Wendy Lecker is a civil rights lawyer who specializes in issues related to education and children.
A new Education Week national survey of school districts reveals disturbing gaps between state and federal policy and the reality in American public schools.
The vast majority of districts report major funding problems. Most list rising special education costs and rising levels of needy students as their top challenges. They also doubt they are financially prepared for the next recession.
The most serious funding problem districts report is convincing elected officials to sufficiently fund public schools. They give both state and federal officials poor marks for their ability to understand school spending, and cite state legislators as the biggest obstacle to making spending decisions that best address student needs. Rather than address need, state legislators perpetuate myths about school spending and quality.
Scholars Sally Nuamah, Jamila Michener, and Domingo Morel have found that poor communities, like school district leaders, lose faith in elected officials, and worse, in democratic institutions, when they experience policies that exacerbate rather than respond to their challenges.
Recent research highlights the failure of federal and state leaders to grasp the reality facing public schools. The most pernicious failure is the refusal to recognize the connection between poverty, funding and educational opportunity.
A new study of the effect of the 2008 recession, by Kenneth Shores of Penn State University and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University, found that the economic downturn resulted in cuts in state and local school spending. Those spending cuts were associated with contemporaneous and persistent declines in student test scores.
Moreover, “school districts serving higher concentrations of low-income and minority students experienced greater declines in achievement from school-age exposure to the recession.”
Stanford education researcher Sean Reardon observes that test scores are a reflection of a difference in access to the opportunity to learn, affected by all circumstances in a child’s life, both in and outside of school. They often do not reflect school quality. Two recent analyses, from Ohio and North Carolina, emphasize this truth. Both found the state ratings of public schools, mostly based on test scores, track almost perfectly with school poverty.
Because children do not leave their life experiences at the schoolhouse doors, schools must have the tools to mitigate the effects of poverty in order to provide students with the opportunity to learn. National studies show that increased school spending improves academic and life outcomes — particularly for poor students.
Yet almost half the states still fund schools below recession levels. And a recent Urban Institute paper reveals that federal spending on education has dropped precipitously and is expected to keep dropping, despite rising student need. Since 2010, funding for Title I, the largest federal education program supporting children in poverty, dropped by $7 billion, as did funding for IDEA, the federal program for students with disabilities.
Rather than recognize that high-poverty schools need more tools, and thus more funding, to best serve their students, federal and state leaders mandate intervention strategies that are proven failures: school turnaround, school closures, and state takeovers of school districts.
A report from the National Education Policy Center shows that the poorer and less white a school district is, the more likely a state will aggressively intervene with these failed mandates.
Federal and state policies repeat a toxic cycle of disinvestment, punishment, then further disinvestment.
Neighborhood and school segregation compounds the inequity. Children of color are five to seven times more likely than white children to be concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. African American and Latinx children are also concentrated in high-poverty schools.
No wonder that school districts and poor communities have little faith in their elected officials.
Massachusetts is bucking the trend of denying the connection between investing in public schools and student outcomes. A new Massachusetts school funding bill commits to closing that state’s 1.5 billion dollar school funding gap. In supporting the bill, state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz acknowledged that “closing the achievement gap requires two times the investment for our poorest students if we are serious about doing it at scale.”
Connecticut Voices for Children reports that Connecticut’s recovery from the 2008 recession is more unequal than the national recovery, which was among the most unequal in U.S. history. Connecticut’s middle class is smaller and whiter than it was before the recession. Moreover, the census revealed that Connecticut is the only U.S. state where poverty increased in 2018. Our leaders should learn from Massachusetts. Investing in our neediest children, both inside and outside of school, will not only improve their outcomes, it may also restore faith in our elected officials.
Wendy Lecker is a columnist for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney at the Education Law Center.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Since 2010, funding for Title I, the largest federal education program supporting children in poverty, dropped by $7 billion, as did funding for IDEA, the federal program for students with disabilities.”
The trend in both the federal government and many states is to disinvest in public education. While at the same time, they expand charter schools under the pretense they are providing equity. This is a lie. Privatization results in winners and losers, and a big losers in the scheme are the poorest, neediest, most expensive to educate. These students are rejected by charters, and they wind up in public schools with large classes and few resources.
Title 1 has provided money for districts that serve poor students. Its intention is to provide districts with more resources for the poorest students. At the same time that the number of poor students are increasing, funding for Title 1 is being reduced. The Trump budget for 2020 cuts aid to public schools by 10%, with no increase for Title 1. He is also asking for a $5 billion dollars tax credit proposal so states can provide vouchers to private schools, even though the research on vouchers has shown it is a waste of money. Our education policy makes no sense.
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“Rather than recognize that high-poverty schools need more tools, and thus more funding…” — all a school needs, any school, is a place to congregate, a bunch of textbooks, a whiteboard, pencils and reams of paper. Really, a good teacher with a good curriculum armed with pencils and paper can do more than an average teacher armed with iPads and Google Classroom.
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What you are saying is that poverty does not affect student performance, a view refuted by decades of social science. Look at the scores on any standardized test. They are arrayed by family income. The richest kids get the highest scores, the poorest get the lowest scores. That’s because kids who do not have regular medical care, decent nutrition, safe housing, and educated parents are at a disadvantage compared to their peers who have them.
If you think poverty has no bearing on opportunity to learn, you are informed.
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Title 1 has been used to fund the salaries of teachers that provide compensatory instruction to ELLs, reading and math. In fact, this is one of the more effective ways to help students that are lagging behind. I cannot speak to other districts, but where I worked Title 1 spent most of its money on direct instruction.
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First, special education is a lot more expensive than regular ed. You need specialized teachers and other intervention specialists, smaller class sizes, often 1-1 aids, etc. That’s not cheap.
Second, the neediest children need more than education. They need nurses, counselors, etc. That’s not cheap either.
I agree that we don’t need fancy tech for the neediest children (or any children for that matter), but “a bunch of textbooks, a whiteboard, pencils and reams of paper” is quite simplistic.
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They need nurses, counselors, free breakfast and lunch (Trump just proposed cutting free meals for hundreds of thousands of kids, and, importantly, safe places they can go AFTER SCHOOL, where there are coaches and counselors and guards and they can play and study in safe environments. In other words, we need, in poor areas, places like the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of yore, with gyms, libraries, movies for the kids, and responsible adults around to keep them safe. We have to provide compensatory out-of-school environments for the poorest of our kids. Otherwise, we’re not going to crack this problem.
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I agree that our society should invest more in our neediest children. It is cost-effective, and the proper and wise thing to do.
We should be strengthening families, and take a more “holistic” approach to poverty.
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I agree. I know that when we help families, we help the children of those families.
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It’s a lot cheaper than the $30K+ per year per inmate to keep people in prison later on ($69K in New York State).
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One sees this in the textbook industry. The major K12 school publishers have shrunk to two–Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the former recently unloaded its US K-12 assets to an equity firm, Nexus Capital Management, in a fire sale, while the latter emerged from bankruptcy after taking on enormous debt when it was acquired by a consortium of equity firms. Both Pearson and HMH have experienced years of declining stock value because schools don’t have the money to buy new texts. Pearson plans to keep its toe in K12 via its assessment and virtual schools operations, in keeping with its Digital First strategy, which it is pursuing aggressively because pixels are cheaper than print. McGraw Hill is still in the K12 textbook business somewhat, but it’s a smaller player there, and it’s just announced a merger with Centgage, another big player in the college and reference market.
Basically, the K12 school textbook business has been terrible for quite some time. It’s been ruined by the quintuple whammy of
declining school funding, in real dollars;
decreased competition in which fewer companies divide up a smaller pie due to a number of forces, including national standards and insanely complex state adoption criteria that act as barriers to entry;
extraordinarily ill-conceived online versions of textbook programs;
componentitis and featuritis resulting from educational publishers competing by adding both until programs are ungodly, unnavigable messes;
and stupid “standards” that encourage, in ELA, incoherent, test-preppy curricula with random exercises on random selections of a “And Now for Something Completely Different” variety and, in math, developmentally inappropriate instruction in the early grades
Companies (or the equity firms that have scooped them up in fire sales) are betting on depersonalized learning because the product is cheaper to create and has pieces (underlying databases) with a longer shelf life. But the online learning stuff is generally pretty terrible. That’s a long story that I won’t go into here in what is already too long a post.
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Oh, and I left out the fact that the textbook companies started outsourcing their development–typesetting (composition), then writing and editing–offshore and to development houses that paid increasingly low wages to increasingly hack writers working with unbelievably complicated, micromanaged specifications driven not by content considerations but by the intricacies of their computer systems, so, where decades ago one could make a great living as a textbook writer or editor, now its starvation work in the gig economy.
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And the companies now get what they pay for. Crap for crap wages. But this doesn’t matter at all to the financial types who run them, who are driven by one thing and one thing only, these days–cutting costs in order to stay alive.
It’s an industry in shambles.
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The way out of this mess is to do away with state adoptions and national “standards” and return decision making about curricular materials to local districts so that smaller entrants to educational publishing can create high-quality, coherent, usable, innovative products and compete school by school, at the local level. We also need to ban publishers’ giveaways of textbook program components and reduce other barriers to entry for new, small educational publishers.
The alternative is going to be a One Ring to Rule Them All situation in which a couple big publishers provide godawful materials in digital only format.
Gates paid for the Common [sic] Core [sic] because he wanted one set of national “standards” to key depersonalized learning software to. This would inevitably lead to a monopoly situation in which one or two big companies provided online textbook products “at scale.”
And, of course, we need to start funding our public schools adequately and stop siphoning off their resources to fund a separate public charter school system.
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Bob (re: 1:03pm post), I so agree w/your “a way out of this mess.” And it’s doable; the digital revolution has made that possible. I don’t know if we can ever retrieve the decentralized, locally-gov’d, teacher-run school systems (gently steered by natl govt) that we once had. But it’s a goal to shoot for. A handful of Northern-Euro nations have achieved it. It’s commonplace to dismiss those comparisons on the grounds that they have ethnically-homogenous populations & low child poverty. But they’ve had steady incursion of immigrants & refugees for some years now. I can’t help thinking they’re better-positioned to accommodate even swift change: their funding is already set up to supplement pockets of poverty; their schools are expected to modify curriculum/ pedagogy to suit the local population; their govts focus on education & review local results regularly.
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Those locally-governed, decentralized school systems built this country. They were a beautiful thing. They tended to be quite conservative and quite similar because of social sanction and the habits of the tribe, but they also allowed for innovation. In the old days, an English teacher wasn’t a micromanaged robot.
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Without Wendy I would not have known about this study. Thanks to Diane R & Wendy
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it is sort of amazing that there would be any question about the need to spend more on the needy. The needy need more. That is how they got the name. Les Misérables. The old “Christian Socialist”, Victor Hugo, taught us why in the Nineteenth Century.
Who needs another study. I propose that we survey class sizes and offerings at private schools and suburban public schools. Then we mandate funding for all schools at that level paid for by a tax on those who have the money.
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“A report from the National Education Policy Center shows that the poorer and less white a school district is, the more likely a state will aggressively intervene with these failed mandates… Federal and state policies repeat a toxic cycle of disinvestment, punishment, then further disinvestment.” Wow, doesn’t that just say it all?
I’d love to just dump all the blame on the ed-reformers. But facts are, we’ve been doing this all along, haven’t we? 19thC formal ed was essentially just for the rich. Farming communities made do by pooling funds to a hire a young spinster at low wage to provide a few grades’ basics. Freed-slave tenant-farmers did something similar on a tiny scale w/their tiny wages. Once public schooling was widespread, it was funded entirely by local RE revenues right up until Title I 1965; poor people got poor schooling. Meanwhile our residential pattern of concentrating poor and minorities in huge pockets of poverty & near-poverty was cast in concrete during the industrial era, & Southerners were allowed to segregate blacks into dirt-poor schools throughout—so we’ve had whole swaths of generational poverty w/consequent low ed achievement pretty much from the get-go. By the time Title I et al came along, patterns were entrenched; supplemental funds attempted (unsuccessfully) to equalize, never to compensate.
Ed-reforms have been repulsive. They essentially represent a throwing up of the hands at difficulties created by poverty & reinforce repugnant stereotypes of the lazy poor who bring their poverty on themselves: if they can’t cut it, close their schools & give them a few bucks for a cheap alternative which is all they deserve.
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