laurencamera

Thanks for your question. The single most shocking piece of data we came across was the total amount of federal dollars – nearly $3 billion – that are supposed to be targeting concentrations of poor students but actually end up in wealthy school districts. It’s also shocking when schools with extremely high poverty rates get very little Title I money, especially in comparison to wealthier school districts. For example: a district in Mississippi with a child poverty rate above 50 percent is receiving similar Title I funding per child as a district in New Jersey that has a child poverty rate below 8 percent. You can compare districts using the table in the main story. It’s interesting to compare districts within states and sort the table by total Title I dollars or concentration of poverty.

We decided to pursue this story for a few different reasons, the biggest being a lot of attention (finally!) started being paid to school funding inequality. While most stories in the media focused on state and local funding inequity, we wanted to look at the federal government’s role. Title I is the pillar of the federal education law known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was passed back in 1965 during the Civil Rights era. We knew that the formula that distributes this money has always been a contentious topic in the halls of Congress and among education policy wonks. But no one in the media had taken a deep dive into exactly how Title I money is being disbursed and whether it’s being done fairly. We also knew our readers would appreciate being able to look up their specific school districts to see for themselves where they stand.

Great question. And you’re right, there are poor students in every single school district, including the rich ones. But schools in wealthier communities have larger budgets due to local and state funding and are better positioned to provide wraparound services and other important programs for low-income students without siphoning money from the limited Title I pot. As many education policy experts explained to us while reporting this story, it’s much better to be a poor kid in a wealthy school district than a rich student in a poor school district. Urban is not synonymous with rich. In fact, some neighborhoods in urban school districts represent some of the worst concentrations of poverty. As we document here, urban school districts typically receive the most in Title I funding.

And in the case of Camden, NJ and others like it, there has definitely been a lot of education funding blown on silver bullets, which the education community is unfortunately fond of.

One of the things we want people to understand about education funding is how complicated it can be to get resources to the school districts where it's most needed, despite the best intentions of politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle. One of the other things we want people to learn from this investigation is just how hard (but nevertheless important) it can be to fix generational poverty and concentrations of poverty. To be sure, there are poor students in every single school district. But for a number of reasons, it’s much harder to provide a great education to concentrations of poor students. As many education policy experts explained to us while reporting this story, it’s much better to be a poor kid in a wealthy school district than a rich student in a poor school district.