Adventures in Malaportionment

Raegan Miller’s CAP paper on “Secret Recipes Revealed: Demystifying the Title I, Part A Funding Formulas” is very interesting but quite complicated and I’m having some trouble fully understanding the whole thing. The main point, however, is that the actual allocation of Title I education money (meant to help with schooling for poor kids) is handing out according to four separate formulae, each of which is pretty opaque, and the overall effect does a bad job of targeting money in needed ways. One source of perversity that I understand perfectly well is this one:

Second, recognizing the special funding challenges faced by small states, the formulas provide for minimum allocations.25 In other words, small states are guaranteed a non-trivial slice of the pie. Since small states tend not to serve concentrations of children in poverty, this adjustment provision detracts from the proper targeting of funds.

When people look at the data and don’t see a clear ideological skew to the Senate’s over-representation of low-population states, it’s important to recognize that the demographic characteristics of low-population states actually do create certain systematic quasi-ideological biases in the political system. In theory, you could have a low-population state featuring high levels of poverty, high levels of urbanization, many minority students, or some combination of the above. The Bronx, for example, has more than enough people to be a state. But it’s not a state, it’s just a part of a city that’s a part of a state.

Instead in the real world the low-population states are disproportionately rural, have very few non-white students, and few high-poverty school districts. Thanks to these states’ over-representation in the senate, however, federal education funding is distorted away from what ought to be high-priority districts in need of help and toward places that don’t really need it. This doesn’t show up as a partisan or ideological bias since many low-population states are represented by Democrats (Kent Conrad) and even very liberal Democrats (Pat Leahy). But the fact of the matter remains that this winds up systematically disadvantaging minority students and even left-wing Vermont Democrats aren’t so high-minded as to be inclined to vote for a change that would direct money away from their state and toward others that objectively need it more.