Federal Title I School Funding Needs Repair

The Rural School and Community Trust has begun a campaign to reform the Federal Title I funding formulas, under which the majority of federal funds for schools are distributed around the country. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is due for re-authorization and there is little doubt that Title I needs a fix.

Designed to assist schools and districts with high numbers and percentages of poor students, the four Title I formulae are currently biased in favor of large urban districts from high education spending states (read ‘wealthy’). These districts have high total numbers of low-income and poor students. This bias is at the expense of poor rural districts in less wealthy states (read ‘the South’). These districts have a higher proportion of students from low-income and poor households but fewer total numbers of poor and low-income students.

What the biases in the funding formulae mean is that rural school districts, especially those in the South, receive less federal money per poor and low-income child than the wealthier urban districts in wealthy states. It also leads to substantial variation within states, including North Carolina, with urban districts generally winners.

The Center for American Progress has an excellent 2009 report that explains the relatively complicated formulae in plain English. It is well worth a read.

The Rural Trust explained the goals of their campaign as follows:

The Formula Fairness Campaign aims to attack the unfairness in the Title I formula by exposing it, organizing rural people and other allies to protest it, and offering fair and reasonable remedies for the injustices it inflicts.

The Formula fairness campaign has two main objectives. One is to mitigate the damage done to rural schools, especially small, high poverty schools, by the infamous “number weighting” system that is built into the Title I formula.

Number weighting sends more money to large school districts, whether they are poor or not, at the expense of smaller districts, even if they are high-poverty. In all about $400 million is shifted from smaller to larger school districts. Some of the shift benefits high-poverty urban districts, but much of it benefits low-poverty suburban districts.

The second objective is to change how the federal government determines the amount of money per Title I student that goes to schools in a given state. Currently, that amount is based on how much, on average, each state spends per pupil on K-12 education, no matter how wealthy or poor the state is. States that can afford to spend a lot without imposing high taxes get more Title I money per student. Those that strain their tax base with high taxes but still can’t afford high levels of spending, get less Title I money.

These goals are laudable, any Title I reform must address the differences in education costs between states (i.e. the differences in teacher salaries) and should not discriminate against smaller districts with high percentages of poor students.