The George Washington University Research Group, under the supervision of the Department of Research and Evaluation, conducted the evaluation and submitted an evaluation report. The findings and conclusions of the study showed the median grade equivalent scores for Title I students in reading and mathematics total increased during the school year as follows: When the Title I students were divided into fourths by ability levels based upon their September 1971 test scores, the students in the bottom fourth (corresponding to the bottom half of the identified student population) gained more than in any other fourth. The average gains in this lowest quartile were as follows: The objectives of the Title I program appear to have been met through a joint cooperative effort of all personnel involved. The outcome reflects an extension of the saturated learning environment which was established in the summer program. These results were encouraging and contributed to the decision to conduct the FY '73 program in a similar manner. We, in the Public Schools of the District of Columbia, are pleased with the results which have been attained with the funds received through Title I, ESEA. The additional services which made these student achievement gains possible would not have been available if the school system had been forced to rely on its regular sources of funding. Although Title I provides the most important source of supplemental funds for our public schools, the other titles of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act also have provided funding for other significant improvements-the acquisition of school library resources, the development and implementation of promising innovative educational projects, the initiation of a major demonstration project with effective community participation, the planning for and evaluation of federally assisted programs and the establishment and improvement of programs to meet local needs. It is my belief that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has contributed important resources to the struggle in urban education to overcome the problems of educational and economic deprivation. Its continuation seems crucial to making our cities responsive to the urgent educational needs of their communities. I urge you to weigh carefully the impact that the loss of these funds would have on those children whose needs are the greatest. ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION AMENDMENTS OF 1973 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1973 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, GENERAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON The subcommittee met at 9:40 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2257, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Carl D. Perkins (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Perkins, Lehman, Mazzoli, Quie, and Towell. Staff members present: John F. Jennings, counsel; Christopher T. Cross, minority legislative associate; and Toni Painter, secretary. Chairman PERKINS. The subcommittee will come to order. A quorum is present. The General Subcommittee on Education is continuing today the hearings on H.R. 69, a bill to extend the major Federal programs affecting elementary and secondary education, and H.R. 16, the School Finance Act of 1973. We are pleased this morning to have as our witnesses two school finance experts, Dr. Goettel and Dr. Kirst, who will describe for us the pattern of distribution of title I funds among school districts. Following these gentlemen, we will hear testimony from Mrs. Elizabeth Randolph, title I coordinator in Charlotte, N.C., who will describe the title I program in her area and who will in particular tell us of some of the problems encountered in administering title I in a desegregated school district. Our first witness this morning is Dr. Robert J. Goettel, associate director, educational finance. Proceed, Mr. Goettel, in any manner you prefer. Without objection, your prepared statement will be inserted. in the record. [The statement referred to follows:] STATEMENT OF ROBERT J. GOETTEL, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, EDUCATIONAL FINANCE AND GOVERNANCE PROGRAM, POLICY INSTITUTE OF THE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH CORPORATION AND ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL FINANCE, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION I am Dr. Robert J. Goettel, Associate Director of the Educational Finance and Governance Program, Policy Institute, Syracuse University Research Corporation. My testimony this morning is drawn from a series of studies in the financing of elementary and secondary education conducted by the Syracuse University Research Corporation over the past four years. Those studies include, among others: 1. A study of federal aid to education recently published in book form as Federal Aid to Education: Who Benefits? Who Governs? by Joel S. Berke and Michael W. Kirst (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1973) 2. A study of state school finance conducted for the New York Fleischmann Commission and published in book form as Financing Equal Educational Opportunity: Alternatives for State Finance by Joel S. Berke, Alan K. Campbell, and Robert J. Goettel (Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1972) 3. A project for the President's Commission on School Finance whose report is Improving Information Systems for Education Policy Making by Robert J. Goettel and Joel S. Berke (Washington, D.C.: President's Commission on School Finance, 1971) 4. A current and continuing long term analysis of the financial aspects of American public education under contract with the USOE/HEW School Finance Task Force. While I believe that the views I shall express in this testimony are consonant with those of my colleagues who participated in these studies, I represent only myself this morning and do not speak for the Syracuse University Research Corporation. The purpose of my testimony today is, first, to assist the committee in understanding the findings of our research as it applies to the effects of Title I on local school districts, and, second to provide some recommendations which appear to me to derive from our research. Let me begin by stating two broad conclusions. The first is that Title I is a substantial success as a fiscal device for distributing additional revenues to local districts least able to provide extra resources for high need pupils. I say that because decidedly higher levels of Title I funds go to school districts with: 1. Central city or rural locations 2. Higher proportions of minority pupils 3. Lower income levels, and 4. Greater educational need as measured by average achievement scores. My second conclusion is that Title I has for the first time linked the concern among educators for the neglected, disadvantaged child with a systematic process of allocating resources for his education. Though the evidence thus far on Title I pupil achievement results is not consistently encouraging, to judge a program reaching nine million children on the single dimension of test scores is to ignore the other political objectives embedded in Title I. Fiscal equalization and enhanced awareness of and concern for educational disadvantage must be considered positive achievements of the program, and cannot be excluded from a balanced review of the effects of Title I. Let us turn now to a more detailed discussion of the evidence on which those conclusions are based. 1. THE PATTERN OF TITLE I DISTRIBUTION The critical factor needed for an understanding of the flow of Title I funds concerns the fact that in many states, districts facing the toughest fiscal and educational problems receive the most from Title I but the least in state aid and other federal revenues over which states have discretion. In most large central cities, particularly those in the northeast and midwest, an extremely discouraging financial pattern prevails. Compared with their suburbs, central cities have populations proportionately more improverished and heavily composed of ethnic and racial minorities, and a pupil population which includes disproportionate numbers of foreign-born, handicapped, racial minorities, and poor-pupils whose education requires extensive resources. Yet central city per pupil expenditures are frequently less than or only marginally higher than those of surrounding suburbs. Because of generally higher price and salary levels in the large city, even an equal amount of money tends to provide less education than it does in suburban school districts. The growth of the property base in the central city, from which the local share of school revenue is drawn, has been only a fraction of that of outlying suburbs over the last decade. Further, as a result of both the relative decline in their fiscal situation and the greater demands for public services in heavily urban areas-police, public health, transportation and wel Most of the results reported here are based on an analysis of federal aid flows from 1966-1968 in California, Massachusetts, Michigan. New York, and Texas. Data for 1969-70 school year for the same five states plus North Carolina, Mississippi, Washington, and Kansas will also be cited. SURC is developing a data bank based on the USOE ELSEGIC III survey, the 1970 Census of Population and Housing, and information obtained directly from states. This effort is conducted under contract to the USOE Task Force on School Finance. fare-tax effort as a proportion of per capita income and per capita expenditures for public services are considerably higher in most large core cities than in suburban areas. There are, of course, important exceptions to these generalizations. Some suburban districts are heavily urban in composition and suffer from many of the problems ascribed to central cities, whereas some cities, particularly those in the west, tend to be less densely populated and less afflicted with the urban fiscal problems of the older cities of the midwest and northeast. Nonetheless, our research shows that the general trend described above is predominant. An examination of the total impact of federal aid to education leads to this conclusion while federal aid in the aggregate is more responsive to urban fiscal problems than state aid, the amount is normally too small to overcome the vast disparities that result from the workings of state/local school finance systems. Further, when total federal aid is broken down into its component programs, the degree of responsiveness varies markedly. The Title I poverty-related formula funnels money into cities other school districts with urban type problems in ways that state aid formulas do not. Districts with large proportions of nonwhite pupils and districts with low median family income levels receive the highest proportion of Title I funds. Many other federal programs appear to be neutral to such factors, and a number of programs, such as the National Defense Education Act and ESEA Title III, are administered in some states in ways that often work to make rich districts richer. In a number of instances, major cities receive less aid from, for example, ESEA Titles II and III. Vocational Education, and National Defense Education Act Title III than they should have been allotted solely in view of their proportion of the state's school population. This pattern becomes still more discriminatory when comparative cost levels and the more costly educational needs of central city students are taken into account. In analyzing the fiscal impact of federal aid in relation to state and local revenue patterns, the Syracuse studies examined the ability of federal aid to offset the wealth based disparities that tend to characterize state and local patterns. The total impact of federal aid was not strongly equalizing in terms of property valuation, since urban areas, with their relatively high property tax rolls, tend to attract substantially higher shares of federal aid than do their suburbs. A more accurate index of the impact of federal aid is direct income level, and in that perspective federal aid does have equalizing tendencies, primarily because of Title I. When we recently examined 1969-70 fiscal data and 1970 census data for the original five states of our "Who benefits?" report (Massachusetts, California, New York, Michigan, and Texas) plus Washington, Kansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, the same pattern observed in the earlier study emerged again. Since we are not yet ready to use income data, we looked at two proxies that can be expected to match income distributions very closely the value of owner occupied housing and the cost of monthly rents. As can be seen in tables 2a and 3a in the attached appendix, the lower the monthly rental and value of owner occupied housing, the more Title I and total federal revenues a district received. However, there is a decidedly mixed pattern as far as total revenues are concerned. In the more urban states of New York, California, Michigan, and Massachusetts, districts with higher value housing and higher rents enjoy higher total revenues. In the more rural states of Mississippi, North Carolina, and Kansas, total revenues are higher in lower rent and lower valuation districts, which reflects the great importance of Title I funds to poor rural districts and equally to relatively low expenditure cities such as Kansas City. A strong relationship exists between rough indexes of educational need and federal aid both in the aggregate and particularly with regard to Title I. Strong positive correlations between the proportion of non-white pupils and federal assistance were found. Tables 1a and 1b clearly show that with the exception of Texas, where there is a high relationship between the proportion of Mexican Americans and federal assistance, and Washington, which has a very small black population, the greater the proportion of blacks living in the school district, the more Title I funds received. However, as I noted earlier, the distribution of discretionary federal funds and state aid tends to be either neutral or, as is the case in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas, distributed in favor of districts other than those with high proportions of blacks. When the distribution of Title I funds within metropolitan areas in the five states was examined, the central cities did almost uniformly well in relation to their surrounding communities. Title I clearly responded to the school finance problems of central cities and poor rural school districts. In answer to the question, "What if there had been no Title I?" It is clear to me that those districts with the most severe fiscal problems over the last ten years would be in far worse shape today without Title I, in spite of its many shortcomings. The pupils served by Title I projects would have been the real losers if there had been no additional funds or if these funds were spread across all pupils rather than focused specifically on them. 2. THE MAGNITUDE OF TITLE I A common belief is that the annual expenditure of $1.5 billion in Title I funds has placed a massive amount of additional resources into local school districts for the education of disadvantaged pupils. With very few exceptions this is certainly not the case. Table 1 illustrates what is in all probability the case in most states. The amount of Title I funds per Title I pupil has been added to the average per pupil revenues from all local, state, and federal non-Title I sources for a few randomly selected districts in four states. The key item in the table is found in column 3, the percent additional revenues that we estimate to be available to Title I pupils. The typical district in this table has about 25 percent more revenues available for Title I pupils than for regular pupils in the district, but some striking surprises emerge. New York City, for example, has only 18 percent additional from Title I and Boston only 15 percent. Some districts have considerably more. Of course, comparable Title I per pupil figures will have more of an impact in districts with low revenue per pupil than in those with high revenue. Nevertheless, these figures cannot be said to indicate that massive amounts of compensatory aid are being allocated to disadvantaged pupils in the typical high need school districts. I might add that our method of estimating the amount of additional revenues available assumes that (1) Title I pupils have at least the district's average revenue figure from all sources made available for their education and (2) that Title I funds only benefit Title I pupils and that there is no "spillover" to non-Title I pupils. Since in reality there are real world problems with both assumptions, the figures in the table probably overstate the funds actually available. How does this additional 25 percent spent on Title I pupils compare with known indexes for other categories of pupils? In New York and many other states, secondary school students (grades 7-12) are weighted 25 percent more than elementary pupils for purposes of determining state aid. In fact, the typical junior or senior high school spends somewhere between 20 and 40 percent more per pupil than the elementary schools in the same district. We might contrast these figures with the Fleischmann Commission's recommendation that an additional 50 percent be spent on each disadvantaged pupil, or the National Educational Finance Project's recommendation for an additional 83 percent. The resources available to the typical disadvantaged pupil would appear to be far short of either recommendation. |