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Notes -
Off the top of my head:
Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.
Dear Colleagues
Making funds contingent on keeping kids in or out of the proper locker rooms
Throwing ESSR funds at districts that almost universally used them to fund new permanent programs and then begged for more funding when the always-temporary funds expired
There’s just a ton more strings attached funds that lead to administrative bloat and generally incentivize schools to chase things that aren’t all that useful except that they get rewarded with funds
In my experience, most conservative-leaning people want the poverty to be concentrated, though. I can think of several small districts in old mill towns near me that are having enough trouble staying solvent with Federal funding. If that dries up then it's game over for them and they will be forced to merge with the wealthier suburban districts that surround them, causing a much bigger uproar among Trumpy types than an obscure DOE incentive structure.
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