Remedial Education

Congress should revise the formula for allocating federal funds to school districts for remedial education so that more aid flows to counties with the largest numbers of poverty-related low achievers and those least able to pay for supplementary services. Because poverty diminishes a child's chances of success in school, Congress established the Chapter 1 program to fund supplementary remedial education services for low achievers in poor neighborhoods. Changing the Chapter 1 funding formula could target more funds to counties with the greatest needs. The existing formula does not accurately reflect the distribution of poor achievers due to poverty, provide extra help to areas with less ability to fund remedial education, or adequately reflect differences in local costs of providing education. A revised formula would improve targeting of Chapter 1 funds if it (1) relied on a more precise way of estimating the number of poverty-related low achievers, (2) used an income adjustment factor to grant more assistance to areas least able to finance remedial instruction, and (3) employed a uniform measure of education services costs that recognized differences within and between states.

GAO found that: (1) the measure of need for Chapter 1 services results in an underestimate of children in need of services in areas with large numbers of poor children; (2) the measure of need for services is inappropriate for schools with high numbers of poor children, since those schools have disproportionately more low-achieving students than schools with fewer children in poverty; (3) for counties with relatively high numbers of poor children, the Chapter 1 formula overestimates the amount of funding allocated per child in need; (4) urban high-need counties generally receive less funding per low-achieving child than rural and mixed high-need counties; (5) the Chapter 1 funding formula does not account for variations in county or state fiscal capacities, which could acutely affect highly impoverished urban and rural counties that have the fewest resources to provide educational services; (6) if used in fiscal year 1990, a funding formula similar to the illustrated formula would have increased Chapter 1 allocations to high-need counties and those with less ability to pay at the expense of those with relatively less need; (7) under the illustrative formula, Chapter 1 allocations to high-need, low-income counties would have increased, on average, from $653 to $958 per child in need, reducing allocations to counties with less need or higher abilities to pay; (8) most of the poverty data used to determine Chapter 1 allocations come from the decennial census; and (9) children aged 5 to 17 in families with incomes below the poverty level make up 95 percent of the 8.1 million children used to allocate basic grants, but those data are not updated.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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