YONKERS: While wealthier school districts in Yonkers routinely spend significantly more money to run their public schools, the dirty little secret is that the disparity between various Yonkers Public Schools that can’t be attributed to the relative wealth in their communities.
All of the schools are part of a single district.
Children of color who need more support to overcome barriers to academic achievement are routinely shortchanged in the city of hills.
Even now with hybrid learning many poorer children of color have not been provided with the laptops and tablets need to complete their school assignments.
Yonkers 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.
the federal data showed that 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.
Until this year, funding disparities between schools in the same district were hard to identify. Most districts didn’t budget in a way that allowed comparisons of school-level spending.
They reported only districtwide averages, making disparities across districts the primary fodder for conversations about educational inequities.
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.
The data was from the 2018-19 academic year.
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. Districts that use the federal dollars to equalize their spending violate federal policy.
The transparency mandate was tucked into the 2015 update of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act but didn’t require states to report that data until June 30 of this year.
Off the record some in Yonkers Public Schools Superintendent Edwin Quezada offices have defended spending less on higher-poverty schools in the city of hills.
They claim that, certain special education programs can drive up costs in certain schools, but will not go on the record with this theory.
But the fact is that Yonkers is systematically being inequitable to poorer children of color and they are not working on solving that problem.
Yonkers has not proposed changes to deal with the inequities laid bare by the new data, even though the took nearly a year to put it together before submitting it.
The bottom line is that Yonkers needs to stop short changing children of color and need to to leverage school dollars to get the greatest outcome for the city’s children.
Maybe before the next Yonkers School budget the board of education should hire an educational consulting firm to do a financial audit of the new federal reporting, so that parents and lawmakers can understand how badly poorer children of color are being cheated out of their futures.
While federal law has only recently demanded transparency around school funding disparities for every district in the country, equity battles have played out in a handful of districts and communities over the years.
And Yonkers may once again, become ground zero in a public education battle if the Yonkers BOE doesn’t take steps to correct what is being done to these poorer children of color.
But Rochester, New York, offers a lesson in how hard it can be not only to make major changes, but to make them permanent.
Jean-Claude Brizard took over as superintendent of the Rochester City Schools in western New York in January 2008.
Soon after he started, he hired a consulting firm to follow the dollars in his district and identify inequities, which, it turns out, were striking.
The budgeting system in Rochester until that point was one in which well-connected principals could advocate for more money for their schools.
Superintendent Brizard wanted to change that.
He started out by sharing the data internally and with the school board and then held community meetings where he aimed to spur enough demand for change that the district would be able to justify going against the wishes of the small but vocal populations of the schools that had gotten more than their fair share of district spending.
Superintendent Brizard orchestrated a three-year transition to a student-based funding formula that clearly laid out how much money schools would get for students with different needs.
Superintendent Brizard was sent packing and just after the new funding formula was fully in place, he said a group of affluent, mostly white, parents succeeded in lobbying the school board to dismantle the new system.
This Yonkers inequitable local school funding issue may once again need the help of the federal courts to solve.
In Los Angeles Unified School District, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Southern California forced the district to revise its methods of allocating spending among schools.
The ACLU sued the district, arguing that it wasn’t directing those dollars to the right students, and LAUSD settled, giving $151 million to a group of schools that had been shortchanged and revising its spending patterns moving forward.