Follow-up: Title I Funding DOES NOT Make Rich States Richer!
In one of my earliest posts, I took on a myth created and shared by many DC Think Tanks that the Title I funding formula inappropriately favors “rich states” and school districts in urban areas.
This myth has its origins in a handful of policy papers and poorly constructed analyses, some of which eventually made into print – albeit in law review journals that tend to be light on reviewing quantitative evidence.
Today, after many conversations over the years, Lori Taylor of Texas A&M, Jay Chambers, Jesse Levin and Charles Blankenship of the American Institutes for Research and I finally published our article in the journal Education Finance and Policy in which we critique the arguments that Title I is making rich states richer. In short, much of confusion boils down to the mis-measurement of income and poverty, an issue I’ve discussed extensively on this blog.
The assertion from prior reports is that the Title I aid formula includes a number of critical flaws that ultimately lead to providing disproportionate funding to states that are relatively high income and can spend more than other states to begin with, and to school districts in urban and suburban areas, shorting the rural districts which on their face may appear to have comparable or even higher poverty in some cases. We summarize this literature as follows:
This myth has its origins in a handful of policy papers and poorly constructed analyses, some of which eventually made into print – albeit in law review journals that tend to be light on reviewing quantitative evidence.
Today, after many conversations over the years, Lori Taylor of Texas A&M, Jay Chambers, Jesse Levin and Charles Blankenship of the American Institutes for Research and I finally published our article in the journal Education Finance and Policy in which we critique the arguments that Title I is making rich states richer. In short, much of confusion boils down to the mis-measurement of income and poverty, an issue I’ve discussed extensively on this blog.
The assertion from prior reports is that the Title I aid formula includes a number of critical flaws that ultimately lead to providing disproportionate funding to states that are relatively high income and can spend more than other states to begin with, and to school districts in urban and suburban areas, shorting the rural districts which on their face may appear to have comparable or even higher poverty in some cases. We summarize this literature as follows: