This story by Matt Barnum appeared on Chalkbeat Colorado on August 25, 2022.
On a bright spring morning earlier this year, Benjamin Mosley, the principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle School in Northeast Baltimore, stood outside, welcoming students as they filed in. As he walked through the hallways, he greeted students by name, fist-bumping, hugging, cajoling, asking about their lives.
Mosley, a former middle school English teacher, has been the principal of the school for eight years, and during that time he’s prioritized creating a warm environment. In the most recent school survey, the vast majority of parents who responded gave the school high marks.
Mosley doesn’t focus on the fact that most of the children at Glenmount come from low-income families. “I don’t know what child is in poverty,” he said. “I hold every student accountable with high expectations.”
But Mosley is also aware of all of the ways that poverty affects the school. The housing instability so many families face, for one, leads more students to switch in and out of Glenmount.
“We had a kid enroll last week,” he exclaimed, speaking in his office with two weeks left in the school year. “It impacts the psyche of teachers.”
Mosley estimates that only about a quarter of students end up as Glenmount ‘life-longers’, meaning they remain in the school from kindergarten through eighth grade. That’s hard on the kids who are regularly switching schools, and a challenge for teachers, who have to adapt to those who enter class in the middle of a year. Research has found that having students enter mid-year disrupts learning of other kids in the class.
On that morning, Mosley encountered another challenge. He popped into the class of a middle school math teacher and found students barely paying attention to a warm-up exercise that seemed more appropriate for early elementary students.
“The students weren’t engaged,” Mosley said as he stepped out of the teacher’s classroom, frustrated. “He’s talking to himself.”
This teacher had been struggling for some time, and Mosley was wrestling with what to do, as he wasn’t sure whether he could find a better replacement. “What’s worse: Someone who’s ineffective at teaching or an empty classroom?” Mosley wondered aloud in the hallway.
Research has long found that there is essentially a tax on schools with more low-income and more Black and Hispanic students: Those schools have a harder time finding and keeping teachers, a key reason that they usually have more inexperienced educators.
The list of extra costs high-poverty schools face goes on. Children in poverty are more likely to be identified as having a disability, which entitles them to additional services.
Low-income children may also experience more trauma outside school, which means schools often need more counselors.
“They can come to me, but there are times it’s like a waiting room in here,” said Jeanette Placeres, a counselor at Glenmount.
Of course, these challenges show up in middle class and affluent schools too, but they are more prevalent in poor areas — and funding typically does not keep pace.
The Baltimore area is racially and economically segregated in part due to a history of government policies that concentrated low-income Black families in certain parts of the city.
Today, about 1 in 3 Baltimore children fall below the federal poverty line, which is one of the highest rates in the state and the country. For a family of four, poverty is defined as having a household income of just $26,500. Many other families are just above that threshold.
That’s the main reason the Shanker study estimates Baltimore needs so much more funding than surrounding districts, despite the fact that it already gets somewhat more than nearby schools.
“Due in no small part to the segregation-fueled concentration of poverty within its borders, Baltimore City is a large peninsula of severely inadequate funding,” wrote the researchers.
Additional money for schools now can only do so much to address the cascading consequences of poverty and segregation. But recent studies suggest that when schools find themselves with more funding, students benefit. Their math and reading scores tend to improve, and they are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. These gains tend to be small but meaningful, and often students in poverty benefit the most from additional school spending.
Many parents also believe that money can make a difference. For years, the most common complaint about public schools from parents and teachers has been a lack of resources, polling shows. Another recent poll found that three-quarters of parents were supportive of providing extra funding for students with additional needs.
“Do we need more funding? Absolutely,” said Terrence Allen, who walks his second-grade grandson to Glenmount every morning. “You get more money, you can do more.”
To be clear, how dollars are spent is crucial, too. Some high-poverty districts seem to have enough money but still see achievement lag. Certainly, in many cases, schools could spend money more effectively.
Take Mosley’s struggle to find a better math teacher. Yes, higher salaries for all teachers would probably help. But so could using existing funds to raise pay for teaching roles in hard-to-fill subjects like math, something that is not permitted by the city’s teachers’ contract.
There is no real tension between these ideas, though. Additional money could be paired with efforts to use those funds as effectively as possible.
“It’s not just money — it’s money spent well, invested well, with a lot of other things,” said Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore public schools.
At this point, it’s impossible to issue a verdict on the COVID-era experiment in pumping money into high-poverty schools. There’s no evidence yet of how much of a difference the money has made, and tracking systems created by the federal government and states have been of limited use.
To a person, though, educators like Mosley say the dollars have been essential for addressing both the pandemic’s health and academic challenges.
At Glenmount, the funding has brought in extra support staff who can work with students in small groups, new science and social studies teachers so those courses are available all year for middle schoolers, and a new drama program, Mosley said. The district as a whole has used the money to add summer programming, hire mental health staff, and upgrade buildings, among many other things.
“Without the money, we would have been in chaos regarding coverage and following COVID protocols,” Mosley said. “We could not have afforded the after-school enrichment and instructional programs that were led by classroom teachers.”
But the last of the federal money has to be budgeted by September 2024, and once schools fall off that funding cliff, they will likely land back on the old funding structure.
The reasons are predictable, even understandable. Many voters don’t want higher taxes. State legislators from better-off communities advocate for their own local schools. (This cuts across political lines, with many purportedly progressive states funding schools in a not-at-all progressive way.)
Improving funding systems is certainly not financially or politically impossible. Maryland, for instance, approved additional funding for high-poverty schools last year, which is another reason Mosley finds himself flush with funding. But state-level politics are often challenging.
Pilch, the Greeley superintendent, says there have long been discussions in Colorado over how to improve school funding. But voters have rejected tax raises to increase funding, making it politically fraught to overhaul the formula. Just recently, an effort to put a school funding measure on the ballot failed.
“Every year we talk about the state formula, and every year it becomes apparent it’s too complex to try to change it,” she said.
States spend wildly different amounts on education, and low-income families are often concentrated in states that spend less. The disparities this creates are hard to solve without more federal funding.
But President Biden’s proposal to double funding for Title I, the formula that sends money to high-poverty schools, has gone nowhere. Instead, Congress approved only an anemic bump. This year, Biden has once again proposed a large increase, but that’s seen as a long shot.
So schools and educators are bracing for a return to the old system.
“Money is a variable — it’s not the end all, be all,” said Mosley. “But without the money, you’re already starting the race miles back from everyone else.”
Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org. This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.