(MintPress) — If funding is the gateway toward opportunity in education, then state budgets for the 2013 fiscal year may worry some as 26 states have reduced per-pupil education funding to some degree. A recent budgetary analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that the cuts put 35 state’s school funding at levels below 2008, the height of the recession.
The reduction in funding comes at a time when students already trail other developed nations in math and science, a troublesome trend when public leaders have called for more careers in innovation and engineering.
Education funding has become an annual issue as tax revenues have become strained across municipalities. Since 2008, both job losses and a decrease in workers’ wages have contributed to a decrease in tax revenues, which gives states less funding to distribute among public sectors. According to CBPP, state tax collections are still 5 percent lower than they were in 2008, despite a slowly improving economy over the past four years.
But public schools have faced the brunt of many fiscal cuts, with more than 220,000 teachers losing their jobs between 2009 and 2011. The figure is more than policemen, firefighters, emergency responders and air traffic controllers combined, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CBPP says the government will have to make a conscious effort to keep education funding high enough to prevent states from further slashing budgets in the future.
“At current growth rates it will take years before state revenues are able to sustain services like K-12 education at normal levels,” the CBPP report said. “States will need to raise additional revenues to prevent school cuts from getting worse and to make significant progress in restoring school funding without forcing cuts in other state services.”
Investment, performance correlation
To emphasize the role of the recession in education funding, only 13 states have seen an increase in spending per student between fiscal years 2008 and 2013. And many of the states that have seen the steepest cuts over that span have been the nation’s worst performing states as it relates to public school performance. Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma and South Carolina all saw cuts of 18 percent or more over that period to their public schooling systems and states in the South commonly perform at the lowest levels in the country.
Massachusetts, which consistently ranks as one of the highest performing states in the country, was one of the few states to see an increase, adding 6.7 percent to its education budget over the five year fiscal span. The state will also see a 1.3 percent increase in funding between fiscal years 2012 and 2013, compared to a 4.5 percent decrease and Alabama and a 5.7 percent decrease in Alaska.
Education spending has become political kindling for debates, as calls for increases have been met with resistance from leaders who say governments need to rein in spending to alleviate deficits. In past budgets, President Barack Obama proposed an increase in education spending by upward of 9 percent, but was met with resistance by Republicans who said austerity-like measures where the ideal way to reduce the deficit.
In states like Mississippi, however, where education budgets are commonly cut despite poor student performance, groups like the Mississippi Economic Policy Center (MEPC) argue that reducing funding will only send the state further back in achievement. Data from 2010 from the Mississippi Department of Education shows that 51 percent of the state’s 152 school districts were deemed “successful” by a state standard, which use a standardized test to aggregate data.
“Mississippi falls on the lower end of the spectrum when looking at cuts across the states by the percentage cut with a 12.2 percent reduction in funding per student,” MEPC wrote. “Continuing cuts to Mississippi’s education program will diminish the quality of education of elementary and high schools. At a time when the nation is trying to produce workers with the skills needed to master technologies in an ever-changing global economy, cuts in education funding threaten essential building blocks for future prosperity.”
Effect on achievement gap
While government funding for schools is important for all students, it is particularly critical for students who come from poor backgrounds. Evidence of a growing achievement gap that once suggested that race played more of a role in education now indicates that affluence is a strong predictor of education attainment. A study by Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon showed a one “unit” difference between similarly aged students from national standardized tests. In the study, a “unit” was roughly equal to the difference between a fifth grader and an eighth grader.
The overwhelmingly gap of test scores was no longer race, as previously thought, but rather income brackets. Students in the 90th percentile of income outperformed students by 40 percent when compared to those in the 10th percentile of income. Reardon noted that as the recession and current economic trends carry on, that gap is sure to widen.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” Reardon said. “With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap.”
The CBPP also acknowledges the correlation between both student achievements with affluence, but also school funding levels as a whole. But the group also admits that school districts have struggled mightily on how to close those gaps,and have taken to a “weight” system to skew their education funding to groups that need it most.
The weighted system, currently used by 38 states, allocates a higher percentage of funding toward districts with higher than average levels of poverty. According to CBPP, those weights can range anywhere from a 6 percent to 25 percent increase per child in poverty. Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center says that the weighted system helps many students and districts, but that the discrepancy in weights still leaves many students disadvantaged compared to their peers.
“Most districts spend between $9,000 and $11,000 per student, but this wide range has a significant impact on the educational opportunities available to students in different districts,” the center said. “For instance, a $2,000 funding gap per student translates into an opportunity gap of $50,000 per class of 25 students.”
The group concluded that student achievement will never be given a fair shake unless the playing field evens out with more comparable funding.
“These large funding differences can create huge achievement gaps. Students in lower spending districts are automatically at a disadvantage when it comes to available resources and access to a high quality education,” the group noted.