This new study by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examines the ESEA comparability requirement, which mandates that school districts provide “comparable” educational services in both high- and low-poverty schools as a condition of receiving Title I dollars. CAP’s concern is that, although this requirement is intended to level the playing field for schools, it actually allows districts to use teacher-to-student ratios or average teacher salaries as a proxy for comparable services, instead of using actual teacher salary expenditures. And because poor schools typically have newer teachers who tend to struggle their first few years and cost less to employ, these schools are getting both less qualified teachers and less money than more advantaged ones.
The analysts examine Office of Civil Rights district spending data for the 2011–12 school year from roughly ninety-five thousand public schools. Adjusting for cost-of-living differences across districts, they compare how districts fund schools that are eligible to receive federal Title I dollars with other schools in their grade span and find “vast disparities” in the allocation of state and local dollars.
Here are the three key findings: one, due to the “loophole” in federal law, more than 4.5 million low-income students attend inequitably funded Title I schools; two, those schools receive around $1,200 less per student than comparison schools in their districts; and three, if the federal loophole were closed, high-poverty schools would receive around $8.5 billion in additional funds each year.
There is, however, a large and insurmountable problem: The data are likely untrustworthy. OCR data are self-reported by districts and aren’t systematically verified. CAP itself admits in a footnote that “it is probable that districts may have filled out these forms using slightly different analytic approaches,” and adds that it was not able to “cross-reference the Civil Rights Data Collection with other school finance datasets.” This means that districts could be all over the map in how they report these data, especially because we know that they tend to budget not using real dollars, but by allocating people and services. A better method would be to use audited expenditures at the school level, use actual rather than average salaries, and file FOIA requests for each employee's title and salary if necessary. This is what we at Fordham did for our Metro D.C. School Spending Explorer, which found most districts (at least in the Washington, D.C. area) to be surprisingly equitable—and even progressive—in their spending.
All of that to say that, yes, in order to sort this out, we need reliable accounting of all expenditures by school level for sundry reasons—not only for comparability purposes. But it is highly doubtful that that’s what we’re getting from OCR.
SOURCE: Robert Hanna, Max Marchitello, and Catherine Brown, “Comparable but Unequal: School Funding Disparities,” Center for American Progress (March 2015).
