Congress should close a loophole in the federal education law that’s allowing wealthier school districts to get more state and local money than poor ones, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Friday.
Duncan said 6.6 million children were being shortchanged in 23 states.
“The children who need the most seem to be getting less and less, and the children who need the least are getting more and more,” the education secretary said in a call with reporters.
The biggest gap was in Pennsylvania, where the school districts with the highest poverty spend 33 percent less on education than those with the lowest levels of poverty. The gap was 18 percent in Vermont and 17 percent in Illinois, Missouri and Virginia, according to Education Department data.
The other states where districts with the highest percentage of low-income students spend less state and local money per pupil than districts that have the least poverty are Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wyoming.
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, part of the “war on poverty,” provides additional federal money for the education of low-income students.
Inequitable school funding has been the norm for decades because schools are mainly funded with property taxes. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires districts to provide comparable funding for wealthier and poorer schools in order to receive federal funding. Duncan said the loophole lets districts mask what they are spending by school.
And he said the gap between richer and poorer schools was getting wider.
He said Republicans in the House and Senate who are working on an update of the education law have shown “little interest” in changing the law to reduce the gap, and their plan to let federal funds follow low-income students to wealthier districts, instead of targeting the funds to districts with lots of poor students, would make it worse.
Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said in a recent statement that the education bill he has proposed in the House “offers states and families new opportunities to rescue children from failing schools. Encouraging good schools to serve more low-income students is the right thing to do.”