The Rich Get Richer

The Education Trust released its annual Funding Gap report yesterday, just in time for New Year's. (Disclosure: I used to work at Ed Trust and wrote the 2003 and 2004 editions of the report.) As always, the report exposes the basic resource inequities that hamstring many educators and disadvantaged children. Despite the fact that low-income children need more resources, many states are giving them less.

As the Post wrote this morning, this year's report features an expanded analysis of an issue that previous reports have touched on: flaws in the Federal Title I formula. The essential problem is that while Title I provides more money to poor school districts than wealthy school districts within each state, it actually provides more money to poor districts in wealthy states than it does to poor districts in poor states. That's because it adjusts per-student funding to states based on how much money the states themselves spend on education. States that spend more, get more.

This seems to reward states that make the effort to support their schools. But as the analysis shows, state funding levels are less a function of effort than they are of wealth. States that have more tend to spend more. So we end up with a situtation where Massachusetts gets more than twice as much Title I money per poor child than Arkansas, even though education funding effort in Arkansas, measured as education spending divided by taxable resources, is greater.

This issue hasn't received a lot of attention, but hopefully that will change as discussions heat up around the reauthorization of NCLB. The federal government should ameliorate inter-state differences in resources, not make them worse.