Jackson Free Press

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., increasingly seems like a holdover from another, kinder era of national politics. Cochran has largely removed himself from the hyper-partisanship of recent years.

Witness his recent support for a bipartisan bill that would fix a loophole in federal education funding for poor students.

Cochran is co-sponsor, with Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., of the ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act. The ESEA, or Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is the massive bill that funds and sets education policy for the nation. It is due for re-authorization this year.

"This legislation seeks to ensure that school districts receiving Title I funds provide their high-poverty schools with a fair share of state and local resources by closing loopholes in the requirement language," Cochran said in a March 31 statement.

"By requiring a more accurate picture of state and local investments in schools, federal funding can be better directed to the children most in need of those resources."

Under former President George W. Bush, ESEA was known as "No Child Left Behind."

The bill's largest program, Title I, provides schools with additional money to educate students in poverty. Bennet and Cochran's bill would close the "comparability loophole" in Title I, which national experts say could provide hundreds of thousands of additional dollars to low-income schools in Mississippi and other states.

The problem comes in the "comparability" stipulation of Title I, which says that school districts must provide all schools with equal state and local funds, before applying any federal money. This makes sense, of course. If, as the principle of Title I suggests, it costs more to educate a low-income student than one from a privileged background, the school that educates him or her should receive more money--on top of the local resources already available to middle-of-the-road school.

What education-policy wonks call a "loophole" is the relatively weak requirements that Title I places on school districts. Title I allows districts to report the state and local contribution to each school's budget without getting into the specifics of how much they give each school for teacher salaries, supplies and other needs.

As a result, districts often provide general estimates of teacher salaries and do not take into account differences in teacher salaries at individual schools. That ambiguity can be dangerous, according to Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at the Center for American Progress, which advocates closing the loophole.

"What schools aren't reporting is their actual, total budget for a school using actual teachers'--and other people's--salaries," Brown said. "They basically say, 'We reach comparability because we have the same number of teachers per kid.'"

In its comparability requirements, the Mississippi Department of Education only asks school districts to show that they have roughly equivalent student-to-teacher ratios at each school. This method can mask differences in the teachers that typically staff wealthier and poorer schools.

The same low-income schools that receive Title I funds also tend to have a less-experienced crop of teachers. Since teacher pay in Mississippi (and in most of the country) is tied to years of experience, teachers at low-income schools tend to make less money. And that, of course, means that districts often spend less on teacher salaries at low-income schools.

Marcus Cheeks, state Title I director for the MDE, said that only a small percentage of Mississippi's 152 school districts would be susceptible to the loophole because they have a mix of Title I-eligible and ineligible schools.

"There are only about 2 percent of the school districts across the state that would have a direct comparison between title and non-title schools," Cheeks said. "Every school district in this state is receiving Title I funding."

For the past two years, school districts have had to provide more detailed accounts of how they allocate local and state dollars as a condition of receiving extra federal funds under the 2009 economic-stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Brown is optimistic that Cochran and Bennet's bill will pass and close the loophole permanently.

The education-policy world is divided on the loophole, however. While the National Education Association, one of the country's two major teachers unions, supports legislation to close the loophole, the other, the American Federation of Teachers, does not. The Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of urban schools, also opposes the reform.

Some urban school systems do not want to address the loophole for fear of exacerbating divisions between high-income and low-income schools within single districts, Brown says.

"The comparability loophole, I think we have a shot at (closing it)," Brown said. "It's really helpful that Sen. Cochran's on it, because this shouldn't be a partisan issue."

Previous Comments

ID

163353

Comment

To not provide education to all the students in the state is bad for Mississippi. You can't survive by keeping the prison system full and having a large teen pregnancy rate. Opportunity to excel is the best medicine for the state. Pick up the poor and increase the revenue for the state. It's a win win.

Author

DeGuyz

Date

2011-05-04T11:14:26-06:00

ID

163368

Comment

DeGuyz makes some great points. The opportunity to excel is the best medicine, but eventually those given the opportunities have to seize them. You can't help those that won't help themselves. For example, Derrick Johnson withholding support of charters schools under the guise of racism, doesn't help those with the academic skill-set to excel but without the environment with which to culture those skills are unfortunately being held back from reaching their potential. Simply throwing more money at underperforming school districts, isn't the sole remedy, in my opinion.

Author

RobbieR

Date

2011-05-05T10:15:58-06:00