Jennifer Cohen Kabaker: All Related Content

Last week, the Title I-derland blog wrote that Congress is gearing up for a Title I formula fight as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA – currently known as No Child Left Behind) reauthorization process. Given the complicated legacy of the current Title I funding formulas, this is likely to further delay the introduction of a complete ESEA reauthorization bill.

A formula fight is exactly what it sounds like – congressional staff members gather around a table and work out a funding formula (or in this case formulas) that distributes Title I funds among states and school districts in accordance with the program’s stated goal – to provide support for the education of disadvantaged students. Of course, staff members will also aim to ensure that the formula(s) benefits each of their states as much as possible – no member of Congress will vote for a program that shortchanges his or her state or district.

It should be no surprise that the resulting formulas often obscure the relationship between funding and poverty. Currently, Title I funding is distributed through four complicated funding formulas that each assess poverty slightly differently. The Basic grant formula distributes funds based on the number of poor students. The Concentration grant formula provides funds to districts with 15 percent or more students living in poverty. The Targeted grant formula gives more funding per pupil to districts with higher concentrations of poor students. Finally, the Education Finance Incentive Grant formula distributes rewards districts in states with more equitable funding formulas.

Not only do these formulas take into account the number or concentration of poor students in a given district or state, but they also take into account state size, per pupil expenditure, and even the degree to which a state equitably funds low- and high-income schools. While these considerations were intended to guarantee states a certain level of funding, account for the cost of providing an education in a given state, or reward states with more equitable funding formulas, they often undermine the intent of the law.

Ed Money Watch has previously written on this issue, showing that annual Title I allocations per poor pupil do not always benefit school districts with the highest percentages of poor students. In fact, districts in different states with similar poverty rates often receive dramatically different Title I allocations per poor pupil. Read more about this issue here, here, and here.

While it may be tempting to scrap the existing formulas and start over, the legislative process is unlikely to be so simple. Luckily, several organizations have already proposed solutions to the formula problem. The Rural Schools and Community Trust would like to ensure that rural and small school districts get their fair share of funds by eliminating provisions that give more funding to larger districts (called number weighting) and changing the way the formulas take state per pupil spending into account.

The Center for America Progress proposes to replace the existing four formulas with a single formula that would distribute funds based on a weighted count of the number of students in poverty, a cost factor based on the Comparable Wage Index, and a measure of fiscal effort for each state.

In reality, it is more likely that Congress will tinker at the margins of the existing formulas to help ensure a greater degree of equity across states and school districts. Two of the funding formulas – Basic and Concentration – have been part of ESEA for decades and are likely to remain. The Targeted and Education Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) Formulas, on the other hand, were first written into law in 1994 and are more likely to be the subject of revision. For example, Representative Glenn Thompson (D-PA) recently introduced a bill, called the All Children Are Equal Act, which would alter the Targeted and EFIG formulas to benefit smaller school districts.

Though it’s clear that ESEA reauthorization is still far off, especially given the recent hoopla over Secretary Arne Duncan’s NCLB accountability waiver plan, a formula fight will surely make an already complicated process even more so. However, because the current Title I formulas are flawed to the point of undermining the program, it will be a battle worth fighting for Congress. Better formulas will go a long way in ensuring that Title I funds are supporting the states, districts, and students that need them the most.

Jennifer Cohen, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, wrote in an email that states were allowed to roll back their education contributions to 2006 levels, with SFSF dollars filling in the void. ...

Last Friday, July 1st, marked the beginning of fiscal year 2012 for many states. For all states, it marked the beginning of the last quarter of federal fiscal year 2011 – the final three months that most funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will be available. Last month we wrote that many states have or almost have spent all of their State Fiscal Stabilization Funds. Unfortunately, that is not the case for the additional Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) funding provided through the ARRA.

According to data made available by the Department of Education, not a single state had drawn down 100 percent of either its Title I or IDEA funds as of June 24th. However, some states are close; seven states have drawn down more than 90 percent of their Title I funds and 12 have drawn down more than 90 percent of their IDEA funds. States, like Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, and Vermont, that have drawn down more than 90 percent of funds from both sources, will most likely expend all of the funds before they expire on September 30th, 2011.

But what about the other states? Several states are not even close to spending all of their Title I or IDEA ARRA funds. Seven states have drawn down less than 70 percent of their Title I funds – the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Hawaii has drawn down the lowest percent – 43.4 percent of its $33.2 million allocation – meaning the state has less then three months to drawn down more than half of its funds. With the exception of Wyoming, these states have all faced sizeable budget shortages in the past two fiscal years. While this would suggest that these states would have spent the money quickly, that is apparently not the case. This may be due to the way the states distributed the funds, whether the states receive the funds via reimbursement, or other budgetary constraints that limited the way districts could spend the funds.

Six states have drawn down less than 70 percent of their IDEA funds, including Delaware, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Utah has expended the smallest percent at 55.3 percent of its $105.5 million allocation. An additional 9 states have only drawn down between 70 and 75 percent of their funds.

One state stands out in both of these lists – Virginia. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Virginia faced a 13.8 percent budget gap in fiscal year 2009 and a 24.1 percent gap in 2010. Why, then, has the state lagged behind many others facing similar gaps in the draw down of both Title I and IDEA funds?

Though the Title I and IDEA funds are more limited in their approved uses than the SFSF monies, it is surprising that so many states still have significant portions of their allocations so close to the end of the federal year. This is particularly true for Title I funds, which can be used for most educational expenditures targeted at low-income students. Similarly, districts could opt to repurpose half of any surplus IDEA funds for general education expenditures if they could not find uses for the funds specific to special education. This flexibility should have ensured a swift expenditure of these funds.

The final fiscal quarter spans the summer months, when educational expenditures slow down considerably. Unless these states are launching major educational efforts over the summer or plan to conserve these funds until September, when school starts up again, they may have difficulties drawing down all their funds on time. Stay tuned to Ed Money Watch as we continue to track these funds through the end of the 2011 federal fiscal year.

To download a spreadsheet with data for all 50 states, click here.

Last week, the Federal Education Budget Project, Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, announced the launch of a new version of its website. The new site includes four years of higher education data on federal financing, demographics, outcomes, and financial aid use for every state and institution in the country. These data expand upon FEBP’s already rich array of K-12 data. In addition to providing the data in an easy-to-read format, the FEBP site also provides a comparison function that allows users to compare data for states, school districts, and institutions of higher education. Today, we will demonstrate how users can utilize the comparison function in order to better understand postsecondary outcomes.

Users can access the comparison function by rolling over an individual indicator name. Say, for example, that we are interested in comparing graduation rates among successful public, four-year schools using University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) as our school of interest. All we have to do is navigate to the UC Berkeley data page, roll over the graduation rate indicator and click the link that says “Compare University of California, Berkeley to other schools based on Total Graduation Rate.”

This will take us to a page that displays all of the public, four year institutions that have graduation rates within 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s 90 percent graduation rate in 2009. In this case, 23 institutions have similar graduation rates, ranging from 81 percent at University of Wisconsin at Madison to 93 percent at the University of Virginia.

The comparison function also automatically displays each school’s average Pell Grant and the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants at the institution. Interestingly, we learn that though these schools all have similar graduation rates, the make-up of their students varies widely. Only 8 percent of students at James Madison University received Pell Grants in 2009, while 69 percent received them at the Institute of American Indian & Alaska Native Culture & Arts in New Mexico. At UC Berkeley, by comparison, 24 percent of students receive Pell Grants. This suggests that some of these schools are better at attracting and serving low-income students than others.

We can also see how these schools stack up on other indicators by adding additional indicators to the display. Just click the button that says “Change Indicators Displayed” and navigate through the tabs to select other indicators. For example, let’s add net price and total enrollment to the display. Unsurprisingly, we learn that these 23 schools vary widely in both their net prices and in enrollment. The Institute of American Indian & Alaska Native Culture & Arts is by far the least expensive school with a net price of $6,170, and the smallest school with a 2009 enrollment of 350 students. This may explain in part the high percentage of low income students at the school. The Pennsylvania State University, on the other hand, is more than twice as expensive at $16,080; and the University of Texas at Austin is several magnitudes larger with an enrollment of 50,995.

We can also widen our comparison by expanding the types of schools we include. For example, if we want to incorporate two year or less than two year schools into our comparison, we just have to click the button that says “School Level: Four or More Years”. This expands our comparison to include 163 public schools. This creates much more variation in the percent of students receiving Pell Grants, primarily because community colleges tend to have much higher proportions of low-income students.

Similarly, we can expand our comparison to non-public institutions by clicking the button that says “School Type: Public.” The results page now shows that there are 857 schools that have graduation rates within 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s. By including private and for-profit schools, our comparison now includes schools with much higher net prices.

The comparison function allows users to delve deeply into the rich higher education and K-12 data available on the FEBP website. This tool can be used to expose idiosyncrasies in the ways in which federal funds are distributed among institutions, or to highlight schools that are succeeding with particular populations. As Congress continues to discuss changes to the laws that govern federal loans, grants, and other programs that affect higher education, this information should play a powerful role in the debate.

Today the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program released the latest version of its Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) website, www.EdBudgetProject.org. Since its launch in 2008, FEBP has become the largest, most up-to-date source of information on both K-12 and higher education funding, demographics, and outcomes.  And introductory video and additional details are below:

Ever since the U.S. Department of Education first released the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds (SFSF) to states in April of 2009, stakeholders across the country have expressed concern that the funds were not getting used fast enough. The $48.6 billion program was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help states fill budget gaps in the wake of the economic recession. Of that $48.6 billion, $39.5 billion was slated specifically for education programs. While some states spent the money right away, as ED encouraged them to do, others stalled on distributing the funds due to various bureaucratic delays or because their fiscal situations were less dire. The SFSF monies expire at the end of this fiscal year on September 30th 2011. And with only four months left, we can safely say that most states will have no problems spending all of their funds before that deadline. However, there are a few states lagging behind.

According to data made available by the U.S. Department of Education on obligations and disbursements of SFSF Education Stabilization Funds, 39 states had drawn down 90 percent or more of their SFSF Education Stabilization funds as of June 3rd, 2011.

Of those 39 states, nine have spent all of their funds. These states include Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Many of these states, like Arizona, Illinois, and New Jersey, faced large budget deficits in early 2009 or even before. The SFSF monies came as a great relief to these states and they spent them quickly. An additional 12 states, including California – another hard hit state – have drawn down 98 percent or more, making that 100 percent goal well within reach.

Ten states, including Alabama, Maryland, New York, and Virginia, have drawn down between 75 and 90 percent of their funds. This means they have just less than one fiscal quarter to spend as much 25 percent of their total Education Stabilization fund allocation. Hopefully, these states have planned these expenditures carefully to ensure that the money is used before it expires in effective and meaningful ways.

Four states, however, have drawn down less than 75 percent of their Education Stabilization fund allocations, leaving them limited time to spend fairly large chunks of that money before the fiscal year ends. Nebraska and Rhode Island have drawn down 74.6 percent and 74.0 percent, respectively, leaving them just behind the group of states discussed below. But Alaska and Wyoming have only drawn down 41.6 percent and 27.0 percent respectively. These two states have far to go before they have used up all of their funds.

It is not surprising to hear that Alaska and Wyoming are lagging far behind in their Education Stabilization expenditures. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin refused to use the state’s allocation to fill budget gaps or otherwise support K-12 or higher education in 2009 or 2010. The current governor used all of the funds to support K-12 education in 2011, creating a much shorter timeframe for spending the allocation.

Wyoming, on the other hand, faced little to no budget deficit prior to mid-year fiscal 2011 (see tables from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for more information). As a result, the state had no need for the funds for most of the time they were available. In fiscal year 2011, however, Wyoming allocated all but $10 million of its $67.6 million allocation to its higher education system. According to SFSF regulations, the remaining $10 million will be distributed to K-12 school districts via the federal Title I formulas.

Though not all states were able to spend their SFSF Education Stabilization funds immediately in 2009 and 2010, it is clear that the vast majority of them will use them by the end of fiscal year 2011. The program may not have created the automatic infusion of funds Congress initially envisioned, but it did help many states keep their education budgets afloat. What happens once these funds, and the still-available Education Jobs Funds, are gone at the end of fiscal year 2012 remains to be seen. However, unexpected increases in tax revenue in states like California and Michigan suggest that more federal support may soon be unnecessary.

Click here for a table containing information on all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico.

The fiscal year 2011 appropriations process has been a frequent topic here on Ed Money Watch since the process first got started early in 2010. The prolonged process finally came to an end in mid-April of 2011, resulting in some significant changes to education funding. Today, the Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), Ed Money Watch's parent initiative, released an issue brief that explains the recently finalized fiscal year 2011 federal education appropriations.

Congress completed the fiscal year 2011 appropriations process on April 14th, 2011, finalizing annual funding for nearly all federal education programs through September 30, 2011 at $68.3 billion, up $4.2 billion from the prior year. Making sense of the federal education budget and the appropriations process can be a frustrating task for education advocates, state and local policymakers, the media, and the public. The fiscal year 2011 appropriations process has been particularly confusing. Congress bypassed several steps in the normal budget and appropriations process this fiscal year. Lawmakers chose not to debate or adopt an annual budget resolution that sets funding limits for appropriations bills, and lawmakers failed to bring the appropriations bill that funds education programs up for a vote in either chamber. Instead, Congress passed a series of stop-gap funding bills that temporarily provided fiscal year 2011 funding at prior year levels for programs subject to annual appropriations, though funding for some education programs was reduced or eliminated along the way. A full six months into fiscal year 2011, Congress ultimately passed an appropriations bill for the remainder of the fiscal year that funds all federal agencies and programs subject to the annual appropriations process.

This issue brief is a helpful guide to the appropriations process and recently enacted fiscal year 2011 education funding. It includes an analysis of funding for major education programs and a timeline of the 2011 appropriations process. It also includes tables comparing 2011 funding to earlier House and Senate proposals, prior year funding levels, and the president's 2011 budget request.

To download the issue brief, click here.

... “Unfortunately, by choosing to go this route we’re not going to end up with a holistically sensible bill in the end,” said Jennifer Cohen, education expert at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. “What we need right now is a bill that’s very comprehensive, coordinated and coherent. I’m not convinced with this approach we’ll get there.” ...

Original article

Since Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009, many policy researchers and the media have focused their attention on the law’s funding for K-12 education. As a result, much of the reporting and analysis on the ARRA has overlooked the significant funding that the law provided for higher education. In response to this lack of coverage, the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project recently released an issue brief titled The State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and Higher Education Spending in the States, Part 2 that explores how states chose to divide their ARRA State Fiscal Stabilization Funds between K-12 and higher education.

The ARRA was intended to stimulate the economy with $862 billion in new spending and tax cuts. The law included nearly $100 billion in one-time funding for new and existing education programs, a historic sum given that annual appropriations for federal education programs were approximately $60 billion in fiscal year 2009. The largest single education program included in the law was the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), a new $48.6 billion program that provided direct grant aid to state governments in 2009 and 2010. The program was designed to help states maintain support for both K-12 and higher education that they might have otherwise cut in response to budget shortfalls brought on by the economic downturn.

The SFSF requires that states use the funds for both K-12 and higher education in proportion to each sector’s share of a state's budget shortfall. It is important to keep in mind that when a state faces a budget shortfall, its legislature decides how to adjust spending to bring the budget into balance. State lawmakers have flexibility over the extent to which they will reduce funding for K-12 or higher education (or both) in response to budget shortfalls. In a state where the legislature made a 60 percent cut to K-12 spending and a 40 percent cut to higher education spending compared to the previous year, the SFSF regulations require that state to spend 60 percent of its allocated Education Stabilization funds on K-12 education and 40 percent on higher education. States where the legislature chose to spare higher education funding from spending cuts could use the funds to fill only the gaps created by cuts to K-12 education.

By examining how states divided their SFSF allocations between K-12 and higher education by fiscal year, we can make general conclusions about how the ARRA may have affected state spending on higher education.

Using data on SFSF allocations collected directly from the states, the paper concludes that states spent the majority of Education Stabilization funds on K-12 education – roughly 78.9 percent of the total $39 billion available for Education Stabilization funds. The remaining 21.2 percent - $8.3 billion – were spent on higher education. This allocation of funding between K-12 and higher education mirrors the typical state budget, in which states tend to spend far more on K-12 than higher education each year. This indicates that most states chose to make larger budget cuts to K-12 education than to higher education in response to lower tax revenues resulting from the economic recession. 

However, five states – Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming – spent a greater percentage of their Education Stabilization funds on higher education than K-12 education over the three fiscal years that the funds were available. This suggests that, when confronted with budget shortfalls, these states chose to make cuts to higher education spending rather than K-12 spending and fill those gaps with Education Stabilization funds. When the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds run out at the end of fiscal year 2011, these states will no longer have federal funding to support higher education budget gaps. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to support their public higher education systems absent continued federal support.

Though more of the funds went to K-12, the SFSF did play a significant role in higher education funding in many states in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Most states did not protect higher education from budget cuts during the economic downturn and in some cases made larger cuts to higher education than K-12 education. While it is impossible to speculate on whether, and how, states would have cut higher education spending absent the Education Stabilization funds, it is clear that the funds helped to keep higher education budgets afloat in many states. 

To download the issue brief, click here.

By late 2008, the United States was in the midst of its most severe economic recession since the 1930s, brought on by a collapse in real estate prices and exacerbated by the failure of many large banks and financial institutions. Heeding calls from economists, Congress and the Obama administration passed a historic law in early 2009 to stimulate the economy with $862 billion in new spending and tax cuts.

School Improvement Grants have become a point of contention in Washington and across the country. Many believe that the $4 billion program, which provides grants to help turnaround struggling schools, has become too rigid and represents intrusive federal meddling in local affairs. But few proponents or opponents of the program ever discuss in detail where the funds are actually being used and what the schools receiving them look like. Today, Ed Sector released a report, accompanied by a new data tool, which fills in some of those details. The tool, which provides an interactive map of School Improvement Grant (SIG) recipients, is based on a wealth of data on the 843 schools that have received SIG grants so far. In addition to the tool, Ed Sector has made these data available to the public so we can find out even more on our own.

The Ed Sector report, A Portrait of School Improvement Grantees, gives a great run down of the basics. Of the 843 grantees so far, more than half – 58 percent – are in urban areas. Of the remaining schools 18 percent are rural, 17 percent suburban, and 7 percent in towns as defined by the National Center for Education Statistics. Nearly half of the recipients are high schools – a new pattern for SIG recipients because most high schools do not receive Title I funds. Twenty percent are middle schools, 24 percent are elementary schools, and 6 percent are “other” types of schools like K-8 or 7-12 schools. And the vast majority of grantees – 73 percent – selected the transformation model for their improvement strategy. This model is considered the least rigorous of the options. Twenty-one percent chose the turnaround model, 4 percent are restarting, and 2 percent are closing entirely.

Using the data provided by Ed Sector, we can look deeper into these patterns. For example, we find that of the 19 schools that chose closure as their improvement model, 9 are high schools (47.4 percent), 8 are middle schools (42.1 percent), and 2 are primary schools (10.5 percent). Of the schools that chose the turnaround model, 67 are high schools (38.7 percent), 40 are middle schools (23.1 percent) and 60 are primary schools (34.7 percent). This shows that the distribution of schools within each improvement model varies significantly by school level.

The Ed Sector data also includes some information on the demographics of students who attend the SIG recipient schools (data are from 2008). The average free and reduced price lunch rate at high schools that received a SIG grant is 67.6 percent. This is significantly less than the FRPL rate at middle and primary schools, which is 80.0 percent and 81.2 percent, respectively. However, high schools typically under identify students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, which could explain why the FRPL rate at these schools is so much lower. Unsurprisingly, the FRPL rate was also higher at rural and urban schools - 71.2 percent and 76.0 percent respectively - than at suburban schools – 68.9 percent.

Finally, we can explore some details about the size of the SIG grants different types of schools will receive. For example, the average size of a total SIG grant is $2,409,716 for a high school, $2,376,471 for a middle school, and $1,972,235 for a primary school. Urban schools get the largest SIG grants, an average of $2,494,640, and rural schools get the smallest, an average of $1,708,965. Interestingly, this does not directly follow school enrollment patterns. While rural schools are by far the smallest – an average enrollment of 411 students, suburban schools are the largest with an average of 912 students.

Ed Sector’s new data tool provides an important resource as the SIG discussion continues. It provides valuable information on which schools are receiving grants and their characteristics. Hopefully data will continue to be available on SIG grantees, continuing expenditures, and even measures of success. This is the information that should determine the future of the School Improvement Grant program, not complaints over federal intrusion.

To download a spreadsheet containing this data, click here.

Here at Ed Money Watch, we have written extensively about the Title I comparability provision. This provision seeks to ensure that Title I schools receive equitable state and local resources compared to non-Title I schools. Comparability has been a popular topic lately, from a recent conference at the Center for American Progress and a new bill that would strengthen the provision introduced in the Senate. The Fordham Institute recently added its divergent voice to the chorus of proposals related to comparability in its new ESEA Briefing Book. Instead of suggesting Congress strengthen the provision, Fordham suggests eliminating it entirely.

Current law allows school districts to meet the federal comparability rule through various methods that do not reflect the actual distribution of state and local funds between low- and high- income schools. These include student-teacher ratios and district-wide salary schedules. Even when districts use per pupil expenditures to demonstrate comparability, they can ignore variation in teacher salary due to years of experience, the most significant driver of teacher pay.

More experienced, and therefore higher paid, teachers tend to work in higher-income schools, while low-income, Title I schools tend to employ less experienced, lower-paid teachers. As a result, higher-income schools receive a greater share of state and local funds to pay for their teachers than low-income schools. But the current comparability requirements never show these inequities. This is known as the comparability “loophole.”

Most proposals to improve comparability include requiring districts to use actual per pupil expenditures, including variation in salary due to experience, to demonstrate comparability. They also want to increase the level of required equity from 90 percent to 95 or even 97 percent. These changes would ensure that Title I schools actually receive equal state and local funding as non-Title I schools.

Fordham also believes that current comparability provisions do not work and should be replaced. However, rather than strengthen the provision, Fordham suggests phasing out comparability entirely and instead requiring school districts to annually report school-level financial data including information on actual teacher salaries. This would provide local parents, teachers, and other stakeholders with the information they need to determine existing inequities and fix them. Strengthening comparability, on the other hand, would be an “enormous new federal intrusion into the operations of local school districts” and would be difficult to monitor.

While Ed Money Watch is the first to champion increased transparency in funding for public education, we can’t help but be skeptical about this proposal. Without a policy lever that requires districts to ensure equitable funding, it would likely be difficult to enforce the redistribution of state and local funds that stakeholders might demand as a result of increased transparency. We have long known that resources are not equitably distributed between high- and low-income schools and yet the inequalities remain.

Similarly, it is important to remember that the parents of students in low-income schools often have the least access to data and information, despite increased transparency. If only parents of students in higher-income schools are advocating for funding, how can we ensure that students in low-income schools will be fairly represented?

It is fair to say that the comparability provision – both the current version and any potential strengthened version – represent a federal intrusion into local operations. But sometimes that intrusion is a necessary means to an important end – ensuring that low-income students receive equitable state and local resources. Until we can ensure that, districts across the country will continue to use Title I funds to fill gaps in funding for low-income schools, instead of to provide the additional services their students need.