Leadership Matters February 2014

Tackling poverty in education ________________________

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faced by low-income students. Ladd mentions such interventions as early childhood education and pre-school programs, school- based health clinics and social services, and after-school and summer programs.

In the package of stories we have assembled in this edition of Leadership Matters, you can read about different perspectives and approaches taken by some of our colleagues from across the state. Interestingly enough, most of these approaches seem to fall into Ladd’s category No. 4 – directly addressing the challenges faced by low-income students. Like many of you, I am troubled by the issue of poverty in public education. It is my hope that IASA’s “Vision 20/20” initiative will offer some ideas, and I also am watching with great interest to see what recommendations will arise from Sen. Andy Manar’s Senate Education Funding Advisory Committee (EFAC). Those recommendations are supposed to be presented to the General Assembly this month (February) and I would guess that the recommendations might include things such as block grant funding and a fundamental change to the funding formula designed to redistribute funding to poorer school districts. The bottom line regarding the state’s funding of public schools is that General State Aid (GSA) must be restored to full funding. GSA was designed to be the great equalizer between school districts in a state that relies primarily on local property taxes to fund public education. Cutting GSA, as has been done the past two years and is predicted to happen again next school year, hurts all school districts. But it disproportionately harms poor school districts that get very little in local property tax revenue. Changing how you slice the pie won’t do any good if the pie keeps getting smaller.

This year marks the 50 th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” In this photo, President Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in front of his one-room Junction Elementary School in Johnson, Texas. In speech after speech, President Johnson presented education — from Head Start preschools and Title I grants to help level the educational field for disadvantaged students, to the forerunner of Pell Grants to help them afford college — as the linchpin of the Great Society efforts. "Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom," he said as he declared an "unconditional war on poverty" in his Jan. 8, 1964 State of the Union address. "The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."

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