A new Center for American Progress report on portable federal funding for low-income students misses the mark on the issue of school choice. According to the report, if students living in poverty can choose to take their federal funding to a better school district, low-income districts might lose some money.
The point of portable funding isn’t for districts to get money, it’s to help students get a better education.
As the report says, “the challenges that low-income students face are significantly greater when the majority of their classmates are also low income.” But portable funding helps impoverished students move into better-performing schools without badly hurting those who remain.
“If anything, the CAP report is an argument to double-down on portability,” Lisa Snell, the director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “If they really want equity for kids, they shouldn’t be looking at the money following kids into districts, they should look at where the kids land.”
Portable education funding is up for debate as education committee leaders in Congress look to fix No Child Left Behind and reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Under Title I of the act, four formulas distribute federal funds to high-poverty school districts.
Snell explained that Title I funding is often distributed inequitably among the schools in a given district. Child poverty rates can vary significantly in larger school districts, and a given amount of funding may go toward the wealthy areas instead of poverty-stricken ones. Staffing is frequently determined by seniority, and older teachers who command higher salaries often prefer wealthy schools to impoverished ones.
“If you could make [Title I funding] portable, weight it based on where the kids actually land and their concentrations of poverty and do it at the school level, you would actually take care of all the objections that CAP has, you would make it much more equitable, and you would actually solve for the inequity that’s actually caused by different levels of teacher experience or staffing, because that’s really where these huge inequities come in,” Snell said.
If low-income school districts end up losing federal money on portability, it won’t be much. The report notes that school districts with a child poverty rate above 30 percent average $12,509 in total revenue per pupil. By the authors’ estimates, these schools would lose $86 per student on average, or less than one percent of funding. Giving students trapped in failing schools an opportunity for better education is well worth 0.7 percent of funding.
Portable funding to traditional public or charter schools is included in an education bill introduced by House education committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn. Kline’s bill would also expand support for charter schools and return some federal education power back to the states, among other reforms.
Title I funding portability was included in an early discussion draft of a bill by Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. On Friday, Alexander and Ranking Member Patty Murray, D-Wash., agreed to start the legislative process over, apparently nixing the Alexander draft.
