School System Equity In CT: Where Does Your District Rank?

CONNECTICUT — The once-a-century global pandemic that is the coronavirus crisis will clearly have a generations-long effect on industry, wealth and mental health. Less immediately obvious will be the hit that children's education takes because of partial or total remote learning.

Low-income students have suffered the greatest "learning loss" due to partial or total remote learning, according to personal finance website WalletHub. Without any kind of public assistance, people in low-income districts were less likely to have the technological resources needed to connect with their teachers and classmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the case of many states, the efforts to assist children to make these connections continues to be extraordinary. But in some others, more affluent school districts receive a greater amount of funding per student than poorer districts. In short, while the U.S. is one of the most educated countries in the world, it doesn’t provide the same quality elementary school or secondary school education to all students.

Connecticut has the 18th least equitable school districts in the U.S. overall, but some districts within the state are fairer than others, according to the data compiled by WalletHub. To find out where school funding is distributed most equitably, their researchers scored 166 districts in the Nutmeg State based on two metrics: average household income and expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools per pupil.

In Connecticut, WalletHub researchers found the balance between household income and expenditures per student to be most equitable in the Litchfield, Eastford, Somers, West Hartford and Voluntown districts. At the bottom of the list are Darien, Weston, Westport, New Canaan and Wilton.

Bruce D. Baker, a professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration, Graduate School of Education at Rutgers says a big part of the problem is that legislators can simply mandate higher standards for schools without providing sufficient funding to do so.

"It creates an unfair playing field. They need to understand the costs, set tax policy to raise sufficient revenues to meet those costs, and develop school funding formulas to target those revenues where they are needed most," Baker said.

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States that do provide equitable funding to all school districts can help prevent poor students from having lower graduation rates, lower rates of pursuing higher education and smaller future incomes than their wealthy peers. The difference is dramatic: College graduates have $524 - $1,112 higher median weekly earnings than people with a high school diploma and no college experience, depending on the degree.

Fewer unfunded mandates will help, but there is also a non-academic component to the win, according to Kathryn Welby, an assistant professor of Practice - Special Education, at the Winston School of Education and Social Policy in Merrimack College.

"In addition to academic resources, such as access to technology, high-quality instruction, evidence-based curriculum, and experienced teachers, we must also think about providing non-academic resources," Welby said. "Addressing students' non-academic needs by attending to the whole child would help the most vulnerable students during this current crisis. Educating the whole child would focus on allocating funds that could be used for wrap-around services. Such services could include health care, crisis interventionists, family community supports, and counseling while increasing the number of counselors, school psychologists, nurses, truancy officers, and social workers within the schools to help meet students' non-academic needs."

The data nationwide, which do not include Hawaii, led to some counterintuitive rankings. Wealthy states such as New York, California and Illinois shared the bottom of the list alongside Idaho and Montana. Iowa is at the top of the list for states with the most equitable school systems, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas, Indiana and Florida.

Methodology

Data used to create this ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics.

For expenditures, for each 1 percent above the state's average, WalletHub researchers removed 1 point from a base score of 50 points for each district. For household income, for each 1 percent above the state's average, they added 1 point to a base score of 50 points for each district. The inverse was true for each 1 percent below the state's average.

The final score for each district was calculated by taking the absolute difference between the score for expenditures and the score for household income. WalletHub then ranked the districts based on the total score, with the lowest value, representing the most equitable, being ranked 1.