Low-Income Students

“Creating a Financial Stake in College” is a four-part series of reports that focuses on the relationship between children’s savings and improving college success. This series examines: (1) why policymakers should care about savings, (2) the relationship between inequality and bank account ownership, (3) the connections between savings and college attendance, and (4) recommendations to refine children’s savings account proposals.

The Asset Building Program and the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis (CSD) are pleased to publish a series of reports collectively titled "Creating a Financial Stake in College." Authored by William Elliott III, professor at University of Kansas School of Social Welfare, the four-part series focuses on the relationship between children's savings and improving college success.

During one of our recent events, Sheldon Garon of Princeton University and Ray Boshara of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis referred to the weak household balance sheet as one of the core economic challenges of our time, suggesting that households must focus on asset-building rather than rely on credit and debt.

A little-known provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is starting to bear fruit.

Deep in the legislative text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress buried a school-level data collection requirement. Every state had to submit school-level data on state and local per-pupil expenditures for school personnel in 2008-09. Once collected, these data would show the degree to which school districts comparably fund their Title I and non-Title I schools, as required in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The Department of Education completed the data collection a few months shy of its original goal and has just released a report on their findings. Though ED avoids drawing conclusions about the degree to which current comparability requirements are or are not working, the evidence put forth in the report is pretty clear. Current comparability requirements fall far short of ensuring that low income students receive equitable resources as their higher income peers.

As a refresher, teacher comparability refers to a current provision of Title I that attempts to ensure that school districts provide equitable state and local resources to both their low-income (Title I schools) and their higher-income (non-Title I schools). School districts can demonstrate comparability by showing that per pupil expenditures or student-teacher ratios at their low-income Title I schools are within 10 percent of the average in their higher-income non-Title I schools.

The kicker, though, is that the law allows districts to ignore any variation in spending per pupil related to a teacher’s years of experience. Conversely, a district can demonstrate comparability by showing that they have a uniform teacher salary schedule that all schools use. Regardless of how a district chooses to demonstrate comparability, the current methods allow districts to obscure the actual resources – dollars per pupil – in their Title I and non-Title I schools. Because teacher salaries are the largest school expense, this “loophole” undermines the intent of comparability and practically ensures that districts are able to inequitably fund low-income schools.

Because the ARRA data collection effort provides data on actual state and local personnel expenditures at the school level for all schools in America, it can be used to determine the degree to which schools are comparably funded. Using these data, ED calculated the number and percentage of Title I or higher-poverty schools that received below average per pupil personnel expenditures for their district by school grade level. Though the report presents the information rather matter-of-factly, the conclusions are cause for concern.

Though the report provides many ways to cut the data, the most telling analysis is also the simplest. The report shows that 15,749 Title I schools (43 percent of Title I schools in the study) received lower per pupil personnel expenditures than their district average in 2008-09. Of those, 11,228, or 31 percent, received per pupil expenditures that were more than 10 percent below the average – above the threshold for variation in resources currently set in the comparability requirement (though districts are not currently required to include actual spending per pupil). Though this number seems somewhat inoffensive – it is less than 50 percent after all – it is still far from zero, where it should be according to the intent of the law.

The average school in 2009 had 547 students. This means that more than 6 million students in this country (that’s roughly the combined student populations in Arizona, Missouri, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, and Indiana), likely those that need additional resources the most, are attending schools that benefit from dramatically less state and local funding than federal law suggests they should.

Title I funds are intended to provide additional resources for low-income students. Given the wide gap in state and local support for these Title I schools, it is difficult to imagine that those funds are doing much more than bringing per pupil funding in these schools up to funding parity. Clearly, comparability as it currently stands is not doing what it should – ensuring that state and local funding provide a level playing field for the education of low-income students.

Luckily, Congress is considering legislation that would change all this in the Harkin/Enzi Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization bill. Though that bill may be flawed in several ways, Congress should be sure to maintain the bill’s comparability language and do more to ensure that low-income students receive the support they need.

Yesterday, Congress introduced the final conference report on the fiscal year 2012 Agriculture, Commerce/Justice/Science (CJS), and Transportation/Housing and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations bills (HR 112-284). Anyone interested in education policy should note that this is the annual funding bill that covers Child Nutrition Act programs like school lunch and school breakfast. And this year’s bill is particularly important. Lawmakers have inserted provisions that would all but tie the Department of Agriculture’s hands as it attempts to set nutritional guidelines for school meals.

Provisions in the proposed funding bill would place significant restrictions on nutrition requirements for school lunches made possible in the 2010 Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act (which reauthorized the Child Nutrition Act of 1966). Congress is proposing these changes before the Department of Agriculture has released the final rules governing the implementation of the Health and Hunger Free Kids Act, which were first released for comment in January.

The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 is largely considered to have made some of the greatest strides in improving the nutritional quality of school meals—and the law once enjoyed bi-partisan support, passing the Senate unanimously in 2010.

Unfortunately, due to a combination of special interest lobbying and concerns over “federal intrusion,” drastically improved nutritional requirements for school meals may no longer be possible. In fact, the bill defines some very specific limitations on nutritional restrictions, including:

1.       Ensuring that tomato paste in pizza sauce can be counted as a serving of vegetables in a meal;

2.       Eliminating any limit on the number of starchy vegetables (potatoes, lima beans, peas, etc…) in a meal;

3.       Prohibiting schools from using any federal funds to limit the sodium content in school lunches beyond an initial two-year target defined in the law; and

4.       Eliminating any requirements on the amount of whole grains in a school meal.

According to a summary released by the House Appropriations Committee, the changes included in the pending appropriations bill would “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations…Without these provisions, the cost of these important programs would balloon by an additional $7 billion over the next five years – leaving states and local school districts in the lurch.”

The $7 billion number appears to come from draft nutrition rules the Department of Agriculture published in January 2011. The Department estimates that the total cost of all nutritional requirements under the proposed regulations would increase by $6.8 billion from 2012 to 2016. This includes the cost of all proposed increases in the amount of fruits and vegetables served at meals, limits to the amount of fats, calories, and sodium in meals, and the cost of switching from refined grains to whole grains in meals. Interestingly, the appropriations bill does not touch on calorie or fat limits, suggesting that some of that $6.8 billion increase in costs will remain despite the limitations described above.

It is important to note that under the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, the federal government specifically provides local schools with additional six cent reimbursement per meal to meet the increased nutritional restrictions in the law. The Department of Agriculture, on the other hand, estimates that the nutritional improvements will cost an additional 3.4 centers per lunch for the first two years, well under the 6 cents provided, and an additional 7.2 cents per lunch after that.

Though the cost of the nutritional requirements will eventually outpace the increased reimbursement rate, it appears that the Health and Hunger Free Act already accounted for most of these increased costs. This leads us to wonder whether schools will continue to receive the additional 6 cent reimbursement if the appropriations bill passes and many of the originally conceived nutritional requirements are no longer possible.

Though saving $7 billion may be compelling during this time of fiscal austerity, Congress should also remember the social cost of eliminating these nutritional requirements. It is no secret that juvenile obesity is a serious problem in America.

In fact, according to Mission: Readiness, a non-profit comprised of retired military leaders working to battle obesity in schools, 27 percent of young adults are too obese to serve in the military making school nutrition an issue of national security. And for low-income students that receive a large amount of their daily nutrition in school, ignoring the importance of improving nutritional requirements for school meals could mean even more trouble down the line.

Congress is slated to vote on the pending appropriations “mini-bus” (a small omnibus funding bill) sometime this week. If the bill passes as is, and the president signs it, most of the nutritional “teeth” of the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act will be eliminated, allowing the low nutritional standards in the school lunch program to continue.

Check out this before-and-after-school lunch menu to understand the full effects improved nutritional rules would have on the quality of lunch offerings.

According a recent U.S. Department of Education report, higher education has reached a troubling milestone: the country’s public and private four-year colleges are now spending a greater share of their institutional aid dollars on trying to attract the students they desire than on meeting the financial need of the low- and moderate-income students they enroll.

The report from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provides the clearest picture to date of how colleges, under the sway of enrollment management consultants, have fundamentally changed the way they spend their institutional aid dollars, to the detriment of low-income students.

With Congress still a long way from reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Department of Education plans in the meantime to waive some of the law’s provisions in exchange for getting states to undertake reforms. The Department might issue such a waiver for one No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act program that is unpopular among states and school districts: supplemental educational services (SES).

Failing schools under NCLB must provide students with supplemental educational services, primarily implemented as tutoring outside of school time. Those schools are required to set aside up to twenty percent of their federal funds under Title I, Part A and use them to fund transportation for school choice students, tutoring, or a combination of both. Whatever portion of the set-aside is not used to cover eligible students can be reverted for use in other Title I activities. A tutoring industry official placed the estimate of federal dollars spent on tutoring in 2010 at about $650 million for 600,000 students, well below the total available amount ($2.55 billion in 2005, up from $1.75 billion in 2001 thanks to a jump in schools characterized by NCLB as “in need of improvement”).

Low participation rates, questions regarding the effectiveness of the program, and costs have all made the tutoring services controversial. Students have been slow to sign up for tutoring. A GAO report published in 2006 suggested that 20 percent of school districts that were required to provide in the 2005 school year had zero students participating. And despite multiple attempts by the school district to notify parents of the service, about half of districts still failed to notify them prior to the start of the school year.

Participation has been a persistent problem throughout the program’s existence, too.  A 2008 report from the Department of Education showed that in 2007, 2.4 million children were eligible to participate in SES, and only 446,000 did so. Today, over half a million students participate annually, but most still only receive 20 to 40 hours of tutoring in an entire school year, hardly enough time to make a significant impact on students’ achievement.

Studies have shown the limited effectiveness of the program. Relative to other Title I activities, one study found that the positive impact tutoring has on students’ achievement is very small. The same report also found that school districts’ programs tended to be more successful than outside providers were; yet as of 2007, only 40 percent of programs were administered by schools or school districts.

States’ abilities to monitor program effectiveness are also highly limited. States are required by the Department of Education to monitor SES programs, measure their impact, and remove from the list of authorized providers any who fail to demonstrate student achievement. But no federal funding is provided for any studies of the programs. Assessment of SES varies from state to state. In early 2006, the Government Accountability Office found that only two states – New Mexico and Tennessee – had managed to provide SES evaluation reports to the public, and only a few others were on their way to doing so.

Students have underutilized the tutoring program, but supplemental educational services have not demonstrated much impact on low-income students in low-performing schools. Tutoring services have set aside significant sums of money from the Title I allocations for each school, necessitating cuts to other activities than have been proven to be effective. The NCLB waivers offered by the Department of Education could end that cycle, allowing schools to pursue more effective routes to improving student achievement.

While states and school districts can typically count on federal support to remain stable after Congress passes and the President signs an annual appropriations bill, that is not the case this year. Earlier this month, the Department of Education released revised fiscal year 2011 Title I Part A allocations to states and school districts to be spent during school year 2011-12. Title I Part A provides grants to school districts to provide additional services to low income students. The revised allocations reflect a $163 million decrease in support resulting from the Fiscal Year 2012 Continuing Appropriations Act. The law mandated a 1.5 percent decrease in spending across-the-board, even though those funds were technically appropriated in fiscal year 2011. Fiscal year 2011 ended September 30, 2011. This decrease comes in addition to the 0.2 percent decrease written into the fiscal year 2011 appropriations law, which was passed in April of 2011, several months after the fiscal year began on October 1, 2010. Additionally, some states submitted revised state per-pupil expenditure data that result in lower allocations than previously published.

With the new lower Title I allocations, states and school districts may have to scramble to readjust their spending plans for this school year. However, not all states and districts will feel the effect equally – while some states, like West Virginia, will see an overall decrease over the mandated 1.5 percent, others like New Hampshire, will see much smaller decreases.

Thanks to the Title I Monitor, a Thompson Publication, the Federal Education Budget Project, Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, is able to incorporate those new allocations into our state and school district data website. Through the website, users can view how Title I Part A allocations have fluctuated over time in the context of per pupil expenditures and student demographics. All data on the site is easily available for download, as well.

Additionally, the database now includes recently released state and school district student demographic data for 2010 including percent of students in free and reduced priced lunch, special education, and English language learner programs.

Check out the new data and the wealth of other information available at www.edbudgetproject.org.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the current incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is almost universally unpopular with lawmakers, state officials, and principals and teachers for a variety of reasons. But it does retain some favor with civil rights groups, particularly because it requires states, school districts, and schools to ensure that minority students and students enrolled in special programs like free and reduced price lunch, special education, and English language learners are reaching performance targets. Further, it requires states and districts to publish information on this disaggregated student achievement through annual report cards that are publicly available to parents and other stakeholders.

Though the report card requirements in the current 2001 law have made great strides in improving parent access to data, Senators Harkin (D-IA) and Enzi (R-WY) recently introduced a bill to reauthorize ESEA (which expired back in 2007) that would take the annual report card even further to provide parents with even more valuable data on school performance. That said, it would also allow states and districts to obscure information on teacher qualifications.

In addition to data on student achievement both overall and for sub-groups of students and graduation rates, the Harkin-Enzi bill would require states and districts to publish three more key pieces of data. These include data on the percentage of graduated students that matriculated to college the following fall, the percentage of graduated students needing remedial education in college, and student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 4^th and 8^th graders.

All three of these changes would significantly improve the usability of the report cards. Including College matriculation data in the state and district report cards would show which high schools have the greatest success sending students to higher education institutions and college remediation data would reveal which schools are not properly preparing their students for college-level learning. Both of these measures would put direct pressure on high schools to improve their focus on college-going and increase the rigor of their courses where necessary. However, it is unclear how many states and districts are able to make these data available. While some states are already able to track student matriculation and coursetaking in college, many are not. States would have until the 2012-13 school year to produce matriculation data and the 2013-14 school year for remediation data.

Including NAEP performance in the report cards, on the other hand, would provide a point of comparison for each state’s standards and student performance on those standards. For example, if 75 percent of a school’s students score proficient in 8^th grade math on the state assessment, but only 30 percent of students in that state score proficient on NAEP, parents could conclude that the state’s standards are not nearly as rigorous as the NAEP standards. This direct comparison could push states to improve their standards.

The Harkin-Enzi bill also includes some optional information states and schools can include on their report card. These include passing rates on AP/IB tests, class size, incidence of school violence, school climate indicators, attendance rates, and school readiness for kindergarten students. While some of these indicators are relatively difficult to track systematically across districts, others, like class size and attendance, are low-hanging fruit. Hopefully most states and districts will take advantage of the data already available and include these two indicators on their report cards.

Strangely missing from the Harkin-Enzi bill is any mention of teacher quality or qualifications in the proposed new report card. NCLB currently requires states and districts to publish in their report cards information on professional qualifications of all public elementary and secondary school teachers, the percentage of all public elementary and secondary school teachers teaching with emergency or provisional credentials, and the percentage of classes not taught by highly qualified teachers, in the aggregate and disaggregated by high-poverty compared to low-poverty schools. The reauthorization bill includes no such requirements; in fact, the report card section doesn’t mention teachers at all.

However, under the “parents’ right-to-know” section, the proposal requires school districts to release information on teacher qualification to parents if they request it. This information would include whether a student’s teacher has met state qualification and licensing requirements, whether the teacher is emergency certified, what the teacher majored in in college, and the qualification of any paraprofessionals in the classroom. At the same time, the bill requires states to submit data to the Secretary of Education on the percentage and distribution of teachers that are not highly qualified, teachers that are inexperienced, teachers that have not completed a teacher preparation program, and teachers that are teaching out of their subject area.

If states and districts are already required to provide this information to the Secretary or to parents that request it, why do they not also have to include it on state and school districts report cards? Teachers are one of the most important components of a student’s learning experience and any information regarding the qualifications or experience of those teachers should be readily available to parents and other stakeholders. Requiring parents to request this information creates an unnecessary roadblock that many parents are unlikely to want to navigate.

The state and school report card is one of the primary sources of school quality information for parents. The Harkin-Enzi bill would make some strides in improving the report cards by strengthening data on high school outcomes and providing a good point of comparison for state standards. But at the same time, it would allow states and districts to conceal valuable information about teacher qualifications.