What Three Title I Schools Reveal About Funding, Leadership, and Where Money Lands

Three Title I schools bent decade-long trends in the same direction. The funding alone doesn’t explain it.

Three Schools, One Question

Three schools in my district were delivering academic growth data that grabbed my attention. All three had been Title I schools for years. All three were serving students in the county’s highest-poverty areas. And all three had begun bending trends that had been flat or declining for a long time, and I wanted to understand why.

Title I funding had been a consistent presence in these schools for years, and little had changed there. Those funds are an essential lifeline for high-poverty schools, but they had not produced this kind of movement on their own. Something had changed, and the most obvious variable was the arrival of community schools funding through the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

The Blueprint is Maryland’s ambitious plan to reverse years of slipping performance and return the state to among the highest performers in the country. My closest colleagues in the state know I am a frequent critic of the plan, but I have always been willing to acknowledge that it is a mixed bag with many promising elements. The Blueprint includes five pillars, each of which seeks to reform key aspects of public schools. Any individual pillar would be a daunting prospect, but together they are massive and often overwhelming for school systems. One key feature of the Blueprint is that the work is prescribed, and for most elements the state provides only about half the funds to do the work, with local funding authorities covering the rest.

Why Community Schools Funding Is Different

The Community Schools pillar is unlike the other four pillars of the Blueprint in a few important ways. State funds flow directly to schools rather than through the matching structures of local government. The money goes to principals, not through central offices. And it is the least prescriptive of all five pillars, which means principals have real room to respond to the specific needs of their school and community. In the Blueprint’s first year of implementation, only schools with the highest concentrations of students in poverty were eligible. The schools with the greatest needs got the resources first and have had them the longest.

Leadership Made the Difference

The two schools with the earliest standout results had something else in common: experienced principals. One had led the same school for many years and knew the community deeply. The other had come from a lower-poverty school but brought years of demonstrated success. The third school had experienced more leadership turnover, but the systems were stabilizing, and the data were beginning to follow suit. The pattern was hard to ignore. The funding created conditions, but it was the presence of experienced leadership with the agency to deploy those resources that converted those conditions into results.

Rethinking the Funding Adequacy Argument

This is the part of the funding adequacy conversation that I think gets skipped too often. There is a familiar and not entirely wrong argument that more money does not automatically produce better outcomes. The data supporting that argument is real and worth taking seriously. But I wonder if we are drawing the wrong conclusion from it. The question may not be whether money matters. The question may be whether we have ever actually put enough money in the right hands, close enough to students, for long enough, to find out.

Proximity matters. When funding flows directly to the school level, when principals have genuine agency over how it is used, and when the people making decisions are the same people who know the students by name, something different becomes possible. Most education policy is designed at a distance from that reality. The Blueprint’s Community Schools pillar, almost by accident, got closer to it than most.

Three Conditions, Rarely Tested Together

What I observed suggests that three things have to hold simultaneously. Sustained and adequate resources. Experienced or exceptionally well-prepared leadership. And the ability to attract and retain strong teachers. When any one of those breaks down, the results become very difficult to produce. We have rarely tested what happens when all three are fully in place for long enough. That seems like something worth knowing, and worth designing for with intention.

I have many frustrations with the Blueprint as a whole. But this particular experiment has sharpened something I have long believed. We may not yet know what it truly costs to ensure students in poverty succeed. What we do know is that we have not funded them as if we intend to find out.

 

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.