Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a recent New York Times Magazine essay, writes about the decision she and her husband made to send their daughter to predominantly Black public schools serving high-poverty communities, where funding and resources were more limited than at many other schools.
Their choice was intentional. They wanted their daughter to attend school with Black children who looked like her. But despite their involvement in the school, PTA and hiring a tutor, Hannah-Jones writes that they later came to realize their daughter still did not receive the quality of education they believed she needed in elementary and middle school.
The issue of providing a quality education for all students extends beyond race or New York City. It can affect a child attending school in rural Georgia or in a lower-income community in metro Atlanta: Do schools have the funding and resources they need to adequately educate the children they serve?
School funding and whether Georgia’s decades-old approach still meets the needs of today’s students was the focus of a September luncheon hosted by RedefinED Atlanta at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. RedefinED is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
During the luncheon, Dana Rickman, president and CEO of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, explained that Georgia school districts are still funded largely through the Quality Basic Education formula, or QBE, created in 1985.
The formula uses student enrollment and a series of weights to determine state funding for districts and staffing needs such as teachers, administrators and social workers. But Rickman said the formula has not kept pace with changes in education or the needs that students bring into classrooms today.
Among the gaps, she said, are the effects of poverty as well as the costs of technology, school safety, mental health and student well-being.
“In the 1980s, technology in school was an overhead projector, maybe a mainframe computer in the media center,” Rickman said. “Today, technology in school is absolutely necessary. High-speed internet, Chromebooks, cybersecurity, all of these things are not properly accounted for in our current QBE model.”
While the state legislature has provided grants for some emerging needs, Rickman said they have been one-time investments.
A panel discussion on Georgia’s current funding model included Dr. Keith Colbert, senior chief of staff for Academics and District Operations for Clayton County Public Schools; Mark Dixon, president and /CEO of A+ Education Partnership in Alabama; and Dr. Cayanna Good, deputy commissioner of Innovation and Impact for the Technical College System of Georgia, and chair of the State Charter Schools Commission of Georgia.
Aarti Sharma, vice president of Policy & Advocacy at RedefinED, moderated the conversation.
Colbert said Clayton County is an example of how much student needs have changed since the QBE formula was created. The district now has highly concentrated poverty and students requiring more intensive academic support.
There might be 700 students who may qualify for early intervention services, he said, but only 20 teachers available to provide them.
“So you have X amount of students who will not receive that intervention service because you don’t have the staff members,” Colbert said
Good said there are nuances in communities affected by poverty.
She recalled visiting a rural Georgia school where some children wore nightgowns to class because the garments provided the long sleeves they needed in cold weather. She thought about purchasing coats but realized there wasn’t a nearby retail store where she could easily buy them.
“That’s a different level of poverty,” Good said.
Alabama has changed the way it funds schools.
Dixon said the state has adopted a hybrid funding model that maintains its existing foundation formula while adding funding based on particular student needs, including poverty, special education, English-language learners and gifted students.
“Being able to look at the whole system … allows you to look at this in a whole new way instead of trying to balance it across the board,” he said.
The state adopted the Alabama Literacy Act in 2019 with the goal of ensuring students are reading on grade level by the end of third grade. He said having a statewide strategy allows Alabama to say with one voice what its plan for literacy is rather than relying on a collection of disconnected initiatives.
Colbert said formulas and education policy ultimately have to come back to the children affected by them.
Clayton County operates under a simple philosophy, he said: “Children eat first.”
“Obviously, in a political atmosphere, we get pulled in different directions but we have to have all the practitioners at the table to recenter around what is the impact for students,” Colbert added. “And we have to continue to ask that question after every decision.”
