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The Hechinger Report… Race and Equity
“Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding
A child who shows promise struggles to make it in middle school as
state and national leaders debate if the country is doing enough to
educate vulnerable students.
By Nichole Dobo
December 19, 2019
WILMINGTON, Del. — Taheem Fennell, 12, loves to ride his bike. He
taught himself when he was 4 years old while visiting older cousins in
Pennsylvania. He remembers running and jumping on, feeling his feet
going around and testing the brakes.
“I never rode a bike with training wheels,” he says.
Taheem wants to ride his bike to the park more, but his mother worries
about him venturing too far from the one-bedroom apartment in the
Quaker Hill neighborhood that they share with his stepfather and four
siblings, and sometimes other relatives. Earlier this year, Taheem
witnessed a shooting as he was walking to school. And in the summer of
2017, Taheem’s 16-year-old sister, Naveha Gibbs, was shot and killed in
a city a 20-minute drive to the north. She was with a 26-year-old man
thought to be in a gang.
So Taheem spends much of his free time inside, reading. His favorite
books are in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, about a kid who’s
starting middle school. Novels help him focus his mind on something
positive, his mother, Charmaine Jones, says.
He started fifth grade about a month after his sister was killed. He
clutched the program from her funeral in class. He had angry outbursts.
The staff at Bancroft Elementary School suggested counseling, and his
mother eagerly accepted the help. Taheem learned coping strategies from
a family crisis therapist at the school, whom he came to trust and rely
on. She taught him how to help himself when he’s feeling overwhelmed
with sadness or rage.
Despite all his struggles emotionally, he remained on track
academically. He marched in an elementary school graduation ceremony in
June 2018, sporting a blue polyester robe while his mom and stepdad
clapped and took pictures. He flashed a big smile, with round cheeks.
After it was over everyone herded into the gym, where he helped his mom
with his 1-year-old brother’s stroller. School staff passed out cake
with fluffy white icing.
But after Taheem began sixth grade at Bayard Middle School this year, everything began to fall apart.
In a neighborhood dotted with tidy brick row homes, Bayard Middle
School rises like a drab brick fortress, virtually windowless. A
chain-link fence frames an American flag on the roof above the concrete
entrance. The nearly 50-year-old school spans three city blocks on
South DuPont Street, a thoroughfare named for one of the most
celebrated and wealthy families of this tiny state.
The children at the school are almost entirely black and poor. Many of them, like Taheem, are scarred by violence and loss.
While he was in elementary school, Taheem’s classrooms were clearly
under-resourced, with a constant shortage of pencils and classroom
floors so damaged that wood slabs were gouged out. But they had a
librarian, and Taheem eagerly awaited his weekly visits to check out
books. Bayard Middle School, when he arrived there, had a library, but
no librarian, so most of the day it’s a dark, unused room. Chapter
books slouch on unattended shelves. Faded posters peel off the walls.
Occasionally, a glow illuminates a corner of the room where children’s
faces are softly lit by a row of desktop computers. They practice for
standardized tests that reveal Bayard to be the lowest-performing
school in the state.
Various attempts to help the school — including with federal money — have, so far, been unsuccessful.
Educators here say they don’t have the support to do their jobs
correctly. And staffing the school is a chronic problem. “The children
who need the most should get the most,” said Krystal Greenfield, a
longtime Wilmington educator.
Children who attend schools in unsafe communities — even if they
themselves have not been a victim of a crime — score lower on academic
achievement tests than children who live in safer places. Children in
Wilmington are more likely to be shot than children anywhere else in
the country, and the city has the distinction of being one of the most
dangerous in the nation, according to a 2017 analysis by the Associated
Press and The News Journal. Newsweek magazine dubbed the city “Murder
Town USA” in 2014. At the time, the mayor told Newsweek that the local
schools were to blame for the cycle of violence.
When Taheem started the sixth grade, Bayard had one behavioral health
consultant for about 325 students, the vast majority of whom have
experienced trauma, and she was only able to take on a dozen or so
cases at a time. So teachers and administrators served as ad hoc mental
health or social service providers for children in crisis. A boy
arrived at school the morning after his 5-year-old sister was shot. A
girl stopped coming to school later appeared on a “missing child” flyer
that her principal discovered in the mail one morning. And on and on.
A new federal regulation was supposed to force change at schools like
Bayard. Part of the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015, it
requires states – many for the first time this year – to reveal
publicly how much money each school gets per student. The push for
transparency is part of a slow-burning movement to overhaul school
funding formulas and make them more fair. Court cases are also
challenging states to increase spending for schools that serve
low-income students. And presidential candidates are also pitching
solutions. Former Vice President Joe Biden made increasing school
funding central to his new education platform. Bernie Sanders has
proposed tripling Title I funding for low-income schools. Elizabeth
Warren’s plan would limit charter schools in favor of funding for
traditional public schools.
Broadly, it’s known that school districts serving more poor students
and more students of color receive less funding than those serving more
white and affluent students. But the specifics of how those dollars are
meted out have been hidden, making it difficult to know how money is
spent in each school building.
“It’s been a bit of a black box for folks,” said Ary Amerikaner, vice
president for P-12 policy, research and practice at the Education
Trust, an educational nonprofit that focuses on the needs of at-risk
students.
One of the biggest obstacles to fixing inequality in school spending is
figuring out how much schools actually spend. The Every Student
Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015,
required states to reveal publicly how much money each school gets from
local, state and federal sources per student. Historically, public
schools have organized spending by category on the district-wide level
— teachers, benefits, materials, for instance — but there were no
structures in place to calculate how much money is spent in each school
building.
Nationally, schools primarily serving black and brown children receive
$23 billion less than schools primarily serving white students,
according to EdBuild, a nonprofit advocacy group, and now a dozen
states, including Delaware, are facing state-level court challenges to
their methods for allocating money to local schools.
Still, advocates hope these numbers will have some effect as they
trickle out this year and next. Advocates are working in some states to
pressure legislatures to spend more money on poor children, including
in notoriously stingy Mississippi.
The new funding transparency is also giving ammunition to the teacher
protests that have swept the country, bringing additional pressure for
change from within the classroom. Teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago,
Denver, West Virginia and Oakland have walked off the job this year
over teacher compensation, class size and classroom funding.
The Trump administration rolled back some of the ESSA regulations set
by the Obama administration in favor of local control that allows
states to set their own rules for how to deal with schools that have
chronically-low test scores and other matters. Rules that require
school-level spending reports remain in effect. This fall, an official
from DeVos’ department of education complained that states were burying
required spending reports for fear that the public will not be able to
understand the information. But already, states have begun publishing
new data on how much is spent in each local school, and it is sure to
fuel more debate, says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab
at Georgetown University. It will be shocking, even to school
principals, how much money is spent on individual schools, she said.
“It’s often jaw-dropping for them,” Roza said.
The escalating fight over money will play out in a quickly shifting
education landscape, as the will to continue to invest in chronically
failing schools like Bayard has dwindled on the federal level and
school choice advocates like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos push
alternatives to the public system. In Wilmington, enrollment across the
lowest-performing traditional public schools has plummeted, with
students opting for charter schools and private schools.
The year before Taheem headed to Bayard, he sometimes begged his mother
to leave the lights on in the house at night. “They tell us it’s
firecrackers but I know it’s not,” Taheem said. “They just don’t want
us to get worried.”
It had been several months since he’d seen two men shooting at each
other on his walk to elementary school. That morning, Jones was in her
apartment. Taheem and two of his brothers, one 14 and the other 7, had
just left for the school bus stop when she heard the shots outside. Her
heart started racing, then she heard someone pounding on the door. Her
husband was there with the children, telling her to get inside the
house.
Jones doesn’t want her children to go for snacks at the corner store a
few blocks away anymore, or to the park to play without her. After that
gunfight, she called the school district repeatedly, she said, until
they agreed to let the neighborhood children catch the bus on a safer
block.
Months later, she continued to worry. In the summer, when children were
restless and out of school, it was increasingly difficult to contain
them.
“I don’t want to lose another child to gun violence,” she said one
summer afternoon while sitting on her stoop, watching the children play
on the sidewalk nearby. “I try to give them the outside but out here
it’s just too much violence. You can’t let your kids do anything. It’s
just ridiculous, but Taheem just … he wants to be with his friends, and
I understand that, but I’m scared.”
She turned to look at Taheem, who was holding his youngest brother’s
chubby baby hands, helping him walk. “I don’t want you out of my
eyesight because I don’t know what’s going to happen out here.”
Jones was pregnant with her first child at 15 years old, and did not
finish high school. Her daughter Naveha spent most of her childhood in
Philadelphia, where Jones grew up, running around with people Jones now
recognizes were trouble. Naveha ran away from home as a teenager, and
spent time in a group home. Jones moved her family to Wilmington, 30
miles south of Philadelphia, nearly five years ago to escape an abusive
relationship.
Naveha desperately wanted her brother to have a different kind of life,
Jones said. She recalled her daughter saying to him: “I don’t want you
ending up where I’m at. You need to do what mommy tell you to do. You
need to listen in school. School is nothing to play with.”
Jones also wants something better for her youngest kids. At home, she
encourages her children to read by assigning them to write book reports
for her.
As Taheem’s stepfather walked him to his first day at Bayard, he gave
him a similar lecture, about growing up and behaving in school. Taheem
was upbeat. He loved school, except for the homework. He had a new
camouflage backpack, a fresh haircut and cherry-red high-top sneakers.
“I am looking forward to meeting new friends and math,” he said. But he
was a little nervous, too.
“I really don’t know what it’s going to be like,” he said.
The year before, Bayard’s sixth grade hadn’t had a math teacher all
year. Many of the school’s teachers were involuntary transfers after a
budget crisis in the district — people forced to teach there because
there wasn’t room for them in other district buildings. Some came from
the suburbs, where teachers with more seniority can “bump” less
experienced teachers out of jobs when there’s a budget crisis. Most
left Bayard as soon as they could find another posting.
Bayard is, without a doubt, a stressful and difficult school to work
in. Teachers have been injured by students. It’s not uncommon for
teachers to call from the parking lot midday and quit. Some don’t even
bother to notify; one just stopped showing up after the winter holiday
break, never to be heard from again. Staff absences are such a problem
that the school leaders decided they had to find several full-time
substitutes to report to school every day to fill in.
Not everyone agrees that the nation’s lowest-performing schools would
perform better if they were better funded. Critics of funding lawsuits
have argued that the problem isn’t money, it’s that traditional public
schools in poor neighborhoods tend to be dysfunctional and the money
isn’t properly spent. Along with high staff turnover, they often lack a
coherent approach to address the emotional and academic needs of
students.
Hardly anyone would argue that school funding does not make a
difference, but academic research on the effects of school funding on
kids’ classroom performance and long-term success has been mixed. More
money does not always equal better results for students—at least not as
can be measured by math and reading assessments. An influx of money at
Bayard wouldn’t immediately solve troubles like how to attract the best
teachers to this tough neighborhood. Nor would it remove union rules
that can block school leaders from picking which teachers get assigned
there.
Bayard, for example, was given occasional infusions of cash and marched
through state-monitored turnaround efforts with few signs of
improvement as a result—most recently, about five years ago, when it
was given money and technical assistance supported by Obama’s Race to
the Top grants. This year, roughly only 4 percent of its students were
proficient in math and 13 percent were proficient in reading.
“It turns out when you give schools extra funds they rarely feel like
they can actually rethink what they can actually do with them,” said
Frederick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, a
conservative-leaning think tank. “You end up putting more dollars into
schools, and everything they have been doing for 40 years remains
intact.”
And, critically, figuring out how what is spent is just the start. To
get a better understanding of what a school lacks, policymakers need to
know what the money is being spent on. A new report from the ACLU, for
instance, reports that 1.7 million children nationwide attend schools
where there are police officers but no counselors.
As dysfunctional as Bayard has been for years, for some students it has
been an important lifeline in the community. Last school year, students
came to the assistant principal, Krystal Greenfield, like a mother. One
day, she got a text message from the parent of a child who had moved on
to high school. He had been a shy child — someone who was bullied in
middle school that Greenfield took under her wing. Now, he was taking
up with a gang, and his mother knew he wouldn’t listen to anyone but
Greenfield. She went to see him, pleaded with him to change his ways.
“He had an internal battle,” she said. “He didn’t know whether he
wanted to be a good guy who got bullied and picked on — or a bad guy
who got respect for money and drugs and being that dude.”
As she walked through the halls, walkie-talkie and jangle of keys at
her hip, Greenfield came to the sixth-grade floor of the school. The
walls are painted an alarming scarlet red, and children are supposed to
wear matching red shirts to allow staff to immediately identify their
grade level. She encountered a group of students, two boys and two
girls, standing in the hallway. They were bickering with a hall
monitor. The monitor grew more animated and loud as the children
continued to defy him. Greenfield sidled up to a short, stocky boy with
his bright red polo shirt tucked into a pair of carpenter-style chinos.
She put her arm around him, hugged him tight and walked him silently to
the other end of the hall. She spun him to face her and smiled warmly.
Then, she was firm.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t you in class?”
The boy launched into a dramatic reenactment of how he was making a
“hmm” noise, and his teacher didn’t like it. He didn’t want to stop
because he liked the sound. The sound is not that loud, he protested,
and other students make noise, too. Greenfield listened to every word
and then looked him in the eyes.
“Please, just stop,” she said.
He agreed and shuffled back to the classroom. Quietly.
Later, Greenfield explained that this child’s home had burned to the
ground a few months earlier. The fire had been intentionally set by a
relative. Two of the firefighters who responded to the blaze were
killed.
Greenfield said that when she runs into a child who’s having problems
in school, sometimes she’ll bring the child into her office to look at
their academic history together on the computer. They’ll look at that
timeline as Greenfield scrolls through various data points — math and
reading achievement tests, primarily — that schools track.
“I show them, I say, ‘All right, these are your test scores,’ ” she
said. “ ‘This is your life, this is what’s on paper, this is what I see
when I look you up.’ ”
The district’s system color codes the numbers like a stoplight. She’ll
trace a finger on the screen. A student may have started out in
elementary school as a green before moving to yellow, then red. “What
happened that year you sank?” she’ll ask. She’s never met a child who
didn’t know what happened.
“Kids know their story,” she said. “They know what happened, they know
when it went wrong and they don’t have an answer for it. They don’t
know how to fix it because they have no power, they have no control.”
Greenfield said that if she had her wish she would staff the school
fully with teachers who were trained and eager to work with this
population. She’d pay them well, she said. But her more realistic plan,
for the 2018-19 school year, supported by the school principal, was to
create more spaces in the school for children to learn to cope with
their feelings.
Instead, Krystal Greenfield left Bayard a week before classes started.
The school district unexpectedly moved her to another school that had a
sudden principal vacancy. Her assistant principal job at Bayard went
unfilled for a few months, but the staff started the year with a
teachers union-organized training to help them understand the needs of
childhood trauma and the school did manage to fill every vacant staff
position in the sixth grade before Taheem started classes. At other
schools, having a teacher in place in every classroom by the start of
the school year might be a given, but at Bayard, administrators hailed
it as a major success.
Radical changes this year were meant to further improve the school’s
position. Bayard became a first-to-eighth grade building this school
year, as part of a plan to find additional money to support the most
challenged schools in Wilmington, including Bayard, by combining
several schools, lengthening the school year and paying staff a little
extra if they promise not to quit.
Gov. John Carney, who took office in 2017, oversaw budget cuts,
including cuts to education, early in his tenure. To deal with the
state’s budget crisis, he created a “shared sacrifice” system in which
programs enjoyed both by the wealthy and the poor were trimmed. Those
budget cuts, combined with the inability to raise local taxes due to a
failed budget referendum, propelled Bayard Middle School deeper into
crisis.
Then Carney, a life-long Delawarean and the son of an educator, visited
Bayard last year. He was appalled. He went into a math class, where
there was a substitute doing not much of anything, papers on the floor,
kids unengaged. He said the teacher didn’t even acknowledge his
presence. “We had single-digit math proficiency standards in these
schools. Are you kidding me? If we doubled the proficiency standards,
you’d be at 10 percent,” Carney said in an interview. “You’d have to
quadruple the achievement standards just to get to 20 percent. It’s
immoral. I mean … you’ve got to do something about it.”
“The physical conditions of the building, the instruction, everything
happening in Bayard at that time was completely unacceptable,” he said.
“We ought to treat these children like they’re our own.”
In Delaware, the school funding formula is more than 70 years old, and
no one, not even the Democrats who control much of the state
government, are eager to change it. When the legislation was written,
schools were still segregated by law. The state also had the dubious
distinction of being the only one in the country requiring black
schools to be funded only by taxes levied from black property owners.
Few people of color owned property, so a wealthy member of the du Pont
family personally funded $6 million for the construction of new schools
for black children in 1920. It was a step forward, but it was hardly
enough. The entire state only had one high school for black children
until the 1950s. (Schools in Delaware were one of the five cases that
comprised Brown v. Board of Education. It was the single case for which
a state court had ruled that separate is not equal.)
National budget experts describe Delaware’s funding formula as
antiquated and regressive. The recently retired chief justice of the
state Supreme Court, Leo Strine, said in an extraordinary statement
last year that leaders have ignored their “moral duty,” arguing that
“kids who have less, need more.” It is one of the few states that
provides no additional money for the education of students who are
learning English, for example. Money for helping poor students, in
general, is not cemented into the formula. As a result, the pot of
money set aside especially for schools that serve low-income students
is subject to the whims of legislators and governors who can (and do)
cut it or shuffle priorities.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional
right to equal funding in education, but plaintiffs in several states
have successfully argued in the courts that state constitutions require
at least an adequate, if not an excellent, education be provided each
student. The cases, including one in New York, have resulted in funding
formulas that funnel more money to students with higher needs. But
court cases can take years to be resolved.
“As a practical matter, work with the legislators is a quicker way to right the ship,” said Rebecca Sibilia, the CEO of EdBuild.
In Delaware, Democrats have controlled the governorship, the majority
in the legislature and nearly every state row office for years. But
they haven’t had the political will to update the way the state funds
its public schools.
A report from EdBuild revealed that, nationally, schools primarily
serving black and brown children receive $23 billion less than schools
primarily serving white students. And the number of children has
nothing to do with it: The schools with children who are not white
serve almost the same number of students.
When the ACLU and Community Legal Aid Society Inc. sued Delaware last
year, the state argued that the court shouldn’t insert itself into the
debate because school funding was the purview of the general assembly
and the governor. In late November, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster
refused the state’s request to dismiss the case and issued a searing
rebuke of the idea that the state’s courts had no jurisdiction over the
matter, writing, “At the extreme, the State could corral Disadvantaged
Students into warehouses, hand out one book for every fifty students,
assign some adults to maintain discipline, and tell the students to
take turns reading to themselves. Because the State does not think the
Education Clause says anything about the quality of education, even
this dystopian hypothetical would satisfy their version of the
constitutional standard.”
Carney proposed increased funding for the state’s neediest students,
including English language learners, and he found enough support in the
Legislature. But he stopped short of proposing a complete overhaul of
the school funding formula. Instead, the additional money would be set
outside that system. Critics pointed out that this would continue to
make the funding susceptible to budget cuts and the whims of
politicians.
In an interview at a Newark, Delaware, bagel shop, Carney said an
increase in spending tied to a new funding formula would make it
difficult to manage the budget. “When you have mandatory spending and
you don’t have revenue that keeps up with it, you just keep digging a
hole that’s harder to get out of,” he said.
But the new plan, which includes the effort to combine schools in
Wilmington, has proven to be a Herculean task. In addition to
transforming Bayard into a 1-8 school, the district is restructuring
and renovating several elementary schools. Another building will be
repurposed as an early education center.
Carney dedicated $15 million to fund these changes, with the local
district kicking in another $2.5 million. The money is one-time
infusion, not a systematic change to how the lowest-performing schools
are funded.
The plans have been difficult to execute, even with the extra money,
proving just how hard it is to make big changes in high-needs schools.
A major renovation planned for Bayard was downgraded. To start the
year, the school got fresh paint, a playground and a key fob swipe
system on doors to the upper floors. Some of the best staff have left
because they can’t work for a longer school year with their own family
obligations. A new librarian and art teacher started this fall.
Paul Herdman, CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, a nonprofit
organization that advocates for education reform, said that without the
lawsuit forcing the state’s hand, and the additional transparency, it
seems unlikely that there will be lasting change to how the state
allocates money for schools.
“There’s the notion of taking a big political risk on changing the
balance of where dollars go in a way that might adversely affect more
affluent students — or at least the perception,” Herdman said. “I think
there’s the perception that it’s a ‘Peter to pay Paul’ kind of
situation that some people are going to lose and some people are going
to win. And I that’s a really difficult political gamble for someone in
office. And so I think once this lawsuit gets in place, I think it’s
actually an opportunity for legislators who want to do the right thing
to come up with a good solution.”
For Taheem, the reforms may come too late. In his first year at Bayard, trouble found him almost immediately.
He got into a fight in math, his favorite class. His mom rode the bus
to school and arrived pushing a stroller bearing her youngest son and
holding the hand of a young granddaughter to meet with a dean of
students. He escorted them into a room in the main office with only one
chair and a hodgepodge of old furniture. The dean leaned on a desk.
Taheem stood near the wall. His mom took the chair.
Jones said that she’d told Taheem there are no excuses for his
behavior. The dean asked Taheem if everything was “cool” now, or if he
thought it would be a good idea for the dean to mediate a talk between
the boys. Taheem wanted to talk.
At that point, Jones explained Taheem’s struggles after the loss of his
sister. She said October would be a difficult month, because it’s his
sister’s birthday month, and Taheem would need help. She suggested
assigning him some extra books to read to “keep his mind occupied.”
“Are you in counseling here?” the dean asked Taheem.
Taheem nodded yes. But he named a teacher who runs a club, not a mental health professional.
Hearing about the counselor, his mom requested that the dean sign up
Taheem immediately, and explained how well Taheem had done with that
extra help in elementary school.
The dean promised to send parental consent forms home with Taheem to get him signed up.
Weeks passed before the school sent home the paperwork.
By then, Taheem’s problems had reached a frightening crescendo.
Three months in to his first year at Bayard, eighth-grade boys jumped
Taheem in the hallway, his mother said, leaving him with a bump on his
head and a busted lip. Taheem didn’t want to go to school at all. Then
he started running around with a group of boys who were drawing the
attention of the police. And he continued to have problems in school,
landing himself on a disciplinary plan last year.
His mother had to quit one of her two jobs as a home health aide
because she was being called to the school so often for meetings about
his behavior. Jones plans to move her family to a safer neighborhood as
soon she can afford it.
“Y’all pile them all up in one school, and all these kids have all these problems,” Jones said. “It’s ridiculous.”
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