Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Title 1 is a well-known, historical, and typical compensatory policy spending a tremendous amount of federal money for American education. As the name of Title 1 –Title 1: Improving The Academic Achievement of The Disadvantaged – implies, the main purpose of Title 1 is to reduce prevailing achievement gaps by improving the educational attainments of disadvantaged students. However, thus far, there has been no clear evidence of whether Title 1 has closed the disparity of education in the U.S. schools, as well as to what extent Title 1 has been effective to achieve the goal. This paper attempts to estimate the effectiveness of Title 1 on academic achievement and on reducing academic achievement gaps through noble approaches that enables to capture the heterogeneous causal effects by subgroups. The featured analytic strategy is to utilize the formula-based mechanisms to determine the amount of Title 1 funds at the district level.

This paper collectively uses three data sets spanning from 2008 to 2015, which are The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), school finance data from Common Core of Data (CCD), and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) from Census Bureau. Overall, this study finds positive and moderate effect size of Title 1 on improving academic achievement, which is in line with previous literature. On top of that, this research reveals that the effectiveness of Title 1 varies by different affluent level of districts. Contrary to the expected way, the effectiveness of Title 1 is much higher in affluent districts than districts in poverty, even though the poor districts have received even more Title 1 funds than other districts. In addition, this paper finds that the Title 1 significantly increases the average math scores of White and Asian students, but not those of Hispanic and Black students. Similarly, Title 1 is significantly associated with increased reading scores of White students, but not significant for Asian, Hispanic, and Black. As a result, Title 1 plays a role in reducing achievement gaps between Asian-White math and reading scores but makes the gaps between Black-White exacerbated. There is not significant effect on Hispanic-White gaps. This paper includes discussion related to the possible explanations for the results based on previous literature and methodological advantages and limitations.