Cndi 2017 – Title I finance Affirmative

AT: States CP

Fed Key – Equity

States fail to ensure equity – that’s key to solve growth

Robinson 15 [Kimberly J. Robinson (Professor of Law @ University of Richmond, J.D., Harvard Law School), “Disrupting Education Federalism”, Washington University Law Review Volume 92 Number 4 2015]

Primary state and local control over education essentially invite inequality in educational opportunity because of pervasive state insistence that local governments raise education funds and state funding formulas that do not effectively equalize the resulting disparities in revenue.121 Although some influential victories have occurred,1 22 school finance litigation has mostly failed to change the basic organizational structure of school finance systems and their reliance on property taxes to fund schools.1 23 Instead, this litigation at best has obtained limited increases in funding for property-poor districts while allowing property-rich districts to maintain the same funding level or to raise their funding rate at a slower pace.124 Recent evidence of the persistent inequalities in school funding can be found in two distinct 2013 reports. A report from the Council on Foreign Relations found that in the United States more is spent per pupil in highincome districts than in low-income districts.1 2 5 This stands in sharp contrast to most other developed nations where the reverse is true. 12 6 The Equity and Excellence Commission report also found that "[n]o other developed nation has inequities nearly as deep or systemic; no other developed nation has, despite some efforts to the contrary, so thoroughly stacked the odds against so many of its children." 27 These disparities are due in substantial part to the continued state reliance on property taxes to fund schools.1 28 As a result, state school finance systems in the United States typically create many predominantly low-income and minority schools that predictably produce poor outcomes because these schools typically lack both the resources to ensure that their students obtain an effective education and the capacity to undertake effective reforms even when these reforms are well conceived.1 2 9 The harms from persistent and pervasive disparities in educational opportunity are not limited to schoolchildren, their families, and their communities. These disparities also harm nationwide interests in a strong economy and a just society. The United States needs to maintain international academic competitiveness to attract businesses and prevent the loss of jobs to other more educated nations.1 3 0 Yet, international assessments reveal that the performance of U.S. students is often average or below average when compared to other countries,' 3' which will make it difficult for U.S. students to compete successfully against students from many other nations. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment of performance in math, reading and science, was administered in 2012 to students in sixty-five education systems.1 32 The results showed that the average U.S. student who participated scored average in reading and science literacy and below average in math literacy when compared to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.1 33 Doctors Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessman, professors of education at Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Munich respectively, summarized the lackluster performance of U.S. students on international assessments in a 2013 book by noting that: The evidence of international comparison is now clear. American students lag badly and pervasively. Our students lag behind students not just in Asia, but in Europe and other parts of the Americas. It is not just disadvantaged students or a group of weak students who lag, but also American students from advantaged backgrounds. Americans are badly underrepresented among the world's highest achievers.1 34 Although some challenge such conclusions from international assessments as overblown and simplistic, 35 others conclude that these less than stellar outcomes indicate that the U.S.education system is failing to prepare many of its students to compete successfully for jobs with other students from around the world.1 36 Research reveals that the long-term vigor of the U.S. economy will depend on the advanced skills that are typically provided in higher education and that are needed for upper-level technical occupations.'37 Although the U.S. higher education system historically has been considered world-class, the United States is facing substantial competition from other countries with their fast-growing higher education systems.1 3 8 As Thomas Bailey, Teachers College professor of economics and education, has summarized in his research: Occupational forecasts, analyses of job content, trends in wages, and changes in international competition all point to an increasing need in the United States for workers with high-level skills. Achieving increases in skill levels will be difficult as long as current gaps in educational attainment based on income, race, and ethnicity remain.' 39 In this environment, the U.S. economy and its competitiveness will be increasingly hindered by low college enrollment and completion rates for Hispanic and African American students who increasingly will make up a larger share of the workforce.1 40 Many U.S. students cannot compete successfully with students from other developed countries, and the lower achievement of U.S. students could cause comparatively slow growth for the U.S. economy in the years to come.141

Only federal leadership solves educational equality – key to mobilize national reform.

Robinson 15 [Kimberly J. Robinson (Professor of Law @ University of Richmond, J.D., Harvard Law School), “Disrupting Education Federalism”, Washington University Law Review Volume 92 Number 4 2015]

By enacting federal legislation and initiatives that embrace each of the elements discussed above, the federal government would reestablish itself as the final guarantor of equal access to an excellent education.251 Historically, equal educational opportunity served as one of the principle rationales for federal involvement in education.2 52 The federal government has played a critical role in assisting vulnerable groups when the states have failed to act in the national interest. 25 3 Yet, an increasing focus on standards and accountability shifted federal attention away from issues of educational equity, while federal reforms unsuccessfully attempted to ensure a quality education for all schoolchildren.254 Although the federal government consistently should aim to maintain excellence, it also needs to reassert itself as the final guarantor of equal educational opportunity because the current failure of the federal government to fulfill this role is one of the critical missing elements of the education reform agenda. In making this recommendation, I join with other scholars, such as Michael Rebell and now-California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, whose proposals call upon the federal government to guarantee some form of equal educational opportunity.2 55 History suggests that the federal government is likely to be the only level of government to engage in the leadership and substantial redistribution of resources that equal access to an excellent education will 21 require.256 Local politics oftentimes hinders substantial efforts to redistribute resources.25 7 Thus, it is unsurprising that it took federal legislation to initiate numerous past reform efforts that addressed disparities in educational opportunity, such as those that assist disadvantaged students,258 girls and women,259 and disabled children.260 The federal government possesses an unparalleled ability to mobilize national, state, and local reform when the United States confronts an educational crisis. 2 6 1 Therefore, my call for a stronger federal role in education would build upon the historical federal role in advancing educational equity and the superior ability of the federal government to accomplish a redistribution of educational opportunity. By focusing its attention on the policymaking areas identified in Parts II.A through E above, the federal government would shoulder the primary burden for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education. This primary federal burden would be carried through a multifaceted approach in which each policymaking area would support and reinforce the others and draw upon federal strengths in education policymaking. At the same time, federal leadership would incentivize the states to engage in a collaborative partnership with the federal government to achieve this goal. States would retain substantial control over education as they choose among a wide array of reforms while facing compelling incentives to join in this national effort. Some may argue that the states should bear the primary burden for ensuring equal access to an excellent education because education remains primarily a state function. I reject this dualist understanding of education2 62 while highlighting our longstanding history that reveals that the states will not rectify opportunity and achievement gaps on their own. The federal role in education has grown significantly in recent decades and has become increasingly influential.26 3 My proposed theory builds upon the growing consensus reflected in NCLB and other federal education legislation that the federal government should exercise a substantial role in education law and policy.264

Local-run education programs lead to inequity in education.

Semuels 16 (Alana, staff writer at The Atlantic, “Good School, Rich School; Bad School, Poor School”, The Atlantic, 25 August 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/property-taxes-and-unequal-schools/497333/, Accessed 30 June 2017, JY)

This is one of the wealthiest states in the union. But thousands of children here attend schools that are among the worst in the country. While students in higher-income towns such as Greenwich and Darien have easy access to guidance counselors, school psychologists, personal laptops, and up-to-date textbooks, those in high-poverty areas like Bridgeport and New Britain don’t. Such districts tend to have more students in need of extra help, and yet they have fewer guidance counselors, tutors, and psychologists, lower-paid teachers, more dilapidated facilities and bigger class sizes than wealthier districts, according to an ongoing lawsuit. Greenwich spends $6,000 more per pupil per year than Bridgeport does, according to the State Department of Education. The discrepancies occur largely because public school districts in Connecticut, and in much of America, are run by local cities and towns and are funded by local property taxes. High-poverty areas like Bridgeport and New Britain have lower home values and collect less taxes, and so can’t raise as much money as a place like Darien or Greenwich, where homes are worth millions of dollars. Plaintiffs in a decade-old lawsuit in Connecticut, which heard closing arguments earlier this month, argue that the state should be required to ameliorate these discrepancies. Filed by a coalition of parents, students, teachers, unions, and other residents in 2005, the lawsuit, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) v. Rell, will decide whether inequality in school funding violates the state’s constitution. “The system is unconstitutional,” the attorney for the plaintiffs Joseph P. Moodhe argued in Hartford Superior Court earlier this month, “because it is inadequately funded and because it is inequitably distributed.” Connecticut is not the first state to wrestle with the conundrum caused by relying heavily on local property taxes to fund schools; since the 1970s, nearly every state has had litigation over equitable education, according to Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University. Indeed, the CCJEF lawsuit, first filed in 2005, is the state’s second major lawsuit on equity. The first, in 1977, resulted in the state being required to redistribute some funds among districts, though the plaintiffs in the CCJEF case argue the state has abandoned that system, called Educational Cost Sharing. In every state, though, inequity between wealthier and poorer districts continues to exist. That’s often because education is paid for with the amount of money available in a district, which doesn’t necessarily equal the amount of money required to adequately teach students. “Our system does not distribute opportunity equitably,” a landmark 2013 report from a group convened by the former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the Equity and Excellence Commission, reported. This is mainly because school funding is so local. The federal government chips in about 8 to 9 percent of school budgets nationally, but much of this is through programs such as Head Start and free and reduced lunch programs. States and local governments split the rest, though the method varies depending on the state. Nationally, high-poverty districts spend 15.6 percent less per student than low-poverty districts do, according to U.S. Department of Education. Lower spending can irreparably damage a child’s future, especially for kids from poor families. A 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending a year for poor children can lead to an additional year of completed education, 25 percent higher earnings, and a 20-percentage point reduction in the incidence of poverty in adulthood, according to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Violet Jimenez Sims, a Connecticut teacher, saw the differences between rich and poor school districts firsthand. Sims, who was raised in New Britain, one of the poorer areas of the state, taught there until the district shut down its bilingual education programs, at which point she got a job in Manchester, a more affluent suburb. In Manchester, students had individual Chromebook laptops, and Sims had up-to-date equipment, like projectors and digital whiteboards. In New Britain, students didn’t get individual computers, and there weren’t the guidance counselors or teacher’s helpers that there were in Manchester. “I noticed huge differences, and I ended up leaving because of the impact of those things,” she told me. “Without money, there’s just a domino effect.” Students frequently had substitutes because so many teachers got frustrated and left, they didn’t have as much time to spend on computer projects because they had to share computers, and they were suspended more frequently in the poor district, she said; in the wealthier area, teachers and guidance counselors would have time to work with misbehaving students rather than expelling them right away. Testimony during the CCJEF trial bears out the differences between poor areas like New Britain, Danbury, Bridgeport, and East Hartford, and wealthier areas like New Canaan, Greenwich, and Darien. Electives, field trips, arts classes, and gifted and talented programs available in wealthier districts have been cut in poorer ones. New Britain, where 80 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, receives half as much funding per special-education student as Darien. In Bridgeport, where class sizes hover near the contractual maximum of 29, students use 15-to 20-year-old textbooks; in New London, high-school teachers must duct tape windows shut to keep out the wind and snow and station trash cans in the hallways to collect rain. Where Greenwich’s elementary school library budget is $12,500 per year (not including staffing), East Hartford’s is zero. All of this contributes to lower rates of success for poorer students. Connecticut recently implemented a system called NextGen to measure English and math skills, college and career readiness. Bridgeport’s average was 59.3 percent and New Britain 59.7 percent; Greenwich, by contrast, scored 89.3 percent and Darien scored 93.1. Graduation rates are lower in the poorer districts, there’s more chronic absenteeism. The crux of the state’s case is that it spends enough on education, and that Connecticut has one of the country’s best public school systems. The Educational Cost Sharing formula gets tinkered with by the legislature, the state says, and Connecticut still spends more on poor districts than many regions of the country. It says that what CCJEF is asking is essentially $2 billion more in taxpayer funding to make schools equitable—a sum that would be difficult to raise in a cash-strapped state. “While we wholeheartedly share the goal of improving educational opportunities and outcomes for all Connecticut children, it is the state's position both that we are fulfilling our constitutional responsibilities and that the decisions on how to advance those goals are best left to the appropriate policymakers: local communities and members of the General Assembly," Jaclyn M. Falkowski, a spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, told me, in an email. ​ Yet the fact remains that delegating education funding to local communities increases inequality. That’s especially true in Connecticut, which has some of the biggest wealth disparities in the country. Indeed, in Connecticut, rich and poor districts often abut each other. Bridgeport is in the same county as Greenwich and Darien; East Hartford is poor, but nearby West Hartford is affluent. How did a state like Connecticut, which had one of the first laws making public education mandatory, become so divided? And why does such an unequal system exist in a country that puts such a high priority on equality? Many of the problems that have arisen in Connecticut’s school system can be traced back to how public education was founded in this country, and how it was structured. It was a system that, at its outset, was very innovative and forward-thinking. But that doesn’t mean it is working for students today. “The origins were very progressive, but what might have been progressive in one era can become inequitable in another,” Rebell told me. In the early days of the American colonies, the type of education a child received depended on where the child was a he or a she (boys were much more likely to get educated at all), what color his or her skin was, where he or she lived, how much money his or her family had, and what church he or she belonged to. States like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York depended on religious groups to educate children, while southern states depended on plantation owners, according to Charles Glenn, a professor of educational leadership at Boston University. It was the Puritans of Massachusetts who first pioneered public schools, and who decided to use property-tax receipts to pay for them. The Massachusetts Act of 1642 required that parents see to it that their children knew how to read and write; when that law was roundly ignored, the colony passed the Massachusetts School Law of 1647, which required every town with 50 households or more hire someone to teach the children to read and write. This public education was made possible by a property-tax law passed the previous year, according to a paper, “The Local Property Tax for Public Schools: Some Historical Perspectives,” by Billy D. Walker, a Texas educator and historian. Determined to carry out their vision for common school, the Puritans instituted a property tax on an annual basis—previously, it had only been used to raise money when needed. The tax charged specific people based on “visible” property including their homes as well as their sheep, cows, and pigs. Connecticut followed in 1650 with a law requiring towns to teach local children, and used the same type of financing. Library of Congress Property tax was not a new idea; it came from a feudal system set up by William the Conquerer in the 11th century when he divided up England among his lieutenants, who required the people on the land to pay a fee in order to live there. What was new about the colonial property-tax system was how local it was. Every year, town councils would meet and discuss property taxes, how much various people should pay, and how that money was to be spent. The tax was relatively easy to assess because it was much simpler to see how much property a person owned that it was to see how much money he made. Unsurprisingly, the amounts various residents had to pay were controversial. (A John Adams-instituted national property tax in 1797 was widely hated and then repealed.) Initially, this system of using property taxes to pay for local schools did not lead to much inequality. That’s in part because the colonies were one of the most egalitarian places on the planet—for white people, at least. Public education began to become more common in the mid-19th century. As immigrants poured into the country’s cities, advocates puzzled over how to assimilate them. Their answer: public schools. The education reformer Horace Mann, for example, who became the secretary of the newly formed Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, believed that public schooling was necessary for the creation of a national identity. He called education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Though schooling had, until then, been left up to local municipalities, states began to step in. After Mann created the Board of Education in 1837, he lobbied for and won a doubling of state expenditures on education. In 1852, Massachusetts passed the first law requiring parents to send their children to a public school for at least 12 weeks. The idea of making free education a right was controversial—the “most explosive political issue in the 19th century, except for abolition,” said Rebell. Eventually, though, when reformers won, they pushed to get a right for all children to public schooling into states’ constitutions. The language of these education clauses varies; Connecticut’s constitution, for example, says merely that “there shall always be free public elementary and secondary schools in the state,” while Illinois’ constitution requires an “efficient system of high-quality public educational institutions and services.” Despite widespread acceptance of mandatory public education by the end of the 19th century, the task of educating students remained a matter for individual states, not the nation as a whole. And states still left much of the funding of schools up to cities and towns, which relied on property tax. In 1890, property taxes accounted for 67.9 percent of public-education revenues in the U.S. This means that as America urbanized and industrialized and experienced more regional inequality, so, too, did the schools. Areas that had poorer families or less valuable land had less money for schools. In the early part of the 20th century, states tried to step in and provide grants to districts so that school funding was equitable, according to Allan Odden, an expert in school finance who is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But then wealthier districts would spend even more, buoyed by increasing property values, and the state subsidies wouldn’t go as far as they once had to make education equitable. The disparities became more and more stark in the decades after World War II, when white families moved out of the cities into the suburbs and entered school systems there, and black families were stuck in the cities, where property values plummeted and schools lacked basic resources. In some states, where school districts were run on the county level, costs could be shared between rich and poor districts by combining and integrating them, especially after Brown v. Board of Education. But in states like Connecticut, with deeper histories of public schooling, there were hundreds of separate districts, and it was much more difficult to combine them or to equalize funding across them. Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress The most aggressive attempt to ameliorate these disparities came in 1973, in a Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. It began when a father named Demetrio Rodriguez, whose sons attended a dilapidated elementary school in a poor area of San Antonio, sued the state of Texas, claiming that the way that schools were funded fundamentally violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause. Rodriguez wanted the justices to apply the same logic they had applied in Brown v. Board of Education—that every student is guaranteed an equal opportunity to education. The justices disagreed. In a 5-4 decision, they ruled that there is no right to equal funding in education under the Constitution. With Rodriguez, the justices essentially left the funding of education a state issue, forgoing a chance for the federal government to step in to adjust things Since then, school-funding lawsuits have been filed in 45 out of 50 states, according to Rebell. Though it might seem odd that the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a right to live in a better zip code and a right to work at a company no matter their race, but not that every American child has the right to an equal education, there is legal justification for this. The founders didn’t include a right to an education in the country’s founding documents. Though the federal government is involved in many parts of daily life in America, schooling is, and has always been, the responsibility of the states.

State funding formulas are ineffective and result in widespread variances.

Glatter 6/1 (Hayley, editorial fellow at The Atlantic, “How Education-Funding Formulas Target Poor Kids”, The Atlantic, 1 June 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/how-education-funding-formulas-target-poor-kids/528741/, Accessed 1 July 2017, JY)

Districts serving many low-income children in New Jersey receive nearly $5,000 more per pupil from the state government than districts with fewer poor students. If that same district was located in Montana, it would only receive an extra $18 per student from the state. Despite the fact that the majority of states have education funding formulas meant to target low-income students, the effectiveness of this targeting varies widely around the country. In states where districts are more economically segregated, policymakers have an easier time targeting funding to the neediest students. Because poor children benefit more than their wealthier counterparts from increased per pupil funding, a correctly tuned targeting formula could be an important step toward closing the achievement gap. According to a new report released by the Urban Institute, a social- and economic-policy nonprofit in Washington, D.C., the degree to which funding is targeted is inconsistent among states. In three states—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—non-poor students attend better funded school districts despite state and federal government efforts to level the playing field. School districts receive local, state, and federal funding, and available local dollars typically reflect the socioeconomic makeup of a community. In areas where students come from higher income brackets, the researchers found, families typically pay more in property taxes, which help fund schools. As a result, local funding is regressive—meaning more of it flows to schools with fewer low-income students—in all but a few states. In some cases, the disparity is extreme: Districts in New Jersey with fewer poor students receive about $3,460 more in per pupil local funding. On the other side, poorer districts receive $242 more per student in local money in Louisiana. To compensate for these disparities, 35 states have funding formulas meant to target districts with larger populations of poor students with extra dollars. This practice is known as progressive funding because the government infuses resources at a disproportionate rate to the districts that need them most. In many places, including New Jersey, Alaska, and Massachusetts, state governments are able to help balance out regressive local funding with state dollars, making overall education funding in the state progressive. “People tend to think that schools are underfunded and in some places, they seem to be doing okay. Of course, it depends on what your standard is,” Matthew Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said. “I think the narrative out there is that in some places, poor kids are really getting a raw deal.” But states that are more successful at counteracting disparities at the local level tend to have an unsavory distinction: increased economic segregation at the district level. In states where the districts tend to be smaller and therefore more socioeconomically homogenous, policymakers have an easier time creating funding formulas that give the neediest students a leg up, researchers found. Chingos said this commonality is more reflective of how district boundaries are drawn than of a state’s total level of economic segregation. But simply put, if there is a higher percentage of poor students in one district, it is more obvious that pumping additional resources into that district will have an outsized benefit in closing the achievement gap. In states like Florida where there is neighborhood segregation but where school districts tend to be larger, the economic diversity of the student population in each district is higher, so local funding is less regressive to begin with. That said, despite such a high number of states working to fine-tune their education funding to help poorer districts, researchers found that districts with more poor students are getting more money in just 28 states. In 16 of those 28 states, funding is progressive by less than $150 per student. “We find that there’s this disconnect between these 35 states that have these provisions in their formulas and then a whole bunch of states that don't actually have funding ... that's all that progressive,” Chingos said. Ultimately, Chingos said, the report could help policymakers compare their efforts to their counterparts around the country. The solution is not simply to make school districts smaller and more homogenous, he said. The economics of smaller systems can be more precarious and researchers have found that students who attend disadvantaged, economically segregated schools suffer from educational and economic handicaps later in life. Taking into account federal dollars, the report found all but three states are at least weakly progressive with their education funding. One of the largest sources of this government money is Title I, the funding for which was held constant in President Trump’s recently released budget proposal.

State funding causes district flight and increased inequality – only federal financing solves.

Ladd & Hansen 99 [Helen F. Ladd (Susan B. King Professor of Public Policy Studies and professor of economics at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy) and Janet S. Hansen, “Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools”, National Academies Press, November 1999, p. 259]

Since enactment of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the federal government has played a significant role in funding schooling for specific groups of at-risk students. The case for targeted support for such students rests largely on a redistributive or equity rationale. In such instances, the highest level of government is most appropriate as the source of revenues. In part, the argument for this is simply practical. It is much more feasible for the federal government to play that role than it is for lower-level governments because of the possibility of movement of households among subnational jurisdictions. For example, consider a large city school district with a large percentage of economically and educationally disadvantaged students. Given that it costs more to provide a given level of education to those than to other students, the city would have to spend significantly more per pupil than other school districts. This condition is likely to lead to higher tax burdens. Those high taxes would provide an economic incentive for middleand upper-income households as well as businesses to move out of the city (or to choose not to move there in the first place). Consequently, the city school district would become increasingly impoverished and unable to do much redistribution of funds away from wealthier residents to the disadvantaged students. In the extreme, there would be no nonpoor residents in the city to support educational services for the poor. This behavior is likely to occur at the state level as well as the local level, but is much less common at the federal level given that taxpayers would have to move out of the nation to avoid the burden of paying higher taxes to support needy students. Related to this practical position is the ethical argument that poverty and its associated education characteristics are national problems that deserve national attention. While some districts would be wealthy enough to fund additional programs for disadvantaged students within the district, one can ask whether it is fair to make the people who happen to live in those districts or states bear the financial burden while others have opted out of such payments by moving to areas with low proportions of at-risk students. To the extent that poverty and other measures of educational disadvantage are national problems, the fair way to fund their alleviation is with a national tax, such as the federal income tax, which would spread the financing burden among all U.S. residents in line with their ability to pay, regardless of where they live. This federal equity rationale is already reflected in categorical programs for specified groups of students, that is, students who need additional educational services in order to achieve to acceptable levels. Largely developed during the second half of this century, these programs often were initiated at the federal level in part because the students involved were not being served sufficiently by states and local school districts. Such programs include Title I, focused on lowachieving students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds; the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), concentrating on students with physical and mental disabilities; ESEA Title VII, directed at students whose native language is other than English; and several other related programs. Today, these programs for students with special needs permeate education strategies at the school, district, state, and national level, nearly always complemented by additional state and local funding. For most professionals in education today, these federally funded programs are simply a part of the infrastructure. However, as discussed in Chapter 7, funding of these programs is still problematic. Although the federal government took the lead role in creating these programmatic emphases, it has never funded them at their fully authorized level. For IDEA in particular, this underfunding has created large financial burdens for states and local school districts. Thus one option for the federal government is to assume a larger share of this particular educational burden. Another would be to fund Title I at the full amount authorized by Congress, $24.3 billion annually (Independent Review Panel on the Evaluation of Federal Education Legislation, 1999:12). These additional federal funds could be used to expand school services for students with special needs and would free up state and local funds to expand the overall level of school services to all students.