Vocational Education: The Basic State Grant Formula of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act. CRS Report for Congress

The current basic grant formula of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act has the following components: distribution of funds is based primarily on state population, but allocations are adjusted to compensate those states with younger populations, to compensate states with fewer resources, and to ensure that no state receives less than a minimum grant. Analyses of federal appropriations showed that the influence of these individual adjustments is relatively small for most states but can be substantial for a few states. For example, the minimum grant provisions sometimes markedly increase the grants of a few sparsely populated states while slightly decreasing grants for all other states. The Applied Technology Education Amendments of 1989, passed by the House of Representatives as House Resolution 7, has a basic grant formula that is similar to the Perkins Act's except that it contains additional provisions for minimum and maximum payments to states and specifies that no state would receive less than its FY 1989 grant. Under the Perkins Act, states have considerable flexibility in their distribution of basic grants. Partly because of findings by the General Accounting Office that some state distributions may favor wealthier communities over poorer ones, House Resolution 7 requires that 70 percent of funds for school districts and postsecondary institutions be distributed based on poverty, 20 percent be based on number of handicapped students, and 10 percent be based on enrollment. The data needed to estimate the effects of these proposed formulas are not available at the federal level. (CML)