Schoolchildren Left Behind

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/opinion/schoolchildren-left-behind.html

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Politicians and voters often say they want better schools, but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to pay for them. Voters this week largely rejected attempts to increase school spending through ballot initiatives.

In 23 states, so-called formula funding — the main type of state aid for kindergarten through 12th grade — is still lower this school year than in 2008, adjusted for inflation and growth in the number of students.

The chronic shortfalls often reflect deliberate policy choices, not economic pressures. For example, in seven of the 23 states — Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — legislators have cut income taxes in recent years by tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, money that could have been used to strengthen schools. And yet, among the states with funding shortfalls, only Arizona, Maine and Oklahoma had major initiatives on their ballots on Tuesday to raise revenue for education. The only initiative that passed was in Maine, where voters backed a tax surcharge on annual income in excess of $200,000.

In the remaining 27 states, only two had major school revenue initiatives. In California, where the formula funding per student has increased modestly since 2008, voters approved two measures: a multibillion-dollar bond issue and an extension of a special income tax on high earners. In Oregon, where per-student formula funding has barely budged since 2008, a proposed business-tax increase to help pay for schools failed.

Inadequate school spending over prolonged periods will leave many students behind, especially low-income children. In a recent groundbreaking study of 15,000 children, poor children were much more likely to graduate from 12th grade if they were in schools that received a financial increase of 10 percent per student from the beginning of their education until the end of high school. As adults, they had higher earnings than others who had grown up in low-income families.

Another recent study analyzed math and reading tests taken over five years in 11,000 school districts. It found that average academic performance levels in the richest and poorest school districts were more than four grade levels apart.

When state governments ignore the needs of schoolchildren, Washington can and should step in to counter the harm. From Day 1, the Trump administration will have a chance to build on the work of Congress and the Obama administration on the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. The law, which revised the Bush-era No Child Left Behind effort, gives states considerable flexibility in how they spend federal money granted under the act. It is the duty of the executive branch to ensure, through regulation and supervision, that the states use that money to provide equal opportunity for poor and low-income children. In the longer term, firm presidential leadership will be needed to reverse Congress’s penchant for cutting Title 1, the major source of federal money for schools.

Children who entered first grade in 2008, during the Great Recession, will graduate from high school in 2020. For many of them, these next few years are their last chance to get a good education.