It's Time to Take Title I ESEA Back to Its Anti-Poverty Roots

_{U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., center, shares lunch with 7-year-old Sigifredo Orona, left, and 8-year-old Michael Zamarano during an appearance at Coronado Hills Elementary School in the north Denver suburb of Thornton, Colo., on Tuesday, April 6, 2010. (AP)}

RCEd Commentary

At long last, reauthorization of the broken No Child Left Behind Act seems within reach with the bipartisan Every Child Achieves Act. But the Full Educational Opportunity Act introduced by Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) Monday does not rise to the challenge of providing more resources for the neediest children.

Throughout the entire reauthorization process, debate has raged over at what point federal laws—particularly when it comes to standards and accountability—constitute overreach and infringe on states’ rights.

The unique potential of the federal role, however, lies in its ability to give out money across state lines. Much more of the variation in school district-level spending per-pupil lies between states, not within them, and only the federal government can address the unequal distribution of resources across states. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) worked hard to achieve bipartisan support on what seemed an impossible issue. It is still more challenging to garner such support for tackling the big problem the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965, and especially its Title I program, was meant to solve: the need to provide more resources for the neediest kids. Now is a rare window in which Congress can rise to this challenge.

Since ESEA was passed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the program has been criticized for spreading funds too thinly. Though Title I is called a “compensatory education” program, more than 95 percent of school districts participate. Over half of public school students nationally are eligible for free lunch or reduced-priced lunch, yet even districts with just 1 percent of students eligible receive Title I funds.

These numbers would not substantively change with the ECA. It is far more damaging for poor kids to live and go to school where they are surrounded by poverty, rather than in economically mixed settings, but it has proven politically difficult to increase the concentration of Title I funds in the poorest districts. This would necessarily disproportionately benefit a small share of districts, while majority votes require a majority of “winners.”

Any proposed change to the formula naturally yields requests for “winner and losers” analyses from the Congressional Research Service. These analyses show allocations from one proposed formula at a time, and compare it to the status quo. Legislators representing the poorest school districts might be pleased their districts “win” by getting larger Title I allocations with proposed changes than under the current law. The pernicious part is what they won’t see—that they could have won bigger if the law ceased to direct billions of dollars to school districts with low concentrations of poverty.

The ECA in its current form is a missed opportunity to clean up the impenetrable mess of a formula—or, rather, formulas, as there are currently four—distributing Title I Part A funds and target federal funds to areas with high concentrations of poverty. Helping places with high poverty requires giving those places more Title I funds per poor child. And with a set appropriation, this means lots of losers. Finding the political will to stand up for poor kids even if your district loses is really hard. Luckily, writing a formula that turns Title I into the compensatory program it was meant to be is far easier. The Targeted Grants under the current structure of Title I provide an example, weighting the grant amount per eligible pupil so that it is higher in districts with greater concentrations of poverty. Even those “targeted” grants have a low bar, sending funds to districts with only 5 percent of their students eligible for free or reduced priced lunch.

The Full Educational Opportunity Act seeks to address this problem but doesn’t actually fix it. Sen. Bennet says it considers “concentrations of poverty while treating kids across the country more equitably.” The problem is that it only considers concentrations of poverty in the formula for dividing the allocation each state gets among that one state’s school districts. The important first step—determining the size of each state’s pie—does not take concentrations of poverty into account. So while a quick read of their formula seems to favor the poorest places, in practice, what a district gets depends not just on its own poverty level and rate, but, without logic or transparency, on how poor kids in the rest of its state are spread across school districts.

Most people—even wonky ones—don’t think the formula is the interesting part of ESEA. But stepping up for the kids who need our help most requires a formula that targets scarce federal resources to them, no matter which state they live in. Who knows when we’ll have another chance?