Title I

Several months ago, the Romney campaign released a document titled “A Chance for Every Child” that outlined the candidate’s education platform. Buried in the document is a proposal to “voucherize” the two largest federal programs for K-12 education: Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) state grants. The proposal would allow eligible students to take that funding with them to the public or private school or district of their choice. While such student-based funding is gaining popularity, can a student really just show up at a school with federal vouchers in hand and demand to be educated? No. It’s not that simple.

For one, federal funds do not come close to covering the cost of that child’s education. To solve that roadblock, Romney’s plan is predicated on another, related concept – open enrollment. Open enrollment ideally gives students an opportunity to seek out the highest-quality educational opportunities, a worthy goal especially when targeted at low-income and high need students. The platform states that under a Romney administration, the U.S. Department of Education would ensure that every state has an open enrollment system.

Though the Romney proposal is short on details, existing open enrollment states can give us some sense of how it could work. While most states have open enrollment laws, which allow students to apply to attend school in another district, many of them are voluntary, allowing districts to opt not to participate. Others are open only to students at certain schools or at certain income levels. Assumedly, Romney’s plan would require states and districts to adopt open enrollment for all students, requiring districts to accept transfers.*

Such programs typically work like this: If both the resident (the student’s home district) and non-resident (the district the student wants to transfer to) approve a student’s transfer application, the state transfers a payment from the resident district to the non-resident district (usually a portion of the annual per pupil funding). The resident district usually gets to keep some portion of the per pupil funding for “fixed costs.” It is important to note that the per pupil amount typically includes both state and local funds.

But federal funds, particularly Title I funds, can’t easily be made portable because of how they are distributed. Currently, states distribute Title I funds they receive from the federal government to districts based on four formulas that account for Census estimates of both the proportion and number of students living in poverty. However, districts distribute those Title I funds to schools based on enrollment in the free and reduced price lunch program. Theoretically, these funds can be tied to specific students based on their family income levels. But, districts can opt to use Title I dollars for students only in certain grade levels. And schools with poverty rates over a certain level are able to use their Title I funds for “whole school” use, rather than targeting that spending to specific eligible students.

That means most of the federal dollars do not follow specific students but instead are pooled in areas where district or school leaders think they will have the greatest impact. This existing system is often inequitable and leaves many students – particularly high schoolers – at a disadvantage. But it also allows district and school leaders more flexibility in how they use the funds.

Under Romney’s plan states will likely have to distribute Title I funds directly to students based on their enrollment in free and reduced price lunch or some other indicator of poverty (like Medicaid or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). This will take the district and school out of the equation, eliminating a district’s ability to target the funds to certain grade levels or create “whole school” Title I programs. The dollars could then truly follow the student.

This would involve significant structural changes to Title I, including likely rehashing the current funding formulas and redefining how schools can use the funds to serve specific students. That will be a serious challenge – no one likes to lose funding and under Romney’s proposal it would be inevitable.

And any sort of voucherized Title I or IDEA system would necessitate mandatory open enrollment to cover the remaining cost of educating transfer students.  This would require significant legislative action at the state level and heavy bureaucratic lifts in federal, state, and local government.

Romney gets extra points for thinking out of the box with this education proposal. It speaks to every parent’s desire to have more control over his or her child’s education and would certainly cause a stir among the education bureaucracy. But at the same time, it undermines local control of schools, a concept many conservatives hold dear. Not only would states be required to implement open enrollment systems and transfer funds among districts, but districts and schools could no longer target their Title I funds to the schools or grades of their choosing.

If candidate Romney becomes President Romney, we predict a long and tough road ahead for his education proposals, likely with resistance from both sides of the aisle.   

*Such systems often allow districts to reject a transfer in cases of extreme financial hardship – where a resident district would lose too much funding or a non-resident district would be unable to support the additional cost of educating a transferring student.

By Jennifer Cohen Kabaker

This post originally appeared on Ed Money Watch.

Several months ago, the Romney campaign released a document titled “A Chance for Every Child” that outlined the candidate’s education platform. Buried in the document is a proposal to “voucherize” the two largest federal programs for K-12 education: Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) state grants. The proposal would allow eligible students to take that funding with them to the public or private school or district of their choice. While such student-based funding is gaining popularity, can a student really just show up at a school with federal vouchers in hand and demand to be educated? No. It’s not that simple.

For one, federal funds do not come close to covering the cost of that child’s education. To solve that roadblock, Romney’s plan is predicated on another, related concept – open enrollment. Open enrollment ideally gives students an opportunity to seek out the highest-quality educational opportunities, a worthy goal especially when targeted at low-income and high need students. The platform states that under a Romney administration, the U.S. Department of Education would ensure that every state has an open enrollment system.

With fresh, third round ESEA flexibility requests from Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and West Virginia, along with Puerto Rico and the Bureau of Indian Education, the U.S. Department of Education has received 47 waiver proposals since last November. Thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. have been approved to date, leaving only Illinois, Idaho, and Iowa with outstanding requests from the second round. Initial concerns about the “strings attached” to the waivers – i.e. college- and career-ready standards and assessments, differentiated accountability and improvement systems, and educator evaluations based on student achievement – haven’t slowed the process. Only six states have failed to take the Department up on their offer for increased flexibility under No Child Left Behind: California, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming (although an additional state, Vermont, submitted a request and later withdrew it from consideration).

But that doesn’t necessarily mean these states are rejecting the waiver game altogether – rather, they are rejecting the rules spelled out by the Department and making their own. While Montana, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania have all requested limited waivers which would allow them to freeze their performance targets, California and Texas are pushing the boundaries further and going rogue. Instead of using the Department’s application, which requires states to sign off on waivers for at least ten provisions of NCLB and agree to 15 assurances, they are picking, choosing, and in some cases, adding to what the Department is offering. Although both states’ attitudes toward the feds’ flexibility deal appear similar – for instance, they both want to rely solely on their long-standing state accountability systems for schools – below the surface, California and Texas have completely different visions for ESEA flexibility.

Short, and Not So Sweet

While most states took hundreds of pages to document their efforts to adopt college- and career-ready expectations, differentiated accountability and support plans, and effective instruction and leadership systems, California needed only nine. Why so short? Is California really committed to these reforms? The state has been criticized for its lack of effort and resources in implementing Common Core and for its minimum expectations when it comes to teacher evaluations. Coupled with the state’s fiscal crisis, the Department should seriously question California’s capacity and will to improve. California is asking to waive only two of the ten required NCLB provisions – both of which would allow the state to use its existing and hardly perfect Academic Performance Index (API) to hold schools accountable. The State Board of Education will “consider” revising the performance targets and measures within the API, but California, it seems, is determined to make no promises and put in as little effort as possible.

With California blatantly ignoring the Department’s “all-or-nothing” approach to waivers and the commitments to all the principles of ESEA flexibility made by other states, California officials cannot possibly expect the feds to go along with their anemic request. Sure, California has a lot of political clout in an election year. But it is not worth undermining the credibility of the Department and the flexibility process – not to mention the education of millions of California students – to shore up a state that is already leaning heavily toward President Obama.

Bigger, Definitely Not Better

California may have thumbed its nose at most of the substance within the Department’s flexibility plan, but Texas is actually embracing it. The Lone Star State intends to apply for every one of the ten waivers included in the flexibility request, in addition to the three optional waivers offered by the Department related to extended learning time, prioritizing Title I funds for eligible high schools with low graduation rates, and removing Adequate Yearly Progress determinations from school report cards. While not a Common Core state, Texas appears more than willing to make the case for its own standards and assessments and demonstrate how they are aligned with college and career readiness. And although the state has not passed teacher evaluation reform to date, most of the states applying for waivers do not have all of the principles of high quality evaluations in place – and are essentially pledging to adopt them and implement them by the 2014-15 school year. So if Texas is already committing to most of what the Department is asking, why are they still going their own way?

Because Texas wants more. Namely, they’d like to rewrite the entire Title I funding formula and decide how the state’s nearly $1.4 billion allocation should be distributed to districts. Texas has not yet specified an exact methodology (or what it finds so offensive in the current formula – though there are many valid criticisms), but promises to account for districts’ identified needs in terms of economically disadvantaged students, English Language Learners, and whatever “educationally disadvantaged” students means. And since one of the standard waivers Texas is requesting would give the state the option to transfer funds from other ESEA programs to Title I, the state is essentially requesting limitless funding flexibility within ESEA – without actually specifying how the new, Texas Title I formula would work.

The state may be promising to hold schools accountable, but how can the federal government hold Texas accountable for improving outcomes for disadvantaged students if the state won’t describe how the funds will be distributed? Giving a state this much discretion within Title I, in addition to what the feds are already offering, would be unprecedented, quite possibly illegal, and potentially disastrous for Texas’ Title I schools and the students they serve.

To add insult to injury, Texas also wants to waive the provision that defines annual measurable objectives (AMOs), opening the door for the state to lower, or even eliminate, performance targets for students and subgroups. AMOs stirred up controversy in other waiver winners (like Virginia), as states attempted to alter, or even undermine, subgroup accountability in their AMOs, particularly through the use of “super subgroups.”

Whether big or small, rogue approaches to ESEA flexibility aren’t likely to work for states anytime soon. Even though the Department of Education is willing to negotiate, both California and Texas have a long way to go before their requests should be considered seriously.

But will state officials be willing to change their proposals if the Department’s waivers continue to be the only viable option for states seeking relief from NCLB? By removing the additional requests and their outlandish Title I funding proposal, Texas would likely be able to secure a waiver after some back-and-forth with the Department. California would have more revisions to make to get their proposal in shape (it was only nine pages, after all). Still, the state adopted Common Core, joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and has many of the components of a strong accountability system in place. Evaluations of teachers and principals – and how to pay for them – are the primary sticking point. But at least for now, it appears California and Texas will continue to go their own way… even if it gets them nowhere.

Paul Ryan’s proposal to cut federal spending by 20 percent has been impossible to ignore – especially what that might mean for education programs. Federal spending currently makes up about 10 percent of annual spending for education, so a 20 percent cut to that spending would only translate to 2 percent of total spending, on average. But what about the impact on non-average school districts?  As it turns out, more than 1,500 districts rely on federal funds for 20 percent or more of their annual revenue, and those districts would take a big hit.

Last week, Ed Media Commons showcased data from the Federal Education Budget Project, Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, to reveal that these cuts could mean much more for districts that rely more heavily on federal funds. Using Census data on school districts’ total annual revenue and federal revenue for the 2009-10 school year, we calculated the percent of each district’s revenue made up of federal funds, as well as how much each district stands to lose under a 20 percent cut.

Of the more than 1,500 districts that rely on federal funds for 20 percent or more of their annual revenue, seventy-seven would lose more than 10 percent of their annual revenue if Congress were to cut federal spending by 20 percent. Those districts tend to be smaller, with enrollments mostly between 100 and 2,000.

These districts’ reliance on federal revenue can mostly be explained by high proportions of American Indian students. Many districts receive funds under Impact Aid, a federal program that provides funds to school districts with high proportions of “federally impacted” students like American Indians. Because those districts do not benefit from property tax revenue from people living on Indian reservations, the federal government makes up for that lost revenue. For example, Sanders Unified School District in Arizona had an enrollment of 1,049 in 2010 and nearly 97 percent of those students identified as American Indian. Of that district’s approximately $15 million in annual revenue, just over $9 million comes from federal sources. If Congress were to cut spending by 20 percent, Sanders Unified could lose as much as $1.8 million, 12 percent of its annual revenue.

Many large districts would also be disproportionately affected by big cuts to federal education funding. Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, and Miami-Dade School District, the second-, third-, and fourth-largest school districts in the country, each rely on federal funds for more than 16 percent of their annual revenue. Chicago receives nearly 24 percent, or $1.2 billion, of its annual $5.1 billion in total revenue from federal sources. That federal funding comes from several federal programs aimed at low-income students such as Title I (about $300 million) and Free and Reduced Price Meals (about $140 million), as well as special education (about $90 million). A 20 percent cut to federal funding would mean a loss of $244 million for Chicago.

Of course, some districts rely very little on the federal government for education funding. Over 2,100 districts get 5 percent or less of their annual revenues from federal sources. These districts also tend to be smaller – only 248 have enrollments over 5,000 – and tend to serve wealthier and less diverse populations. Cheshire School District in Connecticut, for example, had an enrollment of 4,950 in 2010 and an annual revenue of over $71 million, only 4.5 percent of which came from federal sources. The district has a student poverty rate of only 3.1 percent, very few English language learners, and is made up of nearly 87 percent white students. This means the district receives very little federal funding under programs like Title I or Free and Reduced Price Meals. If federal spending were cut by 20 percent, Cheshire would only lose $637,000 in revenue.

While a 20 percent cut would be devastating for many school districts, others would lose only the aforementioned 2 percent or even less. These austere times mean that cuts to federal spending are likely. We hope that Congress is able to target those cuts in such a way that protects the most vulnerable students that benefit directly from federal spending. While Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act special education spending are often the most discussed, it is important that programs like Impact Aid also factor heavily into negotiations. For many of these districts, such a cut could mean millions of dollars or a substantial portion of their annual revenue.

Click here to download these data for every school district in the nation. To view programmatic and demographic data, please visit febp.newamerica.net/k12.

We wrote last week about the Senate Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS)-Education Appropriations Subcommittee’s vote to approve fiscal year 2013 appropriations for programs administered by those agencies. Later that week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the bill, clearing it for the full Senate’s consideration—though that may not happen—and made its text and report language public so we can view the full details. (For an explanation of how the bill would address the Pell Grant funding cliff in fiscal year 2014, check out this earlier post.)

Many factors will influence the final bill, including the presidential election, the Labor-HHS-Education bill’s political contentiousness (it also funds the president’s healthcare bill, for which a Supreme Court decision is expected this month), and the automatic sequester (across-the-board cuts) scheduled to take effect in January. But the Senate Appropriations Committee bill suggests where Democratic leadership will likely start negotiations later this year.

Under the bill, Title I grants to school districts for economically disadvantaged students and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part B state grants for students with disabilities would each get a $100 million increase over fiscal year 2012 levels. The Senate Committee bill also clarifies some details surrounding the implementation of the IDEAmaintenance of effort provision which requires that states provide funding for special education in a given year that is equal to or greater than what they provided the prior year. South Carolina, for example, was fined $36 million by the Department of Education for failing to show adequate spending on special education between fiscal years 2008 and 2011. The bill states that any penalties collected from states in violation of the provision must be redistributed via formula to the states not in violation. It also clarifies that in the year following a violation, a school district must reach funding levels equivalent to the year prior to the violation.

The Senate Committee bill would also maintain funding for Impact Aid at fiscal year 2012 levels, $1.3 billion. In doing so, the committee rejected a proposal from President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget request to eliminate $66.9 million in federal payments that compensate school districts that include non-taxable federal property.

School Improvement Grants, a program designed to provide turnaround funds for the nation’s lowest-performing schools, would also be level-funded at $533.6 million. The bill adds a new reform strategy to the existing four plans that grant recipients can use to turn around schools.  Under the new plan, schools could opt to use “research-proven, whole-school reform” strategies such as those that the U.S. Department of Education funded through the Investing in Innovation (i3) program. According to the committee, this change would address the challenges low-capacity schools have had in implementing the four existing reform options.

The bill would also level fund the Improving Teacher Quality State Grants program at $2.47 billion. However, the Senate Committee would set aside 5.5 percent of those funds for use in an existing competitive grant program for national non-profit teacher training and recruitment organizations like Teach for America, rather than the 1.5 percent set-aside provided under current law. That still falls far short of the president’s fiscal year 2013 request, in which he suggested setting aside 25 percent of the programs funding to invest in and collect evidence on best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting teachers and leaders.

The committee bill would fund Race to the Top at slightly-above fiscal year 2012 levels ($549.3 million in 2013 as compared to $549.0 million last year), an unidentified portion of which would be reserved for another Early Learning Challenge round. Investing in Innovation (i3) would receive level funding at $149.4 million for both fiscal years. The committee also emphasized the importance of ensuring a rural focus in future competitions for both programs. Promise Neighborhoods would receive a $20 million budget boost, up to $80 million in fiscal year 2013. Of that, the committee suggests providing $67 million for implementation grants to past planning grant recipients and only $13 million for new planning grants.

And the Fund for the Improvement of Education (FIE), effectively a catch-all fund for various favored projects, would grow from $66 million in fiscal year 2012 to $86 million in 2013. That would include continuing an existing child literacy program at $29 million, as well as a new Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) initiative funded at $19 million. The STEM program follows through on a similar proposal from the president in his 2013 budget request. It also adds $1 million to a new competition to fund a national education facilities clearinghouse – virtually a line-item request for the existing National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities.

In all, the committee approved $68.5 billion for the Department of Education – a slight increase over fiscal year 2012 ($68.1 billion), but still less than the president’s request for fiscal year 2013 ($69.8 billion). We should also note that the House of Representatives has not taken any action so far on a fiscal year 2013 Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS)-Education appropriations bill. Check back with Ed Money Watch for details on the appropriations process. For more on early education spending in the bill, check out this post from our sister blog, Early Ed Watch.

School districts have always been allowed to use federal Title I funds to establish preschool programs for disadvantaged children, and in fact they can use these dollars to support children beginning at birth.  But because Title I is part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ( ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind, it is most often used to fund K-12 programs. Some school district leaders may not even know that these funds can be used for programs before kindergarten or may be unsure about what is and is not allowed.

Under the accountability structure put in place by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), states are required to bring all of their students to proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Schools and districts are held accountable for the performance of students in particular “subgroups” as determined by race, socio-economic status, and participation in certain programs like special education. Because states aren’t going to achieve this goal, the Department of Education announced in November 2011 that states could apply to have the requirements waived if they proposed – and the Department accepted – alternative student performance plans.

Many have argued that the waivers are turning the original intent of NCLB on its head. States have submitted extremely complicated, opaque, and watered-down accountability measures. Look no further than the myriad ways states propose to measure schools by how student subgroups perform.

Colorado, Florida, and New Mexico are three interesting cases. Despite the Department’s guidance requiring states to include data from individual subgroups in their plans, Florida and New Mexico chose to forgo subgroups defined in NCLB and instead create one “low-performers” subgroup. Colorado, on the other hand, hews to NCLB subgroups and the Department’s guidance, but still makes key changes. Below we discuss how each state’s approved plan treats student subgroups.

Colorado uses subgroup performance in three components of its performance framework: what the state calls growth; growth (or achievement) gaps; and postsecondary- and workforce-readiness. The framework accounts both for growth that English Language Learners make in traditional categories, as well as improvement in their English skills as measured by the Colorado English Language Acquisition Proficiency Assessment (CELApro). The state also disaggregates graduation rates and scores on state math and reading tests by subgroup to determine the degree to which schools are effectively reducing the achievement gap. In total, subgroup performance makes up 37.5 percent in a school’s grade in Colorado. So, while Colorado may not give the same focus to subgroups as they received under NCLB, the state still provides substantial weight to the performance of traditionally high-needs students.

Florida more or less scraps the NCLB subgroup framework and focuses instead on the 25 percent of students showing the least improvement from year to year, as well as students deemed “at-risk.” At-risk students are those who enter high school below grade level based on their eighth grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores in reading and math. Although in theory this measure likely captures the performance of subgroups, it has the potential to mask the degree to which individual subgroups are struggling or succeeding.

The state uses test outcomes of the lowest-performing 25 percent of students in its measure. But the state further complicates the issue by choosing to focus on the graduation rates of at-risk students instead – a likely overlapping but different population of students. In total, at-risk and low-performing students make up about 18.75 percent of a school’s grade in Florida’s model. But the metric also includes the performance of “acceleration” students, accounting for 18.75 percent of a school’s grade, too. (Acceleration refers to the number of students who took assessments higher than their grade-level and the scores on those tests—the top performers at schools.) By including the performance of accelerated students in a school’s grade and giving it the same weight, the state essentially negates the impact of struggling students on those grades.

Similar to Florida, New Mexico does not include disaggregated subgroup data for student growth or graduation rates. Instead, the state accountability metric separately accounts for the performance on state math and reading tests of the top 75 percent and lowest 25 percent of students. And rather than accounting specifically for the graduation rates of low-performing students, New Mexico includes graduation rates both for students who graduate in four years and those who graduate in five years. In total, low-performing and high-performing students each account for 15 percent of a school’s grade, and five-year graduation rates make up four percent of the grade. New Mexico, too, seems to allow the performance of its top performers to overshadow that of its lowest-performers in its metric.

Why did the Department grant the waivers to these states even though some of them stopped disaggregating subgroups—the explicit goal of NCLB? Certainly, the Department needed to give states a way out of the current system. But did they throw the proverbial accountability “baby” out with the bathwater? Or did the sheer complexity of the state proposals, some over 500 pages, obscure the reality of the new accountability measures by making them appear more rigorous?

It remains to be seen if these new metrics will dramatically change states’ accountability outcomes. However, by allowing states to develop their own accountability systems, the Department likely enabled states to minimize the impact of low-income, limited English proficiency, and minority students on their school accountability measures. This could ultimately give schools an opportunity to ignore the needs of these students, defeating the purpose of federal funds specifically targeted to them.  

Late last month, Ed Money Watch wrote about the variation in Title I allocations in rural, urban, and suburban school districts. That analysis showed that rural school districts typically receive far less Title I funding per poor pupil than urban districts due to a variety of factors. This topic has been at the forefront of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind) reauthorization discussions as a broad base of constituents have banded together to encourage lawmakers to rewrite the Title I funding formulas. Our previous analysis unintentionally glossed over some  effects of the number weighting provision in the Title I formulas.

The Title I Targeted and Education Finance Inequity Grant formulas both include number weighting provisions that artificially inflate a district’s number of Title I eligible students to increase its share of funding. Districts with more Title I eligible students are weighted more than districts with fewer. Those weights are determined by brackets written into law. For example, districts with 691 or fewer Title I students (bracket 1) receive a weighting of 1 (meaning each Title I student counts as one student in the formulas), while districts with 35,515 or more Title I students (bracket 5) receive a weighting of 3 (meaning each student counts as three students). This benefits larger districts because they often serve higher numbers of Title I students even if those students make up a smaller proportion of their total populations. The table below shows the five number weighting brackets and the weights they receive under the formulas.

Thanks to data from the Rural Schools and Community Trust, we are now able to present a far more detailed view of the potential effect of the proposed All Children are Equal Act (ACE), introduced by Rep. Glenn Thompson (D-PA) last year. If enacted, the bill  would phase out impact of the number weighting in the Title I formulas over a four year period. Below, we analyze data on how Title I allocations would change under the full implementation of ACE assuming all other factors (like number of Title I students) stay the same. And because locale type (urban, suburban, rural, and town) – used in our last analysis – doesn’t account for the actual size of each district’s Title I eligible population, here we instead examine the change in Title I spending by district number weighting bracket.  This provides us with a nuanced view of the impact of the ACE formula on districts in each bracket and allows us to determine whether the changes would truly benefit the districts with the highest proportions of low-income students.

For this analysis, we calculated the population-weighted average change in Title I allocations in both dollars and percentage per pupil under ACE (comparing actual 2011 allocations to projected 2015 allocations with phased-out number weighting) in each state by number weighting bracket. We also calculated the population-weighted average percentage of Title I-eligible students in districts in each bracket for each state.  Using these averages, we can better understand whether the shifts in Title I funding under ACE will truly provide more funding to the districts that need it most.

We find that districts in the first bracket – those with 691 or fewer Title I students – would see substantial increases in Title I allocations per poor pupil in almost all states. Districts in bracket 1 in Florida will see an average 16.5 percent ($174) increase – a compelling change given that those districts serve the second highest average proportion of Title I eligible students in the state (25.2 percent). Bracket 1 districts in Vermont will see the smallest increase at only 0.1 percent ($4) per Title I pupil on average.

Districts in bracket 2 in the vast majority of states (districts with between 296 and 2,262 Title I students) will also see large increases. Again, bracket 2 districts in Florida will experience the largest increase at 16.4 percent ($178) on average. But some bracket 2 districts will see decreases on average, particularly those in rural states like Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

And because ACE will lessen the benefit of number weighting for large districts, districts in brackets 4 and 5 (with 7,852 or more Title I students) in most states will see large decreases in Title I allocations per poor student. In bracket 4, districts in Massachusetts will experience the largest average decrease at 13.6 percent ($314) per Title I pupil. This includes the Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts School Districts. Interestingly, some bracket 4 districts will see moderate average increases, including Flint and Grand Rapids in Michigan and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. However, each of these districts has rather high student poverty rates (35.0 percent on average in Michigan, for example), explaining why the phase-out of number weighting would not necessarily adversely affect their Title I allocations.

All 18 districts in bracket 5 (with 35,515 Title I students or more) in the nation would see decreases under ACE, with the largest in Los Angeles Unified School District in California at 13.7 percent ($241). Philadelphia public schools would see the largest decrease in dollar terms at $303 per Title I pupil. Clark County Public Schools in Nevada would see the smallest decrease at $50 per Title I pupil.

Given these findings, it appears that ACE would achieve the goal of its sponsors and advocates – generally, the smallest districts will see large increases in Title I funding per poor pupil while many of the largest districts will see decreases. But in some cases, these shifts in funding may hurt districts with both large numbers and large proportions of Title I students.

For example, in Connecticut, the state’s districts with the smallest Title I populations (bracket 1) would receive an average 8.2 percent ($94) increase in funding under ACE, while its largest— bracket 3 – districts (the state has no districts in bracket 4 or 5) would see a 6.4 percent ($130) decrease on average. But even though the bracket 3 districts will still get more Title I funds per pupil, $1,907 compared to $1,240 on average, they also have dramatically higher average concentrations of Title I students – 25.9 percent compared to 5.7 percent in bracket 1. Will Connecticut’s large districts truly be able to provide all of the necessary services to their low-income students with significantly reduced federal support?  A similar pattern is evident in other states like California, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

The ACE proposal has opened up the field for a real discussion on improvements to the Title I funding formulas. And it does succeed in bringing more equity to Title I funding per pupil, particularly for smaller districts. But it appears that the proposal as it stands (based on the data we have) could be problematic for large districts with high poverty concentrations; they stand to lose funding.

These findings illustrate the complexities of the current formulas and the unintended consequences they often have. At the same time, this new information should encourage lawmakers and stakeholders to continue to work at improving the formulas rather than settle for the status quo.

To download data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, click here. Red shading denotes the bracket with the highest proportion of Title I students in each state.

Last week I spoke about the future of early learning in federal education policy at the annual policy symposium of the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies.

On March 7, 2012, Laura Bornfreund presented at the annual policy symposium of the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies. The presentation highlights the current role of early learning in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the opportunity for an expanded role for early learning in the next reauthorization.