Chief State School Officers and city superintendents often feel out gunned when advocating for children in the money driven world of political lobbying. Of the $3.45 billion spent lobbying in the U.S. in 2018, a mere $20.6 million or 00.6% was spent on education, and nearly all of that tiny fraction was spent by higher education, leaving PreK-12 on the sidelines. In this environment, the best way for education leaders to have impact is to arm themselves with powerful facts and human stories that demonstrate the impact of those facts and to use the access they have to policymakers. This post is about a powerful new approach combining some familiar data with less familiar, but readily available, data. The result will be a way to spotlight deep educational needs in the same way that an MRI can show things that an X-Ray will never see.
The Most Familiar Data– Projecting Enrollments
On average, education typically consumes about one third of every state budget. That budget is determined by some kind of funding formula with the largest variable in the formula being the number of students served by the system. Responsible legislators, school boards and governors have a strong interest in projecting budgets which depend on how many students will be served by the education system in any given future year. Education advocates can get or maintain credibility by using data, such as annual grade level enrollment trends, and adding “Vital Statistics” – birth records and rates – from the state health department. They can use historical data on “survival rates”, the number of students who historically show up from one age level to the next, to make the projections quite accurate. Someone at the state department of education is very likely already doing this and will gladly share their data and expertise. The same methodology works at both the state and large district level, and district level leaders can add to district level projections by knowing about housing trends from real estate developers. I had assumed this was all nearly universal practice, but I have found that it is not. It is too easy and too basic not to use. Demographers are always amused when they get “fortune teller” credit for being able to project populations years into the future. Now you can share in the fun – and the credit.
The Less Familiar– the Poverty Data that you didn’t know existed
Poverty is still one of the best predictors of deeper educational need. It has actually become even more important as income inequality has grown so much in recent decades. Unfortunately, nearly all educators have defaulted to using the readily available free and reduced-price lunch data as the only indicator of poverty related educational need. Free and reduced-price lunch (FRL) eligibility is a pretty gross indicator and even using only free lunch data alone will not tell us about much deeper problems that will create the longest-term educational challenges. The eligibility guidelines for free lunches are set at 30% above the federally determined poverty level and reduced-eligibility at 85% over that level. A piece of collateral damage of the increase in income inequality is that legislators, board members and other policy makers have nearly grown immune to this data as more than half the elementary students now qualify for FRL and districts seem to compete with each other in claiming high numbers. I would suggest that FRL data is no longer the best indicator of deep educational need. Allow me to explain better alternative.
What FRL data do not show are the numbers of young children living in families at 50% belowthe poverty level. Looking at 50% poverty is the difference of a family of four living on $247 a week and the same size family with a reduced price lunch eligible income living at $915 a week. It is at this much deeper level of poverty where more profoundly negative issues impact the development of very young children. Young children growing up in families with this level of poverty are much more likely to be surrounded by drug and domestic abuse, incarceration, violence and other unsteadying factors. Those factors result in long-term physiologicalchanges which affect brain development and overall health. (Pleasesee the ACES Study by the CDC at https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/acestudy/aboutace.html). The impact of poverty at this deep level is more like cancer for education and economic development while the impact of poverty at FRL levels is more like the flu. Most school advocates don’t know how to track poverty data at this deeper level and their ability to advocate for the most vulnerable children is severely limited.
The good news is that the finding the data on young children at this deeper level of poverty can be obtained without too much effort and it now exists at the school district level! It is U.S. Census Survey data. You can either find it yourself by navigating the U.S Census Bureau website and working with the “American Fact Finder” tool. If you don’t have the patience for doing it yourself, I would highly recommend contacting the U.S. Census repository for your state. It might be located at the state library or a state university. The good people there can generate a report for you on your state or on your medium-to-large size school district, and they can also provide guidance on margins of error that can be improved upon by averaging multiple years of data and other good advice. For starters, ask or look for data on families with children five an under who are living at 50% of the federal poverty level. You will also be interested in knowing what the trends are over time. For example, I found the number of very young children living at such deep levels of poverty in some jurisdictions were increasing much, much faster than the population of very young children not living in such deep poverty. The implications for education, health, human services, and, if nothing changes, for corrections, are profound.
With the ability to accurately project enrollments and also to predict the number of children in deep poverty coming into the educational system, you will be in a better position to advocate and prepare for these children. It is well worth finding a little of the data geek in yourself or those around you. You may not have dollars to influence policy, but you will have the facts. You will only need to find your voice.