More Money, Lower Achievement in Durham, North Carolina

Durham, North Carolina. It’s a medium-sized, old tobacco and textile city best known for housing Duke University. Most national media coverage of Durham focuses on the ivory tower that is Duke, its highly-ranked undergraduate and graduate programs, and of course Duke’s basketball team. Rarely does anyone outside North Carolina get an accurate (or any) picture of the city itself and its own educational issues.

In the shadow of an elite institution of higher education, Durham’s K-12 public education system is struggling and often failing to educate its students. Only six schools out of 45 made Adequate Yearly Progress (met No Child Left Behind achievement goals) last year. Some 19 of Durham’s 26 Title I elementary schools are in school improvement status, meaning they have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for at least two consecutive years. Only 56 percent of Durham students graduate from high school.

There are obviously a lot of factors contributing to Durham’s poor achievement levels and high drop-out rate. But let’s take a closer look at the money going into Durham’s schools and see how its funding compares to similar districts in North Carolina.

Durham is spending $8,269 per pupil, which ranks 29th out of 115 school districts in North Carolina. About $519 of that spending comes from the federal government in the form of a NCLB Title I grant and IDEA special education grant.

What’s happening in districts with a similar size and poverty rate? Using the Federal Education Budget Project’s Comparison Tool, available at Ed Budget Project.Org, you can compare Durham to other districts in North Carolina and other districts nationwide.

The most similar district to Durham in North Carolina—in terms of size and poverty rate—is Gaston County Schools, a district in the South-Central Piedmont region of North Carolina next door to Charlotte. Both have around 32,000 students, and 17-18 percent of those students live in poverty.

But Durham is spending $1,782 more per-pupil than Gaston County. And the money isn’t translating into higher achievement—Gaston County is doing better on North Carolina’s No Child Left Behind achievement test, the ABCs Test, with 82 percent of 4th graders deemed proficient in reading and 93 percent proficient in math, compared to 75 percent and 88 percent in Durham.

So what’s the story here? Well, it could be that Durham is experiencing a different type of poverty than Gaston County that makes teaching low-income students more difficult. Maybe Durham can’t attract high-quality teachers because of its location, run-down school facilities, or unattractive working conditions.

Or maybe this is an example of what President Bush likes to call the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for minority students: Durham’s schools are 72 percent black and Hispanic, while Gaston County’s schools are 28 percent.

Whatever the combination of factors causing Durham to perform more poorly than its peer school districts while also spending more money, it’s a question that should be raised and discussed by schools, parents, policymakers at the local and state levels.

There are conversations going on in Durham about teacher recruitment and retention, school choice, pre-kindergarten, and the achievement gap, among other issues. But action and results are another story.

Durham isn’t the only community of concern. There are many places in the country where not enough of these conversations are taking place. Check out the funding going to your local school district, or any school district in the country, and take a look at their comparative performance by going to New America’s Federal Education Budget Project at Ed Budget Project.org.