ESEA Reauthorization: 5 Key Principles to Guide Consideration of any ESEA Title I Formula Change
Last year, the federal government spent more than $14 billion to help educate low-income students as part of Title I, Part A, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. For schools, particularly low-income schools, these federal investments make a huge difference. If Title I was used to only fund teachers, for instance, it would support the jobs of more than 200,000 educators.
But while federal education dollars bring many benefits for students, they are distributed in a way that is deeply unfair both between and within states. This unfairness stems from the following flaws in the allocation formula.
- It is overly complex and opaque. Title I today is allocated based on four separate formulas with conflicting incentives. State and local legislators and education officials have almost no way to know how much their allocation will change from year to year due to changes in district or state policy, population, or distribution of students living in poverty. This lack of transparency severally limits the formula from serving as an incentive for policy change or from enabling states and districts to plan for the future.
- It sends more money to wealthier states. Wealthier states have historically invested more heavily in education, and those investments are favored by the current Title I formula. This results in a system that compounds existing inequities by giving more to the haves than to the have nots. Furthermore, the formula’s emphasis on the number of children who live in poverty means that more affluent districts that serve only a handful of such children receive Title I dollars. This dilutes the pool, leaving fewer resources for those places with more concentrated poverty.
- It shows clear bias against rural states and mid-sized cities. As a result of this distortion, the so-called small state minimum, which gives more money to smaller states for no other reason than their small population, “states with small populations and low concentrations of poor children receive radically larger grants on a per-poor-child basis than states with larger populations, including those with substantial rural poverty.” What’s more, the formula prioritizes larger districts. Detroit, for instance, gets much more per student than Flint, Michigan, and Los Angeles gets more than Sacramento, California, due to the formula’s heavy weighting of large communities over mid-sized and rural communities.
To be clear, there is no perfect school funding formula. By definition, formulas distribute limited pots of money among diverse schools and districts, and most districts, if not all, could benefit from more resources. Formula decisions, in other words, force difficult trade-offs. Should the formula spread the funding to more students or leverage it most heavily among the neediest? Should it reward states and communities for investing in education, or should it compensate for the fact that they have not made such investments, which has real and often dire consequences for the students living in those communities? Should the formula fund communities with large concentrations of poor students or fund poor students in more socioeconomically diverse communities? These are difficult questions without easy answers.
The goal for every member of Congress—when considering modifying the Title I formula—should be to maximize public utility or the public good and to find the trade-off point where the greatest number of students receive the maximum boost to their life prospects.
The Center for American Progress proposes the following five principles to guide lawmakers as they consider these vital decisions.
1. Make the Title I formula more fair and transparent
Today, Title I, Part A, funds are distributed through four complex formulas: Basic Grants, Concentration Grants, Targeted Grants, and Education Incentive Finance Grants, or EIFG. These formulas have different eligibility requirements, weighting systems, and purposes. For example, the Education Finance Incentive formula rewards states that spend equally on poor and non-poor students alike. Other formulas do not.
This complexity makes it nearly impossible for policymakers, school system leaders, and the public to understand how money is distributed. It also makes it hard for the federal law to incentivize thoughtful actions at the state and local level since the reward system is so opaque. In order to fix this problem, the formulas should be condensed into a single, straightforward method of allocating funds. In short, dollars should go to schools in a fair and easy to understand manner based on a few simple factors that are predictable. This policy fix would 5 Key Principles to Guide Consideration of any ESEA Title I Formula Change | Center for American Progress:
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