Shortchanging Students in High-Poverty School Districts
Editor's Note: The following Viewpoint is based a comprehensive policy study also written by the authors entitled, "Shortchanging Disadvantaged Students: An Analysis of Intra-district Spending Patterns in Ohio."
Ohio's school funding system has been the source of heated debate, legislative amendment, litigation and general concern for so long that it is difficult to accurately determine just when it all became such a consuming issue. At the heart of all this controversy has been, and continues to be, the question of how the state distributes education resources. At present, disadvantaged students are being shortchanged by the state's school funding formula, and policies that put the preferences of teachers ahead of the needs of students are to blame.
The now infamous series of DeRolph cases decided by the Ohio Supreme Court initially declared that Ohio was in violation of the state constitution because resources were not being distributed equitably among the 611 school districts across the state.
In response, state policymakers have made substantial changes to the way school districts are funded. By adding more money to the education budget and recalibrating the funding formula, the state has tried to bring all schools up to a certain level of funding. It has also provided additional, categorical spending for students who need additional resources, such as those students labeled as gifted, economically disadvantaged, or disabled.
As a result, not only do high-poverty districts have higher average per pupil expenditures, but over time the difference in average expenditures has grown - in favor of the high-poverty districts. Yet, despite all of the legislative activity to provide additional resources to disadvantaged students, the achievement gap remains essentially unchanged.
In an effort to shed light on this seeming contradiction in other states, researchers for the Annenberg Institute at Brown University have investigated the ways in which major urban school districts allocate resources to their schools. Their findings have uncovered a clear pattern of inequitable resource allocations within districts. Put simply, school districts are not passing on the supplemental funding from the state to the students for whom it is intended.
Working from models developed at Annenberg, the Buckeye Institute has analyzed the resource distribution patterns in 72 high-poverty school districts across Ohio. Our findings present a similarly troubling picture of how resources are allocated within high-poverty school districts.
The results of our analysis show that the equity created by the state funding formula among districts is contravened by significant inequity in how Ohio's high-poverty school districts allocate resources to their individual schools. Only slightly more than one-fourth of the high-poverty school districts in our study appear to be spending money based primarily on the needs of students. The state has mistakenly sent the check to each district and then assumed that the district would in turn allocate those funds in the same equitable manner.
Why would districts allow this inequitable spending to occur? After all, districts do have incentives, due in large part to the state's accountability system, to improve academic performance and avoid the stigma of poor ratings. Annenberg research indicates that teacher mobility and transfer rights established in collective bargaining agreements are at least partially to blame.
Teacher salary is determined in large part by seniority, which also often permits teachers to choose their schools of assignment within a district. That teachers with choices, on average, would prefer to work in schools with fewer difficult students is well established. Because the largest portion of school expenditures is concentrated in salaries, districts are thus forced by collective bargaining agreements to allocate money based on teacher seniority rather than student characteristics.
Among the implications of this intra-district inequity in how resources are allocated, two stand out prominently. First, the DeRolph-based debates about how funding is distributed among school districts obscures the far greater, and more important, issues surrounding the ways in which funds are spent within districts. We need to focus on the resources made available to students, not districts.
Finally, the majority of current proposals to alter the school finance system, including the so-called "Get It Right" amendment that would enshrine school districts as the sole focus of funding decisions in the state constitution, provide no guarantee for improving equity in spending on school children. As we have found in our study, spending more on districts doesn't necessarily translate into spending more on students, especially the disadvantaged.
The state must ensure that resources are allocated based on the needs of the students rather than the preferences of teachers. Otherwise, true equity in the resources made available to Ohio's school children will remain unrealized.
Ohio's school funding system has been the source of heated debate, legislative amendment, litigation and general concern for so long that it is difficult to accurately determine just when it all became such a consuming issue. At the heart of all this controversy has been, and continues to be, the question of how the state distributes education resources. At present, disadvantaged students are being shortchanged by the state's school funding formula, and policies that put the preferences of teachers ahead of the needs of students are to blame.
Matthew Carr is the Education Policy Director at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a research and educational institute located in Columbus, Ohio. Marc Holley and Nathan Gray are doctoral fellows at the University of Arkansas.