Clinton Would Divert Funds to Neediest Schools

In one of its first major policy steps on education, the Clinton Administration plans to redirect the federal government’s largest aid program for public schools, taking money from institutions in middle-class areas and increasing it for those in which most of the children are poor.

The change represents an effort to get more clearly recognizable results from the federal government’s annual multibillion-dollar investment in remedial education in public schools.

“To meet our national education goals, we have to focus more resources on those with the greatest need,” MaryJean LeTendre, a top official at the Department of Education, said last week.

Targeting the money for the poorest institutions rather than giving smaller amounts to more schools should produce clearer improvements in those schools that get the money, officials said. However, the new policy also may produce an outcry from middle-income schools that already are absorbing budget cutbacks from state and district governments.

And, for the new Administration, it could intensify criticism, already provoked by recent tax proposals, that the President has abandoned his pledge to help the middle class.

Congressional approval would be necessary to implement the new policy, which entails changing the federal government’s Chapter One program--an effort that will spend $6 billion in fiscal 1992 to subsidize special reading, math and language instruction for about 5 million economically disadvantaged children in about 51,000 schools.

The Education Department is drafting legislation for presentation to Congress this spring that would sharply reduce the number of schools receiving the aid, giving it only to the neediest ones.

“Our research supports shifting money away from a large number of communities and concentrating it on very poor rural and inner-city schools,” said Alan Ginsburg, the author of an extensive Department of Education report on Chapter One. “But it’s hard to know if this will happen, because the more you target, the more difficult it is to get majority support.”

But failing to do so, he said, would doom the Clinton Administration’s education agenda, which mandates setting high academic standards for all American children and achieving them by the year 2000. The larger plan relies in part on the Education Department’s ability to reallocate Chapter One money and to increase the total expenditure for fiscal 1993 to $9 billion, according to Education Secretary Richard W. Riley.

The current allocation is spread so thinly that it does not give enough money to schools in poor communities to help them overcome the exceptional obstacles they must surmount to meet these goals, education officials said.

A top congressional staff aide said that, while members of the House who are in the midst of hearings on Chapter One may understand that a reallocation of funds is a good idea in the abstract, it will be very difficult to get them to vote for a change that means taking funds from their own districts.

“It’s not in their direct interest to give money to the poor,” the staffer said.

The reallocation of funds also would contradict a campaign theme credited for playing a major role in Clinton’s election: that he is a “new Democrat” whose policies would help the middle class as well as the poor.

Several of the Administration’s other major, expensive education priorities also are focused primarily on the poor. It wants to increase funding for Head Start programs that help economically disadvantaged preschoolers, double the money for a massive summer jobs program for poor youngsters that will for the first time dictate a strong educational component for all participants and for the first time pay for a large nationwide Chapter One summer school program.

Education specialists say that the federal commitment to schools in the poorest areas is warranted because they face particularly dire financial straits. Generally relying on a significantly smaller tax base, their budgets are often severely constrained.

Furthermore, they often cannot attract or pay for the most experienced teachers, their facilities are often woefully maintained and their students often suffer from poor emotional and physical health, leaving them unprepared for school and needing more remedial help.

“There’s something distinctively different where 60% to 75% of the students are from economically disadvantaged homes,” said Linda Winfield, a visiting professor at UCLA who is doing research on effective schooling for disadvantaged children. “It’s a qualitative difference; they definitely deserve more funds.”

Susan Wilhelm, chief of staff of the House Education and Labor Committee, said there is no doubt that high poverty corresponds with low achievement.

“Research has shown that kids performing at A level in poor communities would have been earning Cs in schools with a low percentage of children in poverty,” she said.

But Wilhelm suggested that members would be more willing to vote for an increase in funding for poorer areas than they would for reducing funds for their own districts. In the current political and economic climate, however, new money is scarce.

As a result of a complicated distribution formula for Chapter One money, wealthier schools sometimes end up with more money per pupil than poorer districts. And because schools have discretion in how the money is spent, a low-achieving student in an otherwise high-achieving school could get extra help, while a similar child in a poorer district would not, according to Education Department research.

“Chapter One serves 70% of all elementary schools, but they’re not all equally needy,” Ginsburg said. “If there is only a small percentage of poor children, there is no reason that the community and the school cannot absorb the extra costs.”

Part of the Administration’s plan is to restructure the program so that most of the money is used for schoolwide reform, rather than for special programs for particular children who are considered most in need.

“It’s not the kids who need fixing, it’s the schools that need to fundamentally change,” Ginsburg said. Schools that receive funding would be encouraged to use the money to make radical changes in curriculum, decrease class size and improve instruction.