NEWS
- Fight for Children's 2015 School Awards Luncheon [E.L. Haynes PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS, Capital City PCS and Center City PCS mentioned]
- What a new report shows about D.C. schools
- In Washington D.C., Homeless Students Fight The Statistics
- District introduces gifted programs to push talented students, keep families
- D.C. schools food vendor pays $19 million to settle whistleblower lawsuit
- Inequitable school funding called ‘one of the sleeper civil rights issues of our time’
Fight for Children's 2015 School Awards Luncheon [E.L. Haynes PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS, Capital City PCS and Center City PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 5, 2015
Yesterday I was exceptionally fortunate to be able to attend the 2015 Fight for Children School Awards luncheon. Held again this year in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center's Pavilion Room, where even an overcast sky could not stop the glass-enclosed space from being blanketed in light. The glow seemed perfectly matched to the tremendous respect individuals have for the work of this organization, as was clearly demonstrated by the great number of dignitaries in attendance. Among the guests included Mayor Muriel Bowser, Councilman Vincent Orange, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennie Niles, the State Superintendent for Education Hanseul Kang, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, Chairman of the Public Charter School Board Darren Woodruff, PCSB Executive Director Scott Pearson, Vice-Chairman of the PCSB Don Soifer, Deputy Director of the PCSB Naomi Rubin DeVeaux, Ward One Member of the State Board of Education Laura Wilson Phelan, President of Building Hope Joe Bruno, Executive Director of the CityBridge Foundation Mieka Wick, President/CEO of Abdo Development and Fight for Children Board of Directors member Jim Abdo, and Chairman and CEO of Objectvideo and the Chairman of the Fight for Children Board of Directors Raul Fernandez. It was especially an honor to have two family members of the late Joseph E. Robert, Jr., the founder of Fight for Children, join us; his sister Christine Robert and son Joseph E. Robert III, who is also a member of the Fight for Children Board.
Perhaps these numerous prominent members of the Washington D.C. community showed up at one place in the middle of a Thursday because of all the amazing accomplishments Fight for Children has brought over its 25 year history. In the middle of the glossy professionally produced brochure accompanying the program is a timeline showing highlights of the work of this group since its creation in 1990. It reminded me of the advertisement placed in the New York Times shortly before New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's term ended demonstrating all of the achievements he had realized for this city. Some examples from the pamphlet include in 1998: "Provided technical assistance and seed funding to the 19 charter schools that opened their doors in the fall of 1998;" in 2003: "led a coalition of business, education, and government leaders to secure an unprecedented $275 million over seven years in new federal funding, including the Opportunity Scholarship Program, to expand quality education options for low-income families in DC;" and in 2009: "served as the lead local funder of IMPACT, the evaluation and assessment system for teachers and other school-based personnel in DC Public Schools." It is a truly amazing list.
The Master of Ceremonies was Jummy Olabanji, an Emmy award-winning WJLA Channel 7 anchor and reporter. She quickly introduced Fight for Children's President and CEO Michela English, who Ms. Olabanji pointed out, has now been in her role for nine years and who created this awards program in 2007 making this the eighth annual ceremony.
Ms. English explained that she initiated this event, not to recognize the schools that everyone knew about for their academic achievement, but to publicize often "unsung" institutions that were "doing innovative things and reaching each and every student where they were and giving them the tools they need to be successful." This was a perfect segue to the address by Jennie Niles, the Deputy Mayor for Education, who won one of Fight for Children's first Quality School Awards as the founder and head of E.L. Haynes Public Charter School.
Of course, the positive spirit of Ms. Niles is immediately contagious whenever she speaks and this day was no exception. She recognized the school leaders that were present and relayed that she really should not say this in front of her boss, but her last job was much more difficult than her current position. This statement turned out to be O.K. because the Mayor would not arrive for a few more minutes.
Ms. Niles then talked passionately about how much winning a prize from Fight for Children meant in the early days of her charter school's existence. She said that it immediately brought confirmation that they were on the right track to doing something important. Ms. Niles added that this validation was crucially important to her school community, especially the teachers. She revealed that it also brought scarce financial resources that allowed them to develop vitally needed programs for her students. Finally, she mentioned the her charter learned valuable lessons from networking with other winners, access that came along with Fight for Children's award.
The Deputy Mayor then laid out many of the goals for her office, with the overall aim of having all children in the nation's capital learning at a high level. Ms. Niles commented that there was still a long way to go to reach this target, but she stressed that D.C. is making more rapid progress in this area than any other urban school district in the country. She stated that she would achieve this undertaking by being the "air traffic controller around education policy in the city." Some of her immediate actions will be to strive to increase collaboration between the charter and traditional school sectors, optimize resources for all educational institutions. and foster equity around outcomes and programs.
An innovative portion of the program came next in which Ms. Olahanji circulated among the attendees and asked an interview question around leadership to many of the heads of schools. Their answers would then immediately appear on a screen at the front of the stage. Some of the individuals featured included Bob McCarty from Cesar Chavez PCS, Karen Dresden of Capital City PCS, and Maria Tukeva from the Columbia Heights Education Campus.
After lunch and an energetic presentation from the Kelly Miller Middle School Step Team it was time to announce this year's winners. There were three. A special recognition award and $25,000 went to the Truesdell Education Campus. This prize was given by the 10 member volunteer independent selection committee because of the school's "significant turnaround in recent years, for its rapid improvements, as evidenced by its strong leadership team and high quality of instruction." This was the only award that had not been announced prior to the start of the luncheon.
The District of Columbia Public School Rising Star Award was presented to Seaton Elementary. Seaton teaches 295 students in pre-Kindergarten through the fifth grade in Ward 6. This school was selected due to its efforts to close the academic achievement gap through a Family Empowerment Center containing specialized programs for parents of English Language Learners, researched-based English Language Learners teacher training, and expanded online learning for students of the English language.
The 2015 District of Columbia Public Charter School Rising Star Award was given to Center City Public Charter School's Congress Heights Campus. The Congress Heights Ward 8 Campus has an enrollment of over 227 pupils in grades Pre-Kindergarten through eighth. This school was rewarded for the development of its strategic plan that includes as its mission to bring in new technology selected specifically to close the academic achievement gap, improve performance on its standardized tests, and develop in its students 21st century skills.
These last two Quality School Awards were presented by Gina Adams, Corporate Vice President of FedEx Corporation and a member of the host organization's Board of Directors. The prizes come with $100,000 over two years to drive further improvements at these facilities. They were introduced by beautifully produced videos about each of these schools which reminded everyone in the audience that quality is what Fight for Children is all about.
What a new report shows about D.C. schools
The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
June 5, 2015
A RECENTLY released assessment of D.C. public schools’ performance under mayoral control pretty much confirms things that already were known. There has been progress in student achievement; formidable challenges remain; change takes time; and stability is important. The report should quiet the lingering grumbling about the reforms launched by former mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), while spurring school officials to tackle work that still is desperately needed.
The 340-page report by the National Research Council, which cost about $1.9 million, is the first formal assessment of the effects of the District’s bold efforts to remake public education. The report is a bit dated: It examines the period from 2009 to 2013. As with most academic reports, it is laced with qualifiers. Nonetheless, it paints a picture of an improving system in which student test scores are up, enrollment declines have been reversed and the teaching force has become more effective. Complementing improvements in the traditional school system is the flourishing charter school sector that educates 44 percent of the District’s public school students and offers welcome alternatives to parents.
To be sure, a system in which only 59 percent of traditional school students and 69 percent of public charter school students graduated in 2014 has a long way to go. The report singled out the disparities in resources and academic performance between poor and affluent students. The achievement gap is cause for concern, but disparities born of generations of poverty were never going to be eliminated by schools alone — as reform opponents are usually the first to argue — and certainly not in seven years. What’s striking is that the performance of all students — poor and affluent, black and white — has been lifted. Eliminating poverty is the right goal but not an essential precondition for improving schools, in other words.
The report is critical of the city’s education bureaucracy for unclear lines of authority, lack of transparency and poor coordination between the traditional and charter school sectors. No doubt there are long-standing issues with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education that need to be addressed; Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) made a good start when she streamlined operations under a well-regarded deputy mayor for education, Jennifer C. Niles. But city officials should resist any move to respond to the criticism by creating new levels of bureaucracy or vesting new powers in the State Board of Education. Likewise, any infringement on the autonomy that has been critical to the success of public charter schools would be misguided.
Indeed, if there is an overarching lesson to be gleaned from the report, it is that hard work and smart, steady leadership produce results. The District should stay on course.
In Washington D.C., Homeless Students Fight The Statistics
National Public Radio
By Kavitha Cardoza
June 7, 2015
Delonna Jones is a 10-year-old with twisty braids and a toothy grin. She struggles with reading and is repeating the third grade at Ketcham Elementary School in D.C. this year. She says she gets distracted when other children tease her. "Kids like to pick on me," she says. "I get into fights sometimes."
Delonna is one of about 100 children, a third of this school, who are homeless. Nearly the entire school qualifies for free and reduced-price lunch. School is one of the few constants in Delonna's life, as with many other children here. She loves her third-grade teacher best. "She called me her favorite," Delonna says shyly.
Schools in D.C. — traditional and charter — have the nation's lowest graduation rates when compared to state averages. Just 62 percent of students complete high school in four years.
Experts believe you can tell by third grade whether children will graduate high school based on clear early warning signs, or what they call the ABCs: attendance, behavior and course performance. Delonna struggles with all three.
Educators say students face numerous challenges related to poverty that spill into the classroom. Immediate needs, like food and shelter, can make school a lower priority. Many students at Ketcham come late. Sometimes not at all. Delonna missed three weeks of school last year.
Behavior is another early warning sign for dropping out – even in the lower grades. Research has long confirmed that children who witness violence in their everyday lives can become emotional and aggressive, and outbursts can disrupt learning.
So at Ketcham, Principal Maisha Riddlesprigger has structured the school day around stability and consistency. "There's a lot of ugly realities outside of the school communities that kids deal with, and we can't shy away from attacking those issues head-on."
The school provides mental health services, free bus tokens for parents and even an after-school food pantry.
At that food pantry, Delonna Jones carefully selects items including canned vegetables, cabbage and cornbread mix. She sorts out the lighter items like macaroni and granola bars and puts them in her 6-year-old sister's backpack, while she and her 9-year-old sister, Delaya, carry the heavier items like shampoo and juice. "My principal sometimes takes us home in the car. Otherwise we put it in our backpacks so it won't fall."
Julia Zahn, the homelessness liaison at Ketcham, says the school has partnerships with 20 different nonprofits. She has closets full of winter coats, shoes and mittens in a variety of sizes. "When families move and don't have access to their belongings, being able to pick out a stuffed animal is really helpful."
In this urban school district, 76 percent of students are low-income. And schools spend a lot of time meeting their basic needs. One school packs food for about 70 children to take home for the weekend so they have something to eat. Another has a relationship with a bakery to give families fresh bread. Some even provide turkeys at Thanksgiving, but the need is much greater than the resources.
Delonna wants to be a teacher when she grows up, to "help children learn to write their name."
Despite the challenges so many children here face, Principal Maisha Riddlesprigger and teachers here say they believe students like Delonna can beat the odds.
"If we just look at the statistics there would be no reason for us to be here, right?" she says. "But we're in the business of changing lives."
District introduces gifted programs to push talented students, keep families
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
June 6, 2015
When D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson came to the District in 2007, there was no office for gifted education and no plan for serving the city’s most talented learners. The school system was overwhelmed with working to raise basic skills for the large number of struggling students.
The lack of stimulating District classrooms sent many parents looking for gifted or advanced programs in the suburbs, led them to move their children to charter schools or private schools, or prompted long commutes to schools in the city’s wealthiest Zip codes.
To combat such flight from the public school system, D.C. Public Schools is introducing gifted programs in its neighborhood schools, hoping to attract more talented and motivated students back to the system.
Henderson created an office of advanced and enriched instruction in 2012 and set goals for increasing the number of students who perform at the highest level on citywide tests, an effort “to meet the needs of all young people,” she said.
The District’s new commitment to advanced instruction is part of an appeal to middle-class families who are calling for more challenging classes. It also reflects a national push to identify and serve more low-income and minority students who have been underrepresented in gifted education, a growing well of untapped potential as increasing numbers of students live in poverty.
Just 3 percent of low-income fourth-graders across the country scored “advanced” in reading on the 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress, compared with 14 percent of students from wealthier families. The gap is much wider in the District — 2 percent compared with 26 percent — where middle- and upper-class families are often headed by adults with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes.
Jordin McFadden, an eighth-grader at Kelly Miller Middle School in a high poverty neighborhood in Northeast, recalled her first year at the school as “easy.” In math, her favorite subject, the class was learning simple, one-step equations, and she used to speed through her work, then spend the rest of her time talking to friends.
Then, last year, she joined a new “academy” within her school, where her teachers started introducing lessons beyond her grade level on matrices and quadratics and geometry. Class work started spilling over into an hour of homework every night.
“They push us to do better,” said Jordin, who is planning to go to Phelps ACE, an application high school, next year. “They tell us that life is not easy; you have to work hard.”
Many Washington-area suburban school districts screen students from a young age and offer a range of gifted services starting in elementary school. In New York and Chicago, thousands of 4-year-olds take standardized tests in a highly competitive annual bid for admission to a range of gifted programs that start in kindergarten.
Such approaches invite controversy because they tend to reinforce pervasive racial disparities. Nationally, African American and Hispanic students represent just 10 percent and 16 percent of enrollment in gifted programs despite representing 19 percent and 25 percent of the student body in the districts that offer the programs, according to a 2012 report by the U.S. Education Department.
The District has offered gifted services in fits and starts over the years, with special programs offered in some schools or over the summer, and varying levels of support from the central office. At the high school level, top-performing students can compete for admission to selective magnet schools. But elementary schools do not offer the kind of pull-out programs or magnet schools commonly found in other districts. Teachers are trained to provide enrichment within the classroom to strong readers.
As it works to build gifted programs now, the city is pursuing a more flexible path for identifying students for advanced classes and hoping to provide services to as many students as possible.
“We don’t want to further exacerbate race or class disparities that exist,” said Matthew Reif, director of advanced and enriched instruction for D.C. Public Schools.
The cornerstone of their efforts is called the “schoolwide enrichment model,” promoted by Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, education psychologists at the University of Connecticut. Instead of identifying “gifted students,” the program aims to identify “gifted behaviors” in students, such as above-average abilities, creativity and motivation, and to cultivate those abilities.
The first enrichment programs started in middle schools, where the school system is trying to reverse a steady departure of families, including many that turn to high-performing charter schools that offer rigorous course work as a main selling point. Officials also hope to build a bigger pipeline for a growing number of Advanced Placement offerings in high schools.
At Kelly Miller, students fill out an interest survey at the beginning of the year. Then the school’s enrichment resource teacher, Felicia Messina-D’Haiti, designs mini courses for small groups of students that match their interests.
Such as when four students sat at computers during a recent class writing stories about superheroes with special powers and other tales.
“All of us in here, we are all readers, and our vocabulary is high,” said J’Andre Singleton, a seventh-grader.
Another group, with a shared interest in fine arts, came in next and made presentations about research they had conducted on topics they chose ranging from “What causes fear?” to “A history of Ice Ages.”
At Kelly Miller, 66 percent of students scored below proficiency on the citywide standardized reading test last year, and 42 percent scored below proficiency on the math test. But more than half of the students were tapped for enriched instruction.
For children from wealthy families, opportunities for enrichment come in many forms: summer camps and trips abroad and exposure to more vocabulary words at the dinner table. For poor children, school is more likely to be their main outlet for stimulation.
“Kids who have advantages keep getting better and better. These kids skyrocket because of all their resources,” principal Abdullah Zaki said. “A high-potential kid in a less stimulating environment tends to plateau.”
Despite its recent expansion of enrichment, the District got an F this year in a new report card by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation rating statewide policy initiatives to serve low-income gifted students. The city was found to lack policies promoting acceleration — such as allowing early entrance to kindergarten or letting middle school students take high school classes — which research shows can benefit some students.
Zaki also has started to pursue acceleration in his own school through the “academy,” which clusters students in one wing of the school with one class of sixth-graders, one of seventh-graders and two eighth-grade classes. Students who demonstrate ability or motivation spend the day with similar students pursuing more advanced course work.
The principal said he did not think everyone could be served well in a mainstream class.
“People like to say a teacher can teach the really high-performing kids and the really low-performing kids at the same time,” he said. “In reality, they teach in the middle.”
“When you finish your work in class, what does the teacher give you?” he said. “More of the same, or go help Johnny, or go get a book from the library.”
Kelly Miller, along with Hardy Middle School, were the first D.C. schools to get a full-time enrichment teacher. The program has since spread to three other middle schools and a preschool-through-eighth-grade education campus. A handful of elementary schools also have invested funds in enrichment training.
Hardy, in upper Georgetown, enrolls just 15 percent of its in-boundary families and has been making a push to attract more neighborhood families, as well as to better serve many of the students who are motivated to travel across the city for a better education.
Many current and potential parents at the school have been calling for more gifted programs. Soon after the District announced the enrichment program, parents asked for funding to expand it. They were able to hire one additional teacher, so one focuses on science and another focuses on the humanities.
On a spring afternoon, students in a science elective class worked in small groups on projects. Some were using a kit to make electrical circuits with wires, tinfoil and Play-Doh. One student was programming a toy-sized robot to go through a maze, and a pair of students were on a laptop using modern forensic tools to collect evidence from a 19th-century crime scene in a virtual reality sleuthing game.
Down the hall in a humanities enrichment class, students sat around two long tables discussing the question: Can creativity be taught? Last year, Hardy also introduced honors classes, and this year it offered geometry, a high-school-level course, for the first time.
Marcio Duffles, the president of Hardy’s PTO parent-teacher organization, said the advanced courses were a factor when he enrolled his son three years ago. Duffles said his older son also attended Hardy nearly a decade ago, and he has noticed a difference.
“I would say the level of academic instruction that my younger boy got at Hardy is at least one quantum level higher,” he said.
D.C. schools food vendor pays $19 million to settle whistleblower lawsuit
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
June 5, 2015
The largest food vendor for the District’s public school system has agreed to pay $19 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company overcharged the city and mismanaged the school meals programs, with food often arriving at schools late, spoiled or in short supply.
The settlement agreement is the result of a whistleblower lawsuit by a former director of food services for D.C. Public Schools against Chartwells and Thompson Hospitality, which formed a joint venture that provided food services for schools in the District starting in 2008.
The suit led to an investigation and then a complaint from the D.C. attorney general’s office.
“Chartwells has quite reasonably acknowledged and addressed mistakes it made in administering the contract to provide food and food services to DCPS,” Attorney General Karl A. Racine said in a statement Friday. “It is important to ensure that contractors who receive District funds are held accountable for fulfilling their obligations under the contracts, and today’s settlement does just that.”
The whistleblower lawsuit was brought by Jeffrey Mills, executive director of the school system’s Office of Food and Nutritional Services from 2010 until he was fired in early 2013.
Last year, Mills settled a separate lawsuit with the school system for $450,000. That suit alleged that he was terminated for raising flags about the system’s mismanagement of the contract.
“I hope that my lawsuit against Chartwells and the settlement announced today will help improve the food programs for D.C.’s school children, which has always been my goal,” Mills said in a statement issued Friday by Phillips & Cohen, a District-based law firm that filed Mills’s whistleblower lawsuit in 2013.
“The issue of private food vendors prioritizing profits over the well-being of students is a national concern,” Mills said. “I urge all school districts using private food vendors to examine their contracts and the performance of those vendors.”
The settlement leaves the validity of the original claims undetermined, as it does not represent an admission of fact or liability by the contractor.
Owen Donnelly, a spokesman for Chartwells, said in an e-mail that the company “denies any wrongdoing and has agreed to resolve the issues so that focus continues to be on nourishing the bodies, minds and spirits of students to pave the way for a lifetime of success and well-being.”
Donnelly said the underlying issues at DCPS were primarily related to cost overruns and “related reconciliations.”
“In our seven years at D.C. Public Schools, we have significantly increased the quality of food service while saving the District millions of dollars,” he said.
The school system signed a contract with Chartwells in 2008 to provide food services that had formerly been provided in-house. In the District, a majority of students are poor, and many rely on the school nutrition program for meals.
The goals of privatizing the service were to save money and improve the nutritional value of the food.
Another contract was signed in 2012, despite concerns.
The previously sealed complaint from the Office of the Attorney General claimed that Chartwells “knowingly submitted” false invoices that the school system paid.
When the District contracted with Chartwells, the school system’s in-house food program had experienced “million dollar cost overruns,” but those losses did not decrease under the 2008 contract with the company, the complaint said. “Rather, [they] significantly increased.”
Under the terms of the contract, Chartwells was obligated to purchase food “at the lowest possible price.” Instead, the complaint alleged, Chartwells used a corporate affiliate to purchase foods from “companies that manufacture highly processed foods and charge higher prices.”
Chartwells has encountered problems in other parts of the country, including a well-publicized student boycott at a Connecticut high school last fall over the quality of the food the company provided.
In 2012, Chartwells’s parent company, Compass Group USA, paid $18 million to settle allegations by New York’s attorney general that the company overcharged more than three dozen school districts by failing to pass along discounts required by their contracts.
In settling the D.C. lawsuit, Chartwells agreed to make $14 million in credits and payments to the school system and committed to provide $5 million in philanthropic support for the schools, including $4 million to the D.C. Public Education Fund for “innovative programs” and $1 million to several nonprofit organizations that promote literacy and provide mentors, college scholarships and academic enrichment.
The school system plans to continue its contract with the company, which expires June 30, 2017.
“We believe that any issues regarding the provision of school meals, which relate primarily to the prior contract term, have been resolved,” Frederick Lewis, a spokesman for DCPS, said in an e-mail.
He said the current contract has clearer performance expectations and contains “multiple layers of checks-and-balances, including unannounced inspections,” to make sure any issues are addressed.
Ivy Ken, a DCPS parent and longtime advocate for more healthful food in schools, said she is “thrilled” that the lawsuit is bringing to light concerns people have had about the food program that were often dismissed by District officials.
She said she is “appalled” that the contract is being continued, however.
Chartwells is a subsidiary of Compass Group PLC, a British multinational company. Its North American division is headquartered in North Carolina.
The whistleblower — or “qui tam” — provisions of the D.C. False Claims Act allow private citizens to bring lawsuits on behalf of the District and to share in any recovery that is obtained.
Mills could receive up to 30 percent, but an amount has not been set, his attorneys said.
Most of the money from the settlement will return to the District and the schools “to essentially pay the District back . . . for the amount they were overcharged,” said Robert Marus, a spokesman for Racine.
Inequitable school funding called ‘one of the sleeper civil rights issues of our time’
The Washington Post
My Emma Brown
June 8, 2015
Funding for public education in most states is inadequate and inequitable, creating a huge obstacle for the nation’s growing number of poor children as they try to overcome their circumstances, according to a set of reports released Monday by civil rights groups.
Students in the nation’s highest-spending state (New York) receive about $12,000 more each year than students in the lowest-spending state (Idaho), according to the reports, and in most states school districts in wealthy areas spend as much or more per pupil than districts with high concentrations of poverty.
In addition, many states were spending less on education in 2012 than they were in 2008, relative to their overall economic productivity, according to the reports.
The two reports – the Education Law Center’s fourth annual report card on school finance and a companion piece co-authored with the Leadership Conference Education Fund – are meant to help galvanize policymakers and activists to take on longstanding school funding disparities.
“School funding decisions are one of the sleeper civil rights issues of our time,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Leadership Conference Education Fund. “The evidence from across the country is clear and compelling: Our nation must dramatically change the way that educational resources are distributed so that there is true equity in America’s classrooms.”
Henderson pointed to a little-known 1973 Supreme Court case as one reason for why inequitable funding has been such a difficult problem for activists to tackle.
In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, justices ruled that it was legal to base state school funding formulas on local property taxes, even though doing so resulted in unequal resources. The court also ruled that there is no federal constitutional right to an education.
Henderson called the decision a “triumph of states’ rights over human rights,” and said in the long term he wants to see that decision overturned. In the short term, he said, activists need to put pressure on states.
In 2012, just 15 states had school funding systems that funnel more resources to students in poor districts than those in affluent districts, according to the Education Law Center’s analysis.
The remaining states either devote the same funding to the poorest and richest districts, or they send more to districts serving the most affluent students than they send to districts serving the poorest children. Many students in the poorest districts come to school hungry, are in need of health care or lack a stable home life. Such children generally are considered more expensive to educate.
The reports argue that the growing number of poor children and the increasing segregation of impoverished children makes school funding a more urgent issue than ever. Children from low-income families are now the majority in U.S. public schools, according to the Southern Education Foundation.
The four states with the most progressive school finance systems – South Dakota, Delaware, Minnesota and New Jersey – provided their poorest districts with between 30 percent and 38 percent more money per pupil than their most affluent districts, according to the report.
Contrast that with Nevada, which regularly scrapes bottom in state-by-state comparisons of academic performance: In the Silver State, the poorest districts got just 48 cents for every dollar that went to the wealthiest districts.
Nevada legislators this year recognized the disparities, passing a measure to direct more funds to schools serving high concentrations of poor students and students with special needs.
The difference between the school finance system in Nevada and some of its neighboring states is clear in “fairness profiles” that are part of the Education Law Center’s report card.
The fairness profiles are line graphs that show both the level of per-pupil funding in each state and the distribution of that funding. Flat lines, such as for Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, mean that funding is the same for all districts regardless of poverty level; a line that angles down, such as Nevada’s, means that the system is regressive, i.e. poorer school districts get less per-pupil funding.
A line that angles up — such as Delaware and New Jersey, below — means that the system is progressive, i.e. poorer school districts get more per-pupil funding.
A few states, such as Utah, have progressive school finance systems but spend so little on average that they still aren’t doing enough, the report argues.
The “fairness profiles” are based on the Education Law Center’s analysis of federal data from 2012. Some states have made school funding changes since then, while others — such as Pennsylvania, one of the most inequitable in the nation — are considering policy overhauls.
Most of the nation could afford to spend more on education, the report argues, pointing to the falling level of “effort” on education spending in most states. Effort is defined in the report as the ratio of state and local education spending to economic productivity – or the state’s gross domestic product.
In all but four states – West Virginia, Illinois, Wyoming and Connecticut – the level of effort fell between 2008 and 2012. Florida saw the biggest decrease, with its effort declining by 25 percent, but many states saw significant decreases during that time period.
One of the key challenges for education activists seeking more money has always been the lack of a direct connection between taxpayer investment and student achievement. The Education Law Center does not confront that issue in a comprehensive way in its report, but it provides snapshots: state rankings for preschool enrollment, pupil-to-teacher ratio and teacher wage competitiveness.
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