Education: Why Equal Funding Matters

It is an age old debate in this country: how to improve the state of education for our children. Year after year, test scores decline and pundits wonder what the problem is. While it is unlikely to be a nationwide consensus anytime soon, one of the important factors cannot be denied. Schools need money to operate, to bring in quality teachers, and to provide the right equipment and accessories for students to learn. Without the proper funding, schools flounder and the students are punished by factors outside of their control. While the power for parents to choose where their children go to school is something many politicians and parents would like to see, this cannot happen while shorting access and money to those schools that are disadvantages due to their location or other factors.

What many refuse to see is that there still exists a certain type of segregation in today’s public school system. Not forced by any means, this segregation is entirely due to zoning practices. Because of this zoning, the poor children wind up in one school while the better off children are sent to another one. The well off children do better in school due to a host of factors, and their school is rewarded with more money because of it. This increases the initial inequality and the education system breaks a little bit every time this happens. Through parental choice and equal funding, these inequalities and the segregation that leads to them can begin to be repaired.

In most districts, the allocation of funds is largely left up to the school board and the local government. Federal funds may be allocated in equal shares, or at least according to population, but these funds are not doled out in the same manner. Some have blamed this gap on problems with the Title I amendment. This amendment was put into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 with the intention of doing just the opposite: using funds in such a way that comparable schools received the same money. Unfortunately, since education dollars are often spent according to staff percentages rather than on the basis of real money, inequalities continue to occur. The lower income schools may have more teachers, for instance, but receive less money because these teachers are less experienced and less educated.

Solving the education problems in this country isn’t something that can be done with any one broad brush stroke. The issues are complicated and there is a great deal of political equity tied up in both good programs and bad. The first issue, however, that should be addressed is that of equal funding. With that starting point, real change can begin to occur.