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The Results Based Budgeting Of Oakland Unified

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The Results-Based Budgeting of Oakland Unified
Throughout the history of the American public education, lots of problems have emerged but with some effort from enlightened men and the federal government they were successfully solved. However, one of those problems that proved to be intractable over the years despite the many solutions proposed for it was and still is the income achievement gap. Professor Sean R. Reardon, a Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University, showed the inevitable relationship between parental income and the academic achievement of students. The income achievement gap as he defined it is “… the academic performance difference due to … income difference between a child from a family at the 90th …show more content…

In 1965, it was the first government initiative toward a practical solution in attempting to contain this uprising income achievement gap as they issued the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Unsurprisingly, this act gained lots of popularity among education reformers at that time as its objective was to provide equal education opportunities to all students nationwide whether they are rich or poor. Nonetheless, the ESEA was just a quick, ready solution to provide funds to schools at that time but not one that was extensively studied to ensure true equality in distributing those funds. Title I of the Act, which is still implement in the new version of the ESEA that’s now called the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, was the most important part which contained the initiative of providing funds to eligible schools and the way they would be distributed. According to Phyllis McClure, a civil rights activist who also served in the U.S. Office of Education’s Title I Task Force, this Title I in particular contained a “loophole” that allowed for poor schools to still not get their equal share of the funds (McClure). The problem lied in what was called the "comparability provision" law of Title I which allowed Title I schools, that uses a traditional budgeting system based on their average teacher salary, to show a comparable expenditure of their teachers’

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