Funding Public School Disparities

Public School Funding

With reports on the lower standardized test scores among the nation's students, policy makers are once again turning their attention to the issue of education reform. For many educators, one of the culprits behind this is not only the dearth of money spent on public education. Rather, the available funding is disbursed unequally, benefiting the already more affluent school districts.

This paper examines the inequity that exists in funding public school education.

The first part of this paper looks at examples of this unequal funding throughout the country. The next part of the paper then looks at the various reasons for these disparities, from the government level to the lack of public support.

In the conclusion, this paper argues that there remains a strong need to increase public support for education funding, and to re-work the current formula used by states to determine how school funds are disbursed. After all, whether one is wealthy or poor, it is in everyone's interests to ensure that the succeeding generation of Americans is both skilled and educated.

Background

In 2001, Congress agreed to re-write the long-standing Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This alone was a contentious step, since agreeing to the re-write opened the doors for controversial programs such as the school voucher program. Critics of the law also charge that President Bush is ignoring his campaign promise to provide sufficient funding for all school districts, to ensure that low-income students can catch up to the test scores of their more affluent peers (Swindell 2003).

In a study conducted in 2000, the Educational Trust found that across the nation, school districts that serve a higher concentration of low-income students receive far less state and local funding. This holds true in 30 out of 37 states included in the study, where districts with the fewest concentration of low-income families get at least $100 more per student. Corollary to this, school districts with the fewest minority students also receive an additional $100 per student, compared to schools with higher concentrations of minorities. Nationally, these figures mean that the school districts with the fewest minority students are allotted $6,684 per student, compared to only $5,782 for school districts with a large minority population (Brooks 2002).

These disparities hold true, even in wealthy states such as New York. In New York State alone, an average elementary school with a population of 400 students receives $860,800 less if it was located in a minority neighborhood.

These disparities in funding occur even at the state level. When the E. study focused only on locally-raised revenue, the Education Trust researchers further found that New York State alone allots an additional $1,339 per student to districts with the fewest minority students. When factored into the differences in federal funding, school districts with high minority populations have $2,084 less per student (Brooks 2002).

This disparity in funding has numerous implications for the education of minority students. Already, studies such as Jencks and Phillips (1998) have shown that the widening gap between the test scores and academic achievements between black and white students. Many other analysts believe that the fiscal inequalities in education funding do not matter at this point, since poverty and family backgrounds are the overwhelming factors that cause this gap.

However, activists believe that the funding gap is a critical issue, one that keeps many minority students from reaching the state standards of education. These reformers argue that the first step towards closing the achievement gap between high poverty/high minority schools and their affluent counterparts.

Reasons for the funding disparities

These inequalities are the result of numerous factors, ranging from conflicting federal policies to the improper allocation of local resources and the lack of public support.

In his book Funding Public Schools, Kenneth Wong (1999) looks at the allocation methods used to determine how much funding a school receives. The greatest problem, says Wong, is that state and local governments are guided by different allocation rules. While the state level emphasizes promoting funding equity between the different districts, local governments allocate funding based on class size. By emphasizing class size alone, Wong argues that local governments fail to address the inequity between school districts that serve large minority and low-income populations.

Kathryn McDermott (1999) supports Wong's insights, finding that the emphasis on equity in funding at the state and federal levels are often undermined at the local level. Local control of public schools, an honored tradition in education, often gets in the way of achieving any goals regarding funding equity. In Connecticut school districts, for example, McDermott found that when state officials met with local school districts regarding the problem of funding equity, they were met with strong opposition. Many local school districts and residents felt that schools were their "private property" and objected to increasing state control in any decision-making regarding the local public schools.

In addition to conflict among decision-makers, attempts to address inequity in funding are also hampered by the lack of public support. Reed (2001) found that a strong degree of localism underlies any decisions regarding educational achievement, taxes and school performance. Thus, while many people agree regarding the need to promote equal funding, there is a strong "not in my schoolyard" sentiment, wherein people feel that property taxes should benefit their own neighborhoods.