Fund Allocation Paper
School Finance
Iowa is very unique when it comes to school finance. We use the single count date for the purpose of funding the state’s school districts. This is a count of the number of students in attendance on October 1st. This is when the federal government requires a count of the number of students eligible for the free and reduced price lunch program for purposes of Title I funding. An advantage to using the single count date is that it is reasonably easy and it also helps to cut down on administrative costs. There are many disadvantages to using this system. The single count date does not give districts any type of financial incentives for holding onto students after the count date. In most districts, enrollment will rise or fall from fall to spring, so if you have to use the single count date then districts could be more over-funded or under-funded. There are some students who don’t enroll even enroll in school until after October 1st, so this would cause districts to receive no funding for these students.
The top four things the public should know about school finance in Iowa is as follows:
The total amount of money a district has to spend is primarily driven by the number of children a district has. We can’t just raise as much money (or as little) as we want locally.
The tax rate of a district is largely driven by formula and only a small portion is impacted by the school board.
Certain funds have to be spent on certain things. This explains why a district might have the funds to pave a parking lot, even though they don’t have money to pay teachers.
Most of our expenses are staff: approximately 80% of a district’s general fun is ...
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...day of students enrolled in school throughout the school year. ADM differs from ADA because the daily count includes absent students. Advantages to this technique involve the fact there is a great accuracy, financial incentives by keeping students in school all year, and districts funding will not be affected for the absent students. Because ADM is complex, it is subject to local manipulation, and lacks commonsense appeal. An imperfection to this method is that it provides no financial incentive for promoting attendance. Another disadvantage is that ADM involves numerous counting and reporting, it could also be more time-consuming and costly to administrators.
If I had to choose between ADA and ADM, I would chose ADM as it appears you have the advantage of allocating more dollars towards all classifications. It provides a better way to line-item your budget.
The American public school system faces an education crisis. According to Benjamin Barber, American children barely surpass the lowest standards set for education, especially in literacy, throughout the county’s history. Barber supports the existence of this crisis in his essay “America Skips School”, but argues against a solution to remedy the numerous problems facing the system. Although he acknowledges no solution, Barber suggests a smarter flow of financial resources will address many of the issues, however, he fails to acknowledge the distribution of this money. Barber’s suggestion for smarter financial resources for schools can be effectively implemented through a structured committee focused solely on the distribution of money.
“One way to better understand school finance is to think of it in terms of the adequacy and equity of resources. Adequacy is based on the principle that states should provide enough funding for all students to be able to meet academic expectations” (School Funding). The average spending per student in 2008 was 10,0297 and then ranging from as high as 11,572 in Ne...
The fine arts were once highly revered by the community and were a part of everyday life, yet today the fine arts must face their biggest competitor, that being sports. Sports have become a big business and many schools find it easier and better to cut arts programs due to low funding rather than athletic programs. Even though fine arts programs are not as profitable as athletic programs, they should be funded equally to athletic programs because they help student achievement, help students improve their cognitive skills, and encourage creativity.
With this many students, both state and federal representatives have made efforts to adopt reforms designed to make a solution to the funding inequality. The disproportion of funds first and foremost effects the amount of programs offered to children that vary from basic subjects such as: English, Math, and Science. This created the motivation to improve the quality of education for low-income neighborhoods by targeting resources other than property taxes and redirecting the states budgets. The goal the school districts all shared was the need to increase instruction, add after school activities, promote a well-rounded education, physical innovations to facilities and classrooms, and to update the academic resources. The popular demand that the funding to public education needs to correspond throughout all the school districts. Wealthy tax payers often argue that a region that depends on property taxes is the “American way.” This argument derives from the ideology that American success relies on perseverance and hard work, but if the playing field is uneven the higher born student has an advantage. “High property taxes—the burdens and perverse incentives they create, the rage they generate, the town-to-town school funding inequities they proliferate—…represent an endless New England nightmare…” (Peirce and Johnson, 2006). In the attempt to
...he surrounding area are required (and thus get more funding from local property taxes), by law and Education Code, to give a portion of their funding to school districts that are “poor” in order to boost the “poor” school districts performance; this idea of taking from the rich and giving to the poor is why it is dubbed the “Robin Hood” plan (Smith, Schools are Reassigned to Robin Hood, 2011). This bill was the first in a long series of proposed bills that was ruled as a constitutional solution for the 1989 Texas Supreme Court case Edgewood v. Kirby, but it is also the reason for the not only the current lawsuit filed by approximately 600 school districts (both wealthy and poor), but also the 2003 school funding lawsuit (Texas School Finance History, n.d.). It has been ruled unconstitional several times throughout its history, yet it still remains in practice today.
Frank Johnson, a writer for the National Center for Education Statics, “Disparities in Public School Spending.” Reported in 1995, public education expenditures per student are higher in the nation's smallest districts whereas students receive an average fully adjusted expenditure of $4,862 versus $4,216 in the largest district’s 10,000 students and above. (Johnson 4)
The Web. The Web. Feb 2014 Snell, Lisa. A Handbook for Student-Based Budgeting, Principal Autonomy, and School Choice. Los Angeles: Reason Foundation, 2013.
There are many other areas around the United States where urban schools suffer from lack of funding. In many of America...
Proper school funding is one of the keys to having a successful school. Americans believe that funding is the biggest problem in public schools. School improvements revolve around funding. There needs to be funding not only in the successful schools but also the schools that aren’t doing as well. In documentary, Waiting for Superman, it talks about how smaller class sizes will help students. Funding is what will help the smaller class sizes. State funding mechanisms are subject to intense political and economic scrutiny (Leonard). Studies have shown that funding is inversely related to accreditation levels (Leonard). School funding needs to be increased, but there must be accountability as well.
Statewide projects are funded with lottery money. For instance, schools can be updated with all the latest and greatest technology because the state has the funds to distribute to them. The state of Oregon allocates 57% of its profits to funding education. The state of Florida has put more than 3.9 billion dollars since 2010 in renovation and new construction of schools. Essentially, citizens are improving their state’s education system, which affect their child and thousands of others. The...
Financial Aid in Education A guy in $50,000 of debt has got to be irresponsible with his money, right? Actually, it is more likely that he is a college student. Hundreds of thousands of college students around the country are in financial predicament because of the government?s impersonal financial aid policies. The federal government?s current system has too many quirks that end up hurting the people that financial aid is supposed to help.
As colleges’ funds dry up, colleges must turn to the public to further support higher education. By raising state taxes, colleges can collect funds to help improve the school’s budgets. The state provides funds from the taxes for colleges to receive a certain amount for each student currently enrolled. All community and traditional four year colleges collect these funds in order to maintain the school’s budget. As reporter, Eric Kelderman states, “less than a third of colleges’ budget is based from state taxes”. The school’s budget is how colleges are able to provide academic support programs, an affordable intuition, and hire more counselors. Colleges must now depend on state taxes more than ever for public colleges. Without collecting more funds from state taxes, as author, Scott Carlson explains how Mr. Poshard explains to senators “our public universities are moving quickly toward becoming private universities…affordable only to those who have the economic wherewithal to them” (qtd. in.) Public colleges must be affordable to anyone who wishes to attend. If colleges lack to provide this to students, it can affect dropouts, a student’s ability focus, and cause stress. The problem of lack of funding is that colleges have insufficient funds. Therefore, the best possible solution for the problem of lack of funding would be increasing and collecting more funds from state taxes.
Public schools and towns haven’t been receiving their fair share of state revenue. In order to correct for this, you are right, those three options are ways of increasing funding. However, they are not the only way.
Governor Walker and his supporters claim that, rather than hurting Wisconsin’s school system, the budget cuts actually help by making schools be more careful and efficient with their use of money, and they say that spending more money on education will not actually improve it. For example, when budget cuts in Colorado forced some schools to rethink their spending, they switched to several more efficient teaching practices, the most original of which being a four day school week (Schouten 1). The four day school week allowed some districts to save up to $65,000 a year in transportation costs, such as the Maccray School District in Minnesota (Coleman, Walker & Lawrence 5). These newer teaching practices not only saved money on buses and other
Some states want to have separation when it comes to the income of these schools. States argue that high class, wealthy, school districts should have more money than the lower class districts, because of the tax payers wants or because there are better opportunities for students to grow in the wealthier areas. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 50 percent of lower end schools are not receiving the amount of money they should get from the state funds (U.S. Department of Education). This is what is preventing school districts in these areas from helping students with their education. The schools are forced to cut back on programs such as extracurricular activities that are suppose to encourage students to be active, or they would have to cut back on supplies where in some cases there are not enough textbooks for each student to have his or her own. The U.S. Department of Education also stated that teachers that are less paid and have less years teaching are often the ones dealing with the students in poverty. (U.S. Department of Education). This only prolongs the problem with children receiving the proper education. If they are taught by teachers who don’t know what they are teaching or those who don’t have enough experience, then the students are not going to learn the correct information or any information at all. While there are some schools