General Accounting Office
January 31, 2002
A recent report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) examines the flow of Title I dollars to schools attended by low-income children. It responds to a Congressional mandate for GAO to review Title I allocations in terms of how precisely these dollars reach the schools with the most poor kids. This is strictly an examination of the flow of funds, not the benefit produced by or effectiveness of Title I-funded interventions. The GAO found (using 1999-2000 data) that Title I's "complex allocation process resulted in differences in actual funding per poor child among states, school districts, and schools." Indeed, analysts encountered "many instances of states, districts, and schools with either similar numbers or similar percentages of poor children receiving widely differing amounts of funding per poor child." There are many reasons for these variations, including arcane, multi-factor formulas, the persistence of local discretion in allocating Title I funds among individual schools, and "factors other than numbers of poor children [that] are included in Education's formula calculation, for example, the amount a state spends on education." The GAO also notes that "The allocation of Title I funds does not encourage states to target their own funds to children from low-income families. [There are] no monetary, statutory, or regulatory incentive[s] for them to do so." GAO suggests various ways by which Congress could change this but, of course, any of them would also have the effect of taking money from somewhere else. It seems to me odd, even fishy, that, although GAO says they briefed relevant Congressional committees in March 2001 on the "preliminary" results of this work, this report came out after Congress had finished its work on the No Child Left Behind act. It smacks of ringing the fire alarm after the house has burned down. But you might want to see for yourself-the report number is GAO-02-242-and can do so by surfing to the abstract at http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/summary.php?recflag=&accno=A02642&rptno=GAO-02-242.
