Kevin Welner and I maintain that mandating "comparability" in Title 1 funds among schools within districts will do little, if anything, to address the stark funding and resource disparities facing our nation's high need schools and students. Rather, the "real culprit" is the deep funding inequities among districts caused by the seriously flawed, outmoded and broken finance systems in most of the 50 states.

Add a Colorado trial court Judge decison on Friday to the undeniable, and longstanding, evidence of how states turn a blind eye to the needs of its poorest students. Citing an overwhelming trial record and an over $4 billion shortfall in what is necessary for a rigorous standards-based education, the Judge concluded that the Colorado finance system is "unconscionable" and unconstitutional. She ordered the Legislature and Governor to fix it.

It's time to get past the inside-the-beltway hoopla over what amounts to, in so many our communities, a moving deck chairs exercise. I would hope that Colorado's elected officials use the opportunity to undertake real finance reform designed to ensure all children, especially poor children, the resources needed to achieve high academic standards.

What distinguishes NCLB from prior authorizations of ESEA is the tying of consequences around student achievement outcomes to the receipt of Title I funds. Most of the debate about accountability over the last decade has focused on whether and how these consequences work, and everyone agrees that some kind of refinement is in order. But the basic framework governing the input side of the ledger, which predates NCLB by decades, is also in need of sharpening. By this I mean that the fiscal requirements of Title I are in need of an overhaul. The requirements should safeguard the purpose of Title I funds: to enhance the educational experience of children living in concentrated poverty. This means that Title I funds have to make it to schools serving concentrations of low-income children, and that once there that the funds are put to good use.

The existing comparability requirement fails utterly to ensure that Title I funds make it to high-poverty schools. Since Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza's seminal articles on the topic in 2005, a series of increasingly sophisticated reports based on increasingly robust data has documented that Title I schools tend not to receive their fair share of state and local resources. The Department of Education's latest reports draw a bright line under this finding. The problem, of course, is that the current requirement does not speak to actual dollars. Instead, districts are allowed to make believe that their Title I and non-Title I schools receive reasonably comparable benefit from non-federal sources as measured by ratios of student-to-teacher and book-to-student ratios. The flawed requirement is convenient for managers who are, by and large, used to allocating resources by way of staffing ratios, but it covers up the effects of predictable patterns that put a thumb on the scales in favor of low-poverty schools. Most funds are used to pay teachers, and teacher pay is geared to experience. Seeking easier working conditions, experienced teachers migrate to low-poverty schools. High-poverty schools are famously overstocked with inexperienced teachers and novices, and unless districts systematically compensate for the experience deficit with funds to support newer teachers, with lower class sizes or coaches for example, Title I schools simply don't see their fair share of state and local resources. And far from representing additional resources, Title I funds may fail even to bring Title I schools up to par with non-Title I schools in terms of the actual per-pupil dollars from all sources.

This state of affairs is totally unacceptable in terms of equity. The loophole subverts the compensatory intent of the Title I program. And, furthermore, high correlations between the percentages of non-white students and student poverty rates within schools gives the inequity a pernicious flavor of disparate impact. These alone are reasons for closing the comparability loophole. But we also know that traditional modes of operation fail to ensure that Title I funds are put to good use. Districts must shift to more strategic approaches to allocating funds to schools. Allocating resources by way of staffing ratios obscures inequity while being completely indifferent to student achievement results. A meaningful comparability requirement would kick-start the process of shifting to smarter, fairer approaches to allocating resources. Districts using an honest student-weighted funding approach would be in compliance with the most rigorous imaginable comparability requirement. All advocates for closing the comparability loophole appreciate that some kind of transitional period is called for. Comparability reform will not on its own, however, ensure that funds purchase effective teaching and improved student achievement results. Just what will do so goes beyond the scope of today’s discussion.

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In the Department’s report, at the very basic per-pupil expenditure level, as well as in per-pupil expenditure levels based on personnel factors, we can see that Title I schools continue to be shortchanged. Title I was created because it was understood that the condition of poverty could impact learning in such a way that the federal government felt it necessary to support state and local communities in addressing learning challenges. However, what we have seen become stagnant is the issue of the great variance in teacher quality – the foundation of comparability – between Title I schools and those in higher-income communities.

While the teachers who are currently in Title I schools are certainly there to try, these schools are not the magnets of quality teacher talent that we need for many reasons. Those reasons have little to do with the students in those schools but rather, more to do with the schools not having stable leadership, having high attrition rates among their educators and being located in communities where there are concerns for personal safety. Continuing the vicious cycle, many of the reform strategies under NCLB led to a very narrowly prescribed approach to instruction, which is commonly what is clung to when you do not have a highly skilled workforce. Because of these and many other factors, distributing highly qualified teachers equally across all types of schools is compromised at most every turn.

The federal government can help only if willing to enact policies that require equitable funding and staffing for Title I schools. That means staffing them with teachers who are fully licensed. This would at least create a floor for a standard that is being more appropriately met in middle to higher-income community schools.

As it stands, we have never really held our feet to the fire and said we are going to put into these schools a workforce that can dedicate itself to the educational attainment of their students over the long haul. The federal government needs to say to states and states need to say to districts that workforce quality is the foremost comparability factor, the keystone, that we are going to address. Title I schools would then need to make changes to facilitate this, including installing effective feedback loops for teachers, ensuring the environments support updated technology to bolster instruction, making sure that teachers are able to make reliable and valid assessments of student learning and offering teachers the capacity to implement a variety of strategies and interventions – beyond those that are narrowly prescribed.

To make this happen in a situation and time as dire as this, districts just might need to funnel more funding into Title I schools than their higher-performing schools. With commitment over time, it will likely equalize; however, we will never reverse the historical trends in the Department’s report if districts are continually permitted to find loopholes to providing equal funding to low-income community schools that are already in a constant state of remediation.

If we do not focus on a real workforce strategy for Title I schools that would offer the same level of qualified teachers as that of higher performing schools, then we will be left with nothing but bureaucratic workarounds to this fundamental factor of productivity. Until then, children in Title I schools will continue to be left behind.

Many, if not most, Coloradans and Americans would be surprised to learn that we are one of only three developed countries that invests more money in affluent schools than we do in low-income schools. This reality is in part the result of a long-standing loophole in federal law, also known as the “comparability loophole,” that shortchanges children living in poverty and undermines efforts to close the achievement gap.

The original and well-intentioned goal of Title I funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has been to provide additional resources to states and school districts for the education of children living in concentrated poverty. In order to meet that intent, the law has ostensibly required that state and local funds be spent comparably between Title I and non-Title I schools, so that federal dollars supplement, rather than supplant, local and state education funding.

However, the intent of Title I has been undermined by excluding a typical district’s largest expenditure, actual teacher salaries, from calculations of comparability, creating a loophole that allows districts to meet the current federal requirement for comparability without actually spending state and local funds equitably between Title I and non-Title I schools. This longstanding “comparability loophole” means that Title I dollars intended to improve the education of children living poverty are not deployed to the schools where they are needed most. This results in low-income students effectively subsidizing the education of their more affluent peers.

The Center for American Progress has put together a very useful report on the comparability loophole, which can be accessed here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/06/comparability_part3.html

Earlier this year, I introduced a bipartisan bill with Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi that would close the “comparability loophole” and ensure Title I funds are used for their intended purpose. Congressman Fattah, who also posted here, was the House sponsor and has been a long time champion for funding equity. The bill calls for accounting of real per-pupil expenditures and will increase transparency about the allocation of resources. This data will be accessible to parents, taxpayers, districts, states and policy makers at all levels of government.

I am pleased to report that language from the Bennet-Cochran “comparability loophole” legislation was ultimately included in the ESEA bill recently approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. It is my hope that closing this loophole will help ensure that Title I, the flagship program of ESEA, meets its intended purpose of improving the education of children living in poverty.

While we clearly need to do more to address funding inequity and bring innovative efforts to improve educational outcomes for every child to scale, closing the “comparability loophole” would represent a significant step in the right direction.

At Education Resource Strategies (ERS), our work with urban school districts targets how to allocate and organize resources in ways that lead to excellence for all students and schools, equitably and efficiently. The DOE report shines a light on the critical need to insure resource equity. It also highlights the need to improve data and the understanding of the reasons for spending differences as well as the strategies for addressing the differences- which do not always include equalizing spending. Those responding to the report should understand that:

1. Tracking of school-level spending is typically bad. Most districts don’t do a good job tracking spending to the school level ---so a key next step is to do this more consistently. We find that districts range from reporting 40% of spending to the school level to around 80%, making it hard to be sure whether DOE calculations reflect reality. When districts do take care to allocate all of the resources down to each school, many will find that they DO spend more in high poverty schools because they track coaches and some itinerant staff that work in high poverty schools as central spending. (Other districts will find that they keep magnet school and advanced program spending like International Baccalaureate centrally which would typically add dollars to lower poverty schools and thus exacerbate inequity).

2. School size has the biggest influence on inequity. Even if they do track spending, the largest driver of differences in general education spending across schools is usually not teacher salaries but school size (by a large factor). In some districts, the high poverty schools are the smallest and most under-enrolled leading to significantly higher costs and in other districts the reverse is true. The point is this driver is unrelated to opportunities to learn.

3. Teacher salaries are the second biggest influence. The second biggest driver is usually teacher salary. But, since teacher salary levels don’t currently link to teacher effectiveness, a straight equalization of dollars- even with a 10% leeway- isn’t necessarily the right policy solution. Instead, extra support for novice teachers might be a short term solution and revamping teacher compensation certainly is the long term answer.

Strict mandates on expenditure levels without regard to the reasons for them, will not improve equity and excellence, but improved transparency in financial and human resource reporting and problem solving around the reasons for the differences in spending will.

To learn more about school funding systems and how to better calculate spending in a district see the ERS guide, School Funding Systems: Equity, Transparency, Flexibility.

Also, as a quick response to Checker Finn’s point on weighted student funding, ERS has a series of resources that evolved from a summit that brought together districts that have moved to this system. Weighted Student Funding systems do indeed usually result in Federal dollars being more equitably distributed. In addition, districts and state funding is more flexibly allocated which further improves efforts to meet student needs. See Annenberg Institutes for School Reform’s Special issue of VUE, as well as our summit report.

Current comparability requirements – put into place to ensure that Title I dollars enhanced funding, not supplanted funding, for the most needy students and schools – do nothing to prohibit the uneven distribution of teachers between Title I and non-Title I schools because school districts are allowed to show comparability through student-to-staff ratios or teacher salary schedules, not expenditures like actual salaries.

Particularly troubling, the regulations for calculating student-to-staff ratios include both teachers and paraprofessionals. This means there could be, for instance, a Title I elementary school with 40 staff members, but almost half of them are paraprofessionals, compared to a non-Title I school with 40 staff members, nearly all of whom are certified teachers. Under federal law these two schools would be “comparable.” Another scenario: A Title I school’s teaching staff may be predominantly comprised of first- or second-year teachers, whereas the non-Title I school has experienced teachers. There’s nothing equitable about either situation. We know that teacher effectiveness matters, and experience certainly plays a role in effectiveness. We also know that experienced teachers prefer lower-poverty schools for a number of reasons – among them perceived better general working conditions. So why wouldn’t policymakers establish federal equitable funding requirements that help to ensure that students in low-income schools have the same access to equitable resources as their peers in higher-income schools? Helping to ensure an equitable education for all children is a role for the federal government. There are currently some options on the table for making comparability more meaningful. My colleague, Jennifer Cohen, from the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation has written a great deal on the comparability requirement in Title I. Most recently she wrote on the changes proposed in the latest draft of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. She writes that under the new draft: “Comparability would truly become a measure of funds spent, rather than a comparison of easy to document but hard-to-quantify resources. Second, [the proposal] requires that expenditures in low- and high-income schools be equivalent – not within 10 percent. This would give districts far less leeway in variations in funding for their schools. While a 10 percent difference may seem small, it can mean the difference between several teaching positions in some schools or a faculty of less experienced teachers. But most importantly, the Harkin bill closes what has come to be called the ‘comparability loophole’ that allows districts to ignore variations in teacher compensation due to years of experience in their per pupil expenditure calculations for Title I and non-Title I schools.” Closing the loophole is a critical piece to helping ensure that low-income schools receive sufficient funds to either compensate more experienced teachers or implement other programs to support student learning and improve achievement.

The comparability rules are an overall benefit. They’re also of relatively minor importance and are a distraction from the giant issue of funding disparities between districts.

Accordingly, I’m glad that the Department did this analysis. I only wish that it had included an explanation of how the problem of intra-district resource disparities is dwarfed by the issue of inter-district disparities. Rutgers professor Bruce Baker has looked at this issue in two articles (http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/5 and http://bit.ly/rHQ4rK), and he and I together looked in particular at the continuing inter-district problem (http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/718/831).

Baker’s quick thoughts (titled “The Comparability Distraction”) on the new Department of Education study are very much worth a read (http://bit.ly/uQ4KKK)

Yes, let’s strengthen Title I rules to better promote the provision of resources to the most needy schools within a district. But let’s also use Title I and other federal levers to better promote the provision of resources to the most needy districts within a state.

Some things are simply beyond Uncle Sam's reach, and one of those is competent enforcement of spending comparability in the absence of state/district school budget and financing based on KIDS rather than GROWN-UPS. If every public-education dollar (state, district, federal) to which a youngster is entitled followed him/her to the school that he/she actually attended, to be allocated and expended AT that school, this problem would go away--and faster and more dramatically if this student funding were "weighted," i.e. adjusted according to the individual student's needs and circumstances. Couple that with a transparent system for tracking dollars in (and out) of schools and comparing them across schools and jurisdictions, and the comparability challenge is readily overcome. (For what it's worth, we at Fordham have repeatedly urged "weighted student funding"--see for example, http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2006/200606_fundthechild/FundtheChild062706.pdf --as well as transparency in school budgeting and financing. (On the latter point, we actual recommend a federal role, albeit a modest one: http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2011/20110419_ESEABriefingBook/ESEABriefingBook_Issue8.pdf )

The USDOE report on federal Title 1 funds again fails to recognize that, while better distribution of funding to schools within districts may help, it is a proverbial "drop in the bucket" in addressing resource disparities that have long plagued the nation's high poverty schools and districts.

The real culprit is the stark funding disparities between districts (inter-district) caused by state school finance systems, systems that in most states are deeply inequitable and have shortchanged poor students and schools for so long.

As Dr. Bruce Baker aptly points out, the USDOE report, like others before it, "reinforces" the "overemphasis on within district disparity, ignoring entirely between district disparity. In part, it is perhaps a more politically convenient argument to point blame at local school district officials, rather than states, for not doing their part to improve equity across schools. Local school officials make good targets, but it's harder to pick on states & state legislatures."

See: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/the-comparability-distraction-the-real-funding-equity-issue/

At best, Congress is playing at the margins. Every year, Washington hands over federal education funds, including Title 1, to states that make no effort to fairly fund their high need districts and, even worse, simply turn around and cut state education aid from their own budgets. It's high time for Congress to stop subsidizing state funding inequity.

There is a well established consensus that children in concentrated poverty are more expensive to educate than are children with more resources at home. There may be disputes over how much more, what the baseline should be, and on what the money should be spent, but the consensus is that it takes more money. There is also a well established consensus that federal funds should supplement and not supplant state and local funds. That fiscal requirement is included throughout federal authorizing legislation. The current comparability provision, and its implementation, have ignored both of these agreed-upon principles. This report is a welcome confirmation of what has been witnessed throughout school districts across the country. The comparability requirement of Title I should be reformed to reflect our educational goals and what we know to be a reasonable way to count and spend money. I have introduced H.R. 1294, the ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act (Senators Bennet and Cochran have introduced the Senate companion, S.701) to achieve just that objective.

Under current law, and under the proposed changes to comparability, local school officials have the flexibility to devote as much state and local resources to their Title I or higher-poverty schools as they see fit. The concept of a comparability “ceiling” for these higher-need schools is a misinterpretation, not surprising given the complicated and wonky nature of this provision. The federal government has long maintained oversight over the spending of federal funds, including supplement not supplant and maintenance of effort requirements. More to the point, the intent of Title I has always been to assist states and school districts with covering some of the additional costs of educating children in concentrated poverty. The current practice of using Title I to fill holes left by inequitable state and local expenditures violates that long-standing principle.

We must not forget, as Secretary Duncan reminded us this past week, that some districts have no problem meeting the current comparability standard, or a future more rigorous standard. These districts have invested the resources they control where they are needed most without the direction or oversight of the federal government. These district leaders saw schools in need of additional assistance, based on student outcomes, and made financial decisions accordingly. In this time of limited budgets, we have a responsibility, at all levels of government, to see that funds are spent efficiently, appropriately and as intended. Comparability will not solve all of the problems plaguing our highest-poverty schools. But it will address one aspect of federal policy that can provide innovative, results-oriented leaders the guidance they need to ensure we are providing all students the opportunity for success.

The disturbing revelations from recent Education Department reports could only surprise those who have chosen to ignore that unequal education is still a fact of American life 55 years after Brown vs. Board of Education. Need more proof? An analysis by EdTrust also echoes what many teachers and parents of Title I schools have said for years, that “ budgeting practices in school districts across the country are shortchanging [poor] children and undermining federal investment in high-poverty schools…(April 2010, EdTrust).

For those who contend that poverty is irrelevant as a factor in whether U.S. children receive a quality public education, the truth is: America’s poor children are more likely to go to school in buildings that are poorly maintained, poorly equipped, poorly supplied, and poorly staffed. Many schools in high-poverty areas are not only visually depressing, but physically dangerous. How does a teacher convince a kid (or a parent whose child is) sitting in a leaking trailer or dodging falling plaster that we REALLY believe all children deserve a high quality education? What do such disparities say about the level of expectations the nation or the state (upon whom these schools rely for funding) has for the students and teachers who are there? What does it say about our nation that we are unwilling (not unable) to provide some of our children decent, safe school buildings?

Parents in high poverty communities see a constant rotation of administrators, and cycles of temporary, underprepared teaching staff for their children, but veteran, highly accomplished teachers for the children of those who have more? Why should they have to move themselves or their children to get access to those resources and teachers which are public and are proclaimed to be a way out of poverty?

There are millions of hard-working parents in poor urban and rural communities who did not finish school themselves, but desperately want their children to have a better life. Contrary to politically expedient myths, the majority of America’s poor families have always pushed their youngsters to pursue education as the best way not only to achieve individual goals, but also to help uplift the entire community. I submit that many parents in poor areas today appear to value education less because less value has clearly been placed on them and their children by the public education system. These attitudes are not born out of poverty; they are a reaction to what these disenfranchised parents and students correctly perceive as a string of broken promises.

The federal government could and should be playing a much stronger role in bringing an end to these disgraceful inequities, but while Congress fiddles, poor children continue to be underserved, and the dedicated educators who work with them continue to expend precious energies trying to make up for unnecessary gaps in resources and services. Decades of lax monitoring and inadequate funding have thwarted the original intents of hard-won legal remedies such as Title I and IDEA.

For an excellent summary of what the Federal government could do, I recommend the Forum on Educational Accountability's February 2011 document: All Children Deserve an Opportunity to Learn.

Cross-posted at my Teacher Leaders Network blog: TeachMoore.