School District Funding

Student’s name

Institutional affiliation

Reckhow maintains that foundations employ two major strategies in deciding which school districts to give funding to. To begin with, foundations need to have shared interests with the school district. Common interest helps the foundations to amplify their voice. This makes it easy for big foundations to join hands and raise more funding and this way. The foundations can work together as partners. Additionally, foundations only target specific school districts instead of spreading funding in many areas across the country. When they concentrate their funding in one area, they are better placed to achieve their plans and strategies than when they scatter the funding across many locations. Essentially, attaining goals becomes easier because each school is allocated enough funding because they are concentrated in one place. These influences should be of concern because they dictate whether the schools will receive funding and can potentially lock out deserving schools from accessing the funding.

What concerns me the most about contemporary issues affecting urban education has to do with how some schools are likely to be left out in funding while some schools continue getting all the funding. There is a chance that the schools that do not meet the criteria to receive funding will be locked out of funding each time (Mudrazija & Blagg, 2019). This disproportionately affects the performance outcomes of the students and, by extension, the school. This increases the poverty gap between well-to-do schools and schools that do not often meet the criteria for funding from foundations. Schools that qualify for foundations are likely to have more resources, including updated facilities such as libraries that play a critical role in ensuring students attain the highest possible educational qualification. This excludes and marginalizes the students from other schools that do not qualify for loans from foundations.

Student response

I couldn’t agree with you less on this matter. I think that foundations tend to think about what they stand to gain by funding a particular school than the good deeds that the funds will be used to execute. Sadly, the political climate dictates if and when a particular school will receive funding from a foundation.

References

Mudrazija, S., & Blagg, K. (2019). School District Funding in Texas.