Less Money, But More Targeted to Poor Districts
There’s not a lot of good news in the new federal education budget. Once the political tug of war was done, the money appropriated for education in 2006 was just about what was spent in 2005, even though Congress and the President agreed to spend about $1.6 billion in new money on schools affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Perhaps the biggest source of concern is that funding for Title I declined from $12.74 billion in 2005 to $12.71 billion in 2006. Title I is the main way that the federal government provides money to local school systems to help educate poor children, and any decline is very serious.
However, it is worth noting that although the basic Title I grant – which provides Title I money to just about every congressional district – declined by $126 million, the grant that is targeted to poor districts (known as “targeted grants”) and the one to states that target their dollars to high-poverty districts (known as “education finance incentive grants”) each increased for the 2006-7 fiscal year by $50 million. “Concentration grants,” which are less targeted than the other two funds but more than the basic grant, remained steady.
What this means is that some school districts with relatively few poor kids will get less under Title I, but districts with high concentrations of poor children shouldn’t be cut and may even see increases next year.
Some of the other programs that constitute “No Child Left Behind” were also affected:
- Reading First and Early Reading First, which provide grants to districts to provide evidence-based reading instruction, declined by 1 percent and are now funded at $ 1.13 billion.
- Title II, which is the money to improve teacher quality, declined from $2.96 billion in 2005 to $2.89 billion in 2006.
- Money for the education of migrant children declined from $390 million to $387 million.
- Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities declined, from $437 to $350 million.
- Literacy programs for prisoners were cut completely – from $5 million to 0.
- Comprehensive School Reform grants almost disappeared, going from $205 million to $7.9 million
- Educational technology state grants declined from $496 million to $273 million.
- 21st-Century Community Learning Centers grants, which have paid for after-school programs in many high-poverty schools, declined from $991 million to $981 million.
To see the full budget, go to: www.ed.gov. And to see the Education Week article on the budget, click here.
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Bill Taylor, head of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, which is a member of The Achievement Alliance, was the subject of a January 4 New York Times column by Samuel Freedman. To see the full column, click here, but here’s an excerpt:
“While working in Lyndon B. Johnson's administration as staff director of the Commission on Civil Rights, Mr. Taylor recalled, he saw firsthand the utility of backing up laudable values with tough enforcement. Only a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education did Southern schools start to comply, he said, because only then did Washington threaten to withhold federal dollars from districts that defied the integration order.” |
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Ross Wiener, policy director of the Education Trust, another member of The Achievement Alliance, had an article in The Washington Post on January 2. To see the full article, click here, but here’s an excerpt:
“We don't have the luxury of deciding whether we want to take on the heartache and hard work of improving public education. Given the rapidly increasing pressures and demands of the knowledge-based economy, we need to make sure that we take more students to higher levels of achievement. That means pegging standards to the real-world challenges our students will face as adults. But nothing will make up for a lack of commitment to raising teacher quality. We will forever consign millions of poor and minority children to the margins of society if we do not act now to give them the teachers they need and deserve. The latest test results indicate that we have maintained and even built a little on recent gains but that the heavy lifting in education reform is still in our future.” |
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Students in districts with high concentrations of poverty have access to fewer state and local resources than students in wealthier districts. That was the finding of the latest Funding Gap report issued by the Education Trust. Ed Trust has issued annual funding gap reports since 2001 and each one has come to the same dismal conclusion. In this year’s calculation, students in the poorest districts have $907 less spent on their schooling than students in the wealthiest districts (the numbers are based on fiscal year 2003 data, the latest data available).
Some states are worse than others. In New York, for example, students in the poorest districts have $2,280 a year less spent on their schooling than on students in the wealthiest districts. In Illinois, the gap is $2,065.
Some states, however, have sent more funding to the poorest districts. In Massachusetts, for example, students in the poorest districts have $1,164 more per year spent on them than students in the richest districts; in New Jersey, that amount is $1,240.
When school and state officials say that they have tried to do everything to close achievement gaps, it might be worth asking if they have tried making sure their school financing systems are equitable.
To see the full study, go to: www.edtrust.org. |
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Standards Make a Difference
When states have clear standards, assessments tied to those standards, and an accountability system based on those standards and assessments, they can expect to see real improvements in student achievement.
That’s one of the conclusions of the annual Education Week “Quality Counts” report.
This year’s report, which has become one of the most anticipated reports in the field of education, focuses on the last decade of the “standards movement.” The standards movement, which brought together business leaders, governors, and teacher union leaders, has pushed for states to decide what students are expected to know and be able to do at each grade level and assess whether those standards are met.
Some states have done a better job than others of setting up a system of standards, assessments, and accountability, and those states, according to Education Week, showed the most improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
Massachusetts is the clearest example. A leader in the standards movement, Massachusetts set clear, high standards back in the early 1990s, with rigorous assessments and clear accountability. Student achievement followed, with Massachusetts posting the highest NAEP scores in the country in 2003.
In contrast, Iowa, which in the 1990s had NAEP scores well above the national average, has failed to set any kind of state standards, and has seen a substantial drop in relative performance on NAEP.
Other interesting observations made by “Quality Counts” include:
- Policies to improve teacher quality, such as requiring teachers to pass a basic-skills test and a subject-matter test for initial licensure did not seem to result in higher student achievement. That is certainly puzzling, and requires more research to figure out what is going on. The editors were careful to say that this finding does not mean that teacher quality is not important; it may be that the policies states have are not the best policies. Right now this remains a puzzle.
- Although national achievement as measured by NAEP has shown only modest growth over the last decade, that overall assessment masks enormous differences at the state level. Some states have shown significant improvements, some declines.
- Although every state still has significant achievement gaps between White and Black students, between White and Hispanic students, and between poor and non-poor students, some states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Texas, and Oregon) have significantly closed gaps for at least one group. At the same time, some states (Ohio, Colorado, and Arizona) have seen widening gaps over the same period of time.
To see the full report, go to http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2006/01/05/index.html. |
Literacy Rates Dropping
The most alarming finding of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) is that literacy levels dropped slightly for 16- to 18-year-olds between 1992 and 2003.
Well, that’s one of the most alarming findings – but here’s another one: half of adults without a high school diploma have “below basic” literacy, which means they may have trouble reading soup cans and will probably have trouble reading a newspaper. Here’s yet another – the literacy rates of college graduates has dropped in the past ten years.
The drop for 16- to 18-year-olds was so slight that it was not considered statistically significant – but the real point is that literacy for that group did not improve, even as the literacy rates for some age groups, such as ages 50 to 64 did.
Although the fact that 16- to 18-year-olds did not improve over the previous generation is alarming, some NAALS findings were much more positive.
For example:
- Quantitative literacy among adults increased by at least eight points, with every ethnic group except Latinos registering an increase. But another difference in the 2003 test was that participants were allowed to use calculators, so it is hard to know how much to celebrate this news.
- African Americans scored higher in all three categories in 2003 in comparison to 1992, increasing 16 points in quantitative (see note above about calculators), eight points in document literacy, and six points in prose literacy.
- A smaller percentage of Whites, African Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islanders scored below basic in all three kinds of literacy in 2003 than in 1992. The fact that a higher percentage of Latinos scored below basic in prose and document literacy could reflect the recent wave of immigration from Central and South America. The population surveyed included 50 percent more Latinos in 2003 than in 1992 – another indicator of the recent immigration.
To see the full study, go to: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/. |
