Or so a study released yesterday by the Education Trust has found. The report, No Accounting for Fairness , looks at funding patterns in the state's fourteen largest school districts; it uses average teacher salaries, which typically make up 80-90% of school expenditures, to evaluate whether extra funds given to these districts for poor children are actually being spent in high-poverty schools, assuming that salaries are positively correlated with teacher experience. The study then uses teacher salaries to estimate per-pupil spending by school.
The findings are revealing: only three of the fourteen districts, EdTrust found, had higher average teacher salaries at high-poverty schools. In the other eleven districts, lower-poverty schools paid their teachers less--and (we can assume) have less experienced teachers. In Akron, for example, the average difference between a high-poverty and low-poverty school teacher's average salary was $4,000. Furthermore, based on these salary numbers, these eleven districts are spending less per-pupil in high-poverty schools than they are in low-poverty schools.
While it has yet to be proven that more money is the silver bullet solution to low achievement for poor students, we can safely say that it does take more money to educate them. Ohio has done much to equalize funding between more and less affluent districts, but as this study shows, there are still spending disparities within districts that may mitigate those effects.
Terry Ryan, Fordham's vice president for Ohio programs and policies, had this to say in this morning's Columbus Dispatch :
The (teacher) seniority system should be changed.??They provide a disincentive to get your best teachers with your toughest kids. We are paying the same or less for the kids that have the greatest needs, and that's upside down.
