By most measures, poor kids tend to be poor students.

We use the buzz phrase “achievement gap” to describe this phenomenon, and we search for causes. Is it poverty? Is it race? Is it due to less-engaged parents, cultural differences or language barriers?

Probably all of the above. But a study released last week by the University of Washington and a Washington, D.C., think tank suggests that something more basic might be at play – schools with poorer students get less money.

“Put simply: money follows money,” wrote College of Education research associate professor Marguerite Roza and Educator Sector researcher Kevin Carey. “At every level of government – federal, state and local – policy makers give more resources to students who have more resources, and less to those who have less.”

In “School Funding’s Tragic Flaw,” the researchers describe a federal program designed to address poverty but that gives more money to states that already are spending more on schools. The formula assumes that states that spend more have higher costs – that things cost more in Connecticut than in Alabama. But the study found that “interstate differences in per-student spending are primarily a function of differences in wealth, not cost.”

Washington does a better job than many others in how it allocates state money. About 60 percent of per-student funding comes from state government, higher than the national average of 46.5 percent. And Washington caps how much local districts can raise from school levies to lessen imbalances based on wealth.

But Washington also does something that only two other states do – it distributes money for teacher pay based on the actual mix of staff in a district rather than on state averages. That is, if a district already has a lot of teachers with lots of experience, it will get more money than a district with less-experienced teachers.

Since teachers tend to take jobs in districts – and schools – with more resources and therefore more success, that leads to disproportionate funding that penalizes low-performing and high-poverty districts.

Jennifer Priddy is the state’s assistant superintendent for financial resources. She said the state salary policy was created to allow districts to hire the best teachers they could.

“We didn’t want to create a disincentive to hire the most experienced staff,” Priddy said. But she acknowledged it can create disparities.

The effect is most noticeable when school districts allocate state and federal money among their schools. Schools with more-experienced teachers get more money.

“As a result, the average teacher salary in high-poverty schools, which frequently suffer from a steady ‘churn’ of inexperienced, low-paid teachers who leave in short order, is usually much lower than in low-poverty schools that enjoy a stable, highly paid veteran staff,” the study said.

Programs designed to help high-poverty schools and struggling students compensate for staff mix disparities. And the first attempt to use dollars to attract great teachers to struggling schools was begun a year ago in the form of extra bonuses to national board-certified teachers who take tough assignments.

But it isn’t enough to assure that poor schools get the same resources as wealthier schools.

The authors call for reforms “to benefit those who need the most, not those who already have the most.” One idea is to give money based on average salaries. That might require high-performing schools to hire some less-experienced teachers but it also would let low-performing schools offer bonuses to veteran teachers.

But changes won’t be easy, Raza said, because the current system works better for some states, some school districts and some schools, and they’ll fight to maintain it.

“The politically savvy groups benefit from the current formulas,” she said.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

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