4
faced by low-income students.
Ladd mentions such interventions
as early childhood education and
pre-school programs, school-
based health clinics and social
services, and after-school and
summer programs.
In the package of stories we have
assembled in this edition of
Leadership
Matters,
you can read about different
perspectives and approaches taken by
some of our colleagues from across the
state. Interestingly enough, most of these
approaches seem to fall into Ladd’s
category No. 4 – directly addressing the
challenges faced by low-income
students.
Like many of you, I am troubled by
the issue of poverty in public education.
It is my hope that IASA’s “Vision 20/20”
initiative will offer some ideas, and I also
am watching with great interest to see
what recommendations will arise from
Sen. Andy Manar’s Senate Education
Funding Advisory Committee (EFAC).
Those
recommendations
are
supposed to be presented to the
General Assembly this month (February)
and I would guess that the
recommendations might include things
such as block grant funding and a
fundamental change to the funding
formula designed to redistribute funding
to poorer school districts.
The bottom line regarding the state’s
funding of public schools is that General
State Aid (GSA) must be restored to full
funding. GSA was designed to be the
great equalizer between school districts
in a state that relies primarily on local
property taxes to fund public education.
Cutting GSA, as has been done the past
two years and is predicted to happen
again next school year, hurts all school
districts. But it disproportionately harms
poor school districts that get very little in
local property tax revenue.
Changing how you slice the pie won’t
do any good if the pie keeps getting
smaller.
(Continued from page 3)
Tackling poverty in education
________________________
This year marks the 50
th
anniversary of President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” In this photo, President
Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
in front of his one-room Junction Elementary School in
Johnson, Texas. In speech after speech, President Johnson
presented education — from Head Start preschools and Title
I grants to help level the educational field for disadvantaged
students, to the forerunner of Pell Grants to help them afford
college — as the linchpin of the Great Society efforts. "Very
often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty,
but the symptom," he said as he declared an "unconditional
war on poverty" in his Jan. 8, 1964 State of the Union
address. "The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our
fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."
