For the first time in 40 years, about 48 percent of the 50 million students attending K-12 public schools in the United States are living in low-income or impoverished households. The findings come from a new report by the Southern Education Foundation, which is the oldest public charity organization in the U.S. and works to ensure “equity and excellence” in education for all students.
According to the report, which examines family household incomes during the 2011 school year, 17 states reported more than 50 percent of its public school students were designated as low-income students. Of those 17 states, 13 are in the South, while the other four — New Mexico, California, Oregon and Nevada — are in the West.
The state with the highest rate of low-income students was Mississippi, with 71 percent of students qualifying as low-income, followed by 68 percent in New Mexico, and 66 percent in Louisiana. The only southern states to have a rate below 50 percent were Maryland with 40 percent and Virginia with 37 percent.
Steve Suitts is vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and author of the study. He said that the 2008 recession, immigration and a high birthrate among low-income children have largely fueled the changes in poverty rates in the United States, but noted that politicians, policymakers and educators haven’t implemented programs to address the issues that arise with a child raised in poverty.
“We have an education system that continues to assume that most of our students are middle class and have independent resources outside the schools in order to support their education,” Suitts said. “The trends and facts belie that assumption. We can’t continue to educate kids on an assumption that is 20 years out of date. We simply have to reshape our educational system.”
Each year the United States spends about $500 billion on K-12 education programs throughout the nation. The federal government pays for about 10 percent of the costs to operate the schools, and the rest of the tab is left for state and local governments to cover.
Because local governments rely on property taxes to fund schools, officials point out that poor districts with a limited tax base can’t raise as much money as more affluent communities. This leads to children in poorer communities often attending schools that have fewer resources, substandard facilities and less-qualified teachers.
Richard Rothstein is a senior fellow at the Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He said that thus far, national efforts to improve public education such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have focused on the wrong problems.
Rothstein added that holding teachers accountable for their students’ academic performance, rewriting math and reading standards and increasing the number of standardized tests, don’t address the issue of poverty.
Suitts agreed and said, “We have to do something different by the way we educate, but we do it by understanding who are the students and what are the needs.”
According to a report from the Washington Post, some education experts point to the large number of impoverished students in the public school system as a reason why the U.S. lags behind other nations when it comes to international education test results.
Michael A. Rebell is the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University. He said he was shocked at the rapid spike in poverty rates in the United States and agreed it may be a factor in why U.S. test scores are lower than those of other countries.
“When you break down the various test scores, you find the high-income kids, high-achievers are holding their own and more,” Rebell said. “It’s when you start getting down to schools with a majority of low-income kids that you get astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding educational outcomes is not the U.S. overall, it’s the growing low-income population.”
Hank Bounds is the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and former state school superintendent of the state’s schools. He said the country needs to figure out how to educate the growing classes of poor students and reverse the trend.
“Lots of folks say we need to change this paradigm, but as a country, we’re not focusing on the issue,” he said. “What we’re doing is not working. We need to get philanthropies, the feds, business leaders, everybody, together and figure this out. We need another Sputnik moment.”
Gene Nichol, who directs the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, agreed and said, “More and more of these kids are in economic distress. And there’s less and less political will to do the things needed to fix it.”
Misplaced priorities
In its report, the SEF wrote:
“Long-term trends strongly suggest that the nation has not adjusted its support for public schools to reflect the educational challenges that these developments bring. Since 2001, the number of low income students in public schools has grown roughly by one-third (32 percent) across the states. These are the students who need the most assistance. They generally are more likely to score lowest on school tests, fall behind in school, fail to graduate, and never receive a college degree.
“During this same period (2001-2011), the nation’s per pupil expenditure (adjusted for inflation) in public schools increased by only 14 percent — less than half the rate of growth in the numbers of low income students. The growth in the number of low income students far out-stripped the growth in per pupil spending in public schools during the last decade in every region of the country, except the Northeast.”
Though public schools’ spending increased during the last decade along with a growing poverty rate, it did so at a slower rate.
After adjusting for inflation, the SEF reported:
“NCES data show that the nation’s average per pupil expenditure for public education rose by 14 percent from 2001 to 2011. There were, however, considerable differences between and within the regions in rates of increase. The Northeast enlarged per pupil expenditures by 28 percent, twice the national average. The per pupil expenditure in both the South and the Midwest were much smaller – only 12 percent, and the West had the smaller gains, half the national rate from 2001 to 2011.
“These trends in public schools since 2001 have contributed to a pattern that remains today: schools that have the largest proportion of low income students spend the least in support of students. In 2011, a majority of school children in both the South and the West were from low income families, and the public school children in the both the South and the West received the least educational resources: both less than $9,300 per pupil. In contrast, public schools in the Northeast, where 40 percent of all students are low income, spend $16,045 per pupil.”
The SEF said this trend is concerning because “low income students are more likely than students from wealthier families to have lower tests scores, fall behind in school, dropout, and fail to acquire a college degree. These gaps in learning and achievement have not improved in recent years, while the numbers of low income students have escalated in the South and nation.”
Though the report specifically examined poverty rates of children attending public schools in the city, the study acknowledged that 44 percent of rural students and 40 percent of suburban students were eligible for free and reduced lunches as well, meaning they were from low-income households.