Not long after corporate reform started in New York City, the Department of Education adopted a formula promoted by conservative think tanks called “fair student funding” or “weighted student funding.” The surface idea was that each child would have the money he or she deserved “strapped to his/her back.” (Sorry for the clumsy effort to be gender neutral.) The real purpose, from the point of view of those on the right, was to enable students to go to charter schools or maybe even voucher schools bringing their public dollars with them. After all it was only “fair.”
In New York City, the funding system was designed by Robert Gordon, an economist and reformer who now works for President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.
A reader in New York City examined how fair student funding was affecting the schools serving the neediest students. The answer: they get a raw deal.
Wouldn’t you think that in an effort to be fair, the DOE would attach MORE funding to students who have the greatest needs? It turns out that they aren’t even getting a fair deal.
The New York State Department of Education has expressed concern about New York City’s pattern of concentrating high needs students in specific schools. New York City has refused to acknowledge the merit of those concerns. In fact, the leaders of New York City’s schools place all responsibility on individual schools as in this recent story.
Blaming schools and teachers seems to have become the go-to strategy of high-level education bureaucrats. This is one way to avoid personal accountability. All they need to do is “evaluate” schools using standardized exams and manage their “portfolio” of schools using a range of punitive measures. We decided to look at one area where these bureaucrats can’t deny their role in helping schools either ameliorate or worsen the effects of poverty on kids. Namely, how does the New York City Department of Education fund the richest and poorest schools? As can be seen in the charts below these bureaucrats have decided to fund schools in ways that increase these inequities. The richest 10 elementary/middle schools (as measured by the percent of students who are eligible to receive free lunch) receive an average of 89.1% of the funds they are entitled to by the city’s own formula. On the other hand, the poorest 10 schools receive an average of 82.7% of the funds they are entitled to. The range of values also favors the richest schools. None of them receive less than 86% of their funding formula. Some of the poorest schools, on the other hand, receive 22% less money than they would be entitled to under the city’s “Fair” Student Funding formula.
Richest Schools
|
% of Fair Student Funding Actually Received |
School Name |
% of Students Free Lunch |
| 90.68 | Special Music School |
3.7% |
| 88.52 | P.S. 006 Lillie D. Blake |
4.6% |
| 89.34 | The Anderson School |
4.6% |
| 88.08 | P.S. 77 Lower Lab School |
5.7% |
| 86.09 | P.S. 234 Independence School |
6.4% |
| 93.07 | P.S. 098 The Douglaston School |
6.4% |
| 87.23 | P.S. 89 |
6.7% |
| 90.89 | BATTERY PARK CITY SCHOOL |
7.4% |
| 88.1 | P.S. 041 Greenwich Village |
7.9% |
| 89.16 | P.S. 290 Manhattan New School |
9.3% |
Poorest Schools
|
% of Fair Student Funding Actually Received |
School Name |
% of Students Free Lunch |
| 85.4 | P.S. 167 The Parkway |
98.9% |
| 79.35 | P.S. 199X – The Shakespeare School |
99.1% |
| 78.81 | P.S. 115 Alexander Humboldt |
99.5% |
| 80.14 | M.S. 302 Luisa Dessus Cruz |
99.6% |
| 102.67 | P.S. 034 Franklin D. Roosevelt |
99.7% |
| Closed | M.S. 321 – Minerva |
100.0% |
| 84.76 | P.S. 025 Bilingual School |
100.0% |
| 78.57 | P.S. 230 Dr Roland N. Patterson |
100.0% |
| 78.02 | I.S. X303 Leadership & Community Service |
100.0% |
| 79.46 | P.S. 291 |
100.0% |
Perhaps when these bureaucrats announce that “poverty is not destiny” they could explain why they insist on sending poor kids to schools that they have deliberately impoverished through their own decisions. Do they feel that schools with poor kids don’t deserve the same funding as schools with rich kids?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The disparities you track are real, but they do no account for what might be even greater disparities caused by the inequities of PTA funding of schools. The WNYC/NYTimes Schoolbook did a series on this. http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/06/14/a-parent-warns-focus-on-fund-raising-lets-government-off-the-hook/?scp=8&sq=pta&st=cse Class and racial segregation and high rates of poverty are endemic to NYC’s and the nation’s school systems and must be addressed if our nation wants to confront the achievement gaps in education. I am curious if other cities, states or nations allow parents to fund schools through PTAs the way that NYC does.
The point of that article was that the government should be funding ALL public schools. Those fortunate enough to have the resources to supplement their children’s schools, of course, will always do this, but it only widens the achievement gap because many working parents cannot afford to do the same. Public schools should be funded so that ALL children can get a well rounded education including, music, art and drama. Parents should hold the government accountable.
Perhaps they want to close the public schools? I wonder, could that be it?
You’d think it would be blatantly obvious by now that market dynamics is very good at amplifying inequalities but very poor at guaranteeing equal access to public resources.
But nooooo, the same old con artists just keep hawking the same old con games and ever more cynical neo-con games — when anyone who’s been paying attention knows that market systems are just another way of sucking up cash and control from the people doing the educating and the people needing the educating to the bank accounts of absentee CEOs, corporate coffers, and the vampire hordes of financial finaglers.
Poverty is not destiny; it’s policy.
It’s not policy, unless it’s personal policy. People can be unemployed, buit they have family, friends and community to assist in their time of need.
It is interesting that when the conservatives talk about “reform” or “fair” what they are saying is really just the opposite. It about protecting the top and weaken the rest.
I visited this blog because recently I went to a NYC DOE forum where a candidate for the citywide council on high schools was running on a platform to drastically cut funding to the “portfolio” high schools by as much as 30% and transferring that money to poorer high schools. So in doing my research I found this and other articles which refer to the FSF formula and the disparity between schools in their basic funding. But on closer inspection, this is a really misleading blog entry. Why? Because if you do the math (and I did the very simplest math) of dividing the actual money each school gets by number of pupils registered, the differential is staggering and not in the way you suggest. For example, I picked random schools from your list above: P.S 290 (a “rich” school) gets $6415 per pupil; P.S. 167 (a “poor” school) gets $10,277 per pupil. So while true that they may be getting less from FSF — and also true that their needs are greater in the area of student support, special ed, etc.— FSF actually is NOT hurting the poorer schools. When I compared the high schools I found exactly the same thing (Stuyvesant, a “portfolio” school: $5,538 per pupil. High School of Graphic Communications: $9701 per pupil.) That’s a drastic difference and this blog post really misrepresents the reality. I’ve been a public school parent for 15 years and the truly sad thing is when public schools (and their parents and teachers and administrators) are pitted against each other fighting for the scraps left over after wave after wave of successive budget cuts. And I think this article fans those flames. I don’t blame the formula. I am horrified that someone running for the Citywide Council would do so on a platform of cutting funding to OTHER public schools. And I really hate the “rich” vs. “poor” public school talk. We are all public school parents and most of us believe in good, strong public education. And we are all hurting. But it’s not FSF. It’s City Hall, Albany, and Washington where our problems lie.