TITLE: Enrichment only for the rich? How school segregation continues to divide students by income
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2024/05/16/brown-v-board-turns-70-school-segregation-persists/73243509007/
EXCERPT: This week marks 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that determined school segregation violated the Constitution. Decades later, severe divides like those Giglio has seen persist in communities around the country. Although they have received a historic infusion of relief funding since COVID-19 capsized learning, many schools are struggling to help kids catch up – especially low-income ones. School funding has remained uneven, which means the disparities could worsen once relief dollars expire later this year.
Data shared exclusively with USA TODAY shows that even within the same metropolitan area, school districts in wealthy communities often get more dollars per pupil than lower-income districts. In many regions, state funding policies designed to offset these disparities don’t make much of a dent, according to the analysis by the think tank Bellwether. Bellwether's research found some of the greatest funding disparities in blue states like Connecticut. Some of the most equitably funded metro areas are in red states such as Texas.
The findings provide a window into the insidious forces that continue to segregate children – decades after the high court ruled it was unfair to deny a Black girl access to a better-resourced school blocks from her Kansas home. In 2024, students are still sorted into school systems that reinforce rather than level out inequities.
"It's been a long road since Brown v. Board," said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with Bellwether who helped lead the research.
"A lot of progress has been made on many fronts," he said, "but looking at the way we resource our schools right now, it's very clear there's still a lot of progress to be made."
Bellwether, a research nonprofit that focuses on educational equity, examined 123 metro areas across 38 states. Low-income districts tend to get the most dollars per student in just a third of those metro areas. In 40% of the metro areas, wealthier districts get the most funding. A little more than half of the students in the study live in a metro area where the wealthiest communities get the most resources.
The inequities tend to happen in metro areas divided into tiny school districts that draw in vastly different tax revenue. Schools in affluent neighborhoods rake in so much money from taxes on expensive homes that it dwarfs the amount invested in poorer schools through progressive state funding formulas meant to balance the resources.
“If you have a metro area that only has a handful of school districts, that helps to smooth out those differences in the levels of wealth,” Spurrier said. “The more boundaries and borders you have within a metro area, the more there will be these inequities in overall funding.”
Nationally, local property taxes comprise about 37% of public schools' total revenue. That percentage is often higher in wealthy areas. While state funding formulas usually seek to address the gaps, “it’s just not enough to overcome these vast differences in local revenue,” Spurrier said.
For example, in the greater Columbus, Ohio, area, affluent districts raise $13,477 per pupil on average, compared with $9,129 per pupil in lower-income districts like Columbus proper. Even with state dollars, the suburbs maintain a $1,333 advantage.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, elite districts such as Piedmont raise more than twice as much as poorer ones – and despite state interventions, they still eke out a $2,379 per-pupil advantage. Similar phenomena are seen in Philadelphia and its surrounding districts.
Bridgeport is another metro area where funding differences result in vastly different educational experiences for poor and wealthy kids. The city’s local tax rate is more than four times higher than the rate in Greenwich, but the affluent suburb can still produce more per-pupil funding because of property values.
Wealthy districts in the Bridgeport area, such as Greenwich, raise an average of $24,922 per pupil in local revenue. That’s $18,325 more than Bridgeport and Danbury, another poor city nearby. The additional $6,763 these low-income districts receive from the state only goes so far: Even after that funding, the elite districts still generate $11,548 more in per-pupil dollars.
TITLE: Iowa school vouchers prompted tuition hikes, researchers find
https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2024/05/14/iowa-school-vouchers-prompted-tuition-hikes-researchers-find/
EXCERPT: Critics warned early last year that private schools would likely jack up tuition once state funds began flowing. Before long, anecdotes emerged to back up those suspicions. Ty Rushing reported for Iowa Starting Line in May 2023 that at least fifteen private schools across Iowa had approved tuition hikes.
The new working paper lends analytical heft to that debate. [Princeton University doctoral student Jason Fontana and Princeton sociology Professor Jennifer L. Jennings ] found “Eligible grades experience significant increases in tuition following Iowa’s Education Savings Accounts implementation. We observe no such patterns for Nebraska schools.”
Research by Fontana and Jennings also suggests the trend toward higher tuition could accelerate as income limits for Iowa’s program disappear in the third year of operation.
Iowa’s ESAs were open to all kindergartners from the beginning. Students in grades 1-12 could qualify if their family income did not exceed 300 percent of the federal poverty level in the first year or 400 percent of the federal poverty level for 2024/2025. Starting with the 2025/2026 school year, every K-12 private school student in Iowa will be eligible for school vouchers, even if their family income is in the top 1 percent.
Fontana and Jennings found that tuition increased by a larger percentage where more students were eligible for ESA funds.
When eligibility was universal (kindergarten), private schools increased prices 21-25%, compared with 10-16% in grades with partial eligibility. In contrast, private schools did not increase tuition in pre-K, which was ineligible for ESAs.
[Governor Kim] Reynolds has repeatedly claimed her plan would reduce financial barriers to attending private school. She promised during her 2023 Condition of the State address that when the program was fully phased in, “no child will be limited by income or zip code.”
However, tuition hikes can keep private school out of reach for families who lack the means to cover costs exceeding the value of an ESA ($7,635 for the current school year, $7,826 for 2024/2025). Even if the ESA funds fully cover private school tuition, they can’t be used for some related expenses that could be a barrier for lower-income families, such as transportation, school uniforms, and child care before or after school.
“If a goal of ESAs is to extend private school access to new families,” Fontana and Jennings write, “the substantial tuition increases they produce may limit access.”
Fontana and Jennings write,
Iowa’s ESA program’s expressed purpose was to increase access to “the school best suited” for a child, “regardless of zip code or income” (Office of Governor Reynolds 2023). To the extent tuition levels outpace the ESA payment, families unable to further contribute to tuition may be priced out of schools, thus defeating the program’s stated goal. If this is the case, ESAs act as tuition subsidies for families who can already afford private school. Future work should consider to what extent tuition increases limit families’ options.
When Republicans fast-tracked the governor’s voucher plan in January 2023, public school advocates and many Democratic legislators predicted that very scenario: “tuition subsidies for families who can already afford private school.”
Total costs for Iowa’s school choice program are escalating even faster than private school tuition hikes. The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency has estimated the state will spend just under $128 million on ESAs during the current fiscal year. On the last day of the 2024 legislative session, Republicans in the Iowa House and Senate approved a “standings” appropriations bill that projected spending $179 million on ESAs during fiscal year 2025, which begins on July 1. Those numbers far exceed the program’s initial cost estimates.
Once income limits go away in fiscal year 2026, school choice will cost Iowa taxpayers more than $300 million each year. It’s not yet clear how many new private schools will pop up to take advantage of the easy money. Republican State Representative Dean Fisher is board president of one such Christian school, which hopes to begin instruction in Tama County in August 2025.
UPDATE: Kathy Bolten reported for the Des Moines Business Record on May 15 that the Des Moines Christian School Association has paid $6.8 million to by 100 acres about one mile north of its campus. The school, which “had 89 high school graduates in 2023,” plans to build a new high school on the purchased land. Enrollment will be able to expand considerably once grades 9-12 have a separate facility, costing taxpayers more every year.
No doubt many of Des Moines Christian’s benefactors will be able to give even more generously to the capital campaign, with public funds subsidizing their children’s tuition.
TITLE: Illinois School Districts Sent Kids to a For-Profit Out-of-State Facility That Isn’t Vetted or Monitored
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-shrub-oak-schools-students-special-education
EXCERPT: Two years ago, Illinois lawmakers tried to help students with extreme needs who had a limited number of schools available to them.
They changed state law to allow public money to fund students’ tuition at special education boarding schools, including those out of state, that Illinois had not vetted and would not monitor. School districts, not the Illinois State Board of Education, would be responsible for oversight.
In solving one problem, however, Illinois created another: Districts now can send students to residential schools that get no oversight from the states in which they are located.
The facility that has benefited the most has been a for-profit private school in New York that’s now under scrutiny by disability rights groups. A ProPublica investigation uncovered reports of abuse, neglect and staffing shortages at Shrub Oak International School as it tries to serve a population of students with autism and other complex behavioral and medical issues. Shrub Oak has never sought or obtained approval from New York to operate a school for students with disabilities, which means it gets no oversight from the state.
The ProPublica investigation further found that some districts in Illinois have abdicated their own responsibility to monitor students’ education and welfare. Unlike some other states, Illinois law doesn’t require districts to visit the out-of-state facilities that students from Illinois attend, and some districts have never visited Shrub Oak. Records and interviews also show that districts in Illinois and other states have not always held Shrub Oak accountable for notifying them when students are injured or physically restrained, even though a provision in some contracts requires that the school let districts know.
Sixteen Illinois students have enrolled at Shrub Oak this school year, more than at any of the other 24 unapproved residential schools that Illinois students are attending. With the school charging $573,200 per student for tuition and a dedicated aide for most of the day — one of the highest price tags in the country — Illinois districts are on track to pay Shrub Oak more than $8 million this year. The state reimburses districts for most of the cost.
More of Shrub Oak’s out-of-state students come from Illinois than from any other state.
One Illinois school district official who lobbied his legislator to fund more residential schools said he now is second-guessing that work.
“I felt good at the end of this that we were able to help pass a law that had a profound impact,” said Sean Carney, assistant superintendent for business at Stevenson High School, north of Chicago. “But I’ll be honest, knowing that this particular state, New York, doesn’t really have oversight of the facility, it kind of squashes my enthusiasm for the efforts I went through to make change.”
In written responses to questions from ProPublica earlier this year, Richard Bamberger, a communications specialist hired by Shrub Oak, said the school accepts high-needs students from across the country who struggle with self injury, aggression and property destruction. He said the tuition rates are reasonable, especially given all the services it provides.