Cndi 2017 – Title I finance Affirmative

AT: Portability CP

Portability Fails – Equity

Portability makes inequality worse

Sunderman 14 – Gail Sunderman is Director of the Maryland Equity Project, a research and policy center focused on issues of educational opportunity in Maryland. Sunderman has served as expert consultant on educational disparities for the U.S. Department of Justice and other organizations. She is a former Fulbright scholar to Afghanistan and received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. (“REVIEW OF FEDERAL SCHOOL FINANCE REFORM,” National Education Policy Center, November 2014, http://www.greatlakescenter.org/docs/Think_Twice/TT_Sunderman_TitleI.pdf)

VI. Review of the Validity of the Findings and Conclusions Portability (letting the money follow the child) is a policy proposal developed and supported by conservative think tanks and interest groups critical of the track record of federal categorical programs; it dates to the 1990s.5 This report repeats many of the arguments typically made by supporters of portability and of greater flexibility from federal requirements. These include the claim that federal programs lead to bloated bureaucracies that do not serve their intended beneficiaries and that portability will empower parents and create incentives for public schools to improve. Generally, however, portability proposals, including those made in this report, do not explain how portability will improve instruction in Title I schools. One of the ironies of this report is that while the aim of Title I is to improve funding inequities between Title I and non-Title I schools, the report’s recommendation that the money follow the child is likely to exacerbate existing inequities between schools within the same district rather than improve them. This is because portability would permit federal Title I funds to flow out of the public system to private schools. It is not clear from the report how portability would improve student performance, particularly that of students in Title I schools. This is significant since the report cites the poor performance of Title I schools as a reason for reforming Title I funding. The portability proposal is not tied to public school reform and does not address other inequities between schools, such as the inequities in the distribution of teachers between schools referred to in the report. Finally, funding public schools, and Title I funding, are much more complex than the report suggests. For one, choices about how Title I funding is allocated to schools are local decisions, and Title I funding is just one element of how schools are funded. For example, the report argues that allowing districts to average salaries across the district when reporting school level expenditures does little to address funding inequities between schools. However, making Title I portable does not address this inequity, which arises from the way districts develop their budgets much more than from Title I requirements. Some districts are beginning to adopt alternative budgeting policies that allow for more equitable and rational allocation of funds among students.6 These include student-based budgeting and weighted student funding, where budgets for schools are based on its mix of students, rather than on the number of staff positions per student. These practices also give principals more flexibility in budgeting, one of the stated goals of this report. Federal elementary and secondary education funding remains modest, accounting for about 9% of all education spending; therefore its ability to equalize education spending is limited. However, the report does not report the level of federal elementary and secondary funding, and instead reports how federal funds are distributed across programs. This shows that Title I accounts for about 39% of total federal elementary and secondary education expenditures. While correct, this can be misleading, since it ignores the Title I portion of total federal elementary and secondary education expenditures. While the supplement-not-supplant and the comparability requirements may affect how states and districts allocate Title I funds to schools, there is also evidence that funding gaps among states are larger than funding gaps within states, with wealthier, higher-spending states receiving a disproportionate share of Title I funds.7 VII. Usefulness of the Report for Guidance of Policy and Practice The report provides no foundation for its recommendations, which do not address the particular problems it identifies. It is a polemic designed to hang its preferred policy preferences onto recommendations for changing how Title I funds are allocated. It covers no new ground in the debate over choice policies, and is so poorly documented and presented that it has nothing useful to offer policymakers or practitioners.

The competitive nature of school choice systems empirically serves the rich and re-entrenches inequality.

Jason Blakely 17 is an assistant professor of political philosophy at Pepperdine University. He is the author of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science., “How School Choice Turns Education Into a Commodity: Schools are a public good that extreme market proliferation would eventually destroy.”, The Atlantic, April 17 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/is-school-choice-really-a-form-of-freedom/523089/ SC

Making educational funding “portable” is part of a much wider political movement that began in the 1970s—known to scholars as neoliberalism—which views the creation of markets as necessary for the existence of individual liberty. In the neoliberal view, if your public institutions and spaces don’t resemble markets, with a range of consumer options, then you aren’t really free. The goal of neoliberalism is thereby to rollback the state, privatize public services, or (as in the case of vouchers) engineer forms of consumer choice and market discipline in the public sector. DeVos is a fervent believer in neoliberalizing education—spending millions of dollars on and devoting herself to political activism for the spread of voucher-system schooling. In a speech on educational reform from 2015, DeVos expressed her long-held view that the public-school system needs to be reengineered by the government to mimic a market. The failure to do so, she warned, would be the stagnation of an education system run monopolistically by the government: We are the beneficiaries of start-ups, ventures, and innovation in every other area of life, but we don’t have that in education because it’s a closed system, a closed industry, a closed market. It’s a monopoly, a dead end. And the best and brightest innovators and risk-takers steer way clear of it. As long as education remains a closed system, we will never see the education equivalents of Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Wikipedia, or Uber. We won’t see any real innovation that benefits more than a handful of students. Many Americans now find DeVos’s neoliberal way of thinking commonsensical. After all, people have the daily experience of being able to choose competing consumer products on a market. Likewise, many Americans rightly admire entrepreneurial pluck. Shouldn’t the intelligence and creativity of Silicon Valley’s markets be allowed to cascade down over public education, washing the system clean of its encrusted bureaucracy? What much fewer people realize is that the argument over “school of choice” is only the latest chapter in a decades-long political struggle between two models of freedom—one based on market choice and the other based on democratic participation. Neoliberals like DeVos often assume that organizing public spaces like a market must lead to beneficial outcomes. But in doing so, advocates of school of choice ignore the political ramifications of the marketization of shared goods like the educational system. The first point to consider when weighing whether or not to marketize the public school system is that markets always have winners and losers. In the private sector, the role of competition is often positive. For example, Friendster, the early reigning king of social networks, failed to create a format that people found as useful and attractive as Facebook. The result was that it eventually vanished. When businesses like Friendster fail, no significant public damage is done. Indeed, it is arguably a salutary form of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which is a feature of market innovation. But should all goods in a society be subjected to the forces of creative destruction? What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not “compete” in a marketized environment? In Detroit (where DeVos played a big role in introducing school choice) two decades of this marketization has led to extreme defunding and closing of public schools; the funneling of taxpayer money toward for-profit charter ventures; economically disadvantaged parents with worse options than when the neoliberal social experiment began; and finally, no significant increase in student performance. Indeed, some zones of Detroit are now educational deserts where parents and children have to travel exorbitant miles and hours for their children to attend school. On the whole, neoliberalization is hardest on the poor. Market choice does, however, favor those who already have the education, wealth, and wherewithal to plan, coordinate, and execute moving their children to the optimal educational setting. This means the big beneficiaries of school of choice are often the rich. For instance, when Nevada recently passed an aggressive school-of-choice system the result was that the vast majority of those able to take advantage of it came from the richest areas of Reno and Las Vegas. As money is pulled from failing schools and funneled into succeeding ones, wealth can actually be redistributed by the state up the socioeconomic ladder. Market competition in the context of schools thus opens the possibility for a vicious cycle in which weak and low-performing communities are punished for their failings and wealthy communities receive greater and greater funding advantages. Americans should ask themselves a basic question of justice when it comes to the education system: Should it be organized around a model in which the more you win the more you get, and the more you lose the less you are given? Markets are by their nature non-egalitarian. For this reason, neoliberalization has been one of the biggest factors contributing to the growing inequalities and diminishment of the middle and lower classes. A common neoliberal response to this is simply to say that economic inequality is the cost paid for individual liberty and personal responsibility. But the problem is that this discourse of individualism followed to its logical conclusion eliminates any public goods whatsoever.

Portability means that support for schools will no longer be progressive – this means that the worst schools will never receive enough money to improve.

Gordon 2017 (Nora, via brookings.edu, 3-23-17, Associate professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, What Title I portability would mean for the distribution of federal education aid, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/es_20170223_gordon_evidence_speaks1.pdf)

Congressional attempts in the last few years to allow states to divert their Title I funds through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into vouchers that would follow individual poor students to the public or private schools of their choice—Title I “portability”—were unsuccessful. Such vouchers are now a far more politically realistic possibility. It seems most likely that policy choices around vouchers would be made at the state level. While this reassured many senators during Secretary DeVos’ confirmation process, it may not reassure those at the local level. Current Title I rules allow school districts to concentrate their federal funds in their poorest schools, while under a portability state option, school districts would be forced to distribute those funds uniformly per poor pupil. This shift in allocation rules means that portability would affect the distribution of funds not only across districts, but also within them—and that this shift would happen among public schools even in districts where few, if any, students chose to take Title I funds to private schools.The unprecedented public interest in the DeVos nomination reflects great interest in how Congress and the Trump administration might try to promote school choice via the federal role. The administration has not offered a school choice policy proposal with any specific details to date, and education policy watchers are looking to past proposals and state level policies. One relatively fleshed-out policy proposal in the mix is the concept of Title I “portability,” proposed in the House and Senate prior to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The basic concept of making federal funds “portable” is often explained with the analogy of putting the federal cash into a student’s backpack that moves with the student to whatever school he or she attends, public or private. As with any school finance policy, however, the specific details of any portability proposal would be critical. Absent an unlikely considerable influx of new federal funds, portability would fill students’ backpacks using at least in part cash that used to be appropriated to school districts through Title I funds. Much of the policy discussion focuses on the highly salient fact that these vouchers could be used in private schools, prompting many questions. Would vouchers on the order of $1,400 per pupil allow poor students access to private schools? Would poor students using vouchers to attend private schools do better than if they remained in their public systems? Would the competitive pressure from private schools improve public schools in the absence of resource changes? Are public schools spending Title I funds effectively now, and what would change in their absence? The evidence base for these questions is emerging, and answers often depend on local context. These are critical questions, but this discussion of portability misses an important point. Any voucher-type proposal that relies on funds currently appropriated to Title I would not simply shift funds from public to private schools—it would significantly redistribute federal funds within states across school districts, and within districts across public schools, reducing progressivity. This redistribution would spread federal dollars more uniformly across schools rather than concentrating funds in the highest poverty schools within districts, and districts within states, even if few students chose to take their federal dollars to private schools. Districts with few private schools could still feel the impact of portability if their states choose to take it up. In this report, I focus on the short-run fiscal impact of portability, showing how it would affect the distribution of federal funds across school districts within a state, and across schools within a district. I describe a hypothetical portability policy quite similar to that proposed by members of Congress in recent years, in which state-level Title I allocations would remain the same as in the current regime. I use Maryland as an example due to its small number of school districts. If no students took their backpacks of cash to private school, the difference between Title I and the recent portability proposals boils down to whether you think poor students should get the same amount of federal funds no matter where they live and go to school. There are theoretical arguments to be made on both sides of this issue. The current research consensus points to high-poverty schools facing disproportionate challenges: that is, to get the same outcome, they need more resources per student—and per poor student. This would argue for progressive funding based on the poverty level at the school level. However, any formula that offers higher-poverty schools—or districts—greater funding per poor pupil provides an incentive for economic segregation of students in order to maximize federal funding. This is particularly relevant at the school building level, as school district policies—and other local government decisions about zoning, development, and transportation—can affect how economically segregated a district’s public schools are. Just last year, parents in Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia argued—ultimately unsuccessfully—to revise school attendance boundaries to make more segregated schools. Proponents of the segregation plan argue that the creation of higher needs schools would generate more funds for disadvantaged students. A flat per-poor-pupil grant (such as through portability) would neither incentivize economic segregation, nor provide high-poverty schools additional funds for meeting their disproportionate needs; Title I does both. Weighing these tradeoffs requires some assumption about how responsive parties will be to incentives to segregate. In this piece, I provide an analysis of the short-run partial equilibrium effects of portability on school-level Title I revenues. I assume that no students would move within or between districts as a result of portability, and assess how it would change the amount of Title I revenue per poor student enrolled in a school.

Links to Winners Win

Portability is bipartisan.

Kahlenberg 15 (senior fellow at The Century Foundation with expertise in education, civil rights, and equal opportunity, “Saving School Choice Without Undermining Poor Communities,” The Atlantic, 2/14/15, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/saving-school-choice-without-undermining-poor-communities/385510/)

Those findings would suggest that the Republicans’ principle of portability, in fact, has in it the seeds of a solution to reduce economic segregation through public-school choice—if, and only if, portability is properly structured. In order to accomplish this, portable federal Title I funding, as well as state and local funding, would need to be weighted heavily enough to give poor kids sufficient money in their "backpacks" that middle-class public schools would want to recruit them to attend. As it’s currently designed, the Alexander proposal is unlikely to provide that incentive. As former Obama education department official Peter Cunningham recently noted, "the amount of money that would follow an individual child is in the low hundreds." Educators know that it costs substantially more, on average, to bring low-income students into high levels of proficiency. That means that accepting low-income student transfers who come with only a marginal amount of extra money attached to them would likely reduce a school’s test scores and increase the chances of the school being labeled as "failing." But every school has his price. What is the magical amount of extra money low-income students should have in their backpacks to be attractive to middle-class schools? That’s an empirical question that surveys of school administrators could answer definitively. Meanwhile, past experience shows that financial arrangements can be made to assuage middle-class schools. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, a long-standing inter-district public-school choice program has allowed urban African-American students to transfer to suburban schools. In a 2010 paper for the Century Foundation, researcher Marco Basile noted that middle-class white suburban legislators supported this voluntary cross-district integration program because the money flows to the suburbs. The state also set aside some financial aid for St. Louis schools to offset the loss of funding to its urban campuses. Is a grand bargain that weights funding toward low-income students and allows money to travel with children politically feasible at the federal level? There is some reason to think so. About a decade ago, the Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank, assembled a bipartisan group of public officials—from George W. Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige to former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta—to endorse a program that would’ve provided extra funds to low-income students and then allowed that money to follow the child to a public school of choice. Congress is even more polarized today, but it’s notable that, on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Alexander is working with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray to put together bipartisan legislation. The principle that the federal government should play a special role in promoting genuine equal opportunity for low-income students remains as important today as it was when that law was first passed five decades ago. But there is also a half century of accumulated research to suggest that one of the best things the country can do for low-income children is give them a chance to attend a mixed-income school. The Republican effort to introduce choice and portability—if properly modified to create an incentive for socioeconomic school integration—could make the law more effective than it has ever been.

School choice program is bipartisan

AFC 17 (“Gallup Poll Finds Strong, Bipartisan Support for Federal School Choice Proposal,” American Federation for Children, 4/12/17, https://www.federationforchildren.org/gallup-poll-finds-strong-bipartisan-support-federal-school-choice-proposal/)

Yesterday, Gallup released a poll measuring attitudes on President Trump’s recent proposals and it showed strong support among Americans for a federal school choice program. When asked to agree or disagree with the following statement, “Provide federal funding for school choice programs that allow students to attend any private or public school,” 59% of respondents agreed with the concept while only 26% disagreed. Gallup found that this is one of four policy proposals from the President where Americans are in bipartisan, net agreement on an issue. Statement from John Schilling, Chief Operating Officer of the American Federation for Children: “This Gallup poll shows what school choice advocates have always known: parents want more educational options and support for more educational options stretches across party lines. Congress and the Administration should answer the call from parents who are demanding greater educational choice for their children. We believe the best federal proposal, one that will create immediate educational opportunity for children across the country, is a federal education tax credit. Allowing charitable contributions from corporations and individuals to state non-profits who provide scholarships to eligible children would immediately help hundreds of thousands of children access a school of their parents’ choice. Every child in America should have the opportunity to be in the educational environment that best meets his or her needs. That could be a traditional public school, a private school, a charter school, a magnet school, a virtual school, a home school or a blend of learning environments. Empowering parents with educational choice will give more children access to a quality education and improve educational outcomes across the board.” Annually, the American Federation for Children (AFC), the nation’s voice for educational choice, conducts a National School Choice Poll which found similar results to the Gallup survey. AFC’s 2017 poll found 68% of likely voters support school choice, with strong support across political parties, and the strongest support among African-Americans, Hispanics, and Millennials. It also found 72% support the creation of a federal tax credit program.

AT: Courts CP

Courts Fail

Courts fail – too slow, lack of expertise, inflexible, and causes federal-state conflict.

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]

Legislative and Executive Authority Provides a More Fruitful Avenue for Reform than Judicial Authority My theory proposes a framework for how the federal legislative and executive branches could lead the United States in a comprehensive effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education. I do not recommend that the courts should serve as the primary focus for reform for numerous reasons. As previously noted, federal courts frequently have relied on federalism and the interest in local control of education as a reason for curtailing efforts that sought to advance equal educational opportunity.3 13 Also, as I analyzed in detail in prior scholarship, courts provide an inferior forum for education policy reform.3 14 Courts have found a limited ability to institute effective school finance reform when their decisions did not garner significant political support.3 15 Litigation is oftentimes slow and piecemeal and relies on a court order before a state will initiate reform. Yet, even in the face of such an order, legislatures can remain resistant to change. 3 16 Once reform is initiated, court-driven reform also can be difficult and laborious if all or even most revisions to the initial plans require court approval. 1 Federal judges often lack substantive knowledge of the complex and nuanced education issues. 318 Furthermore, litigation solutions are typically driven by the evidence before the court and thus fail to recognize the competing interests of absent affected constituencies. In contrast, federal support, research, and funding for reform can provide a counterbalance to state and local insistence on maintaining the status quo.32 0 A federal legislative and executive approach can offer comprehensive solutions that incentivize actions by all of the states, a feat that a litigation effort is unlikely to accomplish.32' In contrast to litigation that regularly requires court approval for any changes to a remedial order, legislative or executive action can offer much-needed flexibility to revisit and refine the legislation, regulations, or initiatives that are implemented.32 2 Legislative and executive action also would benefit from the expertise of federal policymakers who have knowledge of and experience in education and its many complexities. Federal policymakers can seek input from states, scholars, and policymakers when additional expertise and research is needed.323 Additionally, the legislative and executive process can provide a more comprehensive assessment of the problem, the affected constituencies, and possible avenues for reform. 324 Perhaps most importantly, a court-centered reform effort would undermine the collaborative enforcement approach that is critical for sustained and continuous improvement by the states. Litigation would introduce an adversarial nature to reform and pit the federal government against states and localities.325 In contrast, I propose a collaborative approach in which the federal, state, and local governments enter a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership to ensure consistent improvement through federal assistance for state and local reforms.326 For these and other reasons,3 27 my theory relies upon the legislative and executive branches as the avenues for reform. Nevertheless, my theory also could inform judicial understanding of the need to reform education federalism so that education federalism does not continue to serve as one of the obstacles to effective reform.