Delicate balance for K-12

The federal government gives billions of dollars based on the number of low-income students in local school districts for a simple reason: to help overcome the disadvantages poor children face in learning. School districts have found ways to game the system, using the federal funds not to help poor children but to spend less of their own money. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. is trying to fix that.

Controversy has long surrounded the "supplement, not supplant" provision of the Title I program started under the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. A 1969 report from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. found flagrant misuses; regulators and school districts have struggled with cumbersome requirements. In the Every Student Succeeds Act, the latest renewal of the law, Congress in a rare display of bipartisanship retained supplement, not supplant — but freed districts of what was seen as the most cumbersome requirement.

The goodwill that accompanied that effort quickly dissipated as the Education Department began to draft regulations on how provisions of the law were to be put in place.

Under the department's proposal, school districts would have to show that state and local per-pupil funding in Title I schools was at least equal to the average per-pupil spending in non-Title I schools. Studies have shown that districts with high levels of poverty receive less per pupil in state and local funds than districts with low levels of poverty.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has accused the administration of overreach.

What happens next depends on the final language of the regulations, expected for release this summer. There is no question, as critics of the regulations have argued, that the proposal would cause disruption in the way that many schools do business. But it also is true, as a coalition of civil rights groups pointed out in a letter urging King not to back down, that "the process of moving from inequity to equity or from injustice to justice has never been without disruption."

This story was originally published June 3, 2016 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Delicate balance for K-12."