Education Week - April 14, 2021 - 5

The pandemic squelches
momentum

The pandemic has further warped
states' efforts in several ways.

How money made a difference in
Rochester

Researchers increasingly point
to the impact targeted revenue increases can have on academic out-

Everything
we've done
in the last
five years to

build this
academic
plan, to

build a
sense of
family to
build staff,
that
preparation,
has got us
through
these
difficult
obstacles. "

comes at the school level.
East High School is an example. In
2015, the then-struggling school was
separated from the district, placed
under university control, and made
the recipient of millions in federal
turnaround grants. By the fall of
2019, almost every marker of academic outcomes had risen, and the
school's culture had improved, according to available data and studies
conducted on the school.
Administrators in Rochester attribute their success over the past several years to consistent, adequate,
and careful spending used for a tailor-made curriculum, intense teacher
recruitment and retention strategies,
and in-school and out-of-school
wraparound services for students.
" You have to have sustainable,
predictable revenue, and it has to be
intentionally and strategically spent
on what the evidence tells us makes
a difference, " said Stephen Uebbing,
a school of education professor at the
University of Rochester, who guided
a handful of professors and students
in crafting East's turnaround model.
" We're not just throwing money at
the project, we're taking money and
carefully placing it where it'll produce a better life for kids. "
Uebbing, who led New York's
Canandaigua district for 18 years before retiring in 2006, said the turnaround proposal was built on both
best practices supported by research
and on sufficient funding. He also
said such funding " needs to be equitable, not equal funding. It needs to
reflect the level of needs for the kids
we're working with. "
East had been one of Rochester's
flagship schools into the 1960s. But
it started losing ground due to demographic shifts, failed integration
efforts, and disinvestment from the
school board, according to Nelms.
Community tension was on the rise.
Three days after a campaign visit
from President Richard Nixon in
1971, a fight broke out between Black
and white students in the cafeteria
at a time when the school was attempting to comply with a voluntary
integration plan. Families left the

ABOUT THESE STORIES
Education Week Assistant
Managing Editor Daarel
Burnette II, with support from
an Education Writers
Association Reporting
Fellowship, examines the
pandemic's fiscal impact on
already vulnerable school
districts and its implications
for student achievement.

Illustrations by
Lincoln Agnew
for Education Week

CONTINUED ON PAGE 6 >

Shaun Nelms,
superintendent of East
High School in Rochester,
N.Y., is aiming to keep the
school's turnaround effort
on course amid the
pandemic's disruption.

Mike Bradley for Education Week

In other words, even though these
schools serve students who are conclusively harder and more expensive
to educate, they're starting at an economic disadvantage.
The cause of this upside-down pattern of spending is two-fold, experts
say.
Federal and state governments are
often not sending enough money to
make up for districts' anemic local
property tax revenue. Local administrators also often use the extra money
they receive for academic intervention programs at these low-performing schools to patch holes in their
overall budgets.
Chronically low spending can result
in high teacher and principal turnover,
inefficient curriculum and insufficient
wrap-around services.
This could help explain the mixed
results from President Barack
Obama's initiative under the School
Improvement Grant program to
spend more than $7 billion on the nation's worst-performing schools.
" Was it actually $7 billion extra, or
was it filling in gaps caused by the recession? " asked Terra Wallin, EdTrust's
Associate Director for P-12 accountability and special projects, who helped the
department design and execute its SIG
program in the aftermath of the Great
Recession of 2007 to 2009. " It's wrong
to suggest that there was no return on
investment. "

ESSA gave states more autonomy
to chose a turnaround model, as
long as it was research-backed, and
the law allowed states to consider
accountability measures other than
just test scores in identifying lowperforming schools.
The federal government today
spends more than $14.3 billion under
Title I on schools that serve low-income students. ESSA requires states
to set aside around 7 percent of their
Title I spending to turn around their
lowest-performing schools. That
amounts to about $1 billion a year
for more than 6,000 schools nationwide.
But the percentage of schools
identified as the worst-performing in
each state varies widely, resulting in
money being stretched across many
schools or concentrated in just a
handful. For example, Florida in 2018
identified more than 69 percent of its
schools as under-performing; South
Carolina, by contrast, identified only
3 percent in the same year.
States began identifying those
schools in 2018 and are required to
reevaluate which schools qualify as
the worst-performing every three
years. That new list would have been
due this summer, but because of the
pandemic, the federal government
waived that requirement for a year.
As for the money that's already
been spent, it's hard to tell whether
it's been used effectively because
there's little recent data, partly because of the pandemic's disruption
to standardized testing. Similarly,
it'll take even more data to figure out
which crop of schools have yet to be
identified but need to be.
" This has thrown everything off
track because many of these schools
were just trying to survive, literally
trying to keep their virtual doors
open, " said Wallin. " They're much
less focused on evidence-based intervention. "

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
The digital story includes
additonal photography and
comparison data on
spending in the lowestperforming schools and the
average per-student
spending by school
statewide in select states.
www.edweek.org

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Education Week - April 14, 2021

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