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As new data reveals inequities, few school districts take steps to give poor students more

Second of two parts.

Nationwide, few school districts have made changes to deal with the inequities laid bare by new data on per-school spending that a federal law required them to release this year. But Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland, is well on its way - and it's paying close attention to how spending is tied to student outcomes.

For many who advocated for this financial reporting requirement in the first place, making the connection between resources and results is the whole point of teasing out per-student spending by school.

A Hechinger Report analysis found 53 districts across the United States that spent a statistically significant amount less state and local money on high-poverty schools than on lower-poverty schools.

Elgin Area School District U-46 and West Aurora School District 129 both fall into that category.

The analysis found another 263 districts where spending on each school had little to no connection to the number of students in poverty. Hechinger examined state and local spending by school in nearly 700 districts (those with 15 or more schools) from 40 states that made the data available.

"The end goal is taking this opportunity to leverage our dollars to get the greatest outcome for our students," said Marguerite Roza, the economist at Georgetown University.

Montgomery County Public Schools hired an educational consulting firm to do a financial audit in advance of the federal reporting deadline. The firm found the district spends more on its higher-poverty schools, but it also identified inequities: Overall, Montgomery County's high-poverty schools perform worse, and Black and Latino students from low-income homes perform particularly poorly. In exploring what might contribute to these results, the district found, among other things, that it concentrates its novice teachers and principals in higher-needs schools.

https://tuitiontracker.org/interactives/spending-disparity/

Diego Uriburu, executive director of Identity, a nonprofit in Montgomery County that serves Latino youths and families and that has teamed up with the NAACP of Montgomery County to lead the newly formed Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence, said the findings were not necessarily surprising, but that it was striking to see the data so clearly.

"We as Black and Brown folks have always felt it was hard for us to prove our points because we could only speak about our experience and anecdotes, but then suddenly there was the data that was clearly saying what we have been experiencing," he said.

Jack Smith, the superintendent, came to the district with the explicit goal of improving educational equity. He knew Montgomery County had a long history of high performance for most students, but not all of them. The work he has overseen to root out inequities has caused some angst among families for whom the status quo was working well.

"There's a belief somehow, always, that if someone gets something, I must be losing something," Smith said.

He has worked to dispel that notion and win more support for the idea that improving performance for all students is in the best interests of the entire community.

Budgetary uncertainty thanks to the coronavirus pandemic will leave Montgomery County Public Schools with fewer resources to do things like create new incentives to get more experienced teachers into high-needs schools. But Smith said there's no reason to "sit on our hands and do nothing."

"We're not in a position to do a major incentive program across all 135 elementary schools, but we can start," he said.

In some districts that have tried to shift their spending, keeping up the momentum can be difficult. Rochester, New York, offers a lesson in how hard it can be not only to make major changes but to make them permanent. Jean-Claude Brizard took over as superintendent of the Rochester City Schools in 2008. (He is now a senior adviser and deputy director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Soon after he started, he hired a consulting firm to follow the dollars in his district and identify inequities, which, it turns out, were striking.

"We saw schools of similar size, similar demographics, but one school got 50 percent more per pupil," Brizard said.

The budgeting system in Rochester until that point was one in which well-connected principals could advocate for more money for their schools. Brizard wanted to change that. He started out by sharing the data internally and then held community meetings where he aimed to spur enough demand for change that the district would be able to justify going against the wishes of the small but vocal populations that had gotten more than their fair share of district spending.

Brizard orchestrated a three-year transition to a student-based funding formula that clearly laid out how much money schools would get for students with different needs. But when Brizard left the district in 2011, just after the new funding formula was fully in place, he said a group of affluent, mostly white parents succeeded in lobbying the school board to dismantle the new system.

"The board is often elected by a handful of people, and they will respond to that pressure," Brizard said. His current work focuses on coalition-building across communities, which he says can help overcome pushback. "When you have a community that is galvanized around these equity issues, it brings the stakes beyond a single protagonist."

In some cases funding decisions have been taken out of the hands of school districts.

A lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Southern California forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to revise its methods of allocating spending among schools. California distributes $61 billion through its Local Control Funding Formula, a portion of which is set aside for foster youths, English learners and students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The ACLU argued the money wasn't being directed to the right students, and LAUSD settled, giving $151 million to a group of schools that had been shortchanged and revising its spending patterns moving forward.

While the equity battles in Montgomery County, Rochester and Los Angeles have all played out differently, they share one common thread: clear data. In Montgomery County and Rochester, district leaders produced their own analyses and shared the data with the public. In California, outside researchers tracked the state dollars to the school level and gave advocacy groups a smoking gun.

U-46 instituted a flurry of equity-minded initiatives last school year, but according to the latest state data, released Friday, the district still spends fewer state and local dollars on its higher-poverty schools.

"With this second year of data in mind, we will work to be more deliberate about addressing school funding decisions as we develop our Fiscal Year 2022 budget," Superintendent Tony Sanders said in a written statement.

In West Aurora District 129, the funding disparities have gone largely unremarked upon. Angie Smith, assistant superintendent for operations, said there are no plans to redistribute funds because district leaders believe the spending differences are justified. She pointed to some schools' transportation costs, more expensive staffing in smaller schools and the costs of specialized programs as reasons for the district's spending patterns.

But in Montgomery County, Uriburu believes this latest push for equity might truly result in long-term changes for the district and its students. District administrators are committed, as is the school board, and even the county government has embarked on an equity mission for the broader community. And, of course, there is the coalition. Uriburu said this is the first time the Black and Latino communities have teamed up to advocate for better schools, and they are very clear about their right to make demands.

"By bringing the Black and Brown communities together, we make up 54 percent of the student body of Montgomery County Public Schools," Uriburu said. "It's a different ballgame."

• This story about school funding disparities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletter at hechingerreport.org.

Even within the same district, some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

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