President Bush's Secret $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Program

The Bush Administration hasn't exactly been a friend to low-income Americans. Vetoing health insurance for poor children, undermining labor protections, squandering resources on tax cuts for the super-rich--the list goes on. But as David Hoff reports in Education Week, there's one area where both the President and Congress have consistently pursued what can only be described as progressive public policy focused on the welfare of the neediest children: the formulas used to distribute Title I funding.

Title I is the main funding program under No Child Left Behind, and as such has been highly controversial, because of wide-spread perception that NCLB is "under-funded." This largely a matter of perspective--Title I gets a lot more money, almost $5 billion per year, than it did pre-NCLB. But Title I funding has also fallen far short (over $10 billion in the current year) of what Congress could have provided under the law's authorization targets. Congressional Democrats see this as a broken promise, and by any measure it's a wasted opportunity to build bipartisan support for the law.

But lost in the debate over total Title I funding has been the issue of how Title I money is distributed. Before NCLB, Title I funds were squandered using the so-called "Basic" formula, which essentially gave districts a flat dollar amount per poor student, even if district poverty rates were very low. That's a good strategy for spreading funds among as many Congressional districts as possible, but a lousy way to target resources to those who need it most.

Since NCLB, all the considerable new money has gone into a different set of formulas that are far more targeted, either by limiting eligibility to districts with a minimum poverty rate, or by increasing funding per low-income student on a sliding scale tied to poverty rates. The new formulas also give states incentives to distribute additional state and local resources based on poverty.

As Ed Sector wrote in a policy brief last year, the result has been substantial new funding targeted to the progressive ("Targeted," "Concentration," and "Incentive") formulas (FY 2007 looks much the same):





























There's no secret political calculus here; much of the impetus for this reform back in 2001 came from Democrats like Senators Kennedy, Landrieu, and Bayh, along with Representatives George Miller, Adam Smith and Cal Dooley. The net effect is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into places like New York City and reduce what would have otherwise gone to Republican-leaning suburbs.

And while President Bush, to his discredit, vetoed the recent education and labor appropriations bill that would have provided the first major increase in Title I funding since 2003, both his proposed budget, that bill, and all the other funding proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike have stuck to principle of focusing new federal education resources on the districts with the most poor students. If you believe school funding levels matter, this has made a significant difference in the lives of the most disadvantaged children. In a time when such consensus is hard to come by, this deserves more attention.