Cndi 2017 – Title I finance Affirmative

Case – Solvency

Status Quo Fails

Title I funding is key to resolve educational inequality but the status quo’s distribution formula fails.

Lewis 16 [Lisa L. Lewis, 6-3-2016, "A Half-Century Later, We Still Don’t Know How to Send Money to the Poorest Schools," Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2016/06/title_i_funding_often_still_doesn_t_make_it_to_our_poorest_schools_half.html]

On Wednesday, U.S. News & World Report released a comprehensive analysis showing that Title I, the federal program created as part of civil rights–era legislation to meet the needs of low-income students, is still flawed. A significant portion of the $14.5 billion spent via Title I each year is funneled to students in wealthier districts: Nearly 20 percent, or $2.6 billion, goes to wealthier-than-average districts, while many districts with high concentrations of poverty are shortchanged. The mission of Title I, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty,” was to provide federal funding to help meet the educational needs of low-income students. It’s been reauthorized regularly since then, and it’s a key part of the most recent federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law in December by President Barack Obama to replace 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act. The funding is meant to provide supplemental resources for low-income, struggling students, such as instructional coaches, reading and math intervention programs, professional development, and additional guidance counselors. But it is notoriously difficult to correctly allocate these funds—how do you know how to fairly disburse money so it benefits just the poor students in more than 13,000 school districts? Over the years, Title I has been modified in attempts to address misuse. One of the most significant amendments, passed in 1970, requires districts to use Title I funds to supplement, not supplant, state and local funding. In other words, it prohibits local districts from intentionally underfunding schools serving poor students because they assume they can backfill the shortfall using federal money. A more recent modification helped curb blatant misuses of funds, such as using it to build two Olympic-sized swimming pools in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, which at the time had a child poverty rate of 36 percent. Despite the overall intent that Title I funding help poor students, it doesn’t always work out that way in practice. That’s because of the inherent difficulty in pinpointing exactly which schools should get funding and how much. If a school in a wealthy district enrolls students who live below the poverty line, should it still get a piece of the cake, and if so, how much? Is it the number of poor students that matters or the percentage of students who are poor? (The current formulas take both into account, although more weight is given to the number of poor students.) Title I also incentivizes states to provide higher levels of financial support by offering additional funds when they do. There are other considerations, too; for example, there’s the fact that states with small populations, which are presumed to be rural, receive additional funding. While this makes sense for a state such as New Mexico, it also means that states such as Delaware, whose small population is due to its small size, not its ruralness, also receive this Title I bump—in fact, they end up receiving more Title I funds per student than other states with higher rates of child poverty. Another quirk of the law: In schools where at least 40 percent of students come from low-income families, Title I funds can be used on schoolwide programs that benefit all of the students. The net result is that the distribution of funds is uneven and often counterintuitive. So U.S. News & World Report has built a tool that easily allows anyone to sort districts to see how much Title I funding they receive (it also shows state and local funding, as well as poverty levels). Using this, readers can see that the impoverished district of Nottoway County, Virginia, receives about $775,000 a year in Title I funds, while significantly wealthier Fairfax County, Virginia, receives $20 million. To be fair, Nottoway has a much smaller population than Fairfax, but even with a 30 percent child poverty rate, Nottoway actually receives less money per poor child than Fairfax (which has just an 8 percent child poverty rate). The issues with Title I have been well-known, and there have been several recent proposals to adjust how funding is allocated. But even with all the good in the new federal education act (it’s a huge step up from No Child Left Behind), the act did not change how Title I funds are allocated. And that means that after 50 years, Title I still isn’t closing the education inequality gap the way it was meant to.

Squo fails – Title I formula causes more inequality than it solves.

Gunn 16 [Dwyer Gunn, Freelance journalist and contributing writer at Pacific Standard.The Problem With Title I Education Funding, Pacific Standard, https://psmag.com/education/the-problem-with-title-i-education-funding]

Last week, the Hamilton Project released a report on America's struggling K–12 public education system. The report is full of useful information on the importance of both early education and post-secondary education, but it pays special attention to the country's high-poverty public schools, which currently educate approximately 56 percent of students nationwide. As the graph below demonstrates, that percentage is much higher in southern states (in Mississippi, for example, approximately 92 percent of students attend a high-poverty school). The report also highlights a discouraging trend: Many of these schools receive less per-pupil Title I funding than schools in wealthier states. America's schools are becoming increasingly more segregated (by race and income), a fact that spells bad news for students. Schools with a high percentage of low-income students struggle to attract and retain qualified teachers. In Charlotte, North Carolina, researchers have linked the re-segregation of schools to higher criminal activity, lower test scores, lower graduation rates, and declines in college attendance rates. High-poverty schools also struggle with resources and funding, which is especially troublesome because low-income students are the most likely to need higher-quality teachers, after-school tutoring, and other supplemental services. This is in no small part due to America's education funding system. School districts derive 90 percent of their funding from state and local revenues. Districts in wealthy areas are able to raise substantially higher levels of local revenues, and most states' education funding formulas fail to direct enough state revenues to poor districts to correct these inequities. But federal funding plays a role as well. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was created with the explicit goal of providing supplemental federal funds to low-income students and the schools that educate them. Here's what the text of the law states: IN RECOGNITION OF THE SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF CHILDREN OF LOW-INCOME FAMILIES AND THE IMPACT THAT CONCENTRATION OF LOW-INCOME FAMILIES HAVE ON THE ABILITY OF LOCAL EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES TO SUPPORT ADEQUATE EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS, THE CONGRESS HEREBY DECLARES IT TO BE THE POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES TO PROVIDE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE ... TO LOCAL EDUCATION AGENCIES SERVING AREAS WITH CONCENTRATIONS OF CHILDREN FROM LOW-INCOME FAMILIES TO EXPAND AND IMPROVE THEIR EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS BY VARIOUS MEANS WHICH CONTRIBUTE PARTICULARLY TO MEETING THE SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF EDUCATIONALLY DEPRIVED CHILDREN. Unfortunately, Title I has fallen far short of its original mission. The Hamilton Project report concludes that states with higher percentages of low-income students actually receive less per-pupil Title I funding. So why does a federal education funding system that was created to correct education inequities do the exact opposite? In a policy proposal released alongside the report, Nora Gordon, a Hamilton Project researcher and professor at Georgetown University, provides some context. Title I funding formulas are complicated, she explains, but allocations are based on six criteria: average per-pupil spending, state size, historical funding allocations, the ratio of education spending to per-capita income, and within-state variations in local school spending. Some of those criteria are accompanied by mandatory minimums—there's a minimum funding level for smaller states, for example, and the historical allocation criteria includes a "hold-harmless" rule that requires a minimum funding level based on previous years' funding levels. Here's the problem: Congress doesn't fully fund Title I (by a long shot), but the mandatory minimums aren't waived in the absence of adequate funding. "The result of these formulas is that the amount of Title I funds per poor child varies greatly even across districts and states with similar poverty rates," Gordon writes. As a result, small states like Vermont and North Dakota receive substantially higher levels of per-pupil funding than places like Louisiana or Mississippi, despite having lower shares of children eligible for such funding. (Graph: The Hamilton Project) Gordon's paper also includes a series of recommendations for both simplifying the Title I funding process and making it more progressive, including eliminating the small state minimum and (gradually) phasing out the hold-harmless minimum. Under Gordon's proposed reforms, 36 states would gain per-pupil Title I funds (with Mississippi emerging as the biggest winner), while 14 states and Washington, D.C., would lose funds. Most states would see only minimal losses. While the reforms that Gordon proposes would no doubt provoke political opposition from smaller states, they're clearly needed if Title I is to remain true to its original mission.

Under current Title I funding methods, states with higher concentrations of children in poverty are not getting proportional funding.

Frey 16 (Susan, writer and editor with EdSource, B.A. in International Studies from Ohio State University and a B.A. with honors in Journalism from San Jose State University, “Federal funding formula hurts California schools, report says”, EdSource, 24 March 2016, https://edsource.org/2016/federal-funding-formula-hurts-california-schools-report-says/562211, Accessed 1 July 2017, JY)

California schools are not getting their fair share of Title I federal funds because of “chronic underfunding” and “complex formulas that distort allocations,” according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. States with high concentrations of children in poverty, including California, receive below-average anti-poverty funding per child, according to the report, “Fourteen Economic Facts on Education and Economic Opportunity,” released on Thursday by the institution’s Hamilton Project. To fully fund the Basic Grants portion of Title I in 2015 would have required $50 billion in funding, but Congress allocated only $6.5 billion, according to the report. Basic Grants make up about 45 percent of all Title I funding. Because the allocation rules provide a minimum level of funding for small states, some of those states receive a disproportionate level of Title I funding, according to the report. Another provision allows districts to continue to receive allocations based on previous years even if poverty levels have changed. The formula also gives more weight to the size of the district than on the percentage of students who are poor, creating a disadvantage for small cities such as Bakersfield, according to Education Week. It also credits “effort” – how much states fund education relative to their per capita income. This hurts California, which is 15th in per capita income but in the bottom third in student spending. There were competing efforts in Congress to revise the Title I formula this past year, including one proposal by Sen. Richard Burr, R-NC, that would have helped smaller districts with concentrations of poverty, particularly benefiting southern and western states; California would have seen an increase of $130 million in Title I funding. But the Senate compromise that led to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which includes Title I, left the formula alone. The majority of states, including California, received between $900 and $1,400 per student in 2015 dollars from Title I, according to the report. Vermont, North Dakota and Wyoming received up to three times as much: between $2,400 and $2,900 per student. “The funding is not distributed progressively,” said Diane Schanzenbach, director of the Hamilton Project. The report also weighed in on an issue that California is now grappling with – the importance of early education funding. Based on a review of research, the report found that the federal Head Start preschool programs increased high school graduation rates among students who had participated by up to 20 percentage points, depending on the group of students studied. The program particularly benefited African-American and Latino students, according to the report. “The biggest return is the earliest intervention,” Schanzenbach said. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t cost-effective returns when you intervene later.” The report outlines some successful strategies used to support older students who have fallen behind and says that keeping students in high school one additional year increases their earnings and reduces their likelihood of facing unemployment, welfare or poverty. Overall, the report calls for more spending on preK-12 education, particularly considering that the majority of U.S. public school students – more than 27 million children – attend a high-poverty school. Such a concentration of poverty is problematic, according to the report, because average test scores of low-income students decline as the share of low-income students increases.

Solvency – AT: Title I Fails

Title I significantly helps low-income schools and students.

Meador 5/7 (Derrick, school administrator for 16 years, “How the Federal Title I Program Helps Students and Schools”, ThoughtCo., 7 May 2017, https://www.thoughtco.com/how-the-federal-title-i-program-helps-students-and-schools-3194750, Accessed 28 June 2017, JY)

Title I provides federal funding to schools that serve an area with high poverty. The funding is meant to help students who are at risk of falling behind academically. The funding provides supplemental instruction for students who are economically disadvantaged or at risk of failing to meet state standards. Students are expected to show academic growth at a faster rate with the support of Title I instruction. The Title I program originated as the Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965. It is now associated with Title I, Part A of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Its primary purpose was to ensure that all children were given the opportunity to be provided with a high-quality education. Title I is the largest federally funded education program for elementary and secondary schools. Title I is also designed to focus on special needs populations and to reduce the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Title I has benefited schools in many ways. Perhaps the most important are the funding itself. Public education is cash strapped and having Title I funds available affords schools the opportunity to maintain or initiate programs that target specific students. Without this funding, many schools would not be able to provide their students with these services. Furthermore, the students have reaped the benefits of Title I funds having opportunities that they otherwise would not have. In short, Title I has helped some students succeed when they may not have otherwise. Some schools may opt to use the funds to initiate a school-wide Title I program where every student can benefit from these services. Schools must have a child poverty rate of at least 40% to operating a school-wide Title I program. A school-wide Title I program can provide benefits to all students and is not just limited to those students who are considered to be economically disadvantaged. This path gives schools the biggest bang for their buck because they are able to impact a larger number of students. Schools that utilize Title I funds have several requirements to keep the funding. Some of these requirements are as follows: Schools must create a comprehensive needs assessment that specifies why Title I funds are needed and how they will be used. Schools must use highly qualified teachers to provide instruction. Teachers must utilize highly effective, research-based instructional strategies. Schools must provide their teachers with quality professional development designed to improve the areas identified by the needs assessment. Schools must create a targeted parental involvement plan with associated activities such as a family engagement night. Schools must identify students who are not meeting state standards and create a strategic plan for helping those students grow and improve. Schools must show annual growth and improvement. They must prove that what they are doing is working.

“Title I bad” arguments don’t assume the aff – it changes the formula to make funds targeted and effective

Boser and Brown 16 (Ulrich and Catherine, Senior K-12 Education Fellow at American Progress and Vice President of Education Policy at American Progress, “5 Key Principles to Guide Consideration of any ESEA Title I Formula Change”, Center for American Progress, 7 July 2015, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2015/07/07/116696/5-key-principles-to-guide-consideration-of-any-esea-title-i-formula-change/, Accessed 28 June 2017, JY)

Title I dollars are often spread too thinly. Wealthy and middle-class areas such as Palo Alto, California, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Arlington, Virginia, and Melrose, Massachusetts, all receive Title I dollars. So do districts serving only a dozen children from poor families, such as Robein, Illinois, and Milnor, North Dakota. In fact, a full 67 percent of schools nationwide receive Title I funds despite the fact that the program is designed to help needy students receive a better education. Title I dollars are dispersed widely in part because schools can receive the funding even if they only serve a few students in poverty. Under current law, Basic grants allocate federal dollars to districts solely based on the number of children living in poverty. So a district such as Cedar Bluffs, Nebraska, receives federal dollars for its 10 poor children even though those children live in a community where the child- poverty rate is less than 5 percent. This wide dispersion of Title I dollars is a problem. Significant amounts of research shows that it is not just poverty that limits a student’s life outcomes; living in high-poverty areas and attending school among other poor students—in other words, concentrated poverty—have significant effects as well. It has also been shown that money has the greatest impact when it is invested in improving the education of low-income students who come to school with the greatest needs when compared to their more affluent peers. And although there are poor students in many—if not most—schools, schools serving more affluent populations have larger budgets overall. More affluent schools are better positioned to afford compensatory services for low-income students without the need for Title I support. Moreover, the purpose of ESEA is to compensate for the fact that schools in higher-income areas typically have larger budgets than schools in low-income communities. By sending limited Title I funds to middle-class and affluent areas, the formula undermines its basic intent. A better approach would be to exclude affluent districts from Title I eligibility, thus making more funds available for students living in concentrated poverty. Federal money would have a bigger impact if it were more targeted to schools with a greater percentage of students in need. This point is particularly important to keep in mind during any sort of formula debate. For lawmakers, there is good reason to spread the wealth, but the purpose of the program is to help create a level playing field for schools with large numbers of low-income students. The United States is one of just three Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, countries that provides fewer resources for educating students living in poverty than their peers. Educational outcomes in the United States, which differ significantly by socioeconomic status, reflect this approach. Title I reform could help rectify that problem by providing a greater incentive for states to create progressive funding structures.

Title one funds are the most efficient way to benefit poorly funded schools

Meador 17(Derrick Meador, 5-3-2017, Derrick Meador attended Oklahoma State University where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education - Middle Level Science. Derrick also attended Northeastern State University where he earned a Master's degree in Educational Leadership. He is certified in Oklahoma for elementary education, middle level science, physical education, elementary principal, middle school principal and high school principal. "How Does the Federal Title I Program Helps Students and Schools?," ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco.com/how-the-federal-title-i-program-helps-students-and-schools-3194750)mo

Title I has benefited schools in many ways. Perhaps the most important are the funding itself. Public education is cash strapped and having Title I funds available affords schools the opportunity to maintain or initiate programs that target specific students. Without this funding, many schools would not be able to provide their students with these services. Furthermore, the students have reaped the benefits of Title I funds having opportunities that they otherwise would not have. In short, Title I has helped some students succeed when they may not have otherwise. Some schools may opt to use the funds to initiate a school-wide Title I program where every student can benefit from these services. Schools must have a child poverty rate of at least 40% to operating a school-wide Title I program. A school-wide Title I program can provide benefits to all students and is not just limited to those students who are considered to be economically disadvantaged. This path gives schools the biggest bang for their buck because they are able to impact a larger number of students.

Solvency – Funding Key

Increasing federal funding is key.

Boser 15 (Senior Fellow at American Progress, where he examines education issues. He is also the founding director of American Progress’ science of learning initiative, The Sorry State of Education Funding, US News & World Report, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2015-12-16/letting-states-fund-education-is-a-mistake/)

Education spending debates often make headlines. A rural district will argue that it does not receive equitable funding. A charter school might say it lacks school construction money or a city will simply roll back school funding due to declining enrollments. These are important issues. But they all ignore one of the nation's biggest funding problems: the tremendous difference in school expenditures across different states. A student in New York, for instance, gets three times more money on average than a student in Utah. Plus, these sorts of spending gaps often hit the poorest students the hardest. The bottom line is that we've left education funding to states and districts for far too long, and the federal government should do more to help all students get a fair shot at school dollars. Some argue that a more locally driven approach to education funding makes sense. After all, states are constitutionally required to oversee their education systems. But states and districts have clearly not done enough, especially in light of rising standards. In recent years, for instance, school spending has been slashed in many states, according to a report released last week. At the same time, many states don't give enough money to disadvantaged students, and in about half of the states, lower income schools have less money to spend than their higher income peers. And then there's the fact that some wealthy areas like Westport, Connecticut are able to raise large amounts of money through local property tax systems. In some places, in fact, these high-wealth districts are able to spend almost $10,000 more than the national average. Or just contrast Westport with Del Valle, a high-poverty district located outside of Austin, Texas. Even after correcting for cost of living, the rich Connecticut district spends almost twice as much per student than the low-income Del Valle district. Federal policymakers recently had an opportunity to take on this issue. Over the past few months, Congress has been debating a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act , and the president signed the bill into law last week. But while the reauthorized law includes important policy changes, it does little to boost fiscal equity across states. A new book titled "The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez" underscores one potential policy solution. The book centers on the 1973 Supreme Court case San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, in which the Justices ruled that schooling was not a "fundamental right." In the case, the court argued that there was nothing inherently unfair about an inequitable state funding system. In short, the justices allowed states and districts to continue to shortchange poor districts. Given the conservative nature of today's court, it's unlikely that the Rodriguez decision will be overturned anytime soon. But some argue that the court could have four new Justices in the coming years, and given recent policy developments, there's hope that Rodriguez could be overturned, which would give more power to poor districts to sue for their fair share of dollars. Another option might be a change to the Constitution so that it explicitly addresses the issue of education. But given that Congress has hard time even passing a spending bill, that solution seems unlikely, even in the long term. In the near future, the federal government should be spending a lot more on education, particularly on programs that work, such as pre-school. As my one-time colleague Matt Miller argued, "nowhere is it written in the Constitution that the federal government must contribute only 9 percent of K-12 spending." In his work, Miller argues that the federal government should be spending as much as 30 percent of all education funding. Whatever the policy lever, these sorts of reforms will come with a significant, upfront price tag. But there's research that shows that investments in education pay off, and one recent study found that a boost in spending on low-income students increased earnings by more than seven percent. And in the end increased student outcomes is the headline that we really want when it comes to the nation's fiscal debates.