines two elementary schools in neighboring states that serve similar populations but receive very different levels of federal, state, and local funding. Cameron Elementary in Fairfax County, Va., receives more than twice the per pupil funding Ponderosa Elementary in Cumberland County, N.C., receives even though both schools serve predominantly low-income populations in poorer sections of their respective counties. These funding disparities are the result of funding distribution structures that disproportionately benefit wealthier states, districts, and schools over poorer states, districts, and schools.

A new Pre-k Now report on pre-k finance highlights the increasing use of state school funding formulas as a vehicle for pre-k funding. When Pre-K Now produced a similar report in 2006, it identified only 6 states that funded pre-k through their state school funding formulas. The 2008 report identifies 11 states that do so, including some national leaders on pre-k.

This is good news. There are lots of benefits to using state school funding formulas to pay for pre-k. For starters, it's simple: States simply allow school districts and charter schools to receive state per-pupil funds for four-year-olds, as they already do for older students. Because state school funding formulas and the bureacratic systems to operate them already exist, this approach requires little in the way of additional bureacracy. That's particularly important as more states start thinking about scaling up relatively modest existing targeted pre-k programs: A grant program that works well when you're serving less than 10% of children--as more than half of states currently do--becomes a lot more unwieldy when you're trying to serve all 3- and 4-year-olds in a state. That's borne out by the fact that, of the top 10 states serving the most 4-year-olds in pre-k, 6 use the state school fudning formula to do so.

Early education programs fared poorly under the fiscal year 2008 omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Bush in late December. Of 9 federal programs that provide support for early education, only one—Title I—received a significant funding increase—$1 billion, bringing Title I funding to $13.9 billion for 2008. But, because Title I funds are used to improve education for disadvantaged students from preschool through high school, only a fraction of this increase will go to early education.

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The legislation significantly cuts funding for three early education programs:

• Cuts Reading First, which supports scientifically based literacy programs in kindergarten through third grade, by two-thirds, or $636 million;
• Cuts Even Start, which supports family literacy, parenting classes, and early education, cut by 20 percent, or $16 million;
• Eliminates the Early Childhood Educator Professional Development program.

Several other programs received level funding—a cut in real terms—or small cuts due to a 1.74% across the board recission for all programs. As a result, total funding for early education programs other than Title I fell by $677 million. These cuts exceed any likely increase in school districts’ early education spending as a result of Title I increases.