Still trying to get equity right

An important provision of the original ESEA legislation is getting renewed attention under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

For months, three words have been front and center in the discussions about how to regulate the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): supplement not supplant. Sounds simple enough, but Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in an ongoing tussle over how the U.S. Department of Education should regulate this almost 50-year-old provision of Title I.

At the heart of the debate over supplement not supplant are USDOE’s proposed regulations for the provision. The first draft of the regulations (issued earlier this year) did not go over well with Senate Republicans, and a negotiated rule-making process also failed to achieve consensus. On Aug. 31, USDOE issued its kinder, gentler version of the regulations, but, alas, there was still trouble in paradise. Senate Republicans, including HELP Committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn), expressed disdain for the new rules by referring to them as “illegal” and encouraging school districts to sue the federal government.

To fully understand why negotiations about supplement not supplant have become so complicated, one must first look to the history of Title I itself. President Lyndon John son viewed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 as an essential part of his legislative War on Poverty, and the law’s Title I program specifically targeted the most economically disadvantaged students — those adversely affected by both poorly funded school systems and the crippling effects of concentrated poverty.

Several years after ESEA became law, however, some troubling behavior among states was revealed. In some cases, states were using federal funds to supplant state and local funding. Basically, this meant states were substituting federal funds for state and local funding instead of providing all three to disadvantaged districts.

This practice stood in stark contrast to the law’s original intent to level the playing field by providing additional funding to economically disadvantaged school districts. To remedy this situation, Congress added a provision to ESEA in 1970 to ensure that state and local leaders used federal dollars to supplement state and local funding, not take the place of it. Hence the supplement-not-supplant provision was born.

Now USDOE is using ESSA as an opportunity to strengthen the supplement not-supplant provision. Their main concern is that even with supplement not supplant, about 5,750 Title I schools (their estimate) are receiving “substantially less state and local funding than their non Title I peers within the same school district,” according to a USDOE fact sheet about the provision.

To address this shortfall, the newly proposed regulations include a “statutory directive around how districts must demonstrate compliance with supplement not supplant,” according to the fact sheet. Citing the law’s requirement that districts use a methodology to allocate state and local funds to each Title I school (to ensure those schools receive all the state and local funding they would get even without additional federal support), USDOE offers districts four ways they can demonstrate compliance:

A weighted student formula that provides additional resources for students with characteristics associated with educational disadvantage (for example, poverty, disabilities);
A formula that allocates resources including staffing positions and nonpersonnel resources directly to schools and that ensures each Title I school gets all of the funding to which it is entitled;
An alternative funds-based test developed by the state and approved by expert peer reviewers; or
A methodology selected by the district that ensures per-pupil funding in each Title I school is at least as much as the average per pupil funding in non-Title I schools in the district.

This requirement has undone Sen. Alexander and others in Congress. They feel these regulations are yet another case of federal overstep and do not honor ESSAs original intent to give states more flexibility in how they use Title I funds. Keep in mind that district leaders used to be required to do far less to comply with the supplement not-supplant provision. Basically, district leaders had to detail how they were using Title I funds to support the kind of educational extras that wealthier school districts could afford without the help of the federal government.

The U.S. Department of Education is using ESSA as an opportunity to strengthen the supplement-not-supplant provision.

In a strange twist of politics, the American Federation of Teachers has joined Alexander in his criticism of USDOE expectations regarding supplement not supplant. Although most people would consider Senate Republicans and the AFT as more “frenemies” than allies, the two groups actually worked closely together on ESSA, and in this instance they stand united as well. For AFT, the concern is that USDOE’s proposed regulations could force schools to make staffing decisions in order to comply. AFT said in a press release that schools should “have the latitude to make staffing decisions based on their own needs.”

The debate of supplement not supplant echoes a familiar theme in American education: How committed are we as a nation to the public in public education? When President Johnson began pushing for ESEA (the Johnson administration, not Congress, wrote the legislative bill for ESEA), he did so to foment the notion that the federal government should play a key role in ensuring that all children have access to an equitable education. At that time in American history — the height of the Civil Rights Movement — a commitment to equity for all students was not widely shared. The question today is whether that level of commitment has changed much in the 50 years since ESEA’s initial passage.

There are many ways to approach that complex and uncomfortable question. If you wanted to answer that question visually, National Public Radio’s School Money project developed a visual mapping tool that shows spending dollars for education per student, by district for the entire country: www.npr.org/series/ 473636949/schoolmoney. The brightly colored map belies the stark differences in education funding in America. Although the national average is just under $12,000 per student, the variations that make up that average are sobering. Relying solely on local business and property taxes pits those communities with a weaker tax base against economic powerhouses that can afford to fund schools at much higher levels.

You can also factor in what Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon calls the “income gap.” Putting aside the actual funding dollars that support public schools, there are also increasingly large gaps in family income levels. Reardon’s work quantifies the educational effect of income gaps between wealthy and poor communities. Not surprisingly, students from wealthier communities have access to a wide range of sup ports and resources that most poor students can’t afford. A classic example is SAT prep classes. A 10-week SAT prep course in my area costs north of $1,000, with private tutoring available for an additional cost. A local community college offers residents a six week class (on a first come, first served basis) for $355. Despite the College Board’s very laudable efforts to make high-quality test prep free and accessible to all students, wealthier students will always have the upper hand when it comes to extra academic help, not just to sports, music, and artistic activities.

At the very heart of the provision to supplement not supplant, is a desire to mitigate these and other gaps in school funding. However, Education Secretary John King was correct when he said, “no single measure will erase generations of resource in equities …” Supplementing a highly inequitable system with a relatively small amount of federal funding is one small step in a much longer journey. Even with supplemental funds, schools within communities of concentrated poverty remain highly disadvantaged. Fifty years after President Johnson fired the first salvo in his War on Poverty, the fight continues.

Citation: Ferguson, M. (2018). Washington view: Still trying to get equity right. Phi Delta Kappan 98 (3), 74-75.