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Education Reform
HELP POOR KIDS, NOT POOR SCHOOLS
By Diane Ravitch
The Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2000
Imagine a federal education program that rewards economic segregation. Imagine further that this program has spent about $120 billion over 35 years without narrowing the achievement gap between poor kids and their better-off peers. Wouldn't members of Congress be clamoring to change it?
Unfortunately, they aren't. The program is Title I, the single biggest federal outlay for K-12 education, which currently distributes more than $8 billion annually to schools with high concentrations of poor children. Two congressionally mandated evaluations of Title I have shown that it has not improved the performance of poor children relative to others.
Why has Title I failed? Because no one really knows which methods and approaches are most successful. Title I is a funding stream for schools; it supports a wide variety of methods, equipment and approaches. But the research on what works is meager. Since most schools that get Title I dollars are not successful, it's time to try something different.
Here's how Title I promotes economic segregation: Funds, which travel from Washington to state capitals to local school districts, go to schools with the greatest concentrations of poor children. In many big cities, only schools where at least 60% of the students are poor receive Title I money. Thus in such districts, poor students are eligible for federal funding only if they enroll in a school where most other kids are also poor. Millions of poor children receive no Title I funding at all.
This is a marked contrast with the way Washington funds higher education. In 1972 Rep. Edith Green (D., Ore.) debated with Sen. Claiborne Pell (D., R.I.) about how to fund higher education. Green wanted federal aid to go only to institutions, while Mr. Pell wanted it to follow students like a scholarship. Mr. Pell prevailed, and for nearly 30 years federal aid has followed needy students to the college of their choice, public or private. Today our diverse system of higher education is generally considered the best in the world, while Pell grants and other financial aid have expanded opportunities for needy students.
If higher education were funded like Title I, federal money would support only those colleges where most students are from poor families. Poor students who wanted to attend a university with a largely middle-class student body -- even a state university -- would receive no federal aid. Poor students would be concentrated in those colleges where they were a large majority, and we would have a two-tiered system, with one set of colleges for the poor and another for the nonpoor.
On the other hand, if elementary and secondary education were funded the way higher education is, poor children would be able to move to better schools and bring with them a federal stipend. Critics say that portability is dangerous because it might be turned into a voucher, but the more likely result is that poor children would transfer to better public schools because that's where the supply of seats is.
This year Congress will debate the future of Title I. The districts and states that now control this large pot of money don't want any changes in the funding formula. The House has agreed to let children leave failing Title I schools, but not to take federal dollars with them; the Senate will consider the matter this month.
Congress should allow states or districts that want to try portable grants to do so. This will cost money; appropriations for Title I would surely increase as additional poor children, currently excluded from Title I coverage, began to receive federal assistance. But is there a better way to spend a chunk of the surplus than helping poor students get a better education?
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Ms. Ravitch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institution.
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