National Coalition for Public EducationThe Federal Title I program provides funds to school districts in order to improve the education of economically disadvantaged students in grades K-12. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) wants to amend Title I funding so that the money is “portable,” allowing the funds to follow low-income students to their new public school.
The National Coalition for Public Education strongly opposes this idea and provides three reasons in an open letter to the Senator:
1) Ensuring the Title 1 money goes to the school where the impoverished child enrolls will lead to vouchers.
Put the tinfoil away. Ensuring that schools enrolling poor kids receive extra funding does not lead to vouchers.
2) It hurts the district’s ability to take advantage of “Economies of scale” to combine resources and help students.
Title I funding was created because there are serious problems in schools with high concentrations of poverty. To take maximize of “economies of scale” (the way the coalition argues) districts would need to keep economically-disadvantaged students concentrated in high-poverty schools, sustaining the problems Title 1 hopes to address.
3) It takes away from district’s ability to direct resources to public schools with high concentrations of poverty.
According to the left-of-center New America Foundation, $6.4 billion (or 45 percent of Title I funding), is distributed through the “Basic Grant Formula.” That formula requires districts to have a mere 2 percent economically disadvantaged student population. That low threshold means that pretty much every district is eligible for Title I funding. If funding high-poverty schools was the coalition’s real priority, why send the money through the districts first? The money should go where the needs are.
It makes one wonder if public-school organizations are less concerned with whether this money helps kids than they are with who (them) decides what to do with it.
