Federal Funds Should Educate, Not Just Employ
It’s time for schools serving poor children to stand and deliver.
For years, educators and their political allies have complained that Washington did not invest enough money in Title I, the massive federal program that provides extra funds for public schools in poor neighborhoods.
But Title I grew steadily under former President Clinton, and it’s thriving under President Bush. In 2002, Bush and Congress hiked the program’s budget by $1.6 billion to $10.35 billion, making it by far the largest federal education program. Bush has already requested another $1-billion increase for 2003, making Title I one of the few domestic winners in the budget he’ll release today.
At the same time, the education reform bill Bush just signed into law targets the available funds more precisely on the neediest districts. Between more money and better targeting, Los Angeles could see its Title I grant jump by nearly 40% to almost $300 million; San Diego anticipates a 30% increase. Other big cities may see comparable windfalls.
Which makes this a very good time to ask how well schools are spending the money.
That’s not a question many educators and administrators have liked to discuss. Partly because of byzantine federal rules meant to assure the money is actually spent on kids from low-income families, the programs in many districts have become secretive “fiefdoms” under the control of Title I administrators operating without much oversight from superintendents and school boards, says Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, a group that advocates for students from low-income households. “These are huge kingdoms or queendoms,” she says.
In many places, districts haven’t established a clear plan for spending the money, leaving individual principals on their own. Often they have utterly no idea how to effectively deploy the funds. “A lot of time people just don’t know what to do to improve achievement,” says Phyllis McClure, a consultant for high-poverty school districts.
The result typically has been not much different from throwing the money against a wall and hoping it sticks. Until recent reforms in San Diego, the district didn’t even know how schools were spending the money, says Mary Hopper, the deputy chancellor for instruction. When Roy Romer arrived as Los Angeles’ superintendent, he found “quite often there was not a clear strategy as to how to use Title I. It was, ‘Where are we short on our budget? Let’s use Title I money.’ ”
In the absence of any stronger direction, the Title I money--like so much else in big-city education--has flowed more toward the needs of adults than of children. “In many places,” says McClure, “Title I has been thought of more as an adult employment program than an education program.”
Many districts have used big chunks of their Title I grants to hire paraprofessional teacher aides, many of them mothers from the local community. Though most are committed and work hard, few of these aides have much qualification: A recent federal survey found that in the elementary schools with the highest degree of poverty, only one in every 10 teacher aides had a four-year college degree. (In all Title I schools, the figure was just one in five.) Yet, nationally, schools spend over $1.1 billion in Title I money to hire paraprofessionals; the Education Department says schools nationwide have hired slightly more teacher aides than teachers with their Title I funds.
It gets worse. Most paraprofessionals report receiving less than two days of training. Yet in highest-poverty schools--the schools where students typically need the most help--nearly half of the aides report they have taught classes without a teacher present. And while districts have spent heavily on the teacher aides, they’ve stinted on other services that could help struggling students. Only about one in nine students in Title I schools attend extended-day programs. And Title I schools are spending only one-fifth as much training teachers as they are paying for the teacher aides.
The good news is that a reform movement is budding from the bottom up. In cities from El Paso to Providence, R.I., courageous administrators are seizing control of the Title I money and shifting its focus from providing jobs to helping kids. Two Southern California districts are at the forefront of the movement.
In San Diego, Supt. Alan Bersin and Chancellor of Instruction Anthony Alvarado laid off 600 teacher aides in 2000 (offering them other jobs in the system). The district then redirected the money into extended-day services, summer school and, most important, a coaching program that provides intensive, in-classroom training for teachers. In 1998, the district spent $1 million annually training teachers; now the number is $60 million.
In Los Angeles, which had been among the worst offenders in overemphasizing the aides, Romer is taking a similar tack, shifting money into hundreds of coaches who teach teachers how to teach reading and math. “What happens is Title I money is quite often spent on the edges,” he says. “The real crucial thing here is you have to improve instruction and improve what happens in the classroom.”
None of this is easy. In San Diego, Bersin and Alvarado have faced virtually scorched-earth resistance from teachers’ unions and some community groups to their elimination of the aides. “The feelings still are strong about this,” Hopper says. “It’s very difficult, and I’m not surprised that more . . . people haven’t tried it.”
Yet around the country more districts may have no choice but to follow their lead. The new federal education bill establishes clear mandates for all schools to improve student performance; those that don’t will face escalating sanctions, including mandates that they divert Title I money into a program that will allow parents to purchase after-school tutoring from private companies. Eventually, failing schools face the dismissal of their leadership. That should concentrate the mind.
No one should minimize the challenge facing schools trying to help low-income students coping with chaotic neighborhoods and, too often, chaotic situations at home. It’s fair for schools to protest that they can’t solve all these problems alone. But it’s equally fair for society to demand that schools place no other priority above helping kids. And using Title I as a local patronage program fails that fundamental test.
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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.
