It’s no secret that the most disadvantaged children in the United States grow up in a world with the deck stacked steeply against them. With the exception of perhaps health care, nowhere is this more true and more painful for low-income and minority children than in our schools, and a recently released Education Trust report highlights the ways in which policy makers at every single level of government--district, state, and federal--facilitate educational inequality by failing to provide equal* school resources to these children.

Put another way, the study finds that the funding formulas and systems currently used in the vast majority of school districts and states and at the federal level do more than fail to ensure all children with equal educational opportunities, they actually exacerbate the existing inequalities by channeling disproportionate resources to schools serving wealthy student populations.

Here’s how. At the federal level, Title I expenditures, the main federal source of support for low-income students, are given to states based on a matching formula that gives more funding to states that spend greater amounts on low-income students. While the intent of the law is sound--the feds want to reward states who commit more resources to education as opposed to less--the effect is that the low-income students who happen to live in the highest-poverty states get the shortest end of the stick. For example, UC Berkeley Professor of Law Goodwin Liu notes that Maryland has fewer poor children than Arkansas yet it receives 51% more aid from Title I per poor child than Arkansas… even though Arkansas devotes a higher percentage of its resources to education than Maryland! The reason for this is that Title I only matches absolute spending levels made by states, not proportional ones, so that wealthy states like Connecticut and Massachusetts automatically get a leg up even though there are higher concentrations of children in poverty in other states.

The federal inequities are worsened at the state level, where despite the torch-bearing examples of Kentucky and Massachusetts, which utilize formulas that provide more money to low-income school districts, the majority of states provide fewer resources to high-poverty and high-minority districts than they provide to low poverty and low minority districts. Ross Wiener and Eli Pristoop of the Ed Trust show that, on average, school districts with the highest minority and poverty concentrations get between $800 and $900 less per student than their more advantaged counterparts. Over a child’s educational career, that’s $10,000 worth of resources that poor children do not receive access to… and in a school of twelve hundred kids that’s over a million dollars a year less that the school gets to use on teacher salaries, instructional materials, and facilities.

Finally, as if the double whammy of state and federal inequality building were not enough, multi-school school districts often channel disproportionate resources to schools with the least minorities and low-income children. The principle cause for this disparity is in teacher salaries, since districts assign individual schools a certain number of teaching positions instead of a fair, sum total that each school is allowed to spend on salaries based on the number and type of students who attend it. Because more experienced teachers frequently seek out positions in the higher achieving (and often more advantaged) schools, the net result is that low-income children usually have access to the least qualified and least proven teachers… a sacrifice that they are asked to make so that their wealthier neighbors can pay their teachers disproportionately higher salaries.

* It’s bad enough that funding gaps exist that have poor and minority children receiving fewer school resources than the average children; but this frame of analysis doesn’t do justice to the problem: the truth of the matter is, we need to be providing children born into disadvantaged circumstances with greater-than-average resources if we want to ensure that they have a fair opportunity to realize the American dream through hard work and determination. In other words, proposals like the Weighted Student Funding model which has drawn much attention in the past year are what we need to be talking about—and I’ll provide an overview of this controversial, yet critical proposal in a future entry. But the point of this particular entry is simple. Even though reformers who throw around the “money doesn’t matter argument” have legitimate reasons for concluding so, they have no defense against a more pressing point about our nation’s values and whether we actually care about all of our children. The point is articulated best, perhaps, in Scripture, Matthew 6:21, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The Ed Trust report is still more evidence that our heart is anywhere but with the poor boys and girls struggling to learn in their schools, who will be asked to lead us in the 21st century.