Source Form #12

Title:  An NEA policy brief: Volatility in Census Poverty Estimates for ESEA Title I Grants Undermines Planning, Resource Allocation

http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/mf_PB01_Census.pdf

 

Summary:  This report provides a detailed summary of how allocations of Title I funds work, including fluctuations on a year-to-year basis, and solutions to the wild fluctuations of the allocated funds.

 

Topic: http://msaraceno.wordpress.com/question/

 

Category:  This is an institutional source.  This source also provides graphs as visual aid.

 

What is it?  This is a policy brief that covers the current topic, which is important to the National Education Association.

 

Publication Information: The National Education Association is the website this article is published on.  Published in 2008. 

 

Author:  Dennis Van Roekel, NEA President.

 

Location: http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/mf_PB01_Census.pdf

 

Accessed: February 12, 2009

 

Support:  U.S. Department of Education for the fiscal year 2008.  This source is used to provide a source of where the funding figures are coming from.

            U.S. Census Bureau.  This source is used to provide a table that relates statistical information that was conducted by the Census Bureau.

            Goodwin Liu is cited for an article published that relates statistical information supporting the figures used in this document.

 

The sources in this report are a bringing together of groups of data to correlate relationships of information in one place.  The sources are way to provide a thorough analysis of data that takes a long time to research.  Thus, the author is merely piggy backing data to produce this report in a fashion more timely than if the information was gathered on their own time.

 

Audience and Agenda:  The audience for this report is small and well defined as educators and policy makers.  The idea of this article is to present data of allocations and the year-to-year magnitude of shifts occurring on a state level.  The main readers of this article are going to be educators at the state level who are looking to improve the quality of education and benefits of the Title I funds.  The NEA website is a member based community where teachers and educators across the U.S. pay to subscribe to the ideas and community presented on this website.

 

Usefulness:  This report presents an outlook into the allocations on a year-to-year basis, which is helpful in showing the major fluctuations occurring in a school’s budget.  The information in the report provides a conscious effort in exposing the flaws of such processes and how preparing for a shift is almost impossible.  Since the data is on a three to four year cycle, schools can only get funding for what the numbers were at those dates in current years.  The idea of solution is to simply equalize schools before funds are even allocated as it will make measuring how much a school needs an easier task.  By continuing to allocate in the current manner, policy makers are approving an unsound method, which in turn is ruining the integrity of the funds altogether.  The article is short but precise in what information it is portraying as it is a building block to better things and simply empirical data that can be further analyzed as time continues.  The idea is to raise awareness as a new administration takes a chair to better the education system.  The graphs on this source are based off of the data in a chart on this source.  By using the data in the chart I could plot my own graphs and show whatever states I want to show to people off the data.  The data was gathered from the Census Bureau; thus, it is as reliable as statistical data can get.

 

 

Works Cited:

 

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