In Mena, Arkansas, students are reading. A lot. Test scores are up significantly. Title I funding makes the district’s comprehensive literacy program possible. But programs like this one could be in jeopardy....
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The
Formula Fairness Campaign is exploring options for ways to fix the Title I formulas. One option is to use a figure calculated by the National Center for Education Statistics to determine how much college-educated non-teachers make in local labor markets around the country. This figure could be used to estimate the cost of providing an education in each school district. But this method would make things worse for most rural districts....
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Districts in richer states that support education get a lot more federal money to improve the education of very low-income students than districts in poor states that provide less funding for schools......
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The August 2010 edition of
Rural Policy Matters includes articles about a school-wide comprehensive literacy program that's making a difference in a rural school district; number weighting in Title I funding hurts rural districts headed by African-American superintendents; a coalition of civil rights organizations has issued a compelling document outlining new federal strategies to ensure that all students have substantive and fair opportunities to learn; Rural School Funding News, and more…...
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A coalition of civil rights organizations has issued a compelling document outlining new federal strategies to ensure that all students have substantive and fair opportunities to learn. The document’s critique of competitive mechanisms for distributing federal funding and use of unproven school turnaround strategies that harm students and communities is powerful. Equally important are the strategies it outlines to strengthen communities, engage parents in schools in meaningful way, and make states accountable for providing equitable resources and opportunities for all students. Such strategies would take federal policy in new directions to address the challenges and gross inequities facing low-income students and communities…...
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An analysis of the effects of the “number weighting” provisions of the federal Title I program shows that high-poverty rural districts that are headed by African-American superintendents collectively lost more than $8 million in Title I funding in 2009. These superintendents make up more than a quarter of all African-American superintendents in the U.S. Their districts are losing federal funding to larger, lower-poverty suburban districts......
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