This story by Matt Barnum appeared on Chalkbeat Colorado on August 25, 2022.
Deirdre Pilch has spent much of her career as an educator frustrated.
The superintendent of schools in Greeley, Colorado — a high-poverty district 50 miles north of Denver — has never felt she’s had the money to provide students the education they deserve.
Remarkably, it took a pandemic to change this.
After COVID first hit, experts predicted financial ruin for schools. But state budgets recovered quickly. Then, the federal government sent nearly $190 billion to schools — an unprecedented sum.
“That funding feels like I can actually now do some of the work I’ve needed to do, really my entire career in Colorado,” said Pilch.
Now, each of Greeley’s 27 schools has at least a part-time counselor and social worker. There is a small army of attendance workers who try to track down missing high school students. Class sizes are smaller. Every student has a Chromebook. The summer program has grown.
The federal dollars turned out to be a radical experiment in funding schools based on student need, with Pilch and school officials in high-poverty areas across the country receiving a stunning windfall. But the money is now dwindling and must be budgeted in the next two years. That means the country is hurtling back toward a status quo that defies the advice of experts of many stripes.
“When the COVID relief funds run out, that big gain in school funding equity will evaporate if states don’t step up,” said Zahava Stadler of The Education Trust, an advocacy group that focuses on disadvantaged children.
Before the pandemic, children from low-income families attended school districts with roughly the same amount of funding as non-poor children did, according to two recent studies.
That’s an unheralded victory. Students in poverty aren’t typically getting less, as is widely assumed.
In another sense, though, the victory is a hollow one. Experts who study these issues say that the same amount of funding isn’t enough: Schools serving low-income students should get more.
“The field has come to a consensus that high-poverty kids need more resources than advantaged kids,” said Lori Taylor, a school finance researcher at Texas A&M University.
Even some right-of-center organizations and researchers who question spending more as a strategy for improving schools, agree.
“You want to pay more money to kids that need more help, that are needy in various ways,” said Eric Hanushek, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and a prominent skeptic of school funding increases.
How much more do high-poverty schools need? Here, there’s no agreement. But one recent study is the first effort to come up with a nationwide estimate.
Researchers from the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, statistically estimated how much money it would take to get every district in the country to recent average scores on national reading and math tests.
Some experts, including Hanushek, are skeptical of this study’s approach. Even researchers who use it acknowledge that it’s more like a statistically informed prediction than an exact science. Some districts that spend a lot on schools, including many in New York, don’t actually achieve the average outcomes that this study would predict.
But it’s a useful starting point for discussions about how much more children in poverty and their schools need.
The study’s conclusion: High-poverty districts in most of the country need more money to even get close to the performance of affluent districts.
In Greeley, it would take $2,000 more per student. Baltimore needs nearly $10,000 more per pupil. Schools in Selma, Alabama, need a breathtaking $17,000 more per kid. The typical high-poverty district needs close to $6,000 more, the study estimates.
Many factors drive costs up. Rural districts and those in high cost-of-living areas generally need more. Another particularly important factor is child poverty.
In total, it would cost $105 billion to fill in all these funding gaps every year — a major increase on the $771 billion in funding K-12 schools received in 2020. And that probably underestimates the cost, since the research is based on data before pandemic-induced learning loss.
“This is a tremendous figure,” wrote the Shanker Institute researchers. “It may even sound like an impossible gap to bridge.”
Another way of thinking about that $105 billion number is as a rough estimate of unequal opportunity outside of school facing children from low-income families.
Consider: Children in poverty are more likely to be exposed to pollution and lead, which affects brain development. They’re more likely to have asthma that causes them to miss school frequently.
They’re more likely to be homeless, face eviction, or move around a lot, switching schools frequently.
They’re more likely to be exposed to violence.
They’re less likely to have enough healthy food to eat every day.
They’re less likely to receive preventative medical and dental care and less likely to receive needed treatment for mental health issues.
They’re less likely to be raised by two parents.
They’re less likely to have internet access at home to do homework.
They’re less likely to go to summer camps or to visit museums, among other enrichment activities.
Most of these factors have been linked to lower reading and math achievement. “It turns out that one of the biggest predictors of student performance is things that happen outside of school and not just the effects of school environments,” said Margot Jackson, a Brown University sociologist who studies inequality and child poverty.
These and other hurdles in mind, $105 billion doesn’t seem so surprising.
The point of listing the challenges that many children in poverty face is to help policymakers address them, including by improving how schools are funded — not to stigmatize low-income families.
The difference between low-income and affluent parents is not the aspirations they have for their children, said Jackson, but simply the money they have to buy things like safe and stable housing or enriching summer programs.
“Families across the economic distribution have highly similar values about parenting,” said Jackson.
Child poverty is not inevitable. Giving families money can directly reduce or eliminate it, and improves children’s outcomes in school, too.
But America’s child poverty numbers are going up now that the expanded child tax credit for families, which provided $3,000 annually per school-age child, has expired.
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