Distribution Of State Administered Federal Education Funds PDF Download

The present paper describes the findings of the second phase federal aid to rural schools. A qualitative analysis that was based on fieldwork visits to rural districts in four states. This research was motivated by the claims of rural advocates that rural students do not get their fair share of the federal education dollar. Unfortunately, there has been little analysis that sheds light on claims of antirural bias in the allocation of federal education funds. Earlier studies use nonmetropolitan status (a category that includes cities of up to 50,000 people) as their indicator of ruralness, which might mask the fact that smaller rural districts receive a disproportionately small share of federal funds. The first phase of this study examined, for six states (Vermont, North Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, and California), the distribution of fiscal year 1977 funds between rural and nonrural school districts for two state-administered federal programs: Libraries and Learning Resources (ESEA Title IV, Part B), and Educational Innovation and Support (ESEA Title IV, Part C). These two programs represent the two basic types of federal funding mechanisms--formula-based (Title IVB) and grants competitions (Title IVC). For the purpose of this study, we accepted that there is no perfect definition of rural. The criterion of equity in the quantitative analysis was whether rural districts were receiving the same number of dollars per student from the federal program as were nonrural districts.