Investing in our neediest children

A new Education Week national survey of school districts reveals disturbing gaps between state and federal policy and the reality in American public schools.

The vast majority of districts report major funding problems. Most list rising special education costs and rising levels of needy students as their top challenges. They also doubt they are financially prepared for the next recession.

The most serious funding problem districts report is convincing elected officials to sufficiently fund public schools. They give both state and federal officials poor marks for their ability to understand school spending, and cite state legislators as the biggest obstacle to making spending decisions that best address student needs. Rather than address need, state legislators perpetuate myths about school spending and quality.

Scholars Sally Nuamah, Jamila Michener, and Domingo Morel have found that poor communities, like school district leaders, lose faith in elected officials, and worse, in democratic institutions, when they experience policies that exacerbate rather than respond to their challenges.

Recent research highlights the failure of federal and state leaders to grasp the reality facing public schools. The most pernicious failure is the refusal to recognize the connection between poverty, funding and educational opportunity.

A new study of the effect of the 2008 recession, by Kenneth Shores of Penn State University and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University, found that the economic downturn resulted in cuts in state and local school spending. Those spending cuts were associated with contemporaneous and persistent declines in student test scores. Moreover, “school districts serving higher concentrations of lowincome and minority students experienced greater declines in achievement from schoolage exposure to the recession.”

Stanford education researcher Sean Reardon observes that test scores are a reflection of a difference in access to the opportunity to learn, affected by all circumstances in a child’s life, both in and outside of school. They often do not reflect school quality. Two recent analyses, from Ohio and North Carolina, emphasize this truth. Both found the state ratings of public schools, mostly based on test scores, track almost perfectly with school poverty.

Because children do not leave their life experiences at the schoolhouse doors, schools must have the tools to mitigate the effects of poverty in order to provide students with the opportunity to learn. National studies show that increased school spending improves academic and life outcomes — particularly for poor students.

Yet almost half the states still fund schools below recession levels. And a recent Urban Institute paper reveals that federal spending on education has dropped precipitously and is expected to keep dropping, despite rising student need. Since 2010, funding for Title I, the largest federal education program supporting children in poverty, dropped by $7 billion, as did funding for IDEA, the federal program for students with disabilities.

Rather than recognize that highpoverty schools need more tools, and thus more funding, to best serve their students, federal and state leaders mandate intervention strategies that are proven failures: school turnaround, school closures, and state takeovers of school districts.

A report from the National Education Policy Center shows that the poorer and less white a school district is, the more likely a state will aggressively intervene with these failed mandates.

Federal and state policies repeat a toxic cycle of disinvestment, punishment, then further disinvestment.

Neighborhood and school segregation compounds the inequity. Children of color are five to seven times more likely than white children to be concentrated in highpoverty neighborhoods. African American and Latinx children are also concentrated in highpoverty schools.

No wonder that school districts and poor communities have little faith in their elected officials.

Massachusetts is bucking the trend of denying the connection between investing in public schools and student outcomes. A new Massachusetts school funding bill commits to closing that state’s 1.5 billion dollar school funding gap. In supporting the bill, state Sen. Sonia ChangDiaz acknowledged that “closing the achievement gap requires two times the investment for our poorest students if we are serious about doing it at scale.”

Connecticut Voices for Children reports that Connecticut’s recovery from the 2008 recession is more unequal than the national recovery, which was among the most unequal in U.S. history. Connecticut’s middle class is smaller and whiter than it was before the recession. Moreover, the census revealed that Connecticut is the only U.S. state where poverty increased in 2018. Our leaders should learn from Massachusetts. Investing in our neediest children, both inside and outside of school, will not only improve their outcomes, it may also restore faith in our elected officials.

Wendy Lecker is a columnist for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney at the Education Law Center.