Education Week - December 12, 2018 - 16

Federal Education Aid:
State Winners, Losers
By Andrew Ujifusa
Federal education funding for
K-12 is rising compared with where
it was two years ago-but there are
disparities in terms of which states
are reaping the most benefits. And
federal aid to disadvantaged students is actually on course to decline
in several states over the first two
years of the Trump administration.
Those are two main takeaways
from the most recent statistics put
out by the U.S. Department of Education about changes in funding
over the past two years.
The Education Department's budget has increased by a small degree
since President Donald Trump and
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
assumed office, even though the
Trump team has sought to slash the
agency's budget two years running.
Congress has pointedly ignored the
administration's push.
To gauge the state-by-state federal
funding environment, Education
Week examined changes in state-bystate funding between fiscal 2017,
the last budget Congress passed and
President Barack Obama signed before Trump took office, and the fiscal 2019 spending that Trump approved about two months ago.

State Highlights
In addition to the total state-bystate spending on elementary and
secondary education, the analysis
also breaks out the changes for Title
I grants to districts, which are earmarked for disadvantaged students
and represent the single largest pot

of federal K-12 cash. (The fiscal 2019
numbers are estimates at this point
but give a good idea of where the
numbers are heading.)
* One winner over the past two
years: California. The state with the
largest public school enrollment is
slated to get a Title I funding bump
of more than 9 percent, from just
over $1.8 billion in fiscal 2017 to a
little over $2 billion in fiscal 2019.
Total federal spending on California schools is estimated to increase
8.9 percent, from about $4.1 billion to
roughly $4.4 billion.
* Another big winner? Oklahoma, where Title I spending is
due to jump from $169 million to
$190 million, an increase of more
than 12 percent. That's the singlelargest percentage increase of any
state examined. It's also noteworthy given the high-profile political
fight in the Sooner State over state
spending on public education that's
had a profound impact on schools
and lawmakers. Overall spending
on Oklahoma schools is expected to
rise by about 8.5 percent from fiscal
2017 to fiscal 2019.
* Who's losing out? Kansas. Education funding in the Sunflower
State is due to decline from $333 million to $327 million from fiscal 2017
to fiscal 2019. The state has been
embroiled in school finance wars
for years. Kansas is the only state
where total elementary and secondary funding from the federal government is slated to dip from fiscal
2017 to fiscal 2019.
* Another region that's losing out,
albeit from a narrower perspective,
is New England. Connecticut, Mas-

LEADING THE PACK
The overall federal budget for education has risen under President Donald Trump. But not every
state has benefitted equally from the increase. The chart below highlights four states, plus the
District of Columbia, where the percentage of K-12 funding from Washington has grown by a
relatively large amount from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2019.
Fiscal 2017

Fiscal 2019

Increase

District of Columbia

$95,000,000

$106,000,000

11.5%

North Dakota

$182,000,000

$200,000,000

9.8%

California

$4,073,000,000

4,435,000,000

8.9%

Oklahoma

$471,000,000

$511,000,000

8.5%

Arizona

$875,000,000

$948,000,000

7.7%

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education; Education Week

sachusetts, New Hampshire, and
Rhode Island are all estimated to
receive less Title I money in fiscal
2019 than in fiscal 2017, although
their aid didn't decline by much.
(Connecticut is due for the largest
drop by percentage, or 4.4 percent.)
And farther south, the department
estimates that Georgia will receive
a $3 million dip in Title I funding,
although that's just a tiny fraction
of its fiscal 2017 Title I allocation
of $540 million. One more Title I
"loser"? DeVos' home state of Michigan, where Title I aid is expected to
decline by 3.9 percent down to $485
million.
* Other than the Golden State, the
West Coast is seeing its Title I funding slip. Oregon and Washington are
on track to get less Title I district aid
for disadvantaged students than they
did two years ago. The same is true
for Utah. Farther west than all those?
Hawaii is on course for an 8.2 percent
dip in Title I, the largest Education
Week saw for any state.
Just because Congress decided
to save a program from the Trump

Lining Up for 2020: Potential
Candidates and Education

By Alyson Klein & Andrew Ujifusa

he 2020 presidential campaign is right around the corner-or at least
on the horizon. And there's a chance that education could be a higherprofile-than-usual issue in what's shaping up to be a large and unwieldy
Democratic primary field. Plus there are at least a couple of Republicans who might
try to mount a primary challenge to President Donald Trump-or even run against
him as an independent. They could use education to appeal to the political middle.
So what kind of background do many of the potential candidates have on
K-12? Here's your way-too-early cheat sheet of some possibles and probables:
Former Vice President Joe Biden (D)
As President Barack Obama's
vice president, Biden was the
administration's point man in
responding to the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Conn., that
left 20 children and six staff
members dead. A task force chaired by Biden
recommended more than $100 million in new
mental-health spending and $150 million to
help schools develop comprehensive safety plans

budget axe doesn't mean that there
aren't changes afoot in funding for
individual states.
* West Virginia and Wisconsin,
just to pick two states, are each
due to lose roughly $2 million in
funding for their Supporting Effective
Instruction grants-better known
as Title II, a program the teachers'
unions among others desperately
fought to save as Trump sought to
eliminate them. That's a decline
of 11.6 percent and 5.6 percent for
West Virginia and Wisconsin, respectively.
* For individual programs across
states, there tended to be relatively
large increases in funding for homeless children and youths, special
education, and career and technical
education.
* Puerto Rico is also worth highlighting. Its federal funding setup is
different from its state counterparts,
but the department estimates the island's Title I aid will be $391 million
in fiscal 2019, a decline of 4.2 percent, and its total elementary and
secondary aid will total $650 million,

brace private school vouchers. And he teamed up with
his chief Garden State political rival, GOP Gov. Chris
Christie, to help birth a new
Newark teacher contract that
includes merit pay. He also
persuaded Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to
donate $100 million to the long-struggling
Newark schools. But since coming to the Senate, he's been a lot less enthusiastic about
private school vouchers-and was a leading
voice against the confirmation of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio (D)

and hire school resource officers, counselors, and
more. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Biden
unveiled an education plan that would have provided free preschool to every child and bonuses to
teachers who work in poor neighborhoods.

Brown introduced legislation this session
to boost funding for school construction and
repairs and to increase federal aid for wraparound services at schools. After a virtual
charter school in Ohio shut down this year
amid a scandal about reported student enrollment, Brown also asked the Government
Accountability Office to take a closer look at
virtual charter schools nationwide.

Members of Congress

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (D)

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey (D)

Last year, Gillibrand authored the Computer Science Career Education Act, which
would create federal grants to help foster
four- and six-year computer science programs. She's also backed the SHOP Class

Before coming to the Senate, Booker was
the mayor of Newark, N.J., and one of the
most prominent national Democrats to em-

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 12, 2018 | www.edweek.org

a 1.9 percent dip. The U.S. territory
has been losing students for many
years, a trend that accelerated after
Hurricane Maria last year. But those
shrinking statistics might be a tough
pill to swallow for Puerto Rico since
it's still deep in recovery mode from
the storm.
The Title I formula is remarkably
complex. In fact, it's really four formulas in one. Congress considered
tinkering with it three years ago,
not long before the Every Student
Succeeds Act passed, but ultimately
abandoned the effort. The formula
depends on a variety of factors, student population and demographics
among them. In fact, there's a some
evidence that Title I money is not
particularly well-targeted.
Also keep this in mind: Federal
education funding tends to make up
roughly 10 percent of total spending
on public schools, so relatively shortterm changes in Beltway aid tend
not to have the same impact on any
individual state as changes agreed
to by its lawmakers or local district
decisionmakers.

Act, which would bolster "maker spaces" and
hands-on learning opportunities for students
in career and technical education. She's resisted DeVos' moves to change the federal
government's approach to Title IX, which
bans sex discrimination, at schools and colleges from Obama-era policies.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California (D)
Harris hasn't focused a lot on K-12 during
her first two years in the Senate; many of the
bills she's signed on to in the chamber deal with
historically black colleges and universities and
college access and affordability. She also cosponsored a bill to expand access to child care,
written by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington
state, the top Democrat on the Senate education committee.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (D)
Klobuchar has introduced bills to establish a new competitive-grant program for
STEM, with the goal of doubling the number of science, technology, engineering, and
math secondary schools from about 100
to about 200 nationwide. She's sought to
launch a pilot program for districts to provide 12th graders with voter-registration
information. She's authored a bill that
would award grants to help districts train
teachers, school personnel, and other educators on mental-health conditions.

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - December 12, 2018

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