A Million Dollar Difference

The Loophole That Keeps High-Poverty Schools from Getting Equitable Resources

Cynthia Brown: "Most of the public thinks that poor kids and poor schools get extra money, but they don't."

50,000 American schools serve high-poverty areas ... Congress passed laws to provide them with extra funding.

Raegen Miller: "The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 marks the beginning of a federal role in funding K-12 education in the U.S."

Brown: "Its been regularly renewed ever six, seven, eight years."

This year, Congress will renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ... its most important provision is Title I, Part A.

Brown: "Title I, Part A is the major part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act."

Saba Bireda: "Title I-A provides federal funding to schools that have high numbers or high percentages of children living in poverty. Schools use funding for additional instructional services, for instance after-school and summer programs that can reinforce the regular school curriculum."

But there is a dangerous loophole in Title I.

Brown: "Before the federal money can come into a school, the district has to guarantee that it's spending as much on the average Title I school as on the average non-Title I school. Except from the beginning there was a loophole. When you're looking at these expenditures, you can exclude instructional salaries. Well, they make up almost 80 percent of the budget, so when you exclude that money, you're basically making the comparability provision meaningless."

High-poverty schools suffer most from this loophole.

Miller: "Instead of using actual dollars to account for the level of resources going to high-poverty and low-poverty schools, they use sort of abstract qualities like the ratio of students to teachers. Now, you could have the same ratio of students to teachers across all your schools, but really have quite different resources attached to those."

Brown: "Since we pay teachers in this country not on how well they perform, the older you are, the longer in service you've been as a teacher, the more money you're going to make."

Miller: "Teacher salary determines where most of the money goes, and if teachers in low-poverty schools have higher salaries, and teachers in high-poverty schools have lower salaries, which actually tends to be the pattern we see, then you have a noncomparable baseline upon which you're bringing in the Title I dollars."

Russlyn Ali: "We sam a million dollar difference nearly annually between what Grenada Hills, a school in the Valley of Los Angeles was spending on its teachers and what Locke, a school in South Central, was spending on its teachers."

What can we do to fix this broken law?

Brown: "The important thing is Congress needs to act."

Bireda: "Congressman Chaka Fattah has introduced a bill, the ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act, which would make important changes to the comparability provision."

Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA): "To the degree that we continue to have a disproportionate investment in these children's education, we're going to have disproportionate failure. You would be hard pressed in any of our large cities to find teachers who are teaching core subjects who majored and minored in those subjects."

Brown: "We know that a teacher can become a good teacher in two or three years. We could expand the school day so that you can have more hours. You could even, for your novice teachers, lower their class size so that they wouldn't have quite a difficult time in their first year or two of teaching."

Bireda: "Districts should also no longer be able to achieve comparability by comparing student-teacher ratios or just submitting district-wide salary schedules."

Brown: "You have to report the actual expenditures in schools so that you can look and be sure that low-poverty schools aren't getting more money than high-poverty schools, and they need to eliminate the exclusion of instructional salaries form the calculations."

Bireda: "Congress should implement the changes that Congressman Fattah has proposed in its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act."