How is title 1 funding

Schools in which children from low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment are eligible to use Title I funds to operate schoolwide programs that serve all children in the school in order to raise the achievement of the lowest-achieving students.

Home Board of Regents News Index. Contact Us Employment Business Portal. New York State Education Department. Districts and schools that are recipients of Title I dollars are being asked to tackle disparities of longstanding social and historical origin issues with little money. The program sends token amounts to schools, which use the amounts to funds services that research has found to be ineffective. It is time to modernize this enterprise.

If we want Title I to close achievement gaps, policy needs to provide sufficient funding, clear definitions and metrics for desired outcomes, and better guidance about effective programming, which means continued investments in research to identify effective and ineffective programs.

The Senate bill includes language that moves in this direction. It calls for researchers to be on peer-review panels that will assess state plans; for states to review local plans to ensure they are identifying and implementing evidence-based methods and are monitoring and evaluating their implementation, and for local agencies to collect and use data to adjust programs. It is challenging to put a cost on what it would take to close or even narrow achievement gaps created by poverty.

Researchers in Texas estimated the cost of educating an economically disadvantaged student to reach the same achievement level as other students was 25 percent larger, researchers in Missouri estimated the cost was 56 percent larger, and researchers in New York estimated the cost was percent larger.

There are no standard methods and data for estimating added costs of educating disadvantaged students, which contributes to this wide range.

Federal spending does not need to eliminate the gap. K education is primarily a state and local function and will continue to be. A reasonable goal would be to close NAEP score gaps by the equivalent of a year. The wide range of estimates does not provide explicit guidance about how much spending would be needed to reach that objective. The newly-authorized program may give districts and schools enhanced flexibility to focus on the neediest students even within schoolwide programs.

For example, research is emerging on a highly effective tutoring program that operated within the school day and was supported by Title 1 funds. A broader consideration would be to increase the threshold at which a school becomes eligible for a Title 1 schoolwide program. Currently, an average school qualifies to be a schoolwide program.

Constraining the eligibility rate to be the highest 25 percent of schools in terms of poverty, or even fewer, and using those targeted resources on programs that have been validated with strong research could be a productive way forward that fits within the current fiscal realities of the federal budget. For example, the national assessment of Title I reported that East St. However, these higher amounts are offset by districts receiving even lower amounts than the national average.

The attainment gap is not the same as the score gap, but the cost of closing the score gap has not been studied at the Federal level.

Related Books. Shep Melnick. No Child Left Behind? More on Education. Education Plus Development Holiday shopping in gender-neutral toy aisles? Get updates on economics from Brookings. More than 9 out of 10 students who receive Title I services do so through a schoolwide program, but not all of these students are poor themselves. Studies have suggested these schoolwide programs offer more flexibility to district leaders, but many are not trained enough on how to use the money more creatively.

In the end, about Title I is actually comprised of four related grants, each serving a slightly different need and following a slightly different formula:. Targeted and EFIG grants are more likely than basic or concentration grants to push money toward the areas of highest poverty.

The report, conducted by the American Institutes for Research on behalf of NCES, dug into the variation among districts in different geographic areas.

Districts in the middle, with anywhere from to 24, eligible children, got less money per child than either the biggest or smallest districts from any grant.

But the individual states made a big difference. Take, for example, two remote, rural, high-poverty school districts. In part, this is because each state must receive at least. Critics have noted that this often leads the smallest states to receive higher per-child grants than the national average. Populations shift, sometimes dramatically, from year to year, and the federal support intentionally tries not to count this against districts.

Holding districts harmless can help cushion the blow of changing demographics, but it can also hamstring districts with rising poverty rates, because awarding the grants is a zero-sum game. As the report describes:. In the end, many districts with rising poverty, who would have qualified for more money at the start of the calculations, were left with no additional money once all districts were held harmless. While districts can continue to be held harmless for years or indefinately, for some grants , there is no such guarantee that a school district experiencing rising poverty will also get a boost in Title I.

All of this complicated calculation tells a district what it would get if Title I was fully funded by Congress—which, in more than 50 years, it has never been.