Verbatim Mac

Meta Reform 1ac

Meta reform Inherency

Title I formula complexity distorts funding allocation in absence of full funding

Schanzenbach et al., director of The Hamilton Project and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, 16 (Diane, Davis Boddy, Megan Mumford, Greg Nantz, “Fourteen Economic Facts on Education and Economic Opportunity” 3/16, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/files/education_facts.pdf, 7-6-17, GDI-JIJD)

Title I of ESEA is the primary source of federal funding for schools with high concentrations of poverty. The purpose of Title I, particularly its schoolwide program, is to allocate more money to schools with concentrations of poverty. As discussed in Fact 8, low-income students are more likely to struggle in school and require additional support. However, the negative trend in figure 7 shows that states with higher shares of low-income students receive less Title I funding per eligible student. Because Title I is the primary mechanism for the federal government to distribute school funds across states, this negative relationship is counterintuitive and suggests that the funds may not be targeted appropriately in the status quo. The negative relationship between share of students eligible and funding per eligible student is due in large part to the interaction between Title I’s chronic underfunding and the complex Title I formulas that distort allocations in the absence of full funding. For example, to fully fund the Basic Grants portion of Title I in 2015 would have required $50 billion in allocations; Congress instead appropriated only $6.5 billion. A new Hamilton Project policy proposal by Nora Gordon, “Increasing Targeting, Flexibility, and Transparency in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to Help Disadvantaged Students” (2016) discusses the causes of this dilemma and offers potential policy solutions. Gordon explains that a small state minimum leads to states such as Vermont receiving a disproportionate level of Title I funding. Additionally, a provision known as hold harmless, which allows districts to continue to receive allocations based on allocations received in previous years, prevents Title I funding from adapting quickly to structural changes in poverty levels across states and districts.

Meta Reform 1ac – inequality Adv

Complexity of formulas disadvantage small state, mid sized cities, areas with concentrated poverty – create tradeoffs because Title I underfunded now undermining education quality

Camera and Cook, education reporter at U.S. News & World Report, 16 (Lauren and Lindsey, "Title I: Rich Schools Districts Get Millions Meant for Poor Kids" US News, June 1 2016, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-01/title-i-rich-school-districts-get-millions-in-federal-money-meant-for-poor-kids, Accessed July 4th 2017, GDI AC

Title I, the largest federal K-12 program, was how Johnson planned to do that. And since children from poor families often enter schools with a host of more-costly educational needs – from less exposure to reading and math to social, emotional and nutritional problems – it's important the limited federal dollars are funneled to those who need them most, he reasoned. How is it then that a school district like Nottoway, with a child poverty rate of 30 percent, receives so much less in federal support than Fairfax, one of the wealthiest districts in the country? The answer lies in a complicated and outdated formula that's used to distribute the Title I money – a formula that's resulted in a series of significant funding discrepancies that can shortchange school districts with high concentrations of poverty, and benefit larger districts and big urban areas instead of poorer, rural districts and small cities. "The places that are less poor are getting more money per poor kid," says Nora Gordon, an associate professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University who recently conducted an analysis of the Title I program for The Hamilton Project. "This is what happens when you have four different formulas that are very opaque and interact in different ways. You can have a lot of things in the law that seem like a good idea, but the net result is not a progressive one." In fact, the net result often means that in addition to the formula overlooking poor rural school districts, like Nottoway, it also shortchanges smaller high-poverty urban districts, like Flint, Michigan, which similarly faces challenges that affluent districts often don't, such as dated facilities and teacher shortages. Discrepancies are also visible in the amount of Title I money districts receive per poor child. Virginia’s Mecklenburg County, for example, with a child poverty rate of 30 percent, receives $1,000 per poor student through Title I – the same amount as poor students in York County, where the child poverty rate is less than 6 percent. For more information about your school district, use our interactive table. To be sure, when policymakers crafted the current formula in 2001 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, they did so intending to correct a formula that was directing even fewer dollars to concentrations of poor students than it does today – one that allowed Claiborne Parish in Louisiana, with a child poverty rate of 36 percent, to infamously use its Title I funds to build not one, but two Olympic-sized swimming pools for students. But the formula has proven a sort of intractable beast – one that politicians and policymakers have had little success altering, despite its glaring shortcomings. "In the context of deeply inadequate funding overall, formula changes are always seen as a zero sum game," says Michael Dannenberg, director of strategic initiatives for policy at Education Reform Now. "More money for one district or state is coming at the expense of needy children in someone else's district or state." "Politically it's very hard," he says. "It's not impossible, but it's very hard." Dannenberg would know. He first tried – and failed – to change the formula while working for former Sen. Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island. Years later, as a senior policy adviser for Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dannenberg was part of the push to update the formula as part of No Child Left Behind. That version is still used today. "To be clear, the wealthiest school districts are getting more per Title I child than high poverty school districts," he says. "But the effort to improve targeting of Title I funding [to concentrations of poor students] was realized in part as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act. We had a degree of success, but not nearly as much as one would hope." Still, the changes weren't insignificant. For example, from 2002, when the law went into effect, through 2010, data show that roughly $6 billion in Title I funding was directed to high-poverty school districts that otherwise wouldn't have been under the old formula, according to data from the Education Department. "That's a lot of bake sales," says Dannenberg. A Formulaic Failure? The formula, which is really four separate formulas rolled into one, is intended to send more money to poor districts. But it leaves much to be desired, many education policy experts say, and one of its biggest criticisms is that it spreads dollars too thin. According to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank based in Washington, 67 percent of schools get Title I funding despite the fact that only half have relatively high concentrations of poverty. In Virginia alone, 134 districts get a slice of the Title I pie despite only 79 having higher than average levels of concentrated poverty. That's because districts can tap the federal purse even if they serve only a handful of low-income students. Falls Church City Public Schools, for example, another manicured Virginia district just outside of Washington, receives money for its 76 poor children even though the child-poverty rate there is less than 3 percent. "Title I was never meant to be general education aid," says Liz King, senior policy analyst and director of education policy at The Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "It was meant to be targeted to serve students in concentrations of poverty." The formula, however, places more weight on the number of poor students in a district than on the concentration of poor children in a district – one of the biggest reasons places like Fairfax, at 195,000 students big, gets as much money as it does. In addition, the formula directs extra funding to states with small populations – an attempt to channel more money to rural states, like New Mexico, that often depend on federal support for things like attracting and retaining teachers to remote schools. But wealthy states like Delaware and Connecticut have small populations because they are geographically small, and therefore qualify for the additional funds despite not needing them. Because of this fluke of the law, these small states with lower child poverty rates receive more Title I funds per poor child than poor states. Find them in the top left quadrant of the scatterplot. Meanwhile, many high poverty, rural states that don’t benefit from this rule or the prioritization of large districts. They appear in the bottom right quadrant of the scatterplot because they have a high child poverty rate, but receive less money per poor child. Another oft-cited critique of the formula is that it rewards states and districts for investing more of their own dollars in education. While the goal is to incentivize states to spend more themselves, it tends to compound existing inequalities since wealthier states and districts tend to invest more heavily in education anyway. Mississippi best illustrates this dilemma. Especially in the state's Delta region, where poverty rates soar up to 60 percent, local revenue rarely breaks $1 million, and in some cases schools use their Title I money for bare necessities, like paying the electric and water bills. "We don't want to allow states to roll back their spending," says Gordon. "But the reason why Mississippi is getting so little money per poor pupil is because they are spending very little money."

Specifically, racial composition of schools correlates with resources – increasing disparities in education opportunities and outcomes

Reardon, Stanford University Graduate School of Education professor, et al, 17 (Sean F., Demetra, Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis research associate, Ken, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia with expertise in Educational Theory, Educational Policy, Econometrics, "The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps", January 2017, http://cepa.stanford.edu/wp16-10, 7-8-17, GDI-EC)

While the top two boxes at the right of Figure 1 describe potential out-of-school influences on racial achievement gaps, the bottom two describe potential school-related influences. These are divided into within- and between-school factors. The key to both is that achievement gaps may be caused, in part, by racial differences in school experiences and opportunities. These differences in experiences and opportunities may result from students attending different schools (between-school segregation) or they may occur even among students attending the same school. Between-school segregation is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for between-school differences in educational experiences and opportunities to contribute to achievement gaps; if black, Hispanic, and white students are equally represented in each school, then each group will experience the same average level of (and the same variation in) school quality. In the presence of segregation, however, if school racial composition is correlated with school resources (which affect the ability to attract and retain skilled teachers; teacher/student ratios; the quality of instructional materials, equipment, and facilities; the availability of support staff; and less tangible factors like school climate), then black and Hispanic students will, on average, experience fewer opportunities for learning than their white peers. Although the effects of school segregation are difficult to estimate, the best available research suggests that school segregation tends to widen racial educational disparities in achievement and educational attainment, as well as adult income (Ashenfelter, Collins and Yoon 2005; Card and Rothstein 2007; Guryan 2004; Johnson 2011; Reardon 2016).

And, education reproduces inequality in the Squo – replicates economic marginalization

**don’t use with portability version of the aff

Chen, PhD candidate at Saint Louis University, publishing in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, 2015

(Amy Yun-Ping, “Educational Inequality: An Impediment to True Democracy in the United States,” Sociology Study, Vol.5 No.5, May 2015, http://www.davidpublisher.org/Public/uploads/Contribute/55f62bc2bf7b8.pdf, accessed 7/10/17, GDI-JG)

Education is an investment that tends to increase opportunity for each individual’s success and promote the common good of a country. Schooling also enables children to develop the cognizance of citizenship and decision-making skills, leading to the creation of a better society and boosting the nation’s economy. However, today U.S. education plays a key role in the reproduction of inequality (Anyon 1981; MacLeod 2009). Students’ performance is tied with multiple factors, such as school environment, teacher quality, class size, and educational support, all of which are affected by a school’s socioeconomic status. In regard to educational access and school performance, socioeconomic capital matters in a number of ways. For instance, parents with higher socioeconomic status prefer the placement of their children into higher ability groups and social environments, which in turn increases more focus on raising the students’ school engagement and enhancing their academic advantages (Lareau and Horvat 1999; Lee and Bowen 2006). Also, economic capital gives these parents more options because they have money available to offer their children with access to a variety of activities that are common in the high society and with educational assistance and private tutoring that are not receivable through public schools (Lareau 2000; Lareau 2003; Lareau and Horvat 1999; Lee and Bowen 2006). In other words, financial resources provide children with access to cultural capital and the ability to prepare for future competition.∂ In contrast, many children from impoverished families suffer numerous injustices (Lareau 2003; MacLeod 2009; Nieto and Bode 2008; Putnam 2015). They have a more difficult time attaining a high level of academic achievement because educational resources are inadequate. The schools in poor areas often receive less funding, so the schools have fewer resources available to improve academic achievement and provide quality education (Carter and Welner 2013; MacLeod 2009; Ravitch 2010; Ravitch 2013). Moreover, poor children and parents have fewer choices regarding the selection of a better community or school district. Therefore, the children from impoverished areas end up being victims under this arduous condition. The gaps between the performance of students from “good school districts” and those from “poor school districts” continue to accumulate. The goal of equal educational opportunity has never been achieved, and a nation with democracy has never been established.∂ In addition, the advocacy of individual choice in education leads to establishment of charter school systems, which creates difficult-to-overcome barriers and complex failures in democratic education (Ravitch 2010; Ravitch 2013). The ideas of individual choice and charter schools are a process toward educational inequalities. Charter schools are marketized and privatized public entities. The core concept behind the creation of charter schools is that they are associated with business interest groups. Many recent studies have indicated that charter schools worsen educational inequality and increase the gap among different socioeconomic populations because the under-the-table selection process and the lottery system of admission ruin fairness (Bartlett et al. 2002; Lipman 2003; Ravitch 2013). For example, many charter schools operate independently and autonomously, and they use a lottery process to decide enrollment by random selection. This leaves many children behind and deprives them of educational chances. Lottery winners receive tickets to the path of success; in contrast, lottery losers are doomed to settle for the problematic public education. Children’s futures should not be determined on the basis of a simple gamble. Moreover, the growing competition for public funding between charter schools and public schools negatively affects poor districts with financial deficits (Bartlett et al. 2002; Ravitch 2010; Ravitch 2013). Businesses that become involved in public education generally tend to invest in potentially profitable areas, which are the high-income and majority-White districts. Also, many private education providers are unwilling to address the concerns of and to offer help to nurture low-income communities; instead, they believe it is faster and more profitable to put more effort and investment into wealthier communities and reach efficiency. This strongly skews unfairness against marginalized communities and discriminates based on race and class toward huge disparities in resources and the quality of education.

And inequality kills people through structural violence

Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the University of Washington, 14

(Stephen, 2014, New Press, “Inequality Kills,” https://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/pages/BezruchkaInequalityKillsBkPubInfo14.pdf, GDI – TM)

Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave – Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding , or concern about the health of our youth? Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the United States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing. Inequality is the central element, the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health. The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship, meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible, with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts. Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met, concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence. There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.

Educational equality essential to U.S. democracy—persistent and long standing inequalities undermine participation and democratic decision-making

Chen, PhD candidate at Saint Louis University, publishing in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, 2015

[Amy Yun-Ping, “Educational Inequality: An Impediment to True Democracy in the United States,” Sociology Study, Vol.5 No.5, May, http://www.davidpublisher.org/Public/uploads/Contribute/55f62bc2bf7b8.pdf accessed GDI -TM]

The fundamental concept of democracy aims to offer equal access to all members of society and to ensure that they are empowered to make a good life for themselves and establish the public good for the country. Quality education is a method to eliminate poverty and encourage the engine of shared prosperity for generations of Americans. When education improves the preparation and productivity of young members of the community, it increases the wealth of the country and leads many people to their American dreams. Nevertheless, the persistent and long-standing educational inequalities are an obstacle for the United States becoming a nation with true democracy and equal liberty. Thus, democracy becomes a superficial aspect and a beautiful bubble, and it is not realized in practice. The Collapse of Political Responsibility Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) stated, “Education also powerfully affects people’s involvement with politics and their community, thereby creating another link between the nested structure of inequalities in schooling and the American dream” (Hochschild and Scovronick 2003: 24). Well-educated members of the community largely understand their obligation as participants in a democratic society, and they likely know current political facts and participate in political activities. The virtue of education in a democracy is that it tends to prepare children for citizenship and to foster in them the knowledge necessary for them to function in a civic society. But today in the United States, only some Americans fully exercise their political rights, and these are often citizens with high incomes, high socioeconomic statuses, and high levels of formal education. According to the American Political Science Association Taskforce (2005): In 1990, nearly nine out of 10 individuals in families with incomes over $75,000 reported voting in presidential elections, while only half of those in families with incomes under $15,000 reported voting. Fifty-six percent (56%) of those with incomes of at least $75,000 reported participating in political campaign activities, compared with a mere 6% among Americans with incomes under $15,000. (American Political Science Association Taskforce 2005: 80-81) The evidence indicates that there is a significant correlation between income status and the practice of citizenship. Americans with higher socioeconomic status usually enjoy not only higher educational achievement and salaries, but also have greater resources and skills to engage in politics and organizations. Education provides opportunities for Americans to acquire knowledge of democracy and to recognize their duty as members of a democratic society. Nevertheless, educational inequalities can lead to disparities in resources and skills between privileged and unprivileged people. The situation demolishes the goal of promoting democracy. The voices of U.S. citizens are heard unequally, and collective decisions respond much more to the privileged than to people of average means. The gap of inequality will increase. Instead of making progress, U.S. politics will continue to involve exclusion and unfairness, which strongly distorts the primary framework of democracy.

And, Democracies less violent, more protective of human rights and less prone to war

Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, 2016

(Larry, “Democracy in Decline: How Washington Can Reverse the Tide”, Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug 2016, Volume 95, Issue 4, pages 151-159, accessed via ProQuest, GDI-JG)

Although democracy promotion may have fallen out of favor with the U.S. public, such efforts very much remain in the national interest. Democracies are less violent toward their citizens and more protective of human rights. They do not go to war with one another. They are more likely to develop market economies, and those economies are more likely to be stable and prosperous. Their citizens enjoy higher life expectancies and lower levels of infant and maternal mortality than people living under other forms of government. Democracies also make good allies. As Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has written, "Not every democracy in the world was or is a close ally of the United States, but no democracy in the world has been or is an American enemy. And all of America's most enduring allies have been and remain democracies."∂ Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, are inherently unstable, since they face a central dilemma. If an autocracy is successful-if it produces a wealthy and educated population-that population will construct a civil society that will sooner or later demand political change. But if an autocracy is unsuccessful-if it fails to generate economic growth and raise living standards-it is liable to collapse.

Meta formula reforms 1ac – solvency

Option 1

Plan: The United States federal government should simplify Title I Basic Grants and Targeted Grants and eliminate Concentration Grants and Education Grants.

Option 2:

Plan The United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of elementary and secondary education through reform of Title I grant formulas.

Formula reforms solve – multiple reforms improve resource allocation, enhance forecasting future allocation

Gordon, non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings, 2016 (Nora, “Increasing Targeting, Flexibility, and Transparency in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to Help Disadvantaged Students”, Brookings, March 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Full-Paper.pdf, gdi-JM)

Current law delivers (and ESSA would continue to deliver) Title I, Part A via the four formulas described in table 1, and is often criticized as lacking in transparency and progressivity (e.g., Miller 2009). I propose that we greatly simplify two of these formulas (Basic Grants and Targeted Grants) and eliminate the remaining two (Concentration Grants and Education Finance Incentive Grants). The resulting allocation of funds would better target funds to districts with greater shares of children in poverty. It would have the additional benefit of providing a more transparent framework for forecasting future allocations, and exposing the distributional effects of any proposed formula changes in subsequent reauthorizations. Specifically, formula reform should have the following components. 1. Retain Basic Grants. Introduce language to ensure that Basic Grants consume no more than half the total appropriation for Title I, Part A (they currently allocate 45 percent). Change eligibility requirements so only school districts with at least 5 percent of children in poverty are eligible, as opposed to the current formula that permits districts with at least 2 percent of children in poverty or ten poor children to collect funds. The national child poverty rate in 2014 was 22 percent, and the median school district had 19 percent of children eligible for Title I, so this change is quite modest. 2. Eliminate Concentration Grants. The existing Concentration Grants formula is exactly the same as the formula for Basic Grants, with just one difference: the eligibility requirements. Concentration Grants are awarded to all districts with at least 6,500 eligible children or at least 15 percent children eligible; two-thirds of all districts are eligible for these grants. I propose eliminating this formula from the law and directing the 9 percent of Title I, Part A funds to LEAs allocated via Concentration Grants in 2015 to the modified Targeted Grants formula below. 3. Eliminate Education Finance Incentive Grants. Education Finance Incentive Grants have the most complicated formula of the four Title I grants. These grants are a well- intentioned attempt to reward states for having a greater ratio of per-pupil spending to per-capita income (effort), and lower variance in per-pupil spending across districts (equity), but they have several critical flaws. First, even if Congress could get states to spend more and try to equalize fully, this could inadvertently penalize efficient spending, or encourage school finance regimes that result in a “race to the bottom.” Second, effort and equity are functions of budget decisions at the state and local levels; as difficult as it would be to incentivize state legislatures with this opaque formula, motivating the local school boards or voters who must approve tax changes is unrealistic. Finally, though political decisions affect equity and effort, so do other factors that cannot be readily manipulated by education policy (e.g., longstanding patterns of economic residential segregation within a state), so the formula bestows some rewards arbitrarily. Similar to my proposal for Concentration Grants, I propose to remove the Education Finance Incentive Grants funding mechanism from the law and redirect its budget share (nearly a quarter of Title I, Part A funds to LEAs in 2015) to Targeted Grants. 4. Use freed-up funds to expand Targeted Grants, using poverty rates , rather than counts, to allocate those funds. The current law calculates weights per eligible student based on poverty rates, then again using poverty counts, and chooses whichever calculation is most beneficial to each district. This procedure is referred to as “number weighting.” In practice, with a fixed appropriation to distribute, this directs funds toward districts with a large number, but not share, of poor kids and away from smaller, high poverty– share districts. In July 2011 Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA) sought to address this with his All Children are Equal (ACE) Act. ESSA flags number weighting in particular for study by the Institute of Education Sciences. I propose to eliminate number weighting in Targeted Grants and apply weights to all districts based on poverty rates. (Basic Grants do not use weights so they would be unaffected.) 5. Remove state-level spending per pupil from all remaining formulas. Language in Section 1303 of ESSA specifies that eligible children are to be multiplied by “40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure in the State, except that the amount determined under this subparagraph shall not be less than 32 percent, or more than 48 percent, of the average per-pupil expenditure in the United States.” The defense for this method is that teachers cost more in states with higher costs of living, and that the spending per pupil is a proxy for aggregate state-level differences in teacher salaries. In practice, states with greater spending per pupil (and therefore higher Title I allocations, all else equal) have less poverty; the correlation between state spending per pupil and the share of children eligible in the state is -0.19. I propose to replace the language above with language to multiply weighted eligible children by “6 percent of the national average per-pupil current expenditure in the United States.” Though 6 percent may seem a major cut from the 40 percent (of state spending) in current law, note that Congress now funds Basic Grants at about 14 percent of what full funding would require. At current levels, using approximately this factor would fully fund the proposed program (using all proposed reforms), entailing no ratable reductions for at least for one year. 6. Eliminate the small state minimum. This is the most politically visible aspect of the formula changes and would generate major reductions in allocations for Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, bringing their allocations per eligible child in line with the rest of the country (see figures 1 and 2). 7. Phase in the changes above over a four-year period using hold harmless, then eliminate hold harmless going forward. Hold districts harmless at 80 percent (regardless of counts or rates of eligible children in the district) of FY2015 allocation levels in year one, at 50 percent in year two, and at 20 percent in year three. By year four, district allocations will be calculated using the formula, with no role for previous funding levels. (One option here would be to allow federal or state waivers for districts who present evidence of short- term demographic shocks and who expect enrollments to return.) During the transition, hold district- but not state- level funding harmless.

The net impact of this set of formula reforms yields major distributional improvements: first, per-eligible-pupil Title I funds will increase more rapidly with poverty rates than they do under the current regime (see figure 2). Second, the variance in per-eligible-pupil allocations conditional on poverty rates would be much reduced—that is, similar places would be treated equally under the law. And finally, the allocation of funds will be more transparent and predictable. Though most individual school districts not affected by the small state minimum would experience relatively limited changes in their allocation per eligible individual, the changes should be phased in via the hold harmless schedule outlined above over the four-year period of ESSA to allow districts time to plan and fulfill short-run contractual obligations. That is, the new formulas would go into use immediately, but hold harmless would slow their implementation. Figure 3 shows the state- level allocation of funds under the proposed formula. (These simulated allocations assume constant demographics and appropriations, and are based on no hold harmless; this would summarize allocations four years from implementation of the proposal, once changes were fully phased in.)

Current Title I funding is too complicated, the plan allows for proper Title I funding that supports students and teachers.

Boser & Brown, 15, Vice President of Education Policy at American Progress [Ulrich & Catherine; 7-7-2015, American Progress "5 Key Principles to Guide Consideration of any ESEA Title I Formula Change," Center for American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2015/07/07/116696/5-key-principles-to-guide-consideration-of-any-esea-title-i-formula-change/ ; RJC]

Last year, the federal government spent more than $14 billion to help educate low-income students as part of Title I, Part A, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. For schools, particularly low-income schools, these federal investments make a huge difference. If Title I was used to only fund teachers, for instance, it would support the jobs of more than 200,000 educators.

But while federal education dollars bring many benefits for students, they are distributed in a way that is deeply unfair both between and within states. This unfairness stems from the following flaws in the allocation formula.

It is overly complex and opaque. Title I today is allocated based on four separate formulas with conflicting incentives. State and local legislators and education officials have almost no way to know how much their allocation will change from year to year due to changes in district or state policy, population, or distribution of students living in poverty. This lack of transparency severally limits the formula from serving as an incentive for policy change or from enabling states and districts to plan for the future.

It sends more money to wealthier states. Wealthier states have historically invested more heavily in education, and those investments are favored by the current Title I formula. This results in a system that compounds existing inequities by giving more to the haves than to the have nots. Furthermore, the formula’s emphasis on the number of children who live in poverty means that more affluent districts that serve only a handful of such children receive Title I dollars. This dilutes the pool, leaving fewer resources for those places with more concentrated poverty.

It shows clear bias against rural states and mid-sized cities. As a result of this distortion, the so-called small state minimum, which gives more money to smaller states for no other reason than their small population, “states with small populations and low concentrations of poor children receive radically larger grants on a per-poor-child basis than states with larger populations, including those with substantial rural poverty.” What’s more, the formula prioritizes larger districts. Detroit, for instance, gets much more per student than Flint, Michigan, and Los Angeles gets more than Sacramento, California, due to the formula’s heavy weighting of large communities over mid-sized and rural communities.

To be clear, there is no perfect school funding formula. By definition, formulas distribute limited pots of money among diverse schools and districts, and most districts, if not all, could benefit from more resources. Formula decisions, in other words, force difficult trade-offs. Should the formula spread the funding to more students or leverage it most heavily among the neediest? Should it reward states and communities for investing in education, or should it compensate for the fact that they have not made such investments, which has real and often dire consequences for the students living in those communities? Should the formula fund communities with large concentrations of poor students or fund poor students in more socioeconomically diverse communities? These are difficult questions without easy answers.

The goal for every member of Congress—when considering modifying the Title I formula—should be to maximize public utility or the public good and to find the trade-off point where the greatest number of students receive the maximum boost to their life prospects.