Right to an Equal Education

The right to an equal education is the goal, but is not the Result.

Cody Ford

Professor Murrie

Academic Writing

Right to an Equal Education

Phyllis McClure, Ross Wiener, Marguerite Roza, and Matt Hill wrote an article “Ensuring Equal Opportunity in Public Education” that cited that there is international competition in public education in which the United States is falling behind. The authors believe this based upon the evidence that inequality is a “plaque” that affects our (U.S.) public schools and that one of the most harmful “manifestations” is that “local school district funding is allocated which hurts lower income, and minority students.” The authors see and fear the consequence of the allocated funds, which is a widening academic achievement gap, and are determined to fix it. They believe that in order to hinder the process of the academic achievement gap widening, they must change the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The funds are allocated because of “loop-holes” in Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The act ensures that equality of education is being promoted, but the authors believe it does not. The authors believe there is a “loop-hole” in the act which allows local school funding to be continuously allocated due to the many ways which it may be distributed inequitably. The authors point out that specifically the funds are used to allocate “staff resources” to different schools, which do not have many low income/minority students.

Roza states that there is an equation which is used for Staff to Students, and it appears that the allocated funds are now turning the equation into Staff to Currency. Many lower income schools cannot afford to pay Staff members with many years of experience, so their resort is to hire Staff with less experience. This makes the expenditures differ from the local schools. In some situations, Higher-paid teachers are transferred against their will to a school in the same district which is able to match their salary needs. This hinders the academic process due to the fact that Staff members with years of experience are not present to teach the students and to guide the less-experienced Staff.

They believe if the “Title 1: comparability provision” (gives the power to the federal government to provide equal education to all local schools) was enacted, then the local schools would not have to change their funding, and the allocated funds would be spent on improving academics at their school. If this is done, then local schools across the country would ensure that a local funding education process would be supported. Since this has not been achieved yet, underprivileged students do not have the educational tools required to obtain a stable career in today’s society, and it is our federal government to blame.

Due to the Federal Government assuming the role of providing an equal education to all local schools, many analysts have documented that “despite the federal help for schools with large concentrations of poor students, schools and districts with many low-income students continue to receive less than their fair share of funding based on student need.” They have come to this conclusion based on the way the federal government does their distribution which is based on an equation which “combines numbers of children in poverty with state per-student expenditures. Because their formula is so, this penalizes low-tax states regardless if they tax themselves heavily for education. Due to this, many states have developed a more fair state funding system which is unfortunately the “result of years of litigation in state courts”, yet there still has not been much change in the “equitable way that local school districts fund their schools”

Higher spending has become an issue with schools which have fewer minority students because of their so-called “equal provisionary”. The higher spending schools have fewer poor/minority students which give them the ability to spend more on personnel and services. Because of their ability to spend more, there has been a gap in academic achievement. This gap’s consequences are documented as poorer test scores and the students not able to pass the “standard” test which is shows their progress in reading, and arithmetic. When schools with a majority of students who have a lower income or are of a minority fail the standardized test, they are victims of the system. The hard-working personnel and the students who are just not up to par are the ones who are being taken advantage of. It is not fair to hold the educators for blame, when their tools are limited, and their ability only goes so far.

In order to right the wrongs the education system has mistakenly made, our authors believe that we must first amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 in order to stop these “loop-holes” from occurring, thus slowly remedying the lower income/minority majority schools. The authors all believe that these are small errors, and they can be fixed, but it is not as simple as that. It is believed that if these changes are made, our public school system will benefit greatly; until then students are still scoring under the bar due to the system which has been tasked in teaching, and budgeting our public schools.