The Economic Effect on Student Education

The Economic Effect on Student Education
Lewis and Clark State College

Introduction
In the United States a students’ education is effected by the Economy. Housing location of low income families’ effect student placement in schools that may not have the same resources available to them as other schools. Due to the recent economic downturn, families and thus students with a lower income are challenged to find ways to get the same education as non-low income schools. There are several factors that attribute to a student’s education such as funding, resources, programs, and teachers. When these resources are utilized a student from a low income family should receive the same level of education as those in non-low income schools. While a student’s education may be effected by the economy there are several state and national government programs available to the schools in the low-income communities. There are also several state and national programs available to the students of low-income families to aid in a better education.
Effect on Students
The vast majority of low-income parents today are working but still struggling to make ends meet. They struggle to find and keep a job in an ever changing market. It is tough for them to keep up with their bills and pay the costs of everyday living. The basic bills of mortgage, groceries and utilities are tough to maintain while trying to raise children with a chance to succeed. These families have much in common with other American families. They all try to balance work and family life. One major difference is that parents and children in low-income families are more financially vulnerable than those in higher-income families.

According to the Urban Institute of Research, between 2000 and 2003, the number of low-income families with children increased from 30 to 32 percent. The families with full time jobs that are able work all year fell from 88 to 85 percent. Single-parent families were affected especially hard. In fact 37 percent of them that had lost their full time jobs were only receiving 8 percent of the increase in unemployment and insurance benefits.
School Funding
The home environment of a low-income child can drastically differ from the higher-income family. It can be very stressful for children to live in these environments. Among school-age children and adolescents, those living in low-income families are less likely to be a part of school activities and more likely to exhibit high levels of emotional and behavioral problems.
The State Education Agency or SEA is awarded funds for schools. The SEA then turns around and gives sub grants to Local Education Agencies or LEAs. A local education agency is able to apply to its States Education Agency for a sub grant under the following regulations:
The LEA is not eligible for a grant under the Small Rural School Achievement Program (# 84.358A);
20 percent or more of the children ages 5 through 17 years served by the LEA are from families with incomes below the poverty line; and
All of the schools served by the LEA are designated with a school locale code of 6, 7, or 8.
(U.S. Department of Education, 2012)

Low-income children tend to be concentrated in low-income school districts. These children often attend schools that don’t have these recourses available to them. This is because the recourses they do have are so limited and there are not many to go around. Since education is primarily a state responsibility, more than 90 percent of school funding comes from state and other local sources, and the federal government provides the rest. School districts generally draw much of their revenue from local taxes. This means districts in high-wealth parts of a state often have more funding than other districts in low-income areas. Over time, some states have moved to school finance models. This means that school districts receive more funding from state resources and do not rely so much on government funding. The goal of acquiring more state funding is to ensure that the lower-income school districts have access to additional resources. In other many state, however, the level of school funding comes mainly from the local taxes. There is a small problem with the characteristics that are used to determine a state's level of funding within a state. The comparison has proven that the data has proven that states are not fairly funding their school districts.
School Resources
To help schools improve and better educate their students, there is a School Improvement Grant or (SIG) program, that was initially part of the "No Child Left Behind Act," was intensely restructured and transformed into what we now know as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This new program identified 14,172 consistently low-achieving schools nationwide. The students that make up these schools were urban, poor, and high in minority populations. These numbers were greater than national averages and a high amount of these SIG eligible schools were in districts that are members of the “Council of the Great City Schools.” (Johnson, Kardos, Kauffman, Liu, Donaldson, 2004). The grants that began in the 2010-2011 school year, resulted in 831 schools nationwide receiving awards for school improvement. The average grant that was awarded was $2.54 million over three years. Making changes is difficult especially when trying to turn a school around. This means removing ineffective teachers from their current positions and recruiting well qualified teachers for these challenging schools. The other side is to provide schools with quality recourses that can be available to students to improve their education. The SIG programs are proving to be an effective change in helping schools and students experience an academic achievement
School Programs
We live in a nation where 42% of children come from low-income families. Too many schools face the challenge of teaching students that are not only dealing with learning and school, but are also dealing with the reality of their home lives. Schools and the community work together to improve the student outcomes by providing activities and events that meet the social, physical, cognitive, and economic need of the students, families and community. Schools provide afterschool programs such as key club, D.E.C.A, athletics and many more. In the North Idaho Area there is a Kroc center. This center is a place for students to go after school to do homework, play basketball, rock climb, swim and much more. There are buses that pick the students up from school and transport them to the Kroc until their parents can come get them. The Kroc closes at 10:00 p.m. each night. I spoke will Bill Davenport who is in charge of a lot of these programs. He mentioned that students don’t want to go home until they absolutely have to. The Kroc provides scholarships to students who’s parents cannot afford the memberships. The Kroc works with the community and the schools to provide this place to continue to learn and grow as an individual.
Teachers
Hiring practices, relationships with colleagues, and curriculum are three factors of support for new teachers. These three factors have found to help new teachers be confident while teaching. The new teachers in low-income schools are less likely to experience the support and mentoring of other experiences colleagues then those new teachers entering into a high-income school. The higher-income schools allow teachers to meet the curriculum and standards while containing the flexibility in their own classrooms. These differences create a pattern between high-income and low-income schools that deserve careful consideration because they reveal broad patterns of inequity, which can have severe consequences for low-income students.

“Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL), developed by West Ed, is an approach to improving the teaching of English language learner students at the secondary level. The study is a school-level randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of QTEL using an intent-to-treat model. It aligns with the broader democratic goals of equal access and equal opportunity for all students” (Walqui and van Lier 2010). By enhancing the ability of teachers to work with English learner students, the intervention also seeks to increase the quality of instruction for all of the other students in the classroom.

The results of the QTEL Study aid in making policy decisions and direct where professional development needs to take place for the teachers of English language learner students. QTEL also targets “teachers of English language learner students classified as limited English proficient and those reclassified as fluent English proficient and placed in mainstream classrooms” (Bos et al., 2012). This model tests the effectiveness of offering an intervention rather than that of participation and also suggests that there might be a positive relationship between QTEL and the amount of student-student interaction within classrooms.

In a study on the importance of quality teachers, the Teacher Quality Roadmap, formed and analysis that is “framed around four standards for improving teacher quality. The standards--evaluations, staffing, compensation and work schedule--are supported by research and best practices from the field. (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2012).”

Among the report's findings were that hiring and assigning teachers to certain schools did not give sufficient consideration to that particular schools’ needs. This placed a huge burden on principals and hiring staff, who would then have to screen applicants instead of recruit applicants. same study they found that the local districts were not adequately supporting those teachers who were wanting to take on more leadership.

In Miami-Dade, Florida, where this study took place, they found that there was not a lot of data that included how many teachers were struggling and in need of more education and/or direction in the classroom. There is less of an indication that the Miami-Dade School District looks for “individuals with strong academic backgrounds when recruiting new teachers, even though research has found that teachers with a strong academic background of their own are more likely to be effective” (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2012).

Levine, who wrote a series of policy papers on the Education of Educators, identifies several model teacher education programs. Unfortunately, through his research, Levine found that the majority of the nation's teachers are prepared in programs that have low admission and graduation standards and cling to an outdated vision of teacher education (Levine, 2006). Levine states that “state requirements and accreditation agencies have failed to assure that America's teachers are ready for the classrooms in which they will teach” (Levine, 2006). Closing failing programs, expanding quality programs, and creating the equivalent of a “Rhodes Scholarship” to attract the best and brightest to teaching are just a few ways to improve the quality of teachers at schools. Even shifting the training of a large percentage of new teachers from Master's Degree granting-institutions to research Universities will aid in increasing teacher qualifications and teaching requirements (Levine 2006).
Funding Aid
As one might expect in a nation as diverse as the United States--with respect to economics, geography, and politics, the level of commitment to education varies on a state-by-state basis. Regardless of these variations, improvements in public education can be measured by summary statistics and in the education world, the existence of funding inequities has long been a known fact, but the sources of these inequities have not always been obvious. Typically, local property tax variation has been blamed as the sole, or at least primary, cause of inequalities and called for greater state funding as the solution. In an online article titled “Measuring Inequity in School Funding,” written by Diana Epstein the author explains that “in practice, it is seen that states providing a large share of state aid are not necessarily more equitable in their distribution of school funding” (Epstein, 2011). So it seems that there must be more to the story behind funding inequities, but what stands in the way of equality? Epstein continues that in order to find out more about “inequities in school finance, which are defined as often-overlooked features of school funding systems,” we need to identify those states where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower/higher across different school districts and to which extent the local and state governments commit resources to public education (Epstein, 2011).

The National Education Association Research Department, (NEA) offers different reports to its state and local affiliates as well as to researchers, policymakers, and the public as a tool to examine public education programs and services. Consideration of factors such as a state's tax system, provisions for other public services, and population characteristics also are needed when allocating state governmental aid.

While there are inadequacies and inequalities from state to state aid, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the stimulus package, appropriated $100 billion for education and included $3 billion for school improvement grants (SIGs) to help reform low-performing schools” (McMurre & McIntosh, 2012). The article continues to say that this amount was in addition to the $546 million provided by the regular fiscal year in 2009.
Title I is a large federal program that provides assistance to low-income schools to improve achievement for students who struggle academically. In the year 2009 total of more than $3.5 billion for SIGs represents a seven-fold increase over the previous year's amount. With this large amount of funding, the U.S. Department of Education changed the requirements and availability of these grants. These revised requirements target section 1003(g) funds on the "persistently lowest-achieving" schools within each state, typically the lowest 5%, and limit these schools to using one of four schools improvement models (McMurre & McIntosh, 2012 ). The article continues that the rigorous grant process almost always includes the following four models. “(1) transformation, which entails replacing the school principal and undertaking three other specific reforms; (2) turnaround, which involves replacing the principal and many of the school staff; (3) restart, which means becoming a charter or privately managed school; and (4) school closure” (McMurre & McIntosh, 2012). While these requirements seem drastic, according to a report published by the U.S. Department of Education, “1,228 of the nation's lowest-achieving schools were awarded ARRA SIGs as of March 21, 2011 (Hurlburt et al., 2011).”
Conclusion
With full economic recovery still yet to cross the horizon, education leaders and policymakers at the all levels are well aware of the ripple effect between a rebound from the federal level to the state and local levels. In others words the state and local leaders need to anticipate the upcoming situation. They need to be aware their local situation because it will likely to get worse before it gets better. This awareness directly affects the policy and budget decisions school administrators need to make The economic downturn has shifted has made tightening budgets and enforcing moderate changes have now become significant changes, including increasing cuts to areas that directly impact student achievement.

One of the solutions to economic recovery is schooling. A strong system of schools is capable of feeding the workforce. The economic diversity is essential to a recovering our economy. Reducing investment in schools when we need it most will only delay the economic downturn. Therefore, it is up to the Congress and the U.S. Department of Education work to invest in schools and provide the resources they need to help educate the future. Students across the U.S. deserve the recovery and growth of our schools and quality of education.

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