How districts get more funding for poor students

Jeremy Ray is superintendent of three school districts in Maine. Many students from low-income families are enrolled in all three locations.

But there are some stark differences. About 60 percent of Biddeford County’s 2,300 students qualify for free and reduced-price meals. By contrast, just 28 percent of the 2,800 students in Saco County, just a mile down the road in southern Maine, can say the same.

Maine’s school funding formula provides districts with an additional 5 cents for every dollar per low-income student. All told, that means schools get about $1,200 more for each low-income student than for each higher-income student.

This is problematic in Ray’s eyes for two reasons: There is not enough money to pay for the additional support that a low-income student would need from their school. And above all, says Ray, there is not enough money for his schools, where most students come from low-income backgrounds.

“A student in a community that has 5 percent free and reduced lunch will still receive the same weight of 0.05, but that is a different classroom than one that has 60 percent free and reduced lunch.” said Ray. The latter classroom receives more money, but Ray says the additional funding does not meet the additional needs of students from low-income families in high-poverty areas.

This is one of the many perennial problems facing policymakers, school district officials and advocates as they seek to provide equitable resources for the nation’s complex, decentralized system of public schools. Even after countless legislative debates, a multitude of constitutional challenges in almost every state, and countless revisions to funding formulas, school funding remains grossly inequitable in many places.

However, two recently published working papers argue that providing more resources, more targeted to the students who need them most, can have a measurable effect on the academic performance of students of color and low-income students.

It turns out that increased school spending approved by local voters can have a strong positive impact on test scores for low-income students and students of color. The other side finds significant improvements in student test scores when school leaders are given more flexibility To spend money as students see fit in their buildings.

Research like this reflects that scientists have moved beyond the long-debated question of whether money even plays a role in improving student outcomes, said Chris Candelaria, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the latter paper .

“I’m happy to say that this is no longer an interesting question,” Candelaria said. “A lot of people say, ‘That’s great. Money matters. What now?”

Scientists are studying who benefits most when school funding increases

One of the next questions facing school finance observers: Who cares most about money?

A team of researchers at Brown University examined tax elections for school districts in nine states and school bond elections in eight states where the results were close. The team concluded that districts where school funding increases barely succeeded or narrowly failed would be similar in terms of wealth and the share of residents with school-age children.

The study found that over the decade following a successful local tax increase vote, all students’ test scores, particularly in math, were higher than in districts with failed tax increase votes. Similar, although slightly smaller, gaps existed between districts with successful bond votes for increased spending on school facilities than in districts where bond votes failed.

Researchers found that increased spending due to a voter-approved funding increase had the greatest impact on test scores in districts where the additional funding built on a track record of low spending. They defined “low spending” as falling below the average per-pupil spending of $11,000 in 2022, Rauscher said.

These benefits were evident among students of all racial categories except white students.

“In districts with low prior spending, essentially every type of group benefited from passing a bond, while in districts with higher prior spending, the benefit was much weaker,” said Brown sociologist Emily Rauscher, one of four contributing researchers -wrote the paper.

Rauscher and her team suspect that these positive impacts are due to the products of these increased investments: increased teacher salaries and expanded support services through tax increases; improved facilities and new technology tools from bonds.

“All legislators should expect high achievement and a high level of academic competence from students,” Rauscher said. “Appropriately funding your public schools is one way to get there.”

In Maine, Ray sees differences between districts as an argument for differentiated funding.

In the lower-poverty districts that Ray serves, many parents would “go to the ends of the earth, so X field trip was still in the budget.” But in areas with higher poverty, “we need to be stronger advocates for our own children,” Ray said.

By the same token, school officials in low-poverty districts may be tempted to assume that “everyone has the means” to pay fees or approve tax increases to support schools.

Researchers found that test scores are not the only measure of student performance affected by increased funding for high-need students. Researchers used federal civil rights data and district-level attendance data to show that districts that narrowly approved tax increases also subsequently saw student suspensions and chronic absenteeism rates decline.

“As a community, we need to think about how we program and how we support families and create opportunities,” Ray said. “In some communities this will require more money than in others.”

Some districts emphasize equity when deciding how to distribute funds to schools

The difficulty of maximizing investments does not end once funds have flowed from the state treasury to the district treasury. When states allocate more money to districts with high proportions of low-income students, but those districts then direct most of those funds to individual school campuses with the fewest students from low-income families, efforts are made to divert state resources to improve equity hindered to use.

A growing number of school districts have emerged in recent decades, including large urban districts like BostonClevelandand the District of Columbia– have introduced a system of “student-based budgeting,” also known as “weighted student funding.”

Districts that use this approach develop formulas to determine how much money each student needs. Then they give school leaders more flexibility than usual to determine how to best spend the money on students in their school buildings.

This model is not widely adopted. Many principals lack budget training. Some community members and school staff bristle if the new model means less money for a particular school building.

Just this school year, Chicago abandoned student-based budgeting Supports a model that provides each school with funding for a minimum level of staffing and additional funding based on a complex formula to calculate the unique needs of the community.

But a new working paper was published in August provides some of the first evidence that this funding approach leads to better test scores for students.

Candelaria and his colleagues use an unnamed sample district in the southeastern United States to show that students gained one to three months of additional learning in math and reading per year in the years following the implementation of student-based budgeting. These increases were particularly pronounced among low-income students and English language learners.

A few dozen of the largest of the country’s 13,000 districts use student-based budgeting, according to a 2021 analysis by Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. This number could rise further if other large districts join in.

In August, school officials in Rochester, N.Y., proposed a transition for student-based budgeting. The school board will take a final vote in December.

The model will not make sense for all districts, Candelaria said. Some have too few campuses to justify shifting budgeting work to principals. In some schools, there is little difference in student population from school to school, so there is little need for significant differentiation in funding.

But school districts could benefit significantly from receiving budget contributions from the administrators closest to students’ daily lives and their pressing needs, Candelaria said. He plans to focus future research on identifying the types of investments that produce the greatest improvements in student achievement.

“The money is the first part of it,” Candelaria said. “We need to think about how this directly impacts the resources schools use.”