Lewis Diuguid June 9, 2015

Post-recession, school funding continues to suffer greatly along with students, teachers

Increasingly, schools like Primitivo Garcia Elementary School, pictured here, suffer underfunding from state and federal sources, affecting the quality of education children receive, two new studies note. | File photo The Kansas City Star By LEWIS DIUGUID Public schools nationwide have suffered horribly since the Great Recession because of funding cuts. But as the country has recovered, states and the federal government have not put the money back into educating our children. Those are among the findings of two reports released this week. The Leadership Conference Education Fund study is titled “Cheating Our Future: How Decades of Disinvestment by States Jeopardizes Equal Educational Opportunity.” The Education Law Center’s fourth national study on how states fund publication education is titled “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card.”

“In a time of economic growth and rising state and federal revenue, we are leaving the nation’s most vulnerable public school children behind,” Wade Henderson writes in the joint report release. “In too many places — urban, suburban and rural — our schools are struggling to find the resources they need to serve all children well.” Henderson, president and chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund, notes that public schools are being choked of funding at a time when the majority of students in public schools are in low-income families and a majority of the kids are students of color. The “Cheating Our Future” report notes that underfunding “is undermining our nation’s goal of improving academic achievement and building a stronger workforce.” In “Is School Funding Fair,” the report says financing in most states shortchanges the nation’s 49 million public school students “out of the educational opportunities they need to succeed.” “Student poverty across the country is growing, and poor students are even more likely to be isolated in high poverty districts,” the report said. Disparities surface in early childhood education, where enrollment of lowincome students lags that of their wealthier peers in nearly all states. On pupil-to-teacher ratios, “30 states had a flat or regressive distribution, meaning that higher poverty districts had the same number or more pupils per teacher. Unsurprisingly, the sates with the fairest distribution of staff were also more likely to have a fair distribution of funding.” In the national report card on school funding, Missouri earned a grade of “F,” although it rated a “C” for effort — down from a grade of “D” in 2014 and a “C” for effort. Kansas got a “C” in the latest report and a “B” for effort and the same grades in each category last year. Imagine what 2016 will look like. Although the trend is going in the opposite direction, clearly the reports show that more money needs to be devoted to public schools nationwide as well as in Missouri and Kansas. Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/lewis-diuguid/article23583001.html#storylink=cpy

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