Verbatim Mac

Solvency – better education – general

Mobile Funding key to better educational results, Title 1 solves

Furtick, Policy Analyst, 14 (Katie, “Federal School Fiance Reform: Moving Toward Title 1 Funding Following the Child”; Reason.org, 9/?/14, http://reason.org/files/federal_school_finance_reform.pdf, 7/3/2017, GDI AC)

The best way to solve the problems inherent in the current system of Title I funding is to make Title I funds portable—in other words, allocate funds on a per-pupil basis and require that funds follow pupils to the school of their choice. There are a number of advantages to such a system: First, allocating Title I funds on a per-pupil basis rather than through the existing, stringent funding mechanism simply and clearly ties the funding to the child in need, which is where it is supposed to go. Moreover, attaching extra funding to individual, disadvantaged students gives schools an incentive to attract and retain such students (and the funding that goes with them). This will encourage schools to compete to come up with the best ways to serve disadvantaged students, leading to more innovation and better educational outcomes. Furthermore, this would facilitate the national trend toward families being able to choose the schools their children attend because the child would bring the funding with him. Second, principals should be given both the professional freedom and the incentive to raise low-income students’ achievement. Currently, restrictions like supplement-not-supplant attempt to tightly control principals’ and districts’ use of Title I funds, with significant administrative burdens of management and enforcement. Instead of managing the process by which funding is used, principals could be given greater freedom in how they use that funding, in return for delivering higher achievement scores among the targeted student population. When school principals have greater autonomy over how Title I funds are spent, Federal School Finance Reform | 11 they can use innovative and flexible approaches that serve their particular students’ needs, allowing them to more fully perform the role of school leader. The flip-side of greater financial autonomy is that principals should be more directly held accountable for student outcomes. Judging a principal by students’ academic outcomes assigns responsibility where it is due, and greater autonomy over use of funding to achieve those outcomes confers the authority to foster those achievements. This decentralized approach promotes better results than a one-size-fits-all model. Findings from Reason Foundation’s 2013 edition of the Weighted Student Formula Yearbook suggest that in school districts that use a portable school funding framework to finance schools, more school-level autonomy over school budgets leads to faster improvement in student achievement and a greater likelihood of closing achievement gaps.27

Current failure of Title 1 grants sustain educational inequality—portability solves

Burke, Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation, 2015

(Lindsey M., “From Piecemeal to Portable: Transforming Title I into a Student-Centered Support System”, Heritage Foundation, September 28, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/education/report/piecemeal-portable-transforming-title-i-student-centered-support-system, accessed 7/4/17, GDI-JG)

At the federal, state, and local level, policymakers and education-reform advocates have been striving to improve educational options and outcomes for all children, focusing in particular on improving outcomes for children from disadvantaged families. This effort is not new, nor is the sense that K–12 education is falling short, particularly for those children who need education options the most. In fact, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for, and the subsequent enactment of, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965—the first significant federal intervention into education, which continues to authorize the bulk of federal K–12 spending today—was born out of a belief that existing education programs and spending were not adequate for poor children.∂ Title I refers to Title I of the ESEA, which was viewed as the education component of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives and today remains the nation’s largest federal law governing education policy. Johnson outlined four challenges confronting U.S. policymakers as they considered the ESEA: (1) to provide better education to millions of poor children; (2) to improve education innovations and equipment; (3) to improve teacher training and technology; and (4) to incentivize lifelong learning. “But most of all,” Johnson implored, “we must provide a good education for every boy and girl—no matter where he lives.”[1]∂ Johnson proposed to give first priority to a program of aid to low-income school districts, a priority that would form the basis of Title I.[2] Today, the nearly $15 billion Title I program consists of a stream of convoluted formula grants that have little relationship to actual poverty. These “opaque and unaccountable”[3] grant streams have done little to address education-related issues in schools in districts of concentrated poverty, evidenced in part by the presence of academic achievement and attainment gaps between disadvantaged children and their non-poor peers, which have persisted over the decades since the ESEA was signed into law.∂ Instead of continuing to funnel the bulk of ESEA funding through the labyrinthine Title I program, federal policymakers should give states the option to make Title I dollars portable, following children to any school or education option of choice. Restructuring Title I funding formulas into a single formula stream based on a set per-pupil allocation, and providing states the option to allocate Title I dollars to students in the form of a flexible education savings account (ESA), would create a powerful tool for low-income families to direct their own children’s education, limit federal bureaucracy, and provide a better chance of achieving Johnson’s goal of a quality education for every child “no matter where he lives.”