The New $4.5 Billion Federal School Funding Program Nobody Knows

Kevin Carey:

But lost in this debate is one of the biggest and largely untold stories of NCLB: Since the law's passage, Congress has changed the way it distributes the Title I funds that support NCLB, targeting an additional $4.5 billion to the states with strong school funding policies and the school districts with the highest concentrations of low-income children. Congress and the President deserve credit for the shift.

The change has attracted scant attention because it involves the law's complex funding formulas. Title I uses not one but four different formulas to distribute money to schools—Basic, Concentration, Targeted, and Incentive. Before passage of NCLB, Congress used only the Basic and Concentration formulas. Those formulas spread Title I monies too widely, resulting in districts with relatively few poor children receiving significant funding and high-poverty schools receiving too little. But as the chart below shows, since Congress passed NCLB in 2001 it has increased Title I funding significantly and distributed all of the additional monies through the Targeted and Incentive formulas—helping the nation's highest-poverty school districts and rewarding states that make the greatest effort to fund education and distribute funding fairly to local districts.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 13, 2006 9:36 PM
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