montgomery township school district low income percentage

Schools with the wealthiest students tend to draw the most experienced teachers, who cost more. A lot of factors affect school-level spending, but a handful of district practices routinely drive these disparities. Hechinger’s analysis found multimillion-dollar funding disparities between schools in the same communities. Districts that use the federal dollars to equalize their spending violate federal policy. The analysis focused on state and local spending because federal dollars are explicitly intended to supplement district budgets, rather than provide an alternative revenue stream. Additionally, five states - Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Oregon - reported combined federal, state and local spending. The data was from the 2018-19 academic year, with the exception of Nevada, which has released only the data from 2017-18. Hechinger’s analysis of state and local spending by school included nearly 700 districts (those with 15 or more schools) from 40 states that made the data available. And we are working on that.” Tony Sanders, superintendent of Illinois School District U-46 Now, a federal financial reporting requirement has taken effect, demanding that states report per-student spending by school - just as they report student performance by school - and forcing transparency about disparate spending inside district lines. They reported only districtwide averages, making disparities across districts the primary fodder for conversations about educational inequities.

Most districts didn’t budget in a way that allowed comparisons of school-level spending. Until this year, funding disparities between schools in the same district were hard to identify. It’s the first time this kind of data has been compiled and analyzed nationally, and some of the spending gaps are extreme. In another 263 districts, the level of spending on each school had little to no connection to the number of students in poverty, despite the higher needs often present in low-income schools. U-46 was one of 53 districts across the United States that spent a statistically significant amount less state and local money on high-poverty schools than on lower-poverty schools, according to a new Hechinger Report analysis of how districts disburse funding. Kids who need more support to overcome barriers to academic achievement are routinely shortchanged.

Both schools are part of a single district, U-46, Illinois’ second largest.

While wealthier school districts routinely spend significantly more money to run their public schools, the disparity between Centennial and O’Neal can’t be attributed to the relative wealth in their communities.

Montgomery township school district low income percentage