The All Children are Equal (ACE) Act which addresses inequities in the formula for distributing Title I funds to public schools, will likely be considered as an amendment to a bill that will be before the committee sometime during the week of January 23.
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Democratic Congressman Tim Bishop of New York’s 1st congressional district has added his name to the list of co-sponsors of the All Children are Equal (ACE) Act (H.B. 2485).
ACE would change the way federal funds for the education of disadvantaged children are distributed to public schools by reforming a part of the formula that discriminates against small and moderate sized, high-poverty schools.
Under ACE, a weighting system that was intended to target more money per disadvantaged student to districts with the highest concentrations of such students would be reformed. The current weighting system favors very large districts no matter how low their poverty rate, diverting it from all other districts no matter how high their poverty rate. If ACE is adopted, the weighting system would be based on the poverty rate in a school district, with higher poverty districts getting larger amounts per disadvantaged student.
Rep. Bishop becomes the seventeenth co-sponsor of ACE, which enjoys bi-partisan sponsorship, a rarity in this Congress. He is a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee which will likely consider ACE soon after Congress reconvenes in January. Eight of the 17 co-sponsors are members of the committee. Ten are Republicans and seven are Democrats.
Lead sponsor is Republican Congressman Glenn “GT” Thompson of Pennsylvania’s 5th congressional district.
Thompson’s Title I Monitor, the most widely read and respected newsletter covering issues involving the federal education program for disadvantaged students, has featured the Formula Fairness Campaign in a special report. Normally available only by subscription, this special report was posted on Thompson’s open-site Blog because the firm anticipated
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Congressman Phil Roe (R-TN), representing Tennessee’s First Congressional District, is the latest Member of Congress to add his name as co-sponsor of the All Children are Equal (ACE) Act (H.R. 2485).
ACE addresses the unfair discrimination against small rural and urban school districts that is part of the formula for
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| Background: The formula for distributing federal funds to school districts to help meet the educational needs of disadvantaged students contains a weighting system that artificially inflates the disadvantaged student count in districts with high percentages (“percentage weighting”) or large numbers (“number weighting”) of eligible students.
But the number weighting system, as designed, is so mathematically more powerful than the percentage weighting system that it takes money from nearly all small and moderate sized districts no matter how high their student poverty rate and send it to the very largest districts, no matter how low their poverty rate. The Formula Fairness Campaign aims to reform this weighting system. |
Here is the latest bombshell regarding the Title I formula. It turns out that the “number weighting” system that the Formula Fairness Campaign seeks to end actually discriminates against
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The latest co-sponsor of the Formula Fairness Campaign (FFC) is the Montana Rural Education Association (MREA). This brings the co-sponsor list to 27 organizations. You can see the entire list by clicking here.
FFC is a national campaign to end discrimination against rural and small districts, including small urban districts, in the federal formula for distributing funds under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
MREA membership consists of rural and small school districts throughout Montana. It has an active policy advocacy program that emphasizes equal access to a quality education, equitable funding systems that recognize the higher costs of educating children in rural areas, and local control of schools. It opposes forced consolidation of school districts.
Welcome Montana Rural Education Association!
Thompson Publishing Group, a large publisher of educational handbooks, periodicals, and technical manuals including the encyclopedic two-volume Title I Handbook, ran a story in one of its email alerts to subscribers that got my attention last week. Chuck Edwards, the Executive Editor of the Title I Handbook mailed an alert (and also posted the same message on their blog) quoting a senior education staffer of the House Education and the Workforce Committee predicting there would be a Title I formula fight during re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
That’s not what caught my eye, as anyone anywhere near the re-authorization process would hardly find that news.
I was not even surprised to read that “The groundwork has already been laid. The Rural School and Community Trust, with the endorsement of the American Association of School Administrators, has initiated a “formula fairness campaign” claiming that children in some rural areas and smaller cities with high poverty are underfunded relative to their counterparts in the largest metropolitan areas.”
Clearly, we’ve been urging formula reform and getting more and more people to agree to the need for it, especially around the number weighting issue. That doesn’t mean we want a formula fight, to be sure, but as a practical matter even reasonable reforms don’t get a fight-free ride when someone’s advantage has to give way to someone else’s need for fairness.
What caught my eye first was
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Three new co-sponsors have signed on to the All Children are Equal Act (HR 2485).
They are:
This brings the
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The All Children are Equal (ACE) Act was introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives by 11 original co-sponsors lead by Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA).
HR 2485 addresses the inequities in the formula for distributing Title I funds by lowering the weights used in the number weighting brackets to inflate the student count in larger districts. Under current law, a district with at least 6,900 Title I students gains funding no matter how low the rate of student poverty. Large suburban districts with low poverty rates
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A bill to fix the problem of number weighting in the Title I formula will be introduced soon in the
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