Congress needs to invest, not divest in education

With just days left to fund the government, here’s an easy way House lawmakers could buy themselves time—double down on investing, rather than divesting, in the education of our children.

In 1965, as part of the federal government’s War on Poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Title I program, sending more federal money to public schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families, seeking to compensate for the yawning resource gap in school funding in wealthier as compared to poorer communities. From large, urban districts to smaller, rural ones, Title I has been critical to mitigating the educational inequities associated with concentrated poverty.

This makes policymakers’ efforts to gut Title I funding even more problematic.  While the Senate agreed on a bipartisan agreement to raise Title I funding next year, House lawmakers went the other way, proposing to cut the program by 77 percent, or $14.7 billion.

Almost $15 billion in cuts would undermine school districts’ capacity to attract and retain high-quality teachers when the nation already faces historic teacher shortages. The proposal would trigger 220,000 layoffs and $2.2 billion in teacher-training reductions. These cuts would depress teacher wage growth when educators already earn 24 percent less than comparably qualified college graduates. 

These cuts also would reduce critical student services, including a $890 million cut for academic support for English-language acquisition; $87 million for social and emotional learning; $70 million for instruction-improvement programs; and $35 million in civil-rights enforcement. 

If the cuts themselves weren’t enough, the timing couldn’t be worse. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, shows that U.S. elementary and secondary students are still recovering from the learning losses associated with COVID-19. The NAEP details historically negative trends in math, reading, and most other subjects. Alongside these losses in academic attainment, the socio-emotional harms affecting our children are historic too, as adolescent and teen suicide rates climb and students continue to wrestle with the debilitating psychological effects of the pandemic. 

Supporters of the House bill have argued there’s not enough accountability for schools that benefit from Title I. At KIPP, we strongly support accountability for all public schools, including public charter schools like ours. We believe Congress should steer funds to programs that have demonstrated results and require equitable accountability measures that disaggregate students by race, gender, disability and whether English is their first language — to ensure that schools can’t hide decline or stagnation in any group behind more general, positive measures that include students with significant advantages. The way to ensure accountability is not to reduce scarce resources, but to marry increased investment with clear, enforceable expectations around effectiveness and impact. 

Bill backers have also argued that it’s time to reduce funding now that COVID-19 is no longer a national emergency. Yet, as vividly demonstrated by NAEP’s chronicling of the decades of learning loss caused by the pandemic, the pandemic is far from over and those of us in education will continue to contend with its consequences for years. More specifically, Congress allocated COVID-relief funds through one-off funding appropriations that already have expired. Title I is distinct, representing the federal government’s year-over-year investment in impoverished communities to provide an ongoing funding allocation to mitigate the debilitating effects of poverty. 

Our children face a historically challenging set of conditions in the aftermath of the pandemic, spanning learning loss to mental-health challenges, and face these difficulties when the economy is changing rapidly as innovations in technology and artificial intelligence continue to reshape labor markets specifically and our world more generally. The future of our nation depends upon preparing a generation of leaders to create the America of tomorrow, and our nation’s future will be much less bright if we do not invest in all of our children. 

Title I is a signature element of the country’s commitment to mitigating the inequities inherent to funding educational opportunity based on local property-tax revenue. We implore our representatives to honor Title I’s commitment by growing the federal government’s investment in our children, while tethering these increased resources to evidence-based programs and accountability mandates, to ensure not only that resources are available, but they are leveraged in a way that honors the limitless potential of each student. 

Our nation’s future requires nothing less.

Shavar Jeffries is the CEO of KIPP Foundation.