Reminding Schools of their Responsibilities and Possibilities
[CLICK HERE for the Full Blog Message]
Dear Colleagues,
Introduction
Earlier this Spring, near the 65th
anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, I wrote
two Blog messages addressing the national issue and reality of how students and
schools are inequitably funded relative to their students’ psychoeducational
and multi-tiered academic and behavioral needs.
One of the “bottom lines” discussed was
that:
While segregated
educational facilities were deemed by the Supreme Court to be inherently
unequal, the quality of instruction and the availability of resources and money
in today’s schools—for many students from poverty and students of color—is
unequal.
[CLICK HERE for Part I of
this Series:
Solving Student Crises in the Context of School Inequity: The Case for
“Core-Plus District Funding” (Part I). When Schools Struggle with Struggling
Students: “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”]
_ _ _ _ _
[CLICK HERE for Part II of this Series:
The Journey toward Real School Equity: Students’ Needs Should Drive
Student Services … and Funding (Part II). The Beginning of the Next School Year
Starts Now: The “Get-Go Process”
In this new Blog message, we will summarize
the two previous Blog messages above.
Then, we will review two critical parts of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA): (a)
the requirement that districts and schools annually report how they are using
their federal funds relative to administration, personnel, and—most
importantly—to directly address students’ multi-tiered needs; and (b) the
flexibility within ESEA specific to equitable per pupil funding.
In this latter section, we will include the
flexibility within the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA, 2004) that allows districts to spend up to 15% of their federal special
education funds on preventative services and supports to students not
identified with disabilities.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _
Summarizing
the Recent Inequitable School Funding Series
In Part I of this Series, we provided data
from a number of sources showing that high-poverty non-white schools in this
country receive significantly less money per pupil each year than high-poverty
white schools and middle or upper class dominated schools, respectfully. While this involves approximately 12.8
million students—many of them attending schools in urban settings—this is a nationwide
problem.
Because of the financial inequity, these
high-poverty schools have fewer resources than middle or upper class-dominant
schools, and they are typically staffed by less experienced teachers who have
more skill gaps, and who resign from their schools more often and after fewer
years in-rank. In addition, the students
in these schools typically have less access to high level science, math, and
advanced placement courses, and less access to needed multi-tiered academic and
social, emotional, and behavioral services, supports, programs, and
interventions.
Correlated with the poverty, many of these
students exhibit health, mental health, academic, and social, emotional, and
behavioral challenges, that also triangulate with stress and trauma—including
the impact of hunger and poor nutrition, parental incarceration and loss, abuse
and neglect, and the exposure to violence and drugs.
From a school perspective, all of this
translates into lower numbers of academically-proficient students, and schools
that are either in their state’s ESEA-driven school improvement programs or
that are rated at the low end of their state’s school report card scale.
From a student perspective, all of this
translates into negative effects on students’ school attendance and
expectations, classroom engagement and motivation, academic readiness and proficiency,
emotional self-control and prosocial interactions and, ultimately, their high
school graduation and readiness for the workforce.
Part I ended with a plea for systemic
changes relative to federal, state, and district funding policies, principles,
and practices. We recommended a “Core-Plus Funding” process whereby all
schools in a district receive the core funding needed for student success, but
where the schools with additional or significant student needs receive,
annually, the additional funds and resources needed for their success.
_ _ _ _ _
In Part II of this Series, we discussed a
new report showing the impact of poverty and the importance of inequitable
school funding.
Because this Blog message was published at
the end of the 2018-2019 school year, we also described the “Get-Go” process as
an effective way for districts to identify the “Plus” part of their funding by
functionally reviewing the status and needs of all the students in their
respective schools.
In addition to its contribution to strategic
and differential budgeting, we have also used the Get-Go process across the
country to help districts and schools identify and prepare for their diverse,
multi-tiered student needs for the first day of the new school year.
Finally, we described how the Get-Go process
helps districts know how to best deploy and align existing staff, services, and
support—or determine what new staff to hire and assign—to meet as many student
needs as possible.
[CLICK HERE for the
Full Blog Message with More Complete Descriptions and Citations of these two
Earlier Blogs]
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _
Revisiting the Importance of Equitable School Funding
On May 15, 2019,
Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published a
study, Born to Win, Schooled to Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don’t Get
Equal Chances to Be All They Can Be.
This study used
data from a number of national longitudinal databases to investigate the impact
of the socio-economic status of 21,260 kindergarten and over 15,000 10th grade students
on their college and career outcomes.
This study is
important to our discussion of inequity because it (a) demonstrates that
socio-economic inequity for students in kindergarten has dire, long-term
effects; and (b) that schools with large numbers of poor students (many of whom
are students of color) need more (not fewer—as shown in Part I of this Blog
series) resources and funding to address these students’ needs.
[CLICK HERE for the
Full Blog Message that describes the Key Findings from this Study]
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
ESEA
Requirement: Reporting
School Funding on Each State and District Annual Report Cards
According to a 2018 report by the Aspen
Institute, Ensuring Equitable Funding, ESEA requires:
- States and school districts to produce report cards that include information about per-pupil expenditures, including actual personnel and non-personnel expenditures disaggregated by source of funds at the district and school levels.
- Districts are required to conduct resource reviews for schools that are identified for comprehensive support and improvement and additional targeted support and improvement.
Given these
requirements, this document suggests that Districts have an opportunity “to
drive bigger conversations around equitable funding, expanding the equity
conversation beyond funding to include other dimensions affected by funding
like teaching, school design, instructional support, and central services.”
This Report goes
on to encourage District leaders to meet the requirements above by reporting
the financial information in the most meaningful and parent/community-friendly
ways by:
- Using comparative data to understand relative differences—not just absolute values.
- Sharing school resource data in context of school need and school performance.
- Including explanatory data that show what drives differences in spending levels across schools.
- Integrating other dimensions of resource equity to show the ways in which financial resources are (or are not) invested in strategies and structures that drive student achievement.
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Comment. For some districts
and schools across the country, the reporting of the now-ESEA-required financial
data will be the first time that the public will truly know (if reported—as above—in
functional, user-friendly ways) how public funds are being used to “run” the
school district and to educate its students.
Consistent with the Aspen recommendations above, this will hopefully
fuel a discussion—for both district personnel and the different constituencies
within the community—as to how to best use the available funds as most-directed
toward all students’ academic and social, emotional, and behavioral progress and
proficiency.
Hopefully, from a “Core-Plus Funding” perspective, districts and schools
will provide information on how much “Core” money each school needs to
run an effective educational program, and how much money is needed to support
each school relative to district administration. “District administration,” however, should
include not just district personnel—but also, for example, the physical plant
and infrastructure costs of maintaining the school buildings themselves,
professional development and technology, and transportation, safety, and security.
On the “Plus” side, hopefully districts will provide detailed (but
confidential) information on the different “multi-tiered intensities of student
needs” in each of its schools. This
information should look beyond (but include) information on poverty to also include
other student variable organized by gender and race.
[CLICK HERE for the
Full Blog Message with these Specific Variables]
The Plus information will help both district
and community folk to discuss “equity and excellence” issues from a data-based
perspective—describing and personalizing the needs of different students—rather
than just from a philosophical or conceptual perspective.
All of this helps to add depth and breadth
to the financial information that must be reported. All of this helps to move beyond reporting
the information for compliance purposes, to using the information for
strategic planning and student-centered decision-making.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
ESEA and
IDEA Flexibility: How
Funds Can Be Used to Enhance Equity
ESEA allows districts to use their federal
funds in flexible ways to enhance equity.
The Aspen Institute report cites some possible examples.
[CLICK HERE for the
Full Blog Message for this Overview]
Beyond the Aspen
recommendations, there are at least two additional ways available to districts such
that they can use their federal funds in more flexible ways to enhance the
equitable needs of their students.
The first way
involves ESEA’s Part E—Flexibility for Equitable Per Pupil Funding (Section
1501). According to ESEA, “The
purpose of the program under this section is to provide local educational
agencies (i.e., school districts) with flexibility to consolidate eligible
Federal funds and State and local education funding in order to create a single
school funding system based on weighted per-pupil allocations for low-income
and otherwise disadvantaged students.
While this is a demonstration program that
will involve no more than 50 districts nationwide, this option is available to
districts who want to address the needs of low-income and “otherwise
disadvantaged students.”
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The second way has been available to all
districts nationwide since the passage of IDEA in 2004. In Section 613(f)(2)(A), IDEA—according to the U.S. Department
of Education—allows the following:
LEAs may use up to 15% of
their IDEA Part B funds for coordinated early intervening services (CEIS) to
assist students in grades K through 12 (with an emphasis on K through 3) who
are not currently identified as needing special education and related services
but who need additional academic and behavioral support to succeed in a general
education environment.
CEIS funds can be used to provide professional
development to educators who are responsible for helping children who need
additional academic and behavioral support succeed in a general education
environment or to provide direct interventions to children who need academic
and behavioral support.
CEIS funds may be used in coordination with ESEA funds
but must supplement, and not supplant, ESEA funds for those activities. Title I
schoolwide school may use, to carry out the schoolwide project, an amount of
IDEA funds that is the same proportion of the total cost of the project as the
number of children with disabilities benefiting from the program is to the
total school population participating in the program.
In a Title I schoolwide school that consolidates
Federal funds (e.g., ESEA, IDEA, etc.), a school may use those funds for any
activity in its schoolwide plan without accounting separately for the funds. The
schoolwide school needs to ensure that children with disabilities continue to
receive FAPE, but would not need to show that IDEA funds were spent only on
allowable special education and related services expenditures.
While I understand that the Federal
government has under-funded special education services since the beginning of
IDEA (Public Law 94-142 passed in 1975), this provision means that, for
example, special education teachers who are funded exclusively with IDEA funds
and who are co-teaching in a general education classroom or even teaching in their
own self-contained classroom can still provide instructional or intervention
services to general education (especially at-risk) students.
This similarly means that related service
professionals like school psychologists, social workers, speech pathologists, and
occupational or physical therapists—who, once again, are fully funded by IDEA
money—also can provide some services to non-disabled students.
These professionals, for example, might be
most useful as instructional or intervention consultants to general education
teachers—helping them (a) to better understand academically struggling or behaviorally
challenging students, and/or (b) to design and implement classroom-based
interventions that will address these students’ needs.
The bottom line here is that there is
flexibility within both ESEA and IDEA to allow personnel and funds to more
flexibly and equitably address students who need more multi-tiered strategic or
intensive services, supports, strategies, or programs. Even if districts and schools do not adopt Core-Plus
Funding approaches, they still can tap into these (and other) flexibilities.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _
Summary
In this Blog message,
we briefly summarized two previous Blog messages—written this past Spring
addressing the importance of using educational funds, resources, and personnel
in more equitable and student-centered ways.
We then reviewed two critical parts of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA): (a) the
requirement that districts and schools annually report how they are using their
federal funds relative to administration, personnel, and—most importantly—to
directly address students’ multi-tiered needs; and (b) the flexibility within
ESEA specific to equitable per pupil funding.
In this latter
section, we highlighted the flexibility within the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) that allows districts to spend up
to 15% of their federal special education funds on preventative services and
supports to students not identified with disabilities.
Throughout the
entire discussion, the bottom line has been:
While there are still challenges at the federal and state
levels, districts and schools may have more permission and flexibility to
distribute their funds to differentially address different student needs than
they actually take.
A corollary message
has been that:
When parents and community leaders realize how funds in
their district and schools are being used (if they are being used inequitably,
wastefully, or in ways that do not largely or directly impact students),
districts and schools may have to change their funding processes anyways—due to
the public pressure.
_ _ _ _ _
High-poverty
non-white schools in this country receive significantly less money per pupil
each year than high-poverty white schools and middle or upper class dominated schools,
respectfully. This involves
approximately 12.8 million students.
Because of the
financial inequity, these high-poverty schools have fewer resources than middle
or upper class-dominant schools, and they are typically staffed by less
experienced teachers who have more skill gaps, and who resign from their
schools more often and after fewer years in-rank. In addition, the students in these schools
typically have less access to high level science, math, and advanced placement
courses, and less access to needed multi-tiered academic and social, emotional,
and behavioral services, supports, programs, and interventions.
This Blog has
argued that there are ways to address these circumstances. Not to take our federal and state governments
off the hook, but this ultimately will be a local decision enacted by
individual districts and their schools. In
the end, districts need to consider the implementation and funding of
multi-tiered services, supports, and interventions that are based on student
need and that follow the students regardless of the schools that they
attend.
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I understand the challenges. But I consult weekly with schools across the country that are taking on these challenges.
As always, I appreciate those of you reading these thoughts. If you have comments or questions, please contact me as desired. And please feel free to take advantage of my standing offer for a free, one-hour conference call consultation with you and your team at any time.
Best,
