In Part 1 we looked at the history of the Department of Education and its critical role as a funder, collector, and disseminator of education research. In Part 2, we looked at what the DOE actually funds and what the impact of that funding is. Today, we are looking at what might be the most vulnerable part of the DOE should it actually be disbanded.
The Title I program is firmly in the crosshairs of those who are also seeking to eliminate the DOE. Some are calling for the elimination of Title I funding over the next 10 years. So let’s look what what Title I is and what might happen if it were eliminated.
A Tiny Bit of History
The Title I program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) was created to assist high-poverty schools in providing supplementary services to low-achieving students. The federal government allocated funding that was to be distributed to schools for the purpose of helping ‘neglected and delinquent’ students succeed in school. At its inception, aid was targeted toward specific, individual students. In 1978, the schoolwide program was created to expand the flexibility of ESEA, allowing schools to use the Title I funds towards whole-school approaches that were aimed at improving the achievement of low-achieving students. The Title I program was moved to the Department of Education when it was created in 1979 and continues to be administered by that agency. Title I has the lofty goals of: “provid[ing] all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and [closing] educational achievement gaps by allocating federal funds for education programs and services.” It grants funds to help fulfil that mission and close the achievement and opportunity gaps that exist between schools because of student poverty.
Title I funding supports important services such as mental health and substance abuse programs, two areas that have exploded among teens since the pandemic and go largely unaddressed in impoverished areas. Another major use of Title I funding is to pay additional teachers and support staff such as classroom associates or reading interventionists, which has a direct effect on student learning, as recent problems with finding qualified staff have demonstrated. Title I also provides funding for staff professional development and technology resources that help high poverty schools compete with their wealthier counterparts. Funding can be used in a multitude of ways to meet the increased needs of economically disadvantaged students.
An Imperfect Program
Title I is a big and ambitious program that suffers from the kinds of problems that are endemic to bureaucracies overseen by politicians and administered across massive geographical areas. Some of these problems are not entirely the fault of the program itself. Title I is a grant program that awards about $18 billion to schools each year but its biggest problem is a lack of funding — something it can’t control because funding levels are subject to the whims of Congress. Although the aggregate spending on Title I is big, the actual per-pupil spending is only about $600 or so — about 5% more than would have been spent without it.* This is because 25 million students participate in Title I each year — more than half of all K-12 students in the U.S. The budget is spread far too thinly for real impact. To understand this better, consider this: according to Credit Karma, about a quarter of parents who provide summer programs and specialized camps for their children expect to pay more than $1,000 each month, for each child. Title I funding, which apportions about $600 over 9 months, can’t compete with that for impact, especially if it’s not spent directly on the struggling child. Even simple tutoring, which runs around $40/hour (on average, but varies widely) and which research says should occur 3 times per week for real impact, exhausts that $600 funding in a matter of just 5 weeks. The current administration pledged to triple Title I funding. That would have increased per-pupil spending to about $1800, which is closer to the cost of concerted cultivation experiences wealthier parents provide. The 2024 Title I budget got a slight increase over 2023 levels, but nothing approaching the tripling that was promised. In July of this year, House Republicans proposed a 25% cut in Title I funds.
image via commonwealthfund.org
Most schools that opt into Title I do so as schoolwide programs where the funds are used for the benefit of the entire school rather than targeted for specific students. This makes some sense, because students in poverty often tend to be clustered in neighborhood schools where virtually everyone is economically disadvantaged. Programs that address the entire school have the potential to improve learning or other issues blocking learning, for many more students, However — and this is important to note — schoolwide programs may lack the focus necessary to effect meaningful change. Schoolwide programs have a lot more leeway in how funds are used. While this means there’s a lot of flexibility to use funds in the ways that best meet the specific needs of students, it also means that sometimes those in charge of spending don’t always do the best job. This isn’t malicious, but rather a product of systemic factors, like not having a district vision and expectations for instruction and learning, not having a high-quality curriculum that specifies what kids should know or be able to do with their learning, not understanding what teachers really need to build capacity, not aligning curriculum to specific mastery targets, and so on.* Understanding the end goal is critical in figuring out what kids and teachers need to get there.
A Disaster in the Making
On this map, the darker the state, the more Title I funding it depends on. Some of the most conservative states rely the heaviest on Title I money.
House Republicans initially proposed to cut 2024 Title I funding by 80%, a move that would have eliminated most of the services such funding provides. While this might seem like political posturing ahead of more serious negotiation, it really comprises a pattern of behavior leading up to the much more serious proposal to eliminate Title I funding over the next 10 years. But imperfect as it is, the complete elimination of Title I would be a disaster. Important services like mental health assistance and substance abuse help notwithstanding, many teachers and classroom associates are paid with Title I funds. The elimination of those monies would have a profound negative impact on teaching jobs across the U.S., effectively cutting nearly 6% of the current workforce. Losses by state would range from just under 3% of all teaching jobs in Connecticut to more than 12% in Louisiana. These losses would be greater in the most vulnerable schools — those with the highest proportions of economically disadvantaged students and states with the lowest rates of pay or the harshest working conditions would see the highest rates of attrition. This is not just confined to urban schools: high poverty rural schools would also suffer, lacking the tax base to pay for experienced, certified staff. The loss of teaching jobs has a direct effect on students by increasing class sizes, classroom over-crowding, and classroom management problems. In an era of teacher shortages, the disastrous effect the loss of 182,000+ teaching jobs would have on students across the country cannot be overstated.
There’s also this: the Brookings Institute notes that conservative states are among the lowest spenders on education. Yet, as the map above shows, many of the most conservative states rely the most on Title I money. Removing the Title I program would take the most vulnerable students in the country — the kids whose chances of achieving in school are already reduced by external circumstances — and depress those chances even further by removing even the small amount of monies Title I provides. This is not a stretch to imagine; several of the states in question have declined Summer EBT*** and Medicaid^^ expansion money from the federal government, denying access to both food and medical care to their poorest citizens.
The Right Path?
Title I isn’t perfect. There’s quite a bit of room for overhaul in how it’s administered. In light of what wealthy parents spend monthly on enrichment experiences for their children and what those who can afford it are willing to spend monthly on tutoring (hard to pin down but the cost ranges from a minimum of $150/month to upwards of $320/month), it’s unfathomable that the impetus is to just cut Title I altogether. Those figures highlight the most obvious course of action: to increase funding to levels that are in line with amounts that can have impact. If the per-pupil expenditure were commensurate with monthly tutoring costs, or better still, with enrichment and high-interest program costs, those investments could pay big dividends in kids’ learning.^^^ There may be a number of things wrong with Title I, but the most egregious one is a failure to fund it at meaningful levels. It’s the paucity of funding that makes the schoolwide programs (rather than the student-targeted programs) more attractive: the per pupil dollars can do more when they’re combined.
This kicker, I think, is this: while Title I serves 25 million kids, it doesn’t serve all the kids in poverty. The money goes only toward school age children so it doesn’t cover preschool age kids at all. Sixty-three percent (63%) of schools are eligible for Title I funds, but only 42% actually accept them, so those kids don’t get the benefit of that money either. This makes the funding look even less adequate — we’re not covering all the kids who qualify, and we still don’t have enough to make a real impact.
For politicians to condemn it as ineffective is the ultimate irony and underscores the deep injustice inherent in blaming an underfunded program for failing to have a larger effect on outcomes. Until we do more to address child poverty in the U.S. outside of school, there’s a far better case to be made for some judicious revisions to Title I (including a major increase in funding) than for its blanket elimination.
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*$600 is an average; some students get more and others less. EdWeek has a good breakdown of how funding is calculated — it’s somewhat byzantine and doesn’t actually look at schools per se. Distribution of grants is also dependent on state and district size, but not in a particularly logical way. This is further complicated by federally mandated minimum funding that requires each state to get a minimum amount of the total funding pool for Title I, even if the funding needed to help disadvantaged students in the state doesn’t meet that minimum. A state that doesn’t have enough students to meet the minimum funding level, like North Dakota, gets bumped up to that level, resulting in more money per student than other states.
**For example, Brookings Institute reported that many principals use Title I funds for teacher professional development but (and this is my observation, not theirs) if that development isn’t in service of specific student learning needs its effectiveness (and therefore the impact of the funding) is negligible or non-existent. Spending on classroom associates, however, does have immediate and measurable impact on learning by improving classroom management and providing small group and individual tutoring.
***Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming
^^Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming
^^^I, for one, would like to see greater investment in high-impact tutoring to help get kids up to grade level in reading and math. Since this requires at least 30 minutes, 2-3 days per week for very small groups of kids, it requires more financial support, which would be possible with increased Title I money.