Low-Income Students

Last weekend the Obama Administration released its “Blueprint for Reform,” a document that discusses the president’s proposal for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). On the whole, the document provides some additional, though hardly thorough, details for programs the Administration already alluded to in its fiscal year 2011 budget request. These include the consolidation of several K-12 education programs and the inclusion of a state definition of a “highly effective” teacher and principal as part of the accountability structure. But the document also briefly mentions, though provides no specifics on, a provision that has recently been overlooked in President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s discussion of ESEA reauthorization: Title I comparability.

Comparability refers to a current provision of Title I that requires school districts to provide equitable state and local resources to both their low-income, Title I schools and their higher-income, non-Title I schools. Theoretically, this provision ensures that any federal Title I funds are used to provide additional services to low-income students on top of the baseline provided through state and local funds.

However, current law allows school districts to demonstrate comparability through methods that deeply obscure the amount of state and local funds Title I schools actually receive. For example, districts can demonstrate comparability by comparing student-instructional staff ratios between Title I and non-Title I schools or presenting the federal government with a district-wide salary schedule that demonstrates that all teachers with similar qualification earn the same amount of money across the district. These current methods overlook the variation in teacher pay due to years of experience, a significant factor in teacher salaries. In addition, it blurs the distinction between certified teachers and instructional staff in general, which could include teacher aides and other uncertified staff.

Because more experienced, and therefore higher paid teachers tend to work in higher-income schools, low-income, Title I schools employ primarily less experienced, lower-paid teachers. As a result, higher-income schools receive a greater share of state and local funds to pay for their teachers than low-income schools. Without a dramatic overhaul of the comparability provision, higher-income schools will continue to monopolize state and local resources, short changing low-income students and schools.

Unfortunately, the “Blueprint” is short on specifics for teacher comparability. It only says: “Over time, districts will be required to ensure that their high-poverty schools receive state and local funding levels (for personnel and relevant nonpersonnel expenditures) comparable to those received by their low-poverty schools.”

While this statement does seem to suggest that actual monetary expenditures will be required to demonstrate comparability, it does not clarify what expenditures exactly that will include. Without clearly specifying that districts must demonstrate comparability by including variation in teacher pay as a result of years of experience, rather than student-instructional staff ratios or salary schedules, the Obama Administration leaves these details up to Congress and leaves low-income students vulnerable. Past attempts to strengthen the comparability provision have been wildly unpopular with teachers unions and any significant improvements are likely to be hard won. But including a stronger version of comparability in ESEA reauthorization is an important step towards bolstering Title I schools and ensuring that they have the strongest teaching staff possible.

Read this report to learn about the Federal Education Budget Project’s recommendations for strengthening comparability.

These days, stakeholders across the education arena are talking about the nation’s low high school graduation rates. According to an Education Week publication, three out of every ten high school students do not graduate on time. Thus far, the Obama Administration has talked about activities that seek to prevent students from dropping out in the first place like individualized learning plans and at risk indicators. But little has been said about pulling students that have already dropped out back into high school to complete their degree or even enter college until now. Last week, Senator Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) office held a briefing about the RAISE UP Act, a program in the works that would seek to do just that.

RAISE UP, short for Reengaging Americans in Serious Education by Uniting Programs, would create a $1 billion program to form community partnerships that would engage in high school dropout recovery efforts. It is based on a now-defunct federal program called Youth Opportunity Grants.

More than ten years ago, the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 included funding for a five year, $1 billion competitive grant program called Youth Opportunity Grants. This program provided financial support for 36 locally based programs that aimed to increase employment, high school graduation, and college enrollment rates among disconnected youth in urban, rural, and other high poverty areas like Native American reservations. Over the program’s five years of operation, more than 90,000 disconnected youth received services. Since the federally-supported program expired in 2005, many of the 36 programs have continued to exist but with much smaller budgets in the absence of federal funds.

The anecdotal evidence supporting the Youth Opportunity Grant (YO) program is compelling. At a briefing on Capitol Hill last week, several program alumni spoke about their successes as a result of participation in a YO program. But the evidence behind the program is more than anecdotal. A full evaluation completed in 2007 found that YO increased labor force participation rates and increased high school attainment levels among certain populations. Additionally, YO programs were credited with creating a “safe space for young people, quality youth and adult relationships, enhanced training and education services, and opportunities to be productive.”

Given these positive outcomes, it’s surprising that the Department of Labor did not extend the YO program after 2005 even with its hefty price tag (YO last received federal funding in fiscal year 2003 due to cuts and reorganization in the Department of Labor’s budget). However, a smaller but somewhat similar federal program known as YouthBuild was started in 2006 and provides similar opportunities at a much smaller scale. YouthBuild serves just under 6,000 youth every year.

RAISE UP would create a competitive grant program similar to the Youth Opportunity Grants to address the 8 percent of youth that are neither in school nor working. And while the Stabenow program is still in the initial phases – it has yet to reach the Senate floor – it is one of the first real efforts this Congress has undertaken to address youth after they have left the traditional education system. Will Congress rally around this issue? Are community partnerships the best way to address high school dropout recovery? What are some alternatives to this approach?

Ed Money Watch will be keeping a close eye on this program and others that directly attempt to bring high school dropouts back into the system.

Today, the Fordham Foundation released a report titled “America’s Private Public Schools” that describes the phenomenon of public schools that serve virtually no poor students.[1] The four states with the highest proportions of private public schools are New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Arizona. The first three states also have relatively low free and reduced price lunch participation rates (less than 30 percent) and poverty rates (11 percent or less). Arizona, however, is the outlier. Though 12 percent of schools in Arizona are considered private public schools through this analysis, nearly 40 percent of Arizona public school students participate in FRPL and nearly 20 percent live at or below the poverty line.

But what do high proportions of private public schools, or schools that serve few poor students, mean for state Title I allocations? Title I is the largest federal K-12 education program that aims to provide additional funds for services for low income students. Our analysis, described below, suggests that states with large concentrations of private public schools can feasibly get large amounts of Title I funding despite low overall poverty rates. This is counterintuitive because significant numbers of schools in these states serve virtually no poor students. However, a deeper look suggests that high concentrations of poverty in certain areas in these states may partially explain these patterns.

For our analysis, we used Federal Education Budget Project data on state demographics and federal funding in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Arizona to calculate Title I distributions per poor student in each state. Given the first three states’ relatively low poverty rates (ranking 49^th, 46^th and 47^th, respectively), one would assume that they would receive relatively low Title I allocations per poor student. However, that is not necessarily the case. In 2008, Massachusetts received the 15^th highest per poor student Title I allocation in the country, while New Jersey received the 18^th and Connecticut received the 22^nd.

Arizona’s Title I allocation, on the other hand, is more closely aligned with the size of its impoverished population. Arizona had the 24^th highest concentration of poor students and received the 25^th highest per poor student Title I allocation.

However, examining Title I distributions alone overlooks the role that poverty concentrations – where certain areas within a state serve a large proportion of impoverished students while other areas do not – play in Title I distributions. Typically, schools and districts with high poverty concentrations relative to their state average, receive more Title I funding per pupil than schools and districts with low concentrations because of provisions in some Title I funding formulas. Because low-income schools and districts typically receive less state and local funding than high income schools, we can get a sense of whether high poverty concentrations exist in a state through an indicator calculated by the Department of Education called School Finance Inequity. This indicator represents the degree to which schools within a state are equitably funded, assigning more equitable states a low value, and less equitable states a high value.

According to 2007 data, Massachusetts was the 4^th most inequitable state in the country, indicating that there are likely areas of high and low concentrations of poverty in the state and at least partially explaining the high percentage of private public schools and high Title I allocations. However, in Massachusetts, this high rate of inequity is not the result of under-funding poor districts. Instead, Massachusetts has a progressive education funding formula that provides additional funds for poor districts resulting in inequities that actually favor poor schools.

The other three states are somewhat more equitable than Massachusetts, though still likely have areas of high poverty concentrations that are obscured by other considerations in state funding mechanisms. New Jersey and Arizona[2] were the 11^th and 14^th most inequitable states, while Connecticut was the 25^th most inequitable.

The Fordham report reveals an important and rarely-mentioned aspect of the public school system – public schools that serve few, if any, poor students. Although these schools serve only 4 percent of the public school population, we need to better understand how they affect Title I distributions in their states and school districts.

Yesterday, Ed Week reported on a conference hosted by Teachers College at Columbia University and the Campaign for Educational Equity about the impact of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds on low-income students. The findings, Ed Week journalist Michele McNeil notes, were less than promising. Most researchers found that the use of ARRA funds has actually increased inequities in educational services in many states and will have significant consequences moving forward.

A study by Michael Rebell, Jessica Wolff, and Daniel Yaverbaum titled “Stimulating Equity? A Preliminary Analysis of the Impact of the Federal Stimulus Act on Educational Opportunity” focuses in part on the four reform goals (improving teacher distribution, student data systems, standards and assessments, and support for struggling schools) promoted by the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), a $48.6 billion fund to help fill gaps in state education budgets. Specifically, $39.8 billion of those funds -- called Education Stabilization Funds – must be distributed directly to school districts through each state's primary education funding formula. The study finds that few states, if any, have done anything to directly support the reform goals using Education Stabilization Funds. In fact, the authors state, “…our stark finding was that no state in fact reserved any of its ESF funding for new initiatives in the four reform areas.”

While this finding sounds significant and damning for Congress' and the Department of Education’s attempt to stimulate reform through ARRA funds, it misses a key aspect of the Education Stabilization Funds: Department of Education guidance on the use of these funds specifically stated that all Education Stabilization Funds must be distributed directly to school districts and that governors could not, in any way, dictate how the funds were used at the district level.

Given this restriction on the use of funds, it is clear why no state reserved any Education Stabilization Funds for reform uses – they simply were not allowed to under regulations developed by the Department of Education. However, state governors could have used the remaining $8.8 billion of the SFSF, known as Government Services Funds, to support any of the reform goals. In fact, according to their Phase 1 SFSF applications, some states intended to do just that. Whether that promise will become reality remains to be seen.

It is increasingly becoming clear that the ARRA did not contain sufficient restrictions or requirements to compel states to put significant funds behind reform efforts. But as we’ve discussed before, reform was not the ultimate goal of the ARRA – saving jobs and maintain education services was.

Last week the Center for American Progress (CAP) released Bitter Pill, Better Formula, its second report on the funding formulas used under Title I, Part A, the largest federal K-12 education program. Funding for Title I, Part A ($14.5 billion in 2010) is currently distributed via four separate formulas defined in federal law. The formulas were designed by Congress mainly to distribute funding to school districts based on the number or concentration of students living in poverty, but other factors are also included in the calculations, such as hold-harmless provisions, small-state minimums, and per-pupil expenditures.

In the new report, CAP agues that Congress should reform the Title I, Part A formulas using a single, simplified calculation that would increase the relationship between the funding states and school districts receive and the concentration of students in poverty. As authors Cynthia Brown and Raegan Miller note, the new formula would require some significant political will because it would create winners and losers.

The proposed formula draws primarily from the two most targeted Title I, Part A formulas, Targeted and Education Finance Incentive, and refines some of the measures used in each formula. The formula would only allocate Title I funds to school districts that educate 10 or more children living in poverty and who make up at least 5 percent of the district’s total population. It would distribute funds based on a weighted measure of the concentration of school age children living in families below the poverty line, rather than raw counts of children living in poverty that are used under some of the current formulas. The proposed formula also would include a measure of state fiscal effort for education that takes into account total state expenditure on education (rather than per pupil expenditure) and total personal income (rather than per capita personal income). Finally, the proposed formula would include a revised hold-harmless provision that limits the size of Title I funding increases or decreases based on the concentrations of children in poverty.

Interestingly, Brown and Miller’s proposed formula would not include a measure of equity for school funding within states. Under the current Title I Educational Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) formula, states that equitably fund their school districts receive additional funds. However, the authors claim that this current provision penalizes states that provide more funding to low income school districts than to higher income districts. Eliminating this provision, the authors argue, would encourage states to continue to provide additional funds to needy districts.

Such drastic changes to the Title I, Part A formula would come at a cost for some states and school districts. For example, the proposed formula would take away significant funding from small rural states like Wyoming. Some small states currently enjoy large per poor student allocations under Title I, Part A because they are guaranteed minimum funding amounts each year. Similarly, large school districts that educate significant numbers of poor students, but whose poor populations are not a large share of the total population, would also see drops in funding per poor student. The proposed formula would only take into account concentrations of impoverished students, not absolute numbers.

The changes, however, would free up Title I, Part A funds for states and school districts that have traditionally been overlooked by current formulas. For example, southern and western states would receive more funding per poor pupil under the proposed formula because they would no longer be penalized for lower per pupil education spending. Small and medium sized school districts with significant concentrations of poor students would also gain more funding because the formula would target funds to high concentrations of low-income students regardless of the absolute number of such students in a district.

While the details of the proposed Title I formula are controversial, the CAP report will certainly make it harder for anyone to defend unfair Title I formulas that divert funds from states and school districts most indeed of extra assistance. At a minimum, the new report shows that Congress needs to prioritiz reforming the Title I formulas when it reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year. Ed Money Watch will be following the details as they unfold.

In this month’s issue of the Title I Monitor (subscription needed), former Congressional Research Service analyst Wayne Riddle describes the effect new 2008 Census poverty data will have on Title I State Grants in 2010.[1] He finds that though some states experienced significant changes in the number of school-age children living in poverty from 2007 to 2008, the impact of these changes on actual Title I allocations will be small. This occurs because Title I formulas take into account how a state’s share of the impoverished population changes relative to other states’ shares, not how a state’s impoverished population changed independently.

Federal Title I funding is subject to the annual appropriations process. As a result, state allocations are based on shares of a fixed level of funding set each year that does not adjust to the number of eligible children. This means that if a state experiences a 5 percent increase in the impoverished population from 2007 to 2008, its Title I allocation may actually drop because the overall increase in the impoverished population was 7 percent across the country.

The actual changes in school age poverty counts are somewhat more complicated. Some states, such as Florida, Arizona, Illinois, and California, experienced increases of 6 percent or more in their impoverished populations from 2007 to 2008. However, the percentage change in each state’s share of the overall number of impoverished students was smaller than the actual growth. For example, even though Florida’s impoverished population grew 7.4 percent, its share of the total impoverished population only increased by 6.6 percent. This means that the increase in Florida’s Title I allocation for 2010 will not be as large as its increase in poor students.

Conversely, states whose impoverished populations shrunk significantly, such as Alabama, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Wyoming, experienced an even larger drop in their share of the country’s total impoverished population. For example, Massachusetts saw a 10.4 percent decrease in the number of students living in poverty. However, it saw an 11.4 percent decrease in its total share of the impoverished population. As a result, Massachusetts will experience a decrease in its Title I allocation for 2010 that is larger than the drop in the number of poor students.

These changes, while complicated on the surface, could spell trouble for states with rapidly growing poor populations. If the growth in Title I allocations does not keep pace with the growth in the number of poor students, schools may be unable to provide some services for these needy populations over time. Additionally, the lag in Census poverty data – two years at this point – means that the allocation of federal funds cannot be immediately responsive to economic disruptions like the current fiscal crisis.

These issues, as well as other pressing problems with the current iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, should be tackled during the reauthorization process. Now, more than ever, we need flexible and responsive federal education programs.

The Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, recently made available updated state and district-level student demographic data on its website http://www.edbudgetproject.org. FEBP maintains an extensive database of state and school district level funding, demographic, and achievement data that is continuously updated as new information becomes available.

Now users can view, download, and compare student demographics including enrollment, race, poverty, and participation in special programs in 2008 for all 50 states and nearly 14,000 school districts in the country. The race, program participation, and enrollment data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data while student poverty comes from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program.

These new data can help users understand how federal funds for various programs are distributed among states and school districts. For example, a user can tell an interesting story about the distribution of Title I funds in 2008 using the new demographic data and the custom comparison function available on the website.

The custom comparison function allows a user to select a particular school district of interest and then compare it to similar school districts within the state or other states. In one such case, we selected Cheektowaga-Maryvale Union Free School District in New York state and compared it to other districts in New York with student enrollment within 10 percent of Cheektowaga-Maryvale. Additionally, we asked the comparison tool to display each district’s 2008 student poverty rate, free and reduced price lunch enrollment rate, and Title I funding. See display below:

We found that districts with similar student poverty rates did not always receive similar amounts of Title I funding. For example, Cheetowaga-Maryvale received slightly less than $345,000 in Title I funds in 2008 while Phoenix Central School District received more than $514,000. This disparity is surprising because both districts are similarly sized (2,354 versus 2,329) and have similar poverty rates (12.2 percent versus 12.8 percent). As we have explained in the past (see complete post here), these variations are due to complexities in the Title I formulas that blur the relationship between poverty and Title I funding.

We hope that these new data, and the funding, demographic, and achievement data we will continue to add to the Federal Education Budget Project website, are helpful as Congress begins to discuss reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and other education-related programs. Check out the new data here.

In 1998, the New Jersey Supreme Court took a then-unprecedented step. It ordered the state to provide high-quality pre-Kindergarten programs to all 3- and 4-year-old children in 31of the state’s highest poverty districts, also known as Abbott districts after the long-running Abbott v. Burke school finance case.

The dismal state of America's high school graduation rates - less than 75 percent nationally and below 50 percent in some areas - has become a key federal public policy issue in the last decade. Existing federal programs, including TRIO and GEAR UP, already seek to improve high school graduation and college going rates in underserved populations. But recent developments, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, and President Obama's 2010 Budget Request, have brought new high school intervention programs to the table. Are these programs really all that different?

In July we analyzed funding for K-12 school facilities in the student loan reform bill, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, as passed by the House Education and Labor Committee. The full House passed the bill in September and preserved the $2.0 billion per year school repair program. Although the Senate has not yet acted on a similar student loan reform bill, a version drafted by the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee was leaked a couple of months ago. The leaked bill suggests the Senate is headed in a different direction than the House when it comes to funding school facilities construction.

Both of these pieces of legislation provide a glimpse into the federal government's first major foray into directly funding K-12 school facilities and neither propose an insignificant amount of money. The most striking difference between the two versions is that the House includes a two-year, formula-based investment in K-12 school facilities, and the Senate bill creates a five year competitive program for K-12 school repair, renovation, and construction.