The Beverly Hills, 90210 Guide to Title I Portability
This week marks the closest Congress has come to replacing the widely reviled No Child Left Behind Act since it officially expired in 2007. Democrats and Republicansare squabbling over the usual issues: high-stakes testing and whether kids should be able to opt out of it; how accountable teachers and schools should be to those test results; and, more broadly, how much control the federal government should have over education (consensus: not nearly as much).
But one of the most divisive issues under consideration, what’s known as Title I portability, or “financial backpacks,” is also one of the most abstruse. There’s a portability provision in the House bill that passed, barely, Wednesday night, but the subject has become such a flashpoint for Democrats that President Obama has threatened to veto any bill that includes it. The final bill almost certainly won’t, since the more moderate Senate bill still being debated has omitted any mention of portability, but it’s still worth understanding what exactly portability is and why it’s such a big deal.
First, a little background on Title I, which came into existence with the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, still the most sweeping federal education bill ever passed. (No Child Left Behind—ditto the House’s Student Success Act and the Senate’s Every Child Achieves Act now being debated—are all iterations of ESEA.) Because U.S. schools are mostly funded by property taxes, there have always been huge discrepancies between schools with a rich student body and schools with poorer, usually minority populations. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, Title I was designed to level the playing field by putting federal money in schools with the highest concentrations of poverty.
How Title I funds are allocated is extremely complicated, but basically, the states and districts distribute them by priority based on how many poor kids are in each school: The schools with the highest percentage of poor kids get the lion’s share of the federal money, while some schools that may qualify for Title I, but have a lower concentration of poverty, might get none.
Portability, which allows the money to follow the individual kids, wherever they end up, completely upends the original intent of Title I—and to show why, I’ll have to borrow a scenario from Beverly Hills, 90210, which is apt because the ranking Democrat on the education committee, Rep. Bobby Scott, frequently invokes the funding discrepancies between the Los Angeles Unified School District (which has a lot of poor kids) and the adjacent Beverly Hills Unified School District (which does not) to illustrate why Title I portability is a ruse.
Remember the Yale-obsessed editor of the Title I portability: A flawed House proposal would change education funding. Here's how Beverly Hills, 90210 explains it.: