Our Country’s Confounding Chasm

Executive Perspective

This month’s issue of School Administrator focuses on combating poverty. It’s ironic that this should even be a topic for discussion in one of the richest countries in the world. Yet according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 45 percent of American children live in low-income households and more than half of public school students qualify for lunch subsidies.

Paul Buchheit, a teacher of economic inequality at DePaul University in Chicago, points out that in the past six years America’s wealth grew by 60 percent while in that same period the number of homeless children also grew by 60 percent. America is a leader in childhood poverty. UNICEF reports that the United States has one of the highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world and the majority of poor children are black, Latino and American Indian.

Is it any wonder we have an achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots? Should we be surprised when the zip code is as accurate a predictor of academic achievement as results on standardized tests?

Tackling Equity

For years now, we have pointed to results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress that show schools with a high concentration of students on free and reduced-price lunch have significantly lower scores than schools with a low concentration. Schools in impoverished neighborhoods tend to have higher class sizes, spend less per pupil, have teachers earning lower salaries, are not as well equipped as schools in wealthier areas and enroll students who are exposed to various social and economic issues.

These students, however, are as capable as their wealthier counterparts, and when immersed in environments with equitable resources, we see significant improvement in performance. Indeed, the same NAEP data show that students on free and reduced-price lunch, when attending a school where their concentration is less than 10 percent, will significantly outperform their peers in poverty schools.

How do we combat poverty? By confronting the issue of equity.

No equity exists in how our schools are funded. Per pupil funding varies in all 13,000 school districts in America. How can we possibly believe that a child receiving an education in a system that is spending only a third of what a neighboring district is spending will be getting the same quality of education? Yet that is the reality in our schools. Underfunded urban and rural schools cannot match the performance of their wealthier suburban communities.

Parents who recognize this disparity may try to enroll their children in the better-performing school by providing forged documents or listing the address of relatives or friends living in that community. Those districts will spend considerable resources on attendance officers who follow students to see if they actually go to the residence listed. We read news accounts of parents charged with theft of service and potential jail time.

These events reflect the sad state of inequity in our systems and the unfortunate and unlawful attempts on the part of parents to provide their children with a quality education in a safe environment. This inequity will prevail as long as we fund education with, on the average, 45 percent of funding coming from local real estate taxes, 45 percent from state sources such as income and sales taxes and perhaps lottery sales and a mere 10 percent from the federal government.

When we criticize the performance of our students relative to the performance of students from other developed nations, we fail to note that in most of those nations the per pupil funding is the same across the nation or at least across their states. In neighboring Canada, the provinces offer equitable funding. Think of our having equitable funding at least at the state level. Consider the effects of changing our funding distribution so that local funding would only be 10 percent while the feds picked up 45 percent. Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen in the United States.

Money Speaks

Inequitable funding will persist in our schools. Critics will continue to point to the outliers, those schools in impoverished areas that miraculously beat the odds and use them to reinforce their argument that money does not matter. But money does matter. Our best teachers will be recruited by school systems paying the higher salaries and offering the better working environments. So will administrators and support staff. Wealthier communities will be flush with the latest technology, smaller class sizes and modern buildings.

Choice will not solve inequity, it will only widen the chasm. Charters will not solve the problem unless we make every school a charter, at which point the “reformers” will want to re-create public schools. The solution rests with a country that has the will to provide each and every child with what each needs to receive a quality education, not with the vagaries of what their school can afford.