Verbatim Mac

Title I Flawed – Comparability loophole

ESSA leaves in place comparability loopholes

Effort and comparability standards unchanged by ESSA – means comparability requirement judged based on spending per student not number of teachers per student

Knight, Center for Education Research and Policy Studies, and DeMatthews , Educational Leadership and Foundations, 2016

(David and David “Are ∂ school districts allocating resources equitably? ∂ Implications for Title I funding and the Every Student Succeeds Act” CERPS Working Paper 2016∂ -∂ 2∂ . ∂ University of ∂ Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX. http://www.utep.edu/education/cerps/_Files/docs/papers/CERPS_Working_Paper_2016_2.pdf accessed 7-6-17 GDI - TM)

The federal government ensures Title I funding reaches the intended students through three requirements: (a) maintenance of effort; (b) comparability; and (c) supplement, not supplant.4 Maintenance of effort implies that no states or districts can decrease total or per-pupil funding by more than 10% from the prior year. ESSA makes no major changes to the maintenance of effort requirement.

Comparability requires districts to staff Title I schools with equal or more instructional staff per pupil compared to non-Title I schools. However, because more experienced teachers typically sort into more advantaged schools within districts (Clotfelter, Ladd, Vigdor & Wheeler, 2006; Goldhaber, Lavery & Theobald, 2015) and more experienced teachers earn higher salaries, comparability in pupil-staff ratios may not imply comparability in spending on instructional staff members (Haxton et al., 2012). Over the past decade, DOE representatives have argued that comparability should be judged based on spending on teachers per student, rather than simply the number of teachers or staff members per student (Government Accountability Office, 2011; Hanna, Marchitello & Brown, 2015; Heuer & Stullich, 2011; National School Board Association, 2013). While the DOE has used the enactment of ESSA to push for equalized spending on teacher salaries between Title I and non-Title I schools, ESSA makes no changes to the statutory language of the comparability requirement and the DOE has not suggested changes to the methods in which districts meet the comparability requirement.

Comparability loopholes – teacher funding disparities

Comparability loopholes incentivizes teacher funding shenanigans

Knight, Center for Education Research and Policy Studies, and DeMatthews , Educational Leadership and Foundations, 2016

(David and David “Are ∂ school districts allocating resources equitably? ∂ Implications for Title I funding and the Every Student Succeeds Act” CERPS Working Paper 2016∂ -∂ 2∂ . ∂ University of ∂ Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX. http://www.utep.edu/education/cerps/_Files/docs/papers/CERPS_Working_Paper_2016_2.pdf accessed 7-6-17 GDI - TM)

Over the past four decades, policymakers in the Department to Education (DOE) have enacted various regulations to encourage school districts to allocate funding equitably across schools. Local school districts that meet certain eligibility requirements for receiving Title I funding are required to identify the “Title I schools” that will receive federal funds. Based on those classifications, the DOE currently requires districts to staff Title I schools with at least as many instructional personnel per student as non-Title I schools (the “Comparability Rule”). This policy is meant to ensure that districts will allocate federal funding equitably across schools.

However, in most cases, the highest-poverty schools within each district have higher teacher attrition rates and, as a result, the least experienced teaching staff (Goldhaber, Lavery & Theobald, 2015). Because districts typically use standardized salary schedules that offer higher compensation to more experienced teachers, districts that use equal staffing ratios across schools actually allocate less teacher salary funding per student to the highest-poverty schools. The “comparability loophole” refers to the lack of any requirement that districts spend equal dollars per student across Title I and non-Title I schools (Hanna, Marchitello, & Brown, 2015; McClure, 2008; Roza, 2008; Roza, Miller & Hill, 2008). A controversial policy that the DOE has pushed for, both historically and during the current rulemaking process required to implement ESSA, would mandate districts to equalize spending on teacher salaries between Title I and non-Title I schools.

Low-income students face inadequate funding— salaries calculations proves

Liebman, Simon H. Rifkin Professor, Columbia Law School, and Mbikiwa, Attorney, the High Court of South Africa, 2017

(James S. and Michael, “EVERY DOLLAR COUNTS: IN DEFENSE OF THE OBAMA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S "SUPPLE-MENT NOT SUPPLANT" PROPOSAL”, Columbia Law Review Online, March 1, 2017, accessed via LexisNexis, accessed 7/14/17, GDI-JG)

It is well established that children from low-income families need more funds to succeed in schools than their more privileged counterparts. n89 Working from this premise, Congress designed Title I to provide compensatory funds to poor children. Since then, in the face of various attempts to undermine this goal, amendments to Title I have stood by this core principle, including by insisting that districts use Title I funds to supplement, not supplant, local funds for disadvantaged children.∂ Today, poor children face yet another threat to Title I's compensatory purpose: efforts to read the caveat barring the counting of teacher salaries for purposes of "comparability of services" into the rule requiring districts to supplement not supplant local with federal funds"--even though Congress has omitted that caveat from the "supplement not sup-plant" requirement for fifty years. Relying on this unpersuasive interpretation, and exploiting the difficulty of proving a subjective motivation to underspend on Title I schools, some districts seek to exclude from "supplement not supplant" consideration the many millions of dollars they spend on the salaries of their most effective and experienced teachers, who are disproportionately deployed to economically privileged non-Title I schools. If allowed to persist, this strata-gem will continue providing many fewer local dollars to Title I schools than to other schools, in direct violation of Title I's compensatory purpose.∂ To preserve Title I's compensatory purpose, the Department of Education in 2016 crafted a reasonable proposed regulation, which used a long-established and well-respected method of identifying actions taken pursuant to an unlaw-ful motivation--in this case, a motivation to supplant local with federal funds. It is unsurprising that the regulation came under fire from partisan constituencies aiming to preserve the local funds districts have been diverting to econom-ically advantaged schools by concentrating their most experienced and effective teachers there and not counting the extra dollars they spend on those teachers. It is surprising, however--and regrettable--that the nonpartisan CRS lent conse-quential aid and comfort to this effort through poor legal reasoning--reasoning the Obama administration likely consid-ered when abandoning this important proposal.