Fed Ed Funds Can't Help If Rules or Reticence Get in the Way
The 2020 presidential contest has featured a bevy of ambitious proposals to boost federal school spending. Elizabeth Warren has called for quadrupling Title I funding to $450 billion, raising the ante on Joe Biden (who’d previously called for tripling Title I funding). Kamala Harris has called for spending $300 billion to raise teacher pay. Such proposals have reheated the familiar debate over whether more school spending will make a difference. But, wherever one stands on that issue, it should be easy to agree that federal funds should be spent wisely and well—and that federal rules shouldn’t get in the way of that.
And, yet, in a new analysis, veteran education attorneys Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric argue that confusion over the complex rules governing federal education funds too often means these dollars are spent ineffectively. They should know. As co-founders of the consulting firm Federal Education Group, they have made a career out of helping states and schools navigate the maze of existing requirements.
Federal rules, designed to help ensure that school funds are used as intended, have evolved into a maze of paperwork and confusing legalese. Junge and Krvaric note that school systems today spend a lot of time and energy detailing their compliance with restrictions on which students can be served by a given program, exactly how they are managing programs, how they’ll ensure that funds are spent within particular time-frames, and so forth.
One consequence is that, seeking to abide by the rules, school systems often end up spending federal funds on fragmented services. For instance, Junge and Krvaric observe that “many districts use Title I funds to support one kind of reading intervention for Title I students, IDEA funds to support a different reading intervention for students with disabilities, and Title III funds to support yet a different reading intervention for English learners, all of which is separate from the core reading instruction delivered to all students.” Yet a wealth of research suggesting that such fragmentary approaches don’t work, and that what students — especially struggling students — need is systematic, coherent instruction. Remarkably, much of the fragmentation is due not to the rules on the books but due to confusion about what those rules require. Because it’s easiest to show that federal funds have been spent properly when purchases are kept separate, school systems continue to do this even as their staff lament the result.
Another result is that districts wind up spending funds on the same activities year after year, even when they have questions about the value of the spending. District officials do this because they fear that spending money in new, untested ways could result in funds being delayed during a prolonged application review or, even worse, funds having to be returned if a district’s spending is ultimately deemed impermissible. This gives the district a strong proclivity to lean on familiar programs that feel “safe,” even when doing so leads to dubious decisions. Junge and Krvaric tell of districts in one state annually spending their Title I funds on a reading program that showed dismal results, because it had been “recommended by the state’s Title I office and had never been flagged in an audit.”
These kinds of practical, real-world frustrations render academic many of our long-running debates. Debates about whether to spend more on schooling only make sense if there’s reason to think that new funds will be spent well. With that in mind, here are three suggestions as to how we might do better.
District leaders need to put in some effort. Instead of defaulting to traditional spending patterns because it’s “safe,” school and district leaders should aggressively investigate what is and isn’t allowed by federal regulations. Krvaric and Junge relate how one school leader put in the effort and learned that she could use Title I funds to pay for school counselors — something she had never known to be possible. We need to encourage and then equip leaders to actually lead, and not be intimated by paperwork requirements or long-standing routines.
Federal and state officials should clarify what’s okay. School and system leaders often imagine they’re more constrained than they are. In other words, they’re more able to make good decisions about how to spend federal funds than they may realize. Federal and state officials need to help these leaders by providing clearer guidance about what’s allowed. Such efforts should be user-friendly, avoid technical jargon, and emphasize concrete examples.
Elected officials need to focus on the “how” as well as “how much.” Whatever one thinks of proposals for expansive new federal spending on education, proponents need to do much more than simply funnel new dollars into the existing, balky machinery of federal spending. If new dollars are to deliver on their promise, they need to be accompanied by a commitment to streamlining rules, empowering leaders, and clearing away misconceptions.
We’re inevitably going to debate how much money we should spend on schooling and how much of that money should come from Washington. But left and right should be able to find common ground when it comes to insisting that educators feel able and obliged to spend public funds wisely—and to seeing that federal spending rules aren’t getting in the way.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
