lindseyrogerscook

There has been many proposed solutions that could lead to more of the funding going to districts with higher concentrations of poverty. Here are some examples: * Increase the cut-off point for when a district can't receive funds. Right now, it is extremely low. If a district has a 2 percent poverty rate or 10 or more poor students, it can receive funds. * Eliminate the part of the formula that takes into consideration how much states spend per pupil. Originally this was meant to incentive states to increase their school funding, but ended up rewarding rich states in many examples. * Give more weight to the share of poor kids (the poverty rate) as opposed to taking into consideration the poverty rate or the number of poor kids. This currently benefits large district who may have thousands of poor kids, but a very small poverty rate because of the number of children in the district.

We included data on how some of the proposals would affect local school districts. You can see it in the table here.

Southern states, in particular, have been affected negatively by the way the formula is now. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1. The Southern states don't have as many super large urban centers (think NYC, LA, Chicago) so they don't benefit greatly from the emphasis on number of poor kids over concentration of poverty. 2. Of the states, Southern states are more likely to have high concentrations of poverty, particularly rural poverty. 3. Southern states, think Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, have rural school districts but don't benefit from the small state minimum -- which is meant to help rural states.

On the other side of the coin, states that do meet what's known as the "small state minimum," particularly states with higher education budgets that don't have state-wide poverty (think Connecticut, Delaware) typically benefit from how the formula is currently written.

In the main story, we have a scatterplot where you can see the poverty rate versus Title I money per poor child at a state level. From that chart, it is really clear which states are benefiting and which states are getting short-changed.

Title I doesn't control for local cost differences currently. We didn't address this in our story, but I think it's definitely something that would be interesting to look at. Several groups have called for something called the comparable wage index to be a factor in the formula, for the reasons you describe.

In terms of the politics, it varies, which interestingly enough ensures that the issue spans the aisle. It's more about the size of the district, the state and all the other factors that determine the formula, if the representative favors change or not. Two of the largest advocates for change (Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Glenn Thompson) are Republicans. Both represent rural areas and both proposals have bipartisan support. You can read more about that here.

In terms of demographics, it's difficult to say. The South in particular is affected by this. On average, there are more black students in the South. Black students are also more likely than white students to be poor. Anytime you talk about poverty, particularly generational poverty, race is an important factor.

Hi! Thanks for your question. I would recommend reading the article. We talk about the per poor child numbers in the article and have a helpful scatterplot with per poor child number versus poverty rate. You can also lookup these numbers for your local school. The video is meant to be a teaser to the article and isn't a complete summary of the report we did (that would be very difficult to fit into 2 mins).