Cndi 2017 – Title I finance Affirmative

Establishing an interstate foundation cements federal control and resolves state-by-state inequity – that’s key to effective education policies.

Pasachoff 8 [Eloise Pasachoff (Professor of Law at Georgetown University, serves on the executive committee of the Education Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, recipient of the Education Law Association's Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law, M.P.A. from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School), “How the Federal Government Can Improve School Financing Systems”, The Brookings Institute, Center on Children & Families, January 2008, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/01_education_pasachoff.pdf]

Because the Rodriguez decision left decisions about school finance equity to the states, most efforts towards reducing resource disparities between poor and rich districts have been implemented at the state level. As should be clear by now, this does not mean that interstate disparities are insignificant. To the contrary, between-state inequity is much larger than within-state inequity; spending differences across states account for two-thirds of the variations in perpupil spending, while intra-state spending differences account for only one-third.325 There is a limit, then, to the effect that intra-state equalization reforms can have. Moreover, between-state spending differences are significant and have changed very little over the last several decades. Per-pupil spending in the lowest-spending states is on average only half of per-pupil spending in the highest-spending states, and the highest-spending districts in the lowest-spending states still provide less than the lowest-spending districts in the highest-spending states.326 Even adjusting for geographic differences in purchasing power and student poverty measures, the variation in spending is striking.327 These variations take on growing importance in a time of heightened expectations of school systems. As described above, while fights in Congress about the extent to which funding for NCLB is adequate take on a partisan tone, at the state level there is a fairly unified feeling across political lines that no state has adequate resources to achieve the high goals of NCLB. A widely-cited review by William Mathis of all of the studies addressing the cost to the states of complying with NCLB suggests that the additional administrative costs (such as addressing systems for measuring adequate yearly progress and for imposing mechanisms to ensure highly qualified teachers) result in an average increase of $11.3 billion, while the costs of teaching all students to proficiency add an estimated $137.8 billion.328 Subtracting from these new costs the added federal dollars, mostly in the form of increased Title I funding at approximately $4 billion, reveals an obviously significant shortfall.329 To be sure, these figures have not gone unquestioned. Eric Hanushek, in particular, has critiqued the methodologies and assumptions behind the so-called “costing-out studies” underlying Mathis’s review.330 Even one of the nation’s greatest proponents of increased education funding, Michael Rebell, agrees that the costing-out studies have shortcomings, but he argues that these shortcomings can be fixed.331 Rebell also acknowledges that no one actually believes that NCLB’s goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is realistic and that this goal nonetheless drives many of the costing-out studies. He notes that a slightly lowered but still ambitious goal of 90 percent proficiency would profoundly lower cost expectations.332 But current federal funding is insufficient to meet even these lower cost expectations driven by lower proficiency goals. Indeed, a recent study of funding and proficiency rates in Kansas and Missouri found that federal aid comes nowhere close to providing the funding increases needed for those states to achieve their intermediate proficiency goals for 2007, 2009, and 2011 under NCLB.333 The study emphasized what some observers have been saying since NCLB was passed: minimal funding increases combined with sanctions for failing to meet proficiency provide an incentive for states to set low thresholds for proficiency.334 Thus, without providing more funding, NCLB works against its own goals. Moreover, because of their varying fiscal capacities, states shoulder unequal burdens in attempting to meet the shortfall prompted by NCLB. One measurement of each state’s cost-adjusted Total Taxable Resources per weighted pupil – including a geographic cost-adjustment factor and adjusting for varying needs of different types of students – found that in 2001 the average fiscal capacity of the top 20 percent of states was more than 50 percent greater than the average fiscal capacity of the bottom 20 percent of states: the top 20 percent had cost-adjusted Total Taxable Resources per weighed pupil of $238,000, compared to $151,000 for the bottom 20 percent.335 Another measurement of interest in a comparison of available state resources for education is average personal income per student. This measurement, too, reveals great differences among the states. For example, in 1996, the average cost-adjusted personal income per enrolled student in New Jersey was $247,000, compared to only $62,000 in Mississippi.336 Under either measure of comparison, if Mississippi wanted to raise its education spending significantly, it would be hard-pressed to match the financing capabilities of a richer state like New Jersey. 2. The Solution A federal foundation program with additional funding to support some of the added costs of NCLB would address both concerns about inadequate resources as well as states’ different abilities to increase education funding. As envisioned by the Committee on Education Finance, the program would first determine some level of per-pupil spending that it deemed adequate for a state or district with the typical student.337 The program would then adjust this per-pupil spending for geographic cost variations and variations by student need.338 Next, the program would call for each state to apply a minimum tax effort to its own resources and would provide federal funding to make up the difference between what each state is able to raise and what the federal government deems an adequate funding level.339 This structure would target more federal funding to high-need states. Finally, the program would ensure that states equitably distribute resources to districts and schools, again varying by geographic cost differences, student need, and local spending power.340 Of course, there would have to be some provision limiting the supplantation of state and local spending with the influx of federal dollars.