education in the united states there is no federal

When it Comes to Education, the Federal Government is in Charge of ... Um, What?

• Posted August 29, 2017
• By Brendan Pelsue

Judging by her Senate confirmation process, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is one of the most controversial members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. She was the only nominee to receive two “no” votes from members of her own party, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. On the eve of her confirmation vote, Democrats staged an all-night vigil in which they denounced her from the Senate floor. Following a 50–50 vote, Vice President Mike Pence was summoned in his capacity as president of the Senate to break the tie for DeVos — a first in the Senate’s 228-year history of giving “advice and consent” to presidential cabinet nominees.

Now that DeVos is several months into her tenure as the 11th secretary of education, both her supporters and detractors are paying close attention to the policies she is beginning to implement and how they will change the nation’s public schools. Even for veteran education watchers, however, this is difficult, not only because the Trump administration’s budget and policy proposals are more skeletal than those put forward by previous administrations, but because the Department of Education does not directly oversee the nation’s 100,000 public schools. States have some oversight, but individual municipalities, are, in most cases, the legal entities responsible for running schools and for providing the large majority of funding through local tax dollars.

Still, the federal government uses a complex system of funding mechanisms, policy directives, and the soft but considerable power of the presidential bully pulpit to shape what, how, and where students learn. Anyone hoping to understand the impact of DeVos’ tenure as secretary of education first needs to grasp some core basics: what the federal government controls, how it controls it, and how that balance does (and doesn’t) change from administration to administration.

This policy landscape is the subject of an Ed School course, A-129, The Federal Government and Schools, taught by Lecturer Laura Schifter , Ed.M.'07, Ed.D.'14,, a former senior adviser to Congressman George Miller (D-CA). Schifter has noticed that even for students who have worked in public schools, understanding the federal government’s current role in education can be complicated.

“Students frequently need a refresher on things like understanding the nature of the relationship between the federal government and the states, and what federalism is,” she says. With that in mind, the course begins with a civics review, especially the complicated politics of federalism, then moves on to a history lesson in federal education legislation since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and finally to an overview of the actual policy mechanisms through which the federal government enforces and implements the law. Throughout, students “read statutes, they read regulations, they read court decisions,” Schifter says — activities she believes are essential since there is no better way for educators to understand the law than to consult it themselves.

The civics and history lessons required to understand the federal government’s role in education are of course deeply intertwined and begin, as with so many things American, with the Constitution. That document makes no mention of education. It does state in the 10th Amendment that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the States respectively.” This might seem to preclude any federal oversight of education, except that the 14th Amendment requires all states to provide “any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

At least since the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, this has been interpreted to give the federal government the power to intervene in cases of legally sanctioned discrimination, like the segregation of public schools across the country; to mandate equal access to education for students with disabilities; and, according to some arguments, to correct for persistently unequal access to resources across states and districts of different income levels. According to Associate Professor Martin West , the government’s historical and current role in education reflects the conflicts inherent in these two central tenets of the nation’s charter.

Before 1965, the 10th Amendment seemed to prevail over the 14th, and federal involvement in K–12 education was minimal. Beginning with Horace Mann in Massachusetts, in the 1830s, states implemented reforms aimed at establishing a free, nonsectarian education system, but most national legislation was aimed at higher education. For example, the 1862 Morrill Act used proceeds from the sale of public lands to establish “land-grant” colleges focused on agriculture and engineering. (Many public universities, like Michigan State and historically black colleges like Tuskegee University, are land-grant institutions.)

And then, in the late 1860s, the first federal Department of Education under President Andrew Johnson was established to track education statistics. It was quickly demoted to “Office” and was not part of the president’s cabinet. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the federal government took a more robust role in K–12 education.

The impetus for the change was twofold. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools, gave the executive branch a legal precedent for enforcing equal access to education. At the same time, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I (and the technological brinksmanship of the Cold War more generally) created an anxiety that the nation’s schools were falling behind.

Those threads came together in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a bill designed in part by Francis Keppel , then the commissioner of education (the pre-cabinet-level equivalent of secretary of education) and a transformative dean at the Ed School. The bill was a key part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and has set the basic terms of the federal government’s involvement in education ever since.

Rather than mandating direct federal oversight of schools — telling states what to do — ESEA offered states funding for education programs on a conditional basis. In other words, states could receive federal funding provided they met the requirements outlined in certain sections, or titles, of the act.

Every major education initiative since 1965 has been about recalibrating the balance first struck by esea. Until 1980, the program was reauthorized every three years, each time with more specific guidelines about how federal funds were to be used (Title I money has to add to rather than replace locally provided education funding, for example). In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now IDEA) ensured that students with disabilities are provided a free appropriate public education to meet their needs. This initial flurry of expansion culminated in 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, with the establishment of the federal Department of Education as a separate, cabinet-level government agency that would coordinate what West calls the “alphabet soup” of the federal government’s various initiatives and requirements.

The Reagan administration briefly rolled back many ESEA provisions, but following the release of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, which pointed out persistent inequalities in the education system and made unfavorable comparisons between U.S. students and those in other nations, old requirements were restored and new ones added.

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) marked a new level of federal oversight by requiring states to set more rigorous student evaluation standards and, through testing, demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” in how those standards were met. Flaws in the law quickly surfaced. Standards did not take into account the differences between student populations, and so, according to West, the Department of Education often ended up “evaluating schools as much on the students they serve as opposed to their effectiveness in serving them.”

When the Obama administration came to office, it faced a legislative logjam on education. NCLB expired in 2007, but there was no Congressional consensus about the terms of its reauthorization. The administration responded by issuing waivers to states that did not meet nclb standards, provided they adopted other policies the administration favored, like the Common Core standards. At the same time, the Race to the Top program offered competitive grants that awarded points to states based on their implementation of policies like performance-based evaluations. The two programs were seen by many conservatives as executive overreach, and when ESEA was reauthorized in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB standardized testing requirements were kept, but the evaluation and accountability systems meant to respond to the results of those tests became the responsibility of individual states. When DeVos was testifying before the Senate in January 2017, the federal government still had a greater hand in public education than it did at any point before No Child Left Behind, but it had also recently experienced the greatest rollback in its oversight since an era of almost continual expansion that began in 1965.

Back in Schifter’s class, students grapple with simulated versions of the actual dilemma now facing the Trump administration: how to design and implement policy. For Schifter’s students, that means choosing between two final projects: a mock Congressional markup on an education-related bill or a mock grant proposal similar to Race to the Top. For Trump, it means navigating how education policy is shaped by all three branches of government.

Congress has the ability to write statute and distribute funds. If, for example, it releases funds as formula grants, which are distributed to all states on the same basis, it can ensure universal adoption of programs like Title I. Competitive grants like Race to the Top arguably make policy implementation more efficient: the executive branch can regulate, clarify, and be selective about its enforcement of the law. And judicial rulings can redefine what qualifies as implementation of policy, as the Supreme Court did in its 2017 Endrew F. v. Douglas County School Dist. RE-1 ruling, a unanimous decision that interpreted idea as requiring that a disabled student’s “educational program must be appropriately ambitious in light of his circumstances.”

It seems the Department of Education’s approach under DeVos is still taking shape. Some of its actions have been swift and decisive. In February, the Departments of Justice and Education jointly announced they were rescinding the Obama-era guidance protecting transgender students’ right to use a bathroom corresponding with their gender identity.

In other areas, however, the department’s positions have been vague. On Inauguration Day, the administration ordered a freeze on state evaluation and accountability plans for schools, which under essa must be federally approved. In a February 10 letter to chief state school officers, however, DeVos said states should proceed with their proposals. If the department is lenient in its evaluation of these plans, it would amount to a de facto rollback in federal oversight because the Department of Education would be choosing not to exercise its powers to the full extent permitted by law.

The administration’s proposed budget, released in May under the title “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” calls for $500 million dollars in new charter school funding — a 50 percent increase over current levels, but less than the $759 million authorized over the first two years of the George W. Bush administration. The budget also allots an additional $1 billion in “portable” Title I funding, meaning the money would follow students who opt to attend charter or magnet schools (currently it stays in their home districts). Under ESSA, however, much of what was once overseen by the Department of Education has now reverted to the states.

“Ironically, we will see an administration that will be reluctant to dictate specific policies,” says Professor Paul Reville , the Massachusetts Secretary of Education under former Governor Deval Patrick. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the Department of Education and the administration are unable to exert influence, but it appears they are planning to do so through cutbacks rather than new initiatives. Trump’s budget proposes a 13.5 percent cut in the Education Department’s 2018 budget, including a $2.3 billion cut that would eliminate Supporting Effective Instruction States Grants, which fund teacher training and development.

And cutbacks in other areas could also affect students, since not all federal funding for schools comes from the Department of Education. For example, money for the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, whose school lunch nutritional guidelines were recently loosened by an executive order, comes through the Department of Agriculture. Public school employees like occupational and physical therapists bill much of their work through Medicaid, which also provides dental, vision, hearing, and mental health services. Programs like this are at risk in part because the administration’s proposed budget cuts Medicaid by $800 billion dollars.

Beyond the budget specifics, there is also the power of the presidential bully pulpit. Reville cites evidence that the administration’s rhetoric on charter schools and vouchers has already put conservative state governments “on the move, emboldened by the new federal stance on choice.”

The administration’s budget is only, however, a wish list. The actual power to determine federal expenditures rests in the House and the Senate, and even in years of less drastic proposals, legislators often pass a federal budget that looks quite different from the one suggested by the president. Trump’s budget has received pushback, and for some education-minded conservatives, the administration’s advocacy on their behalf is unwelcome. Frederick Hess , Ed.M.'90, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, believes in school choice — but worries what will happen if Trump pushes for it.

“The last thing we want,” Hess says of school choice, “is for the least popular, most maladroit leader in memory to become the advocate for an otherwise popular idea.”

Not everyone agrees with Hess’ assessment of the president, of course, but his concerns do illustrate a basic idea about policymaking that Schifter has borrowed from political scientist John Kingdon and tries to pass on to her students. For any given idea to become a legal reality, the theory goes, policy proposals are only one part of a triangle. Politicians must also effectively prove the existence of the problem, and they must do so at a moment in history when the fix they are proposing is politically possible. For Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the problem was that the nation’s schools were not serving all students equally. The solution was for the federal government to distribute funds in a way that would correct the balance. The political moment was when both Cold War anxieties and newly robust understandings of the 14th Amendment made the changes possible. The result was a new relationship between the federal government and the states on education policy.

Although the Trump administration has outlined some first principles, both its ability to make its case to the American people and the possibilities of this unprecedented political moment remain to be seen.

Brendan Pelsue is a writer whose last piece in Ed. looked at gap year programs .

Illustrations by Simone Massoni

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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How are public schools funded?

Public school funding comes primarily from local and state governments, while the federal government provides about 8% of local school funding.

Updated on Fri, July 21, 2023 by the USAFacts Team

Public schools in the US serve about 49.5 million students from pre-K to 12th grade. But how does it all get funded?

It's primarily a combination of funding from local and state governments, along with a smaller percentage from the federal government. Here's a breakdown.

Where does school funding come from?

In the 2019-2020 school year , 47.5% of funding came from state governments, 44.9% came from local governments, and the federal government provided about 7.6% of school funding.

Federal funding for schools

Most federal funding for public schools comes from the Child Nutrition Act, Title I, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), followed by other programs, according to 2018-19 school year data .

Title I grants

Title I provides funds to school districts with large numbers of low-income students. According to data from 2015-2016 school year, nearly 56,000 schools received money from Title I grants, serving more than 26 million students. About $14.6 billion went toward funds for Title I grants during the 2019-2020 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides funding to help children with disabilities receive quality special education and related services that are designed to meet their unique needs, according to the Education Department. In 2020–21, 7.5 million students received special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) . Some $14.3 billion in federal funding went toward IDEA in 2022.

Child Nutrition Act

During the 2020 fiscal year, $23.6 billion in federal funds were allocated for child nutrition programs , providing free or reduced lunches to eligible students.

Other federal funding

Federal funds also went towards Head Start programs (supporting children from birth to age 5 in low-income families), magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, Impact Aid (assistance to districts with children residing in areas including Indian lands, military bases, and low-rent housing properties), vocational programs and Indian Education programs.

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State funding for schools

Some states allocate more money for public K-12 schools than others. In five states, two-thirds or more of K-12 public school funding comes from state revenue.

State revenues are raised from a variety of sources , primarily personal and corporate income and retail sales taxes, as well as taxes on tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, and lotteries—depending on the state.

Each state uses a different funding formula to determine how money for K-12 education is raised and how much each school district receives in a given school year. Funding formulas calculate whether school expenditures come from state governments versus local governments, such as counties, cities, or school districts themselves.

In at least 35 states, the state government sets a base level of funding per student that all school districts receive, according to a Congressional Research Service report that summarized various approaches of categorizing states' education funding models.

Local funding for schools

Local school revenue comes from cities, counties, or the school districts themselves. About 81% of local funding for schools comes from property taxes.

Other revenue comes from parents via parent-teacher associations and other groups. Schools also receive some private revenue from tuition, transportation fees, food services, district activities, textbook revenue, and summer school revenue.

Property taxes are a major source of school funding

According to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, property taxes contribute 30% or more of total public school funding in 29 states .

• More than 60% of total public school funding came from property taxes in New Hampshire—the highest of any state.
• On the low end, Vermont had such little funding from property taxes that it rounded to zero. And Hawaii's one school district did not receive any funding from property taxes.

How are charter schools funded?

Public charter schools are funded by state and local governments and may also receive federal funding through Department of Education Charter School Program grants . Charter schools are independently run under an agreement (charter) with the state, district, or another entity. School choice programs offered in some states give parents the option to enroll their kids in charter schools, magnet schools, or opt for home-schooling.

How has school funding changed over time?

Over the past decade, funding provided by local and state governments has increased steadily while federal funding dropped by $30.2 billion. This has resulted in a lower share of school funding from the federal government, dropping from 12.5% in the 2010-11 school year to 7.6% in the 2019-20 school year.

Although federal funding for public schools plays a minor role, it supports programs like Title I, IDEA, and the Child Nutrition Act. As federal contributions have decreased over the past decade, the responsibility for supporting education increasingly falls on local and state entities, highlighting the role of local property taxes and state revenues in funding public education.

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A primer on elementary and secondary education in the United States

Editor’s Note: This report is an excerpt, with minor edits, from Addressing Inequities in the US K-12 Education System , which first appeared in Rebuilding the Pandemic Economy , published by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group in 2021.

This report reviews the basics of the American elementary and secondary education system: Who does what and how do we pay for it? While there are some commonalities across the country, the answers to both questions, it turns out, vary considerably across states. 1

Who does what?

Schools are the institution most visibly and directly responsible for educating students. But many other actors and institutions affect what goes on in schools. Three separate levels of government—local school districts, state governments, and the federal government—are involved in the provision of public education. In addition, non-governmental actors, including teachers’ unions, parent groups, and philanthropists play important roles.

Most 5- to 17-year-old children – about 88%– attend public schools. 2 (Expanding universal schooling to include up to two years of preschool is an active area of discussion which could have far-reaching implications, but we focus on grades K-12 here.) About 9% attend private schools; about a quarter of private school students are in non-sectarian schools, and the remaining three-quarters are about evenly split between Catholic and other religious schools. The remaining 3% of students are homeschooled.

Magnet schools are operated by local school districts but enroll students from across the district; magnet schools often have special curricula—for example, a focus on science or arts—and were sometimes designed specifically to encourage racial integration. Charter schools are publicly funded and operate subject to state regulations; private school regulations and homeschooling requirements are governed by state law and vary across states. Nationally, 6.8% of public school students are enrolled in charter schools; the remainder attend “traditional public schools,” where students are mostly assigned to schools based on their home address and the boundaries school districts draw. Washington, D.C. and Arizona have the highest rates of charter enrollment, with 43 and 19% of their public school students attending charter schools. Several states have little or no charter school enrollment. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all public schooling took place in person, with about 0.6% of students enrolled in virtual schools.

Local School Districts

Over 13,000 local education agencies (LEAs), also known as school districts, are responsible for running traditional public schools. The size and structure of local school districts, as well as the powers they have and how they operate, depend on the state. Some states have hundreds of districts, and others have dozens. District size is mostly historically determined rather than a reflection of current policy choices. But while districts can rarely “choose” to get smaller or larger, district size implicates  important   trade-offs . Having many school districts operating in a metropolitan area can enhance incentives for school and district administrators to run schools consistent with the preferences of residents, who can vote out leaders or vote with their feet by leaving the district. On the other hand, fragmentation can lead to more segregation by race and income and less equity in funding, though state laws governing how local districts raise revenue may address the funding issues. Larger districts can benefit from economies of scale as the fixed costs of operating a district are spread over more students and they are better able to operate special programs, but large districts can also be difficult to manage. And even though large districts have the potential to pool resources between more- and less-affluent areas, equity challenges persist as staffing patterns lead to different levels of spending at schools within the same district.

School boards can be elected or appointed, and they generally are responsible for hiring the chief school district administrator, the superintendent. In large districts, superintendent turnover is often cited as a barrier to sustained progress on long term plans, though the causation may run in the other direction: Making progress is difficult, and frustration with reform efforts leads to frequent superintendent departures. School districts take in revenue from local, state, and federal sources, and allocate resources—primarily staff—to schools. The bureaucrats in district “central offices” oversee administrative functions including human resources, curriculum and instruction, and compliance with state and federal requirements. The extent to which districts devolve authority over instructional and organizational decisions to the school level varies both across and within states.

State Governments

The U.S. Constitution reserves power over education for the states. States have delegated authority to finance and run schools to local school districts but remain in charge when it comes to elementary and secondary education. State constitutions contain their own—again, varying—language about the right to education, which has given rise to litigation over the level and distribution of school funding in nearly all states over the past half century. States play a major role in school finance, both by sending aid to local school districts and by determining how local districts are allowed to tax and spend, as discussed further below.

State legislatures and state education agencies also influence education through mechanisms outside the school finance system. For example, states may set requirements for teacher certification and high school graduation, regulate or administer retirement systems, determine the ages of compulsory schooling, decide how charter schools will (or will not) be established and regulated, set home-schooling requirements, establish curricular standards or approve specific instructional materials, choose standardized tests and proficiency standards, set systems for school accountability (subject to federal law), and create (or not) education tax credits or vouchers to direct public funds to private schools. Whether and how states approach these issues—and which functions they delegate to local school districts—varies considerably.

Federal Government

The authority of the federal government to direct schools to take specific actions is weak. Federal laws protect access to education for specific groups of students, including students with disabilities and English language learners. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education, and the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. The U.S. Department of Education issues  regulations and guidance  on K-12 laws and oversees grant distribution and compliance. It also collects and shares data and funds research. The Bureau of Indian Education is housed in the Department of the Interior, not the Department of Education.

The federal government influences elementary and secondary education primarily by providing funding—and through the rules surrounding the use of those funds and the conditions that must be met to receive federal funding. Federal aid is typically allocated according to formulas targeting particular populations. The largest formula-aid federal programs are Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provides districts funds to support educational opportunity, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), for special education. Both allocate funding in part based on child poverty rates. State and school district fiscal personnel ensure that districts comply with rules governing how federal funds can be spent and therefore have direct influence on school environments. Since 1965, in addition to specifying how federal funds can be spent, Congress has required states and districts to adopt other policies as a condition of Title I receipt. The policies have changed over time, but most notably include requiring school districts to desegregate, requiring states to adopt test-based accountability systems, and requiring the use of “evidence-based” approaches. 

IDEA establishes protections for students with disabilities in addition to providing funding. The law guarantees their right to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive setting and sets out requirements for the use of Individualized Educational Programs. Because of these guarantees, IDEA allows students and families to pursue litigation. Federal law prohibits conditioning funding on the use of any specific curriculum. The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program was also designed to promote specific policy changes—many related to teacher policy—but through a competitive model under which only select states or districts “won” the funds. For the major formula funds, like Title I and IDEA, the assumption (nearly always true) is that states and districts will adopt the policies required to receive federal aid and all will receive funds; in some cases, those policy changes may have  more impact than the money  itself. The federal government also allocated significant funding to support schools during the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic through specially created fiscal stabilization or relief funds; federal funding for schools during the COVID crisis was significantly larger than during the Great Recession.

The federal tax code, while perhaps more visible in its influence on higher education, also serves as a K-12 policy lever. The controversial state and local tax deduction, now limited to $10,000, reduces federal tax collections and subsidizes progressive taxation for state and local spending, including for education. As of 2018, 529 plans, which historically allowed tax-preferred savings only for higher education expenses, can also be used for private K-12 expenses.

Non-Governmental Actors

Notable non-governmental actors in elementary and secondary education include teachers’ unions and schools of education, along with parents, philanthropists, vendors, and other advocates.The nation’s three million public school teachers are a powerful political force, affecting more than just teachers’ compensation. For example, provisions of collective bargaining agreements meant to improve teachers working conditions also limit administrator flexibility.  Teachers unions  are also important political actors; they play an active role in federal, state, and school board elections and advocate for (or, more often, against) a range of policies affecting education.  Union strength varies considerably across U.S. states.

Both states and institutions of higher education play important roles in determining who teaches and the preparation they receive. Policies related to teacher certification and preparation requirements, ranging from whether teachers are tested on academic content to which teachers are eligible to supervise student teachers, vary considerably across states. 3 Meanwhile,  reviews of teacher training programs  reveal many programs do not do a good job incorporating consensus views of research-based best practices in key areas. To date, schools of education have not been the focus of much policy discussion, but they would be critical partners in any changes to how teachers are trained.

Parents play an important role, through a wide range of channels, in determining what happens in schools. Parents choose schools for their children, either implicitly when they choose where to live or explicitly by enrolling in a charter school, private school, participating in a school district choice program, or homeschooling, though these choices are constrained by income, information, and other factors. They may also raise money through Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) or other foundations—and determine how it is spent. And they advocate for (or against) specific policies, curriculum, or other aspects of schooling through parent organizations, school boards, or other levels of government. Parents often also advocate for their children to receive certain teachers, placements, evaluation, or services; this is particularly true for parents of students with disabilities, who often must make sure their children receive legally required services and accommodations. Though state and federal policymakers sometimes  mandate parent engagement , these mechanisms do not necessarily provide meaningful pathways for parental input and are often dominated by  white and higher-SES parents .      

Philanthropy also has an important influence on education policy, locally and nationally. Not only do funders support individual schools in traditional ways, but they are also increasingly active in influencing federal and state laws. Part of these philanthropic efforts happen through advocacy groups, including civil rights groups, religious groups, and the hard-to-define “education reform” movement. Finally, the many vendors of curriculum, assessment, and “edtech” products and services bring their own lobbying power.

Paying for school

Research on school finance might be better termed school district finance because districts are the jurisdictions generating and receiving revenue, and districts, not schools, are almost always responsible for spending decisions. School districts typically use staffing models to send resources to schools, specifying how many staff positions (full-time equivalents), rather than dollars, each school gets. 

Inflation-adjusted, per-pupil revenue to school districts has increased steadily over time and averaged about $15,500 in 2018-19 (total expenditure, which includes both ongoing and capital expenditure, is similar but we focus on revenue because we are interested in the sources of revenue). Per-pupil revenue growth tends to stall or reverse in recessions and has only recently recovered to levels seen prior to the Great Recession (Figure 1). On average, school districts generated about 46% of their revenue locally, with about 80% of that from property taxes; about 47% of revenue came from state governments and about 8% from the federal government. The share of revenue raised locally has declined from about 56% in the early 1960s to 46% today, while the state and federal shares have grown. Local revenue comes from taxes levied by local school districts, but local school districts often do not have complete control over the taxes they levy themselves, and they almost never determine exactly how much they spend because that depends on how much they receive in state and federal aid. State governments may require school districts to levy certain taxes, limit how much local districts are allowed to tax or spend, or they may implicitly or explicitly redistribute some portion of local tax revenue to other districts.

Both the level of spending and distribution of revenue by source vary substantially across states (Figure 2), with New York, the highest-spending state, spending almost $30,000 per pupil, while Idaho, Utah, and Oklahoma each spent under $10,000 per pupil. (Some, but far from all, of this difference is related to higher labor costs in New York.) Similarly, the local share of revenue varies from less than 5% in Hawaii and Vermont to about 60% in New Hampshire and Nebraska. On average, high-poverty states spend less, but there is also considerable variation in spending among states with similar child poverty rates.

Discussions of school funding equity—and considerable legal action—focus on inequality of funding across school districts  within the same state . While people often assume districts serving disadvantaged students spend less per pupil than wealthier districts within a state, per-pupil spending and the child poverty rate are nearly always uncorrelated or  positively  correlated, with higher-poverty districts spending more on average. Typically, disadvantaged districts receive more state and federal funding, offsetting differences in funding from local sources. Meanwhile, considerable inequality exists between states, and poorer states spend less on average. Figure 3 illustrates an example of this dynamic, showing the relationship between district-level per-pupil spending and the child poverty rate in North Carolina (a relatively low-spending state with county- and city-based districts) and Illinois (a higher-spending state with many smaller districts). In North Carolina, higher poverty districts spend more on average; Illinois is one of only a few states in which this relationship is reversed. But this does not mean poor kids get fewer resources in Illinois than in North Carolina. Indeed, nearly  all  districts in Illinois spend more than most districts in North Carolina, regardless of poverty rate.

Figure 4 gives a flavor of the wide variation in per-pupil school spending. Nationally, the district at the 10th percentile had per-pupil current expenditure of $8,800, compared to $18,600 at the 90th percentile (for these calculations we focus on current expenditure, which is less volatile year-to-year, rather than revenue). Figure 4 shows that this variation is notably  not  systematically related to key demographics. For example, on average, poor students attend school in districts that spent $13,023 compared to $13,007 for non-poor students. The average Black student attends school in a district that spent $13,485 per student, compared to $12,918 for Hispanic students and $12,736 for White students. 4  School districts in high-wage areas need to spend more to hire the same staff, but adjusting spending to account for differences in prevailing wages of college graduates (the second set of bars) does not change the picture much.

Does this mean the allocation of spending is fair? Not really. First, to make progress reducing the disparities in outcomes discussed above, schools serving more disadvantaged students will need to spend  more  on average. Second, these data are measured at the school district level, lumping all schools together. This potentially masks inequality across (as well as within) schools in the same district.

The federal government now requires states to report some spending at the school level; states have only recently released these data. One study using these new data finds that within districts, schools attended by students of color and economically-disadvantaged students tend to have more staff per pupil and to spend more per pupil. These schools also have more novice teachers. How could within-district spending differences systematically correlate with student characteristics, when property taxes and other revenues for the entire district feed into the central budget? Most of what school districts buy is staff, and compensation is largely based on credentials and experience. So schools with less-experienced teachers spend less per pupil than those with more experienced ones, even if they have identical teacher-to-student ratios. Research suggests schools enrolling more economically disadvantaged students, or more students of color, on average have worse working conditions for teachers and experience more teacher turnover. Together, this means that school districts using the same staffing rules for each school—or even allocating more staff to schools serving more economically disadvantaged students—would have different patterns in spending per pupil than staff per pupil.

[1] : For state-specific information, consult state agency websites (e.g., Maryland State Department of Education) for more details. You can find data for all 50 states at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics , and information on state-specific policies at the Education Commission of the States .

[2] : The numbers in this section are based on the most recent data available in the Digest of Education Statistics, all of which were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[3] : See the not-for-profit National Council on Teacher Quality for standards and reviews of teacher preparation programs, and descriptions of state teacher preparation policies.

[4] : These statistics may be particularly surprising to people given the widely publicized findings of the EdBuild organization that, “ Nonwhite school districts get $23 billion less than white school districts. ” The EdBuild analysis estimates gaps between districts where at least 75% of students are non-White versus at least 75% of students are White. These two types of districts account for 53% of enrollment nationally. The $23 billion refers to state and local revenue (excluding federal revenue), whereas we focus on current expenditure (though patterns for total expenditure or total revenue are similar).

Disclosures: The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online  here . The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation .

About the Authors

Sarah reber, joseph a. pechman senior fellow – economic studies, nora gordon, professor – mccourt school of public policy, georgetown university.

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7 Education Federalism: Why It Matters and How the United States Should Restructure It

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and Professor of Education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. She speaks nationally and internationally about educational equity, civil rights, and the federal role in education. Her edited book, A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy, was published in 2019 and considers the questions raised when considering recognition of a federal right to education in the United States.

• Published: 02 April 2020
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Education federalism in the United States promotes state and local authority over education and a limited federal role. This approach to education federalism often serves as an influential yet underappreciated influence on education law and policy. This chapter explores how education federalism in the United States has evolved over time, its strengths and drawbacks, as well as how it has hindered efforts to advance equal educational opportunity. It argues that to achieve the nation’s education aims, education federalism must be restructured to embrace a more efficacious and efficient allocation of authority of education that embraces the policymaking strengths of each level of government while ensuring that all levels of government aim to achieve equitable access to an excellent education. The chapter proposes how to restructure education federalism to support a partnership between federal, state, and local governments to achieve equitable access to an excellent education. It also explains how this new approach to education federal could guide the United States toward a more impactful reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Introduction

“ Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope or dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation.” —President John F. Kennedy, Jr. 1

Our nation’s approach to education federalism determines the balance of authority between the state, local, and federal governments in education. Although the federal role in education has grown substantially over the last half century, education federalism in the United States typically promotes primary state and local authority over education and a limited federal role. 2 Maintaining this approach to education federalism serves as a key driver of education law and policy in the United States. It is often underappreciated as one of the fundamental influences on education. Teachers, superintendents, chief state school officers, governors, philanthropists, private and for-profit entities, and the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education all spring to mind as influencers of education. Yet education federalism shapes the purview of authority for each of these actors and exerts substantial pressure on education reform. 3 Understanding education law and policy requires comprehending education federalism’s influence on education and how the United States could and should reshape education federalism to achieve the aims of education.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides a recent example of the influential nature of education federalism and the limits it places on education law and policy. ESSA protects states and localities as the key drivers of education decisions on everything from the content standards students will be taught, how and when success in learning these standards will be measured, and what interventions should occur when students fall short of meeting these standards. 4 The law greatly curtails the federal role in education because many felt that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001’s (NCLB’s) dramatic increase in federal influence over education was both far too prescriptive and ill-advised. 5 This recent backlash against federal involvement in education 6 suggests that many have quickly forgotten that a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, ushered in the sizable increase of the federal role and spending in NCLB because federal accountability was needed to insist that states and localities raise expectations, expand opportunities, and effectively serve all students, including disadvantaged students. 7

This chapter begins with a brief overview of how the U.S. approach to education federalism has evolved in the United States and its benefits and drawbacks. It then explains how this approach has served as a roadblock to education reforms that aimed to advance equal educational opportunity. This chapter also presents my proposal for disrupting education federalism and restructuring it in ways that would more successfully support a partnership between state and local governments and the federal government to enable all three levels of government to pursue equitable access to an excellent education for all children. Finally, I provide an example of how this restructured approach to education federalism could be applied to guide reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Throughout the chapter, I use the phrase “education federalism” to refer to a balance of power over education that emphasizes state and local authority over education and a circumscribed federal role, unless another use is indicated.

What Is Education Federalism and Why Does It Matter?

Historically, the United States has structured education federalism to protect state and local control of education and limit federal influence. 8 The U.S. Constitution does not include education within the purview of federal authority. The Tenth Amendment reserves for state authority any matter that the Constitution does not assign to the federal government. These constitutional foundations for the primacy of state and local authority and a limited federal role over education remain influential in contemporary debates over how education federalism should be structured.

Yet the persistent emphasis on a limited federal role in education often overlooks constitutional history that reveals that the Fourteenth Amendment obligates Congress “to ensure that all children have adequate educational opportunity for equal citizenship” and that Congress can wield tremendous influence over education through the Spending Clause. 9 History also demonstrates that federal leaders have long understood the importance of support for education for the prosperity of the nation and the endurance of our democracy. Although federal involvement in education was relatively limited until the mid-twentieth century, it is important for debates about the proper federal role in education to acknowledge that federal involvement in education dates back to the late eighteenth century when the Land Ordinance of 1785 required a portion of land in each township to be set aside for public schools. 10 In addition, when southern states were readmitted to the Union after the Civil War, Congress required the states to develop nonsectarian, free public schools. 11 The federal government has been and will remain influential in education even when its role has been circumscribed. This reality raises the question that this chapter examines: how should the balance of governmental power over education be arranged to accomplish the goals of education?

The balance of state, local, and federal power over education has been shifting for well over half a century in new and often unexpected ways from its decentralized origins. Three substantial evolutions have occurred. First, the federal role in education has greatly expanded from its initial role. Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny substantially expanded federal influence over education when the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed segregated schools unconstitutional. 12 Congress continued to expand the federal role in education when it passed several laws that advanced equal educational opportunity in public schools, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. 13

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been a particularly powerful vehicle for increasing federal authority over education. It began as limited federal support for the needs of disadvantaged students to advance equal opportunity and civil rights. 14 Through such reauthorizations as the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 and NCLB, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act expanded its goals to include ensuring that all children receive high-quality educational opportunities and are taught and tested based upon challenging academic standards. 15 ESSA continues this expanded focus on all children while it also seeks to aid the most disadvantaged children. 16 Today, as it has for decades, the federal government influences education from the state capital to the classroom. 17

Second, state control of education has increased significantly since the time when local townships and schools exercised primary authority over schools in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 18 Nationally, for the 2015–2016 school year, states provided the greatest share of funding for schools at 47 percent, local sources provided 45 percent, and the federal government provided 8 percent. 19 In contrast, for the 1919–1920 school year, states provided 17 percent of funding, local sources provided 83 percent of funding, and the federal government provided less than 1 percent of funding. 20 As states have contributed a greater share of education funding, they also have increased their authority and influence over education. 21 For example, states determine the content standards for each grade level and the tests used to assess student knowledge of the standards, which has resulted in greater state power over the curriculum. 22

Finally, the concurrent increase in state and federal authority over public schools has led to a decrease in local authority over schools. Today, local control of schools primarily involves the daily administration of schools. 23 These responsibilities include raising and managing funding for schools; hiring and overseeing staff; busing students; building, obtaining, and maintaining school buildings; upholding attendance policies; managing vendor contracts; and executing federal and state programs and court orders. 24 Local boards oftentimes raise funding through property taxes, which constitutes 36 percent of total school funding. 25 States determine the nature and extent of local control when they choose to delegate their authority. As the president of University of Virginia and education scholar James Ryan has noted, “There is a popular belief that public schools are locally controlled. As a legal matter, this has always been something of a myth. … As a practical matter, it is becoming more difficult to identify many, if any, areas over which local school boards retain exclusive or significant control.” 26 Although local control retains popular support as a public value within the United States, 27 the realities of school governance today reveal that states are the dominant actors in public schools and the federal government wields influence far beyond its limited financial investment.

Education Federalism’s Benefits and Drawbacks

The U.S. emphasis on state and local control of education yields important benefits. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted, states can act as laboratories of “experimentation” that help solve the social and economic challenges confronting the nation. 28 States, local school districts, and schools can serve this experimental role. Through the variety of governance structures, teaching methods, and school and curricular models, states and localities have the opportunity to search for the approach that best serves the needs of students, families, and communities. 29

State and local authority over education can empower educators and policymakers to obtain superior outcomes. The decentralization of education allows flexibility to identify effective educational approaches given the questions that exist regarding the best approaches. 30 States and localities also can compete for citizens and businesses by offering high-quality education and other public services which can promote an efficient allocation of services. 31

Additionally, some particularly praise local decision-making because it empowers individuals to have a more influential voice. 32 State and local education officials are more accountable to citizens than federal officials. 33 Local control of education also can encourage parental participation in decision-making for their children. 34 Parental monitoring and involvement in their child’s school can raise student performance and build community within the school. 35 The Supreme Court in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez heralded the importance of local control of education for its ability to garner continued support for the public schools, to tailor education to local needs, as well as to foster “experimentation, innovation, and a healthy competition for educational excellence.” Indeed, the Court contended that no other social policy could benefit more from diverse viewpoints and an array of approaches than education. 36 Americans continue to value local control of education and prefer state and local control of education to federal control. 37 These perceived benefits of education federalism lead many to defend its current structure and resist law and policy efforts to change it.

Although many trumpet the benefits of education federalism, far fewer acknowledge its drawbacks. State and local control of education seeks to enable states to serve as laboratories of reform, but these laboratories do not consistently achieve effective or efficient outcomes. For example, the Supreme Court declared its belief that the states would serve as laboratories for school finance reform in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez . 38 Despite decades of funding reform since Rodriguez , this reform has not resulted in even a majority of states providing significant additional resources to low-income districts even though compelling research confirms that such districts need these resources for their students to compete on a level playing field with their peers. 39 States continue to incorporate property taxes into their school funding schemes despite the inherent inequalities and inequities that this funding approach occasions and the Court’s 1973 admonition in Rodriguez that states “may well have relied too long and too heavily on the local property tax.” 40 Ultimately, school-funding reforms have been limited in scope and not substantial enough to result in funding that would enable all students to receive equitable access to an excellent education. 41

In addition, while state and local control of education retains an important place in our nation’s approach to education federalism, local control of school districts is quite limited. 42 Local involvement in school board governance and elections can be low. 43 School board meetings are often poorly attended. 44 Research reveals that those who support local control of school boards often fail to understand how school boards function, nor do they actually support their local school boards. 45 Furthermore, low-income communities typically lack the financial and political resources to influence districts and schools. Such communities also cannot successfully lobby state and local governments to enact policies that their governments cannot afford. 46 Therefore, many local communities either do not or cannot exercise the local influence that education federalism affords them.

Although education federalism aims to support an effective and productive education system, too often the education system fails to achieve these goals. 47 The United States loses billions of dollars each year due to the costs of poorly educating millions of students, including billions in lost income and tax revenues; spending on housing and welfare assistance; unnecessary healthcare costs and diminished health outcomes and longevity; and impacts of criminal behavior. A deep achievement gap exists in the outcomes of African American and Hispanic students when compared to their white and Asian peers, as well as the outcomes of the average student from a low-income family and his or her peer from a higher-income family. 48 While educators and policymakers have been focusing on closing the achievement gap, most often they have failed to even attempt to remedy the pervasive and inequitable opportunity gaps that drive the achievement gap and that deeply contradict the ideals of the American dream and equal educational opportunity. 49

State control of education allows states to determine their priorities. Yet states too often exercise this authority in ways that neglect educational equity as a goal. States possess an array of information that reveals educational inequities. Nevertheless, education scholar and reformer Cynthia Brown explains that “despite this ready access to information that can and does reveal inequities, state efforts to correct even glaring problems are rare.” 50 Even acknowledging the recent state genuflect to equity through a statement issued by the Council of Chief State School Officers, 51 most states have tolerated inequitable opportunity gaps for generations and have failed to adopt a robust and sustained commitment to educational equity. Education federalism’s limitations on federal influence over education invite and tolerate this lack of state commitment to making equity and excellence a priority and a reality. 52

How Preserving Education Federalism Has Undermined Federal Reform to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity

Perhaps most importantly, preserving state and local control of education while limiting federal influence has served as a roadblock to a variety of legal and policy efforts that sought to advance equal educational opportunity. Maintaining this approach to education federalism hampered efforts to desegregate schools, federal school funding reform, and NCLB. For instance, although the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed racially separate schools inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education I , it quickly undermined this holding in Brown II when it allowed districts to forestall desegregation by allowing them to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” 53 The Court did not insist on effective and wholesale desegregation until more than a decade later in its 1968 decision, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County , in which the Court demanded that school districts immediately implement a plan that ended black and white schools and created “just schools.” 54 The Court strengthened its insistence on effective desegregation in its 1971 decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education , in which the Court approved of both court-ordered busing to accomplish desegregation and the use of student ratios to guide desegregation. 55

However, the Court quickly retreated from its commitment to effective desegregation in a series of decisions that claimed that preserving education federalism required the justices to retreat from desegregation. In its 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley , the Court rejected an interdistrict remedy for the Detroit public schools because involving the surrounding suburban schools in the plan would reduce local control of schools and increasing federal court control over the schools would be undesirable. 56 In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell , the Court instructed federal courts to release districts from court supervision upon showing good faith implementation of a desegregation decree that eliminated past discrimination “to the extent practicable.” It again emphasized the priority of maintaining local control of schools and the balance of power between the federal and state government in education as the principal reasons for adopting these lenient standards that abandoned Green ’s and Swann ’s insistence on effective desegregation. 57 When the Court in Freeman v. Pitts sanctioned federal courts releasing school districts from supervision on a piecemeal basis rather than requiring a district to desegregate all facets of the district before court supervision could end, it went even further in heralding the primacy of local control of schools when it stated that local control was “the ultimate objective” of school desegregation. 58 The Court similarly emphasized local control of education rather than lasting and effective desegregation in Missouri v. Jenkins when it struck down a desegregation plan for the Kansas City, Missouri, school district that sought to voluntarily attract suburban students to the urban district. 59 In each of these decisions, the Court privileged the primacy of state and local control and a limited federal role over equal educational opportunity and revealed its unwillingness to disturb this balance of power to achieve desegregation. 60

Similarly, the Court’s decision in Rodriguez emphasized maintaining state and local control of education as one of the primary reasons for rejecting a federal constitutional right to education. 61 In the absence of a fundamental right to education, the Court upheld the funding scheme in Texas because it found it rationally related to local control of schools, which the Court determined was a legitimate state interest. 62 The Court also noted that it did not want to upset the balance of federal-state power in education by recognizing a right that would lead to litigation in all fifty states. 63 Indeed, the Court commented that it could not imagine a case that would upset the structure of federalism more than the Rodriguez case. 64

Rodriguez closed the federal courthouse to claims seeking reform of state education funding systems and has left those harmed by such systems with inconsistent and oftentimes ineffective state remedies. 65 Many state education systems now fail to link funding to the goals of the education system, provide less education funding to high-poverty districts, have low funding levels, and employ ineffective funding accountability mechanisms. 66 These shortcomings need a more powerful remedy than most state courts have been able or willing to provide, which is why litigation has recently returned to federal court to challenge persistent and inequitable educational opportunity gaps. 67

Education federalism also limited Congress’s most ambitious and far-reaching attempt to promote educational equity and excellence in NCLB. 68 When Congress decided to condition federal funding on states adopting “challenging” academic standards in math, reading, and science and testing students’ knowledge of the content in these standards, the insistence on state and local control of education prevented Congress from even considering federal standards and assessments. 69 Although these NCLB requirements were intended to lead states to develop rigorous academic standards, many states instead chose to forgo this opportunity and adopted weak standards or modified existing standards or the scores required to be proficient to make them easier for students to master. Many states chose to adopt this approach to avoid the law’s sanctions for the failure of students or subgroups of students to make adequate yearly progress. 70

In addition, when NCLB conditioned federal funding on ensuring all teachers are highly qualified in districts that accept Title I funds, 71 Congress ensured that states maintained control of the standards for licensing teachers by permitting state certification or licensure and passage of a state test in the appropriate subject area to satisfy the highly qualified teacher provision. 72 States used this flexibility to simply retain the preexisting licensure and certification standards and thus did not raise the standards for existing teachers or new teachers. 73 Undoubtedly, Congress could have adopted a federal definition for a highly qualified teacher, but felt constrained by federalism from doing so. 74 NCLB provides simply another example of how education federalism has erected lasting roadblocks to efforts to advance equal educational opportunity.

Despite the ways that NCLB kept states and districts in the driver’s seat for education, when debating and passing ESSA, lawmakers focused on further reducing federal influence and re-establishing state and local control over education as a primary goal. Members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representative repeatedly highlighted the importance of achieving this aim throughout hearings and floor debates that preceded passage of the legislation. 75 ESSA accomplished this goal through such provisions as allowing states and localities to establish the school reforms for low academic performance, as well as the measures of success and the timetables for reform. 76 Limitations on the federal role in education involve substantial costs to our nation as early implementation of ESSA reveals that states and localities are not making a consistent commitment to equity and equal educational opportunity. 77 Given these impactful drawbacks of education federalism, the United States should restructure it to achieve the essential aims of education.

Restructuring Education Federalism

The United States is not bound to its current approach to education federalism. Indeed, the nation has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to shift the structure of education federalism when necessary to achieve national goals. For instance, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 reshaped education federalism to drive additional federal support for the achievement of disadvantaged students. 78 NCLB dramatically expanded federal influence over education by significantly increasing federal education spending in exchange for greater accountability, choice, and flexibility. 79 ESSA represents a substantial reduction in federal involvement in education and a return of education authority to state and local governments in response to the perceived shortcomings of NCLB. 80

It is time for the United States to take a smarter, more effective, and more deliberate approach to education federalism that moves beyond merely responding to the shifting winds of partisan politics. This approach should create a more impactful federal, state, and local partnership for education that builds on and embraces the strengths of each level of government. In the following I present my previously published theory for disrupting the current model of education federalism and replacing it with a more efficacious one. 81 The six components are:

prioritizing a national goal of ensuring all children have equitable access to an excellent education and acknowledging that achieving this goal will require disrupting education federalism;

incentivizing development of common opportunity-to-learn standards that identify the education resources that states must provide;

focusing rigorous research and technical assistance on the most effective approaches to ensuring equitable access to an excellent education;

distributing financial assistance with the goal of closing the opportunity and achievement gaps;

demanding continuous improvement from states to ensure equitable access to an excellent education through federal oversight that utilizes a collaborative enforcement model; and

establishing the federal government as the final guarantor of equitable access to an excellent education by strengthening the relationship between federal influence and responsibility.

I provide a brief explanation of these components here. A full explanation of my theory can be found in my Washington University Law Review article, “Disrupting Education Federalism.” 82

First, to establish equitable access to an excellent education as a top priority, the nation’s federal, state, and local leaders must initiate a national conversation on why the United States must end the inequitable and deeply entrenched disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes. Although many leaders have acknowledged the importance of this goal, far fewer have taken concrete steps to achieve it. Leaders must make the case that the entire nation would benefit from ending these disparities given research indicating that reforms that focus on helping low-income communities often fail unless they benefit wealthier segments of society. 83 They also must explain why closing these disparities must be prioritized on the national policymaking agenda. In addition, leaders need to explain that the federal government must roll up its sleeves alongside the states and localities to work in partnership to achieve this goal because the states and school districts lack the capacity and political will to do this alone. 84

Second, the federal government should incentivize states to develop and adopt common opportunity-to-learn standards that measure and track the nature and scope of disparities in the opportunity to learn. We measure what matters. Measuring and publishing opportunity gaps will help draw attention to the depth and impact of these gaps and should spark impactful reforms to close them. Measuring and reducing the opportunity to learn was an initial essential component of the standards and accountability movement. Goals 2000 provided two options for the creation of opportunity-to-learn standards, but when Republican lawmakers gained control of Congress they eliminated the federal power to create common opportunity-to-learn-standards. 85 New opportunity-to-learn standards would build on the consensus regarding the common core standards, which have been adopted in forty-one states and the District of Columbia. 86 The creation of common opportunity-to-learn standards is essential because, as leading education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond has noted, “there is plentiful evidence that—although standards and assessments have been useful in clarifying goals and focusing attention on achievement—tests alone have not improved schools or created educational opportunities without investments in curriculum, teaching and school supports.” 87

Third, the federal government should provide both rigorous research and effective technical assistance to state and local governments so that they have the capacity to implement reforms that advance equitable access to an excellent education. Federal support for and provision of a robust program of research and technical assistance serves as a means to address the disparate capacities of states and districts to enact comprehensive reform. 88 Limited capacity to implement effective reforms hindered state departments of education in their implementation of NCLB. 89 Recent reports indicate states are raising concerns about their ability to implement ESSA. 90 The federal government should conduct, support, and disseminate the rigorous evidence-based research and technical assistance that states and localities need to measure and close opportunity and achievement gaps.

For instance, as noted previously, inequitable school funding systems continue to provide a broken foundation for our nation’s schools. Research on the most impactful and efficient funding models for education, both in the United States and abroad, could facilitate state adoption of these models. Research also should identify the common barriers to equitable and excellent education systems and disseminate an array of potential solutions so that states may choose the approach that best suits their constituents. This and other additional research would build upon existing federal support for research.

In addition, by building on existing federal technical assistance, new federally supported or provided technical assistance can help states implement evidence-based approaches to ensuring all students receive equitable access to an excellent education. 91 Additional federal support for research and technical assistance also can help to avoid the duplication of efforts that may arise if states fail to collaborate to identify the most impactful models for achieving this important goal.

Fourth, our nation will not achieve equitable access to an excellent education for all students without additional federal financial support for education. If a more effective partnership is to be created between the federal and state governments, the federal government must increase its investment beyond the modest current investment of 8 to 10 percent of the cost of education. Federal financial assistance should provide both incentives for states and localities to engage in reform and assistance to implement reforms. Robust federal incentives can encourage states to engage in reforms that advance equity and excellence that they otherwise would not consider, much less implement. 92 The potential effectiveness of such reforms is amply demonstrated by the ability of the Race to the Top program to ignite and encourage states to change their education laws. 93 Federal financial assistance would help to cover some of the costs of reforms that expand educational opportunity and increase excellence based upon the disparate capacities of states to achieve these goals, with those with less capacity receiving more financial assistance. Those states with the capacity to implement reform also could receive significant, but more modest, assistance to reward successful and enduring comprehensive reform. Increasing federal financial assistance to elementary and secondary education is critical for reshaping the federal-state relationship from one in which the federal government often demands much and contributes very little to one in which the federal government bears greater responsibility for the reforms that it seeks. 94

Fifth, the United States should implement a collaborative system to monitor state progress toward providing all children equitable access to an excellent education. Such monitoring would create federal accountability for achieving this goal, which is currently lacking from federal law and policy. A federal monitoring system could publicize both success stories and where improvement is needed. It also would guide federal investments in research, technical, and financial assistance. I proposed such a monitoring system in a 2007 95 article, and I continue to believe that this type of federal accountability will be essential for our nation to achieve equitable access to an excellent education. This collaborative system would require states to periodically report their efforts to accomplish this goal, including reporting their progress, identifying impediments, and explaining plans for future reforms. Feedback and recommendations would be offered from a panel or commission of experts after educational organizations, civil rights groups, and citizens provided comments. This approach to federal accountability would supplement, but not supplant, state and local accountability for education that has been unable or unwilling to consistently require excellence and equity.

Finally, the federal government must serve as the final guarantor of equitable access to an excellent education. This responsibility would build on the federal government’s superior, but not unblemished, track record and capacity in protecting vulnerable groups and advancing equity when the states have refused to do so. 96 The states have failed to consistently make equity a priority in their laws and policies, despite statements to the contrary. 97 History indicates that only the federal government will engage in the priority setting and redistribution that achieving this goal will require. 98 Furthermore, only federal leadership that is committed to making equitable access to an excellent education a reality will be able to guide the nation in the sustained effort that closing opportunity and achievement gaps will require.

Collectively, my theory for restructuring education federalism establishes the architecture of a new federal, state, and local partnership that embraces the federal government serving shoulder to shoulder with the states and districts to ensure equitable access to an excellent education. Admittedly, this restructuring would increase the federal role in education. However, it does so only when necessary to achieve essential national goals for education. Even with the reduction of federal involvement in education under ESSA, federal funding aims to achieve federal goals and demands without including significant federal responsibility for achieving them. My theory would require a closer link between federal goals and demands and federal responsibility, while ensuring that states retain primary authority in areas of law and policymaking strengths. 99 Simultaneously, the states would face powerful incentives to enact lasting reforms while retaining flexibility to innovate and choose among the many reforms that best achieve equitable access to an excellent education for all schoolchildren. 100

Undoubtedly, my proposal will not be adopted in the near future because law and policymakers currently are focused on addressing the adverse impacts of the pandemic and implementing ESSA. Nevertheless, it is essential to develop a comprehensive and intentional plan for how education federalism should be restructured that may be implemented when the nation realizes that a new federal, state, and local partnership as well as additional federal leadership and support are prerequisites to achieving equitable access to an excellent education.

Reconstructing Education Federalism’s Approach to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

My proposed restructuring of education federalism should occur through incremental shifts in the balance of federal, state, and local authority over education. These incremental shifts would occur in three phases. First, the federal government would create inviting incentives that encourage states to achieve the policy aim of equitable access to an excellent education. Second, the federal government would establish compelling, but not unconstitutionally coercive, conditions for federal financial assistance that support this aim. Finally, when necessary and appropriate for a particular policymaking arena, the federal government would enact meaningful mandates that insist upon states providing equitable access to an excellent education. 101

One of the most powerful vehicles for accomplishing this restructuring of education federalism is through a reconstruction of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Congress and President Lyndon Johnson passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to provide additional resources to impoverished communities. 102 Despite the law’s expansion to address the importance of high academic standards and accountability for results, it retains its aim at increasing equity by reducing the impact of poverty on educational opportunities and outcomes. 103 However, the most recent reauthorization, ESSA, fails to adopt an effective approach to advance educational equity. 104 Therefore, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act should be reformulated to adopt a comprehensive approach to achieve this goal. I have developed an institutional design for equity that proposes four components of an equitable education: fair funding; an equitable distribution of effective teachers; high-quality Pre-K–12 opportunities to learn; and economic and racial integration. 105

To incorporate my institutional design for equity into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, I propose that my incremental approach for restructuring education federalism be tailored to each component. For instance, a future effort that aims to achieve fair funding should build off of the state and district public reporting of per-pupil spending required by ESSA. 106 This information will place new information about the nature and breadth of funding disparities in the hands of the public, advocates, and lawmakers. Therefore, this data should spark new dialogues about greater equity in funding as well as reforms. The federal government should encourage reform by offering powerful incentives for states to end the practices that contribute to inequitable funding, including spending more funding on affluent families; lacking adequate ties between funding systems and educational aims; providing low funding; and insufficient oversight regarding how funding is distributed and spent. 107 As soon as some consensus is reached about the components of fair funding, the federal government should build upon these incentives to condition Elementary and Secondary Education Act funding on fair funding of education. Finally, the federal government should consider lasting mandates that require states to adopt fair funding that makes it an enduring part of our nation’s educational landscape. 108

Similarly, Congress should create an incremental plan to ensure that states achieve an equitable distribution of effective teachers. ESSA will fail to achieve this goal because, among other reasons, it merely retains the provision from NCLB that required states to adopt plans that prevent low-income and minority students from disproportionately being taught by “ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers” despite the ineffectiveness of this NCLB requirement due to a lack of federal accountability. 109 To encourage an equitable distribution of effective teachers, the federal government should first develop a grant program that incentivizes experimentation with how to accurately and consistently measure teacher effectiveness that builds upon existing research on this topic. Then federal grants should support state and district experimentation and innovation with how they can provide an equitable distribution of effective teachers. The federal government also should directly support an increase in the quality and distribution of teachers through the form of a “major education manpower program” modeled after federal support for training and supplying doctors to high-need areas. 110 Only after this foundational work is completed should the federal government include conditions within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that require the equitable distribution of effective teachers. Without this foundational work, these conditions will continue to lack meaning and influence. 111

A federal effort to support states and districts offering high-quality Pre-K–12 opportunities must first be preceded by a national conversation about the scope of current education disparities and the costs of these disparities to our nation. As soon as there is greater public awareness of disparities in educational opportunities, the federal government should adopt incentives for states to develop and adopt opportunity-to-learn standards and close opportunity gaps. Federal conditions within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that insist on measuring and closing opportunity gaps must build upon the insights and experimentation that occurs in these first two phases. Both federal incentives and federal conditions must be accompanied by federal financial assistance to close opportunity gaps. Although additional federal spending alone will not close opportunity gaps, it will be necessary to support state and local efforts to expand and enhance educational opportunities, strengthen after-school and summer-school options, and improve the social supports that facilitate success. 112 Ultimately, a federal mandate should require states to provide the equitable distribution of excellent educational opportunities to support the robust economy and effective democracy that our nation needs.

Finally, additional federal support for economic and racial integration should be implemented by building upon the successes of the other three elements of my model. Integration can only be achieved when parents are provided with opportunities to choose among successful, well-funded schools with effective teachers and high-quality opportunities to learn. Federal financial incentives that foster experimentation with economic and racial integration, coupled with federal research and technical assistance to support experimentation, should inspire some districts to implement integration plans. Elementary and Secondary Education Act conditions regarding integration should be implemented first as a separate program and then through Title I, while including language that acknowledges that integration is beyond the reach of some districts. 113

Collectively, the elements of my institutional design for equity work synergistically to create a federal, state, and local partnership that is empowered to provide the full complement of educational opportunities that equitable access to an excellent education demands. The limited, piecemeal approach of modern education reform will not lead us to the comprehensive reforms needed to achieve this goal. Therefore, our nation must be willing to embrace a new understanding of education federalism that is consistent with our enduring educational goals.

Restructuring education federalism requires welcoming bold reforms that change the very foundations of our nation’s education system and how it is governed. Such bold reforms are overdue given the disconnected reforms of the past that have failed to close opportunity and achievement gaps for generations. In this chapter and throughout my scholarship, I call for a new way of thinking about education federalism that ushers in a novel federal, state, and local partnership. Without this shift to the foundations of our education system, we will likely repeat the failed experiments of the past and continue to wonder why they have not succeeded. With this shift, we can forge a brighter and better future for our children, a stronger economy, and a more robust democracy.

Proclamation No. 3422, 3 C.F.R. 130, 130–131 (1959–1963).

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, The High Cost of Education Federalism , 48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 287, 287 (2013).

See id. at 294–305, 307–314, 322–330.

Every Student Succeeds Act, Pub. L. No. 114-95, 129 Stat. 1802 (2015) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 20 U.S.C.). For an argument that the Every Student Succeeds Act effectively abandons the federal role in education, see Derek W. Black, Abandoning the Federal Role in Education: The Every Student Succeeds Act , 105 Cal. L. Rev. 1309, 1340–1361 (2017).

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425 (2002) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 20 U.S.C.); Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Restructuring the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s Approach to Equity , 103 Minn. L. Rev. 915, 916, 931 (2018).

Evidence of this backlash can be seen in part through the statements of lawmakers and witness testimony in Congress during reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that the federal role in education needed to be greatly reduced. Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, No Quick Fix for Equity and Excellence: The Virtues of Incremental Shifts in Education Federalism , 27 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 201, 242–246 nn.260–271 (2016).

Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005, at 1–2, 5, 156–157, 162–164, 179 (2006).

Carl F. Kaestle, Federal Education Policy and the Changing National Polity for Education, 1957–2007 , in   To Educate a Nation: Federal and National Strategies for School Reform 17, 17 (Carl F. Kaestle & Alyssa E. Loewick eds., 2007).

James E. Ryan, The Tenth Amendment and Other Paper Tigers: The Legal Boundaries of Education Governance , in   Who’s in Charge Here? The Tangled Web of School Governance and Policy 42, 42 (Noel Epstein ed., 2004) (noting this common misperception of the Constitution and that the omission of education from enumerated powers cannot compete with the vast spending powers of Congress); Goodwin Liu, Education, Equality and Equal Citizenship , 116 Yale L.J. 330, 335 (2006).

Land Ordinance of 1785, reprinted in   28 Journals of the Continental Congress 1774–1789 , at 375, 378 (John C. Fitzpatrick ed., 1933). See also Gerard Robinson, A Federal Role in Education: Encouragement as a Guiding Philosophy for the Advancement of Learning in America , 50 U. Rich. L. Rev. 919, 940–948 (2016) (summarizing early federal involvement in and support for education beginning in the late 1700s).

See Derek W. Black, The Constitutional Compromise to Guarantee Education , 70 Stan. L. Rev. 735, 779–781 (2018). Additional federal support for education included financial support for land-grant colleges in 1862, the creation of a modest U.S. Office of Education in 1867, and the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917 that supported vocational education. McGuinn , supra note 7, at 26.

Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).

Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-352, §§ 601–605, 78 Stat. 241, 252–253 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000d–2000d-4 (2012)); Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-10, 79 Stat. 27 (codified as amended in scattered sections of 20 U.S.C.); Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, Pub. L. No. 94-142, 89 Stat. 773 (codified as amended in scattered sections of 20 U.S.C.); Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-380, 88 Stat. 514 (codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1758 (2012)); Education Amendments of 1972, Pub. L. No. 92-318, tit. IX, §§ 901–907, 86 Stat. 235, 373–375 (codified as amended at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688 (2012 & Supp. V 2017)).

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 48.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425, 1425 (2002) (stating within the act’s title that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was passed “[t]o close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.”); Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103-382, sec. 101, § 1001(d), 108 Stat. 3518, 3521 (current version at 20 U.S.C. § 6301 (Supp. V 2017)) (stating that Title I of the Improving America’s Schools Act was passed “to enable schools to provide opportunities for children served to acquire the knowledge and skills contained in the challenging State content standards and to meet the challenging State performance standards developed for all children”).

Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6301 (Supp. V 2017) (stating that the Every Students Succeeds Act aims “to provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps.”).

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Disrupting Education Federalism , 92 Wash. U. L. Rev. 959, 969 (2015).

Ryan, supra note 9, at 55–58; Michael W. Kirst, Turning Points: A History of American School Governance , in   Who’s in Charge Here? The Tangled Web of School Governance and Policy,   supra note 9, at 14, 27–28; Thomas D. Snyder et al., Nat’l Ctr. for Educ. Statistics, U.S. Dep’t of Educ.,   Digest of Education Statistics 2017, at 360 tbl. 235.20 (2019) [hereinafter Digest ].

Digest,   supra note 18, at 360 tbl. 235.20.

Id. at 358–359 tbl. 235.10.

Paul T. Hill, Recovering from an Accident: Repairing Governance with Comparative Advantage , in   Who’s in Charge Here? The Tangled Web of School Governance and Policy,   supra note 9, at 75, 77–78.

Kirst, supra note 18, at 14, 36–37.

Hill, supra note 21, at 78.

Digest,   supra note 18, at 358–359 tbl. 235.10.

Ryan, supra note 9, at 60.

Kaestle, supra note 8, at 20; Paul Manna, Collision Course: Federal Education Policy Meets State and Local Realities 11 (2011).

New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

Manna,   supra note 27, at 12–14.

Aaron J. Saiger, The School District Boundary Problem , 42 Urb. Law. 495, 518–519 (2010).

See Nestor M. Davidson & Sheila R. Foster, The Mobility Case for Regionalism , 47 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 63, 82 (2013); Charles M. Tiebout, A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures , 64 J. Pol. Econ. 416, 418 (1956).

See, e.g. , Gerald E. Frug, The City as a Legal Concept , 93 Harv. L. Rev. 1057, 1068–1069 (1980).

Michal Heise, The Political Economy of Education Federalism , 56 Emory L.J. 125, 131 (2006).

Kirst, supra note 18, at 38.

Saiger, supra note 30, at 519–520.

San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 49–50 (1973).

Associated Press-NORC Ctr. for Pub. Affairs Research, Education in the United States: Choice, Control, and Quality 2 (2017); Manna,   supra note 27, at 11; Rebecca S. Jacobsen & Andrew Saultz, The Polls—Trends: Who Should Control Education? , 76 Pub. Opinion Q. 379, 388 (2012); Kirst, supra note 18, at 16.

Rodriguez , 411 U.S. at 58 (“The consideration and initiation of fundamental reforms with respect to state taxation and education are matters reserved for the legislative processes of the various States…”.).

Bruce D. Baker et al., Educ. Law Ctr., Is School Funding Fair?: A National Report Card 9 (7th ed. 2018) (finding that seventeen states provide at least 5 percent less funding to districts with 30 percent poverty or more, twenty states provide the same funding to high- and low-poverty districts, and eleven states provide at least 5 percent more funding to districts with 30 percent or more students in poverty); Jack Jennings, Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools: The Politics of Education Reform 179 (2015) (noting that “lower-income students desperately need extra assistance to overcome such early disadvantages as a more limited vocabulary,” but in the United States “the pattern is the opposite of what it should be,” with students of higher socioeconomic status receiving more resources than their lower socioeconomic status peers); Richard Rothstein, Why Children from Lower Socioeconomic Classes, on Average, Have Lower Academic Achievement than Middle Class Children , in   Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance 61, 61–69 (Prudence L. Carter & Kevin G. Welner eds., 2013).

Rodriguez , 411 U.S. at 58; Deborah A. Verstegen & Teresa S. Jordan, A Fifty-State Survey of School Finance Policies and Programs: An Overview , 43 J. Educ. Fin. 213, 215 (2009).

James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America 153, 171–172 (2010); Robinson, supra note 6, at 206–220.

See, e.g. , Kirst, supra note 18, at 38; Sarah F. Anzia, Election Timing and the Electoral Influence of Interest Groups , 73 J. Pol. 412, 422 (2011) (finding that median registered voter turnout in 2007 Minnesota school district elections was 13 percent); Julia A. Payson, When Are Local Incumbents Held Accountable for Government Performance? Evidence from US School Districts , 42 Legis. Stud. Q. 421, 430 tbl. 1 (2016) (presenting and analyzing data showing that California school board election turnouts ranged from a mean 16 percent in off-year elections to 33.3 percent in presidential election years from 2003–2012); Erika K. Wilson, Leveling Localism and Racial Inequality in Education through the No Child Left Behind Public Choice Provision , 44 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 625, 633 (2011).

Wilson, supra note 43, at 633 (citing Kathryn A. McDermott, Controlling Public Education: Localism Versus Equity 54–60 (1999)).

Wilson, supra note 43, at 633.

Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future 23–26 (2010).

Sean F. Reardon et al., Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Academic Achievement Gaps , in   Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy 491, 492–496 (Helen F. Ladd & Margaret E. Goertz eds., 2d ed. 2015).

Kevin G. Welner & Prudence L. Carter, Achievement Gaps Arise from Opportunity Gaps , in   Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance , supra note 39, at 1, 6, 9.

Cynthia G. Brown, From ESEA to ESSA: Progress or Regress? , in   The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States 153, 165 (Frederick M. Hess & Max Eden eds., 2017).

See   The Aspen Inst. Educ. & Soc’y Program & the Council of Chief State Sch. Officers, Leading for Equity: Opportunities for State Education Chiefs (2017), https://ccsso.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/Leading%20for%20Equity_011618.pdf (highlighting commitments state chiefs can implement to create equity plans); Daarel Burnette II, State Chiefs at Conference Tout Equity Policies in ESSA Plans , Educ. Wk.: State EdWatch (Feb. 16, 2018, 5:52 PM), http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2018/02/state_chiefs_tout_equity_policies_in_essa_plans.html . Work on the recommendations preceded the 2016 election and represents the work of not only state chiefs but also district leaders and civil rights advocates. Alyson Klein, See How States Plan to Approach Equity , Educ. Wk.: Pol. K–12 (Feb. 2, 2017, 7:02 AM), https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/02/states_plan_approach_equity_ESSA.html .

Robinson, supra note 17, at 979–982.

Brown v. Bd. of Educ. (Brown II), 349 U.S. 294, 300–301 (1955); Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 488, 495 (1954).

Green v. Cty. Sch. Bd., 391 U.S. 430, 442 (1968).

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 1, 16, 24–25, 29–30 (1971).

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 741–744 (1974). For a comprehensive discussion of how Milliken v. Bradley and other Supreme Court decisions sanctioned a return to segregated schools, please see Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Resurrecting the Promise of Brown : Understanding and Remedying How the Supreme Court Reconstitutionalized Segregated Schools , 88 N.C. L. Rev. 787, 812–839 (2010).

Bd. of Educ. v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237, 248–250 (1991); Robinson, supra note 2, at 300–301.

Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 489 (1992).

Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70, 98–100, 102 (1995).

See Robinson, supra note 2, at 294–304.

See id. at 307–314.

See San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 54–55 (1973).

See id. at 47–48, 54–55.

See id. at 44.

See Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. & Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity , in   The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity 263, 264, 268–272 (Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. & Kimberly Jenkins Robinson eds., 2015); Robinson, supra note 2, at 314–322.

Robinson, supra note 6, at 210–220.

Gary B. v. Whitmer, 957 F. 3d 616 (6th cir. 2020), vacated 958 F3d 1216 (6th cir. 2020) (en banc). Martinez v. Malloy, 350 F. Supp. 3d 74 (D. Conn. 2018); A.C. ex rel. Waithe v. Raimondo, No. 1:18-cv-00645 (D.R.I. filed Nov. 28, 2018).

See Robinson, supra note 2, at 322–330.

No Child Left Behind, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(1)(A)–(C), (b)(3)(A)–(C) (2012) (amended 2015); Manna,   supra note 27, at 41.

Manna,   supra note 27, at 47, 153; Ryan,   supra note 41, at 251–252.

No Child Left Behind, 20 U.S.C. § 6319(a) (2012) (repealed 2015).

See id. § 7801(23); Manna,   supra note 27, at 30.

Benjamin Michael Superfine, The Courts and Standards-Based Education Reform 52 (2008); Eric A. Hanushek & Steven G. Rivkin, The Quality and Distribution of Teachers Under the No Child Left Behind Act , 24 J. Econ. Persp. 133, 135–136 (2010).

See Robinson, supra note 2, at 327–328.

See, e.g. , No Child Left Behind: Early Lessons from State Flexibility Waivers: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on Health, Educ., Labor, & Pensions , 113th Cong. 30–31 (2013) (statement of Sen. Paul, Member, S. Comm. On Health, Educ., Labor, & Pensions, Republican-Ky.) (“All of these ideas are ideas of decentralization. They’re an idea and a conclusion that the Federal Government has been an abject failure in this, that No Child Left Behind was a mistake, and that what we need to have is more local control of schools.”); Raising the Bar: Exploring State and Local Efforts to Improve Accountability: Hearing Before the H. Comm. on Educ. & the Workforce , 113th Cong. 6 (2013) (statement of Rep. Miller, Member, H. Comm. On Educ. & the Workforce, Democrat-Cal.) (“We all agree, Democrats, Republicans, and the administration, that the federal role should shift in this reauthorization. States, districts, and schools should be able to manage their schools in a way that current law doesn’t allow.”); 161 Cong. Rec. S8596-97 (daily ed. Dec. 10, 2015) (statement of Sen. Booker, Democrat-N.J.) (“Local teachers, principals, and parents are best equipped to know how best to turn around a failing school, and this bill gives them the arsenal to do so. I believe the new accountability provisions empower local leaders, with State and Federal guidance, to pursue the improvement strategies best suited to their local needs.”); 161 Cong. Rec. S8509 (daily ed. Dec. 9, 2015) (statement of Sen. Alexander, Republican-Tenn.) (noting on the floor of the Senate that the Every Student Succeeds Act is “the single biggest step toward local control of schools in 25 years”); 161 Cong. Rec. H8886 (daily ed. Dec. 2, 2015) (statement of Rep. Thompson, Republican-Pa.) (stating that the proposed law “will establish a more appropriate Federal role in education by ending the era of mandated high-stakes testing, limiting the power of the Secretary of Education to dictate cookie-cutter standards, repealing dozens of ineffective and duplicative programs, and ensuring resources are delivered to where they are most effective and necessary.”); 161 Cong. Rec. S4680 (daily ed. July 7, 2015) (statement of Sen. Collins, Republican-Me.) (“The bottom line is that Washington should not be imposing a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to assessment. … Providing a good education for every child must remain a national priority so that each child reaches his or her full potential, has a wide range of opportunities, and can compete in an increasingly global economy. The Every Child Achieve Act honors these guiding principles while returning greater control and flexibility to our States, to local school boards, and to educators.”); 161 Cong. Rec. 2555 (2015) (statement of Rep. Kline, Republican-Minn.) (“Unfortunately, past efforts have largely failed because they are based on the idea that Washington knows what is best for children. We have doubled down on this approach repeatedly, and it is not working. … Success in school should be determined by those who teach inside our classrooms, by administrators who understand the challenges facing their communities, by parents who know better than anyone the needs of their children.”). For additional examples of statements from lawmakers on the need to reduce the federal role in education, see Robinson, supra note 6, at 242–246 nn.260–271 (noting these and other examples of lawmakers’ comments on the need to reduce the federal role in education under No Child Left Behind and return control to states and school districts).

Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(a)–(f) (Supp. V 2017).

Natasha Ushomirsky et al., The Educ. Tr., Trends in State ESSA Plans: Equity Advocates Still Have Work To Do 2 (2017).

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 31.

See id. at 1, 5–7, 179, 201.

Black, supra note 4, at 1340–1361.

Robinson, supra note 17, at 983–1005.

Id. Since I originally published this article, I have changed the goal for my reforms from equal access to an excellent education to equitable access to an excellent education. I made this change because the distribution of excellent education should acknowledge the disparate needs of students and should drive more resources to mitigate the disadvantages that any child brings to her or his school. In this way, equitable access aims to ensure that the excellent education that is provided to each child enables her or him to participate in education on a level playing field.

David K. Cohen & Susan L. Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? 9 (2009).

Robinson, supra note 17, at 985–987.

See Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Pub. L. No. 103–227, § 213(c), (d), 108 Stat. 125, 139–145 (1994) (repealed 1996); Darling-Hammond,   supra note 47, at 73–74; McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 109; Michael A. Rebell & Jessica R. Wolff, Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity 68 (2008).

Standards in Your State , Common Core State Standards Initiative , http://www.corestandards.org/standards-in-your-state/ (last visited Mar. 7, 2019).

Darling-Hammond,   supra note 47, at 74.

Cohen & Moffitt,   supra note 83, at 14.

Manna , supra note 27, at 49.

Ushomirsky et al.,   supra note 77, at 8–9.

Robinson, supra note 17, at 995–997.

Id. at 998.

Barry Friedman & Sara Solow, The Federal Right to an Adequate Education , 81 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 92, 146 (2013); Patrick McGuinn, Stimulating Reform: Race to the Top, Competitive Grants and the Obama Education Agenda , 26 Educ. Pol’y 136, 143–147 (2012).

Robinson, supra note 17, at 999.

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, The Case for a Collaborative Enforcement Model for a Federal Right to Education , 40 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1653, 1715–1722 (2007).

Charles Barone & Elizabeth DeBray, Education Policy in Congress: Perspectives from Inside and Out , in   Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools 61, 63 (Frederick M. Hess & Andrew P. Kelly eds., 2011); Frederick M. Hess & Andrew P. Kelly, Reflections on the Federal Role: A Half-Century of Hard-Won Lessons , in   Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit,   supra , at 273, 275–276; Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, The Past, Present, and Future of Equal Educational Opportunity: A Call for a New Theory of Education Federalism , 79 U. Chi. L. Rev. 427, 457 (2012) (reviewing Ryan,   supra note 41).

Compare Brown, supra note 50, at 165 (noting the persistent lack of state interest in advancing educational equity), with   The Aspen Inst. Educ. & Soc’y Program & The Council of Chief State Sch. Officers,   supra note 51 (discussing how state education chiefs issued a statement committing to recommendations regarding equity).

Marilyn Gittell, The Politics of Equity in Urban School Reform , in   Bringing Equity Back: Research for a New Era in American Educational Policy 16, 39 (Janice Petrovich & Amy Stuart Wells eds., 2005).

See Robinson, supra note 17, at 985.

Id. at 1003–1004.

I explain how my incremental approach to restructuring education federalism could be applied to guide states in adopting equitable and adequate funding systems in Robinson, supra note 6, at 220–237.

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 29.

Robinson, supra note 5, at 927.

See id. at 938–974.

Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(h)(1)(C)(x), (h)(2)(C) (Supp. V 2017).

Robinson, supra note 5, at 984–988.

No Child Left Behind, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(8)(C) (2012) (amended 2015); Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(g)(1)(B) (Supp. V 2017); Robinson, supra note 5, at 955 (citing Chad Aldeman, The Case Against ESSA: A Very Limited Law , in   The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States 92 (Frederick M. Hess & Max Eden eds., 2017)).

Linda Darling-Hammond & Gary Sykes, Wanted: A National Teacher Supply Policy for Education: The Right Way to Meet the “Highly Qualified Teacher” Challenge , 11 Educ. Pol’y Analysis Archives 1, 3 (2003).

Robinson, supra note 5, at 988–992.

Id. at 992–995.

Id. at 995–997.

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Report | Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment

Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul : How a larger federal role would boost equity and shield children from disinvestment during downturns

Report • By Sylvia Allegretto , Emma García , and Elaine Weiss • July 12, 2022

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Summary 

Education funding in the United States relies primarily on state and local resources, with just a tiny share of total revenues allotted by the federal government. Most analyses of the primary school finance metrics—equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency—raise serious questions about whether the existing system is living up to the ideal of providing a sound education equitably to all children at all times. Districts in high-poverty areas, which serve larger shares of students of color, get less funding per student than districts in low-poverty areas, which predominantly serve white students, highlighting the system’s inequity. School districts in general—but especially those in high-poverty areas—are not spending enough to achieve national average test scores, which is an established benchmark for assessing adequacy. Efforts states make to invest in education vary significantly. And the system is ill-prepared to adapt to unexpected emergencies.

These challenges are magnified during and after recessions. Following the Great Recession that began in December 2007, per-student education revenues plummeted and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years. The recovery in per-student revenues was even slower in high-poverty districts. This report combines new data on funding for states and for districts by school district poverty level, and over time, with evidence documenting the positive impacts of increasing investment in education to make a case for overhauling the school finance system. It calls for reforms that would ensure a larger role for the federal government to establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that channels sufficient additional resources to less affluent students in good times and bad. Furthermore, spending on public education should be retooled as an economic stabilizer, with increases automatically kicking in during recessions. Such a program would greatly mitigate cuts to public education as budgets are depleted, and also spur aggregate demand to give the economy a needed boost.

Following are key findings from the report:

Our current system for funding public schools shortchanges students, particularly low-income students. Education funding generally is inadequate and inequitable; It relies too heavily on state and local resources (particularly property tax revenues); the federal government plays a small and an insufficient role; funding levels vary widely across states; and high-poverty districts get less funding per student than low-poverty districts.

Those problems are magnified during and after recessions. Funding inadequacies and inequities tend to be aggravated when there is an economic downturn, which typically translates into problems that persist well after recovery is underway. After the 2007 onset of the Great Recession, for example, funding fell, and it took until 2015–2016, on average, to return to their pre-recession per-student revenue and spending levels. For high-poverty school districts, it took even longer—until 2016–2017—to rebound to their pre-recession revenue levels. And even after catching up with pre-recession levels, revenue levels in high-poverty districts lag behind the per-student funding in low-poverty districts. The general, long-standing funding inadequacies and inequities combined with the worsening of these problems during and in the aftermath of recessions have both short- and long-term repercussions that are costly for the students as well as for the country.

Increased federal spending on education after recessions helps mitigate funding shortfalls and inequities. Without increased federal education spending after recessions, school districts would suffer from an even greater decline in funding and even wider gaps between funding flowing to low-poverty and high-poverty districts.

Increased spending on education could help boost economic recovery. While Congress has enacted one-time education spending increases in difficult economic times, spending on public education should be considered one of the automatic stabilizers in our economic policy toolkit, designed to automatically increase and thus spur aggregate demand when private spending falls. Deployed this way, education spending becomes part of a set of large, broadly distributed programs that are countercyclical, i.e., designed to kick in when the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Along with other automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance, education spending thus would provide a stimulus to boost economic recovery.

We need an overhaul of the school finance system, with reforms ensuring a larger role for the federal government. In light of the concerns outlined in this report, policymakers must think differently both about school funding overall and about school funding during recessions. Public education is a public good, and as noted in this report, one that helps to stabilize the entire economy at critical points. Therefore, public spending on education should be treated as the public investment it is. While we leave it to policymakers to design specific reforms, we recommend an increased role for the federal government grounded in substantial, well targeted, consistent investment in the children who are our future, the professionals who help these children attain that future, and the environments in which they work. To establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that supports all children, investments need to be proportional to the size of the problems and to the societal and economic importance of the sector.

Introduction

The hope for the public education system in the United States is to provide a sound education equitably to all children regardless of where they live or into which families they are born. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed four interrelated, long-standing realities of U.S. public education funding that have long made that excellent, equitable education system impossible to achieve. First, inadequate levels of funding leave too many students unable to reach established performance benchmarks. Second, school funding is inequitable, with low-income students often and communities of color consistently lacking resources they need to meet their needs. Third, the level of funding reflects an overall underinvestment in education—that is, the U.S. is not spending as much as it could afford to spend in normal times. Fourth, given that educational investments are not sufficient across many districts even during normal times, schools are unable to make preparations to cope with emergencies or other unexpected circumstances. An added, less known feature is that economic downturns make all four of these problems worse. Downturns exacerbate funding inadequacies, inequities, underinvestment, and unpreparedness, causing cumulative harm to students, communities, and the public education system, and clawing back any prior progress. The severity of these problems varies widely across states and districts, as do the strength of states’ and localities’ economic and social protection systems, which may either compensate for or compound the problems.

The pandemic-led recession made these four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system more visible, leading to serious questions about the U.S. education-funding model, which relies heavily on local and state revenues and draws only a small share of funding from the federal government. While public education is one of our greatest ideals and achievements—a free, quality education for every child regardless of means and background—the U.S. educational system is in need of significant improvements.

As the report will show, the core barriers to delivering universally excellent U.S. public education for all children—funding inadequacies and inequities that are exacerbated during tough economic times—were present in the system from the very start. They are the outcomes of a funding system that is shaped by many layers of policies and legal decisions at the local, state, and federal levels, creating widespread disparities in school finance realities across the thousands of districts across the country in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This complex funding puzzle speaks to the need for a funding overhaul to attain meaningful and widely shared improvements.

In this report, we first provide an overview of the characteristics of the U.S. education funding system. We present data analyses on school finance indicators, such as equity, adequacy, and effort, that expose the shortcomings of funding policies and decisions across the country. We also discuss factors behind some of these shortcomings, such as the heavy reliance on local and state sources of funding.

Second, we illustrate that recessions exacerbate the funding challenges schools face. We parse a multitude of data to present trends in school finance indicators both during and after the Great Recession, demonstrating that the immediate effects of federally targeted funds helped schools navigate recession-induced budget cuts. We also look at the shortfalls and inequitable nature of those investments. We explore how increased federal investments—in good economic times and bad—could help address these long-standing problems. We argue that public education funding is not only an investment in our societal present and future, but also is a ready-made mechanism for countering economic downturns. Economic theory and evidence both demonstrate that large, broadly distributed programs providing public support serve as cushions during economic downturns: they spur overall spending and thus aggregate demand when private spending falls. As we note, there are strong arguments for placing public education spending within the broader category of effective fiscal responses to recessions that are countercyclical—designed to increase spending when spending in the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Increases in public education spending during downturns work as automatic stabilizers for schools and provide stimulus to boost economic recovery. We review existing research on the consequences of funding in general and of funding changes—evidence that supports a larger role for the federal government.

Third, we discuss the benefits of rethinking public education funding, along with the societal and economic advantages of a robust, stable, and consistent U.S. school funding plan, both generally and as a countercyclical policy. We show that federal investment that sustains school funding throughout recessions and recoveries would provide three major advantages: It would help boost educational instruction and standards, it would provide continued high-quality instruction for students and employment to the public education workforce, and it would stimulate economic recovery. Education funding, in particular, would blanket the country while also targeting areas with the most need, making the recovery more equitable.

We conclude the report with final thoughts and next steps.

This paper uses several terms to refer to investments in education and to define the U.S. school finance system. Below, we explain how these terms are used in the report:

Revenue indicates the dollar amounts that have been raised through various sources (at the local, state, and federal levels) to support elementary and secondary education. We distinguish between federal, state, and local revenue. Local revenue, in some of our charts, is further divided into local revenue from property taxes and from other sources.

Spending or expenditures indicates the dollar amount devoted to elementary and secondary education. Expenditures are typically divided by function and object (instruction, support services , and noninstructional education activities). We rely on data on current expenditures (instead of total expenditures; see footnotes 2 and 30).

Funding generically refers in this report to the educational investments or educational resources. Mostly, when we use funding we refer to revenue, i.e., to resources available or raised, but funding is also used to refer to the school finance system more broadly, and in that case it could be either referring to revenue or expenditures, depending on the context.

For more information on the list of components under each term, see the glossary in the  Documentation for the NCES Common Core of Data School District Finance Survey (F-33), School Year 2017–18 (Fiscal Year 2018) (NCES CCD 2020).

A funding primer

The American education system relies heavily on state and local resources to fund public schools. In the U.S. education has long been a local- and state-level responsibility, with states typically concerned with administration and standards, and local districts charged with raising the bulk of the funds to carry those duties and standards out.

The Education Law Center notes that “states, under their respective constitutions, have the legal obligation to support and maintain systems of free public schools for all resident children. This means that the state is the unit of government in the U.S. legally responsible for operating our nation’s public school systems, which includes providing the funding to support and maintain those systems” (Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Bradbury (2021) explains that state constitutions assign responsibility for “adequate” (“sound,” “basic”) and/or “equitable” public education to the state government. Most state governments delegate responsibility for managing and (partially) funding public pre-K–12 education to local governments, but courts mandate that states remain responsible.

States meet this responsibility by funding their schools “through a statewide method or formula enacted by the state legislature. These school funding formulas or school finance systems determine the amount of revenue school districts are permitted to raise from local property and other taxes and the amount of funding or aid the state is expected to contribute from state taxes. In annual or biannual state budgets, legislatures also determine the actual amount of funding districts will receive to operate their schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

A quick note on data sources

Some of our analyses rely on district-level data, i.e., the revenues and expenditures use the district as the unit of analysis. We rely on metrics of per-student revenue or per-student spending, i.e., taking into consideration the number of students in the districts. Other analyses use data either by state or for the country, which are typically readily available from the Digest of Education Statistics online. Sometimes the variables of interest are total revenue or expenditures, whereas on other occasions we rely on per-student values. All data sources are explained under each figure and table, and some are also briefly explained in the Methodology.

The federal government seeks to use its limited but targeted funding to promote student achievement, foster educational excellence, and ensure equal access. The major federal agency channeling funding to school districts (sometimes through the states) is the U.S. Department of Education. 1

Figure A shows the percentage distribution of total revenue for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools for the 2017–2018 school year, on average. As illustrated, revenues collected from state and local sources are roughly equal (46.8% and 45.3%, respectively). Two other factors also stand out. First, revenue from property taxes accounts for more than one-third of total revenue (36.6 %). Second, federal funding plays a minimal role, providing less than 8% of total revenue (7.8%). As discussed later in the report, this heavy reliance on local funding is a major driver in the funding challenges districts face.

More than 90% of school funding comes from state and local sources : Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools by source of funds, 2017–2018

The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel.

The data underlying the figure.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website.

Key metrics reveal the four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system 

Fully comprehending how school funding works and how it contributes to systemic problems requires drawing on key metrics and characteristics that define the education investments or education funding. Understanding these metrics is the first step toward designing a comprehensive solution.

The adequacy metric tells us that funding is inadequate

Adequacy, one of the most widely used school finance indicators, measures whether the amount raised and spent per student is sufficient to achieve a certain level of output (typically a benchmark of student performance or an educational outcome).

We use the adequacy data provided by Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber (2020). These authors, who use the School Finance Indicators Database, compare current education spending by poverty quintile with spending levels required for students to achieve national average test scores—typically accepted as an educationally meaningful benchmark. The authors’ estimates account for factors that could affect the cost of providing education, including student characteristics, labor-market costs (differences in costs given the regional cost of living), and district characteristics (larger districts for example may enjoy economics of scale).

Figure B reveals that spending is not nearly enough, on average, to provide students with an adequate education. As this figure illustrates, relative to the wealthiest districts, the highest-poverty districts need more than twice as much spending per student to provide an adequate education. As the figure also shows, the gaps between what is spent on each student and what would be required for those students to achieve at the national level widen as the level of poverty increases. Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)

U.S. education spending is inadequate : Per-pupil spending compared with estimated spending required to achieve national average test scores, by poverty quintile of school district, 2017

Notes: District poverty is measured as the percentage of children (ages 5–17) living in the school district with family incomes below the federal poverty line, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The figure shows how much is spent in each of the five types of districts and how much they would need to spend for students to achieve national average test scores.

Source: Adapted from The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems , Second Edition (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020).

The equity metric tells us that funding is inequitable 

An equitable funding system ensures that, all else being equal, schools serving students with greater needs—whether for extra academic, socioemotional, health, or other supports—receive more resources and spend more to meet those needs than schools with a lower concentration of disadvantaged students. Across districts, states, and the country as a whole, this means allocating relatively more funding to districts serving larger shares of high-poverty communities than to wealthier ones. While our funding system does allocate additional funds based on need (e.g., to students officially designated as eligible for “special education” services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and to children from low-income families through the federal Title I program), in practice, more funding overall goes to lower-needs districts than to those with high levels of student needs.

Figure C compares districts’ per-student revenues and expenditures by poverty level, and shows gaps relative to low-poverty districts. The figure is based on data from what was, when this research was conducted, the most recent version of the Local Education Agency Finance Survey (known as the F-33) (NCES-LEAFS, various years). As shown in the figure, on average, per-student revenue and spending in school districts serving wealthier households exceed revenue and spending in all other districts. In low-poverty districts (i.e., districts with a poverty rate in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues averaged $19,280 in the 2017–2018 school year, and per-student expenditures averaged $15,910. In the high-poverty districts (i.e., in the top fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues were just $16,570, and per-student expenditures were $14,030. High-poverty districts raise $2,710 less in per-student revenue than the lowest–poverty school districts, reflecting a 14.1% revenue gap—meaning high-poverty districts receive 14.1% less in revenue. Per-student spending in high-poverty districts is $1,880 less than in low-poverty districts, an 11.8% gap. 2 In other words, rather than funding districts to address student needs, we are channeling fewer resources—about 14% less, per student—into districts with greater needs based on their student population.

Districts serving poorer students have less to spend on education than those serving wealthier students

: total per-student revenues by district poverty level, and revenue gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018, : total per-student expenditures by district poverty level, and spending gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018.

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 and adjusted for each state’s cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the second fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the third fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: Authors’ analysis of 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Adequacy and equity are closely intertwined

In recent decades, researchers have explored challenges to both adequacy and equity in U.S. public education. For example, Baker and Corcoran (2012) analyzed the various policies that drive inequitable funding. Likewise, lawsuits that have challenged state funding systems have tended to focus on either the inadequacy or inequity of those schemes. 3

But in reality, especially given extensive variation across states and districts, the two are closely linked and interact with one another. At the state level, for example, apparently adequate levels of funding can mask disparities across districts that innately mean inadequate funding for many, or even most, districts within that state (Farrie and Schiarra 2021). 4

In addition, disparate levels of public investments in education are often made in a context that correlates positively with disparate levels of parents’ private investments in their children’s education and related support (Caucutt et al. 2020; Duncan and Murnane 2016; Kornrich 2016; Schneider, Hastings, and LaBriola 2018). Substantial research on income-based gaps in achievement demonstrates that large and growing wealth inequality plays a role. Parents at the top of the income or wealth ladders, who can and do pour extensive resources into their children’s human capital, constantly set a baseline of performance that can be hard for children and schools without such investment to attain (Reardon 2011; García and Weiss 2017). 5

The “effort” metric tells us that many states are underinvesting in education relative to their capacity

 “Effort” describes how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so. Researchers measuring effort determine capacity to spend based on state gross domestic product (GDP), which can vary widely (just as wealthier neighborhoods can raise more revenues even with lower tax rates, states with higher GDP and thus greater revenue-raising capacity can attain higher revenue with a lower effort, i.e., generate more resources at a lower cost). The map ( Figure D ), reproduced from Farrie and Sciarra 2021, shows state funding effort from the 2017–2018 school year.

School funding ‘effort’ varies widely across states : Pre-K through 12th grade education revenues as a percentage of state GDP, 2017–2018

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Note: “Effort is measured as total state and local [education] revenue (including [revenue for] capital outlay and debt service, excluding all federal funds) divided by the state’s gross domestic product. GDP is the value of all goods and services produced by each state’s economy and is used here to represent the state’s economic capacity to raise funds for schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

Source: Adapted from Making the Grade 2020: How Fair is School Funding in Your State? (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

As Farrie and Sciarra (2021) note, states fall naturally into four groups:

• High-effort, high-capacity: States such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming are high- capacity states with high per-capita GDP, and they are also high-effort states: They use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education, which generates high funding levels.
• High-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia have lower-than-average capacity, with low GDP per-capita, but they are high-effort states. Even with above- average efforts, they yield only average or below-average funding levels.
• Low-effort, high-capacity : States such as California, Delaware, and Washington are high-capacity states that exert low effort toward funding schools. If these states increased their effort even to the national average, they could significantly increase funding levels.
• Low-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arizona, Florida, and Idaho are low-capacity states that also make lower-than-average efforts to fund schools, generating very low funding levels.

Evidence shows that districts and schools lack the resources to cope with emergencies

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, our subpar level of preparation to cope with emergencies or other unexpected needs reflects another aspect of underinvestment. As García and Weiss (2020) not about the COVID-19 pandemic, “Our public education system was not built, nor prepared, to cope with a situation like this—we lack the structures to sustain effective teaching and learning during the shutdown and to provide the safety net supports that many children receive in school.”

Whether due to lack of resources, planning, or other factors, districts, schools, and educators struggled to adapt to the pandemic’s requirements for teaching. Schools were unprepared not only to support learning but also to deliver the supports and services they were accustomed to providing, which go far beyond instruction (García and Weiss 2020). This lack of preparation was the result of both a lack of contingency planning as well as a failure to build up resources to be ready “to adequately address emergency needs and to compensate for the resources drained during the emergencies, as well as to afford the provision of flexible learning approaches to continue education” (García and Weiss 2021).

A lack of established contingency plans to ensure the provision of education in emergency and post-emergency situations, whether caused by pandemics, other natural disasters, or conflicts and wars (as examined by the education-in-emergencies research), prevents countries from being able to mitigate the negative consequences of these emergencies on children’s development and learning. The lack of contingency plans also leaves systems unprepared to help children handle the trauma and stress that come from the most serious events. This body of literature has also shown that access to education and services—and an equitable and compensatory allocation of them—helps reduce the damage that students experience during the crisis and beyond, since such emergencies carry long-term consequences (Anderson 2020; Özek 2020).

Public education’s over-reliance on local funding is a key factor behind the troubling funding metrics

The heavy reliance on local funding described above is at the core of the school finance problems. Extensive research has exposed the challenges associated with this unique American system for funding public schools. 6 The myriad factors that drive school funding—politics and political affiliation, state legislative and judicial decisions, property values, tax rates, and effort, among others—vary substantially from one community to another. Thus, it is not surprising that this system has contributed to institutionalizing inequities, especially in the absence of a strong federal effort to counter them.

It is well understood that the local sources of revenues on which school districts heavily rely are often distributed in a highly inequitable way. Revenues from property taxes, which make up a hefty share of local education revenues, innately favor wealthier communities, as these areas have a much larger capacity to raise funds based on higher property values despite their lower tax rates. 7 These higher property-tax revenues in wealthier areas lead to greater revenues for their districts’ schools, since property-tax revenues account for such a significant share of the total.

State and federal funding are insufficient to compensate for these locally driven inequities

State funding of public education is the largest budget line item for most states. 8 Along with federal funding, state funding is expected to make up for local funding disparities and gaps. 9 Federal funding, in particular through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is specifically designed to compensate low-income schools and districts for their lack of sufficient revenues to meet their students’ needs. 10 Similarly, state funding is intended to offset some of the disparities caused by the dependence on local revenues. However, in reality, state and federal sources do not provide enough to less-wealthy school districts to make up for the gap in funding at the local level, as shown in Figure E .

As the figure   shows, the U.S. systematically funds schools in wealthier areas at higher levels than those with higher rates of poverty, even after accounting for funding meant to remedy these gaps. On average, local property-tax funding per student is $5,260 lower in the poorest districts than in the wealthiest districts.

Federal and state revenues fail to offset the funding disparities caused by relying on local property tax revenues : How much more or less school districts of different poverty levels receive in revenues than low-poverty school districts receive, all and by revenue source, 2017–2018

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution for that group; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the second fourth (25th–50th percentile); medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the third fourth (50th–75th percentile); in high-poverty districts, the rate is in the top fourth. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

While state revenues are a significant portion of funding, they only modestly counter the large locally based inequities. And while federal funding, by far the smallest source of revenue, is being deployed as intended (to reduce inequities), it inevitably falls short of compensating for a system grounded in highly inequitable local revenues as its principal source of funding. As such, although states provide their highest-poverty districts with $1,550 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, and federal sources provide their highest-poverty districts with $2,080 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, states and the federal government jointly compensate for only about half of the revenue gap for high-poverty districts (which receive a per-student average of $6,330 less in property tax and other local revenues). That large gap in local funding leaves the highest-poverty districts still $2,710 short per student relative to the lowest-poverty districts, reflecting the 14.1% revenue gap shown in Figure C. Even though high-poverty districts get more in federal and state dollars, they get so much less in property taxes that it still puts them in the negative category overall.

Disparities shortchange states’ (and districts’) ability to access and allocate the resources needed for effective education

Given the heavy reliance on highly varied local funding, it is no surprise that there is similarly significant variation across states with respect to almost every aspect of funding discussed here. Table 1 reports federal, state, and local funding for each state and for the District of Columbia, with local funding broken down into three categories.

Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by source of funds and by state : Share of each source in total revenue, 2017–2018 

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b). 

Nationally, in 2017–2018, local and state sources accounted for 45.3% and 46.8% of total revenue, respectively; just 7.8% comes from the federal government. However, these averages mask substantial variation in the shares of revenue apportioned by each source across states. Local revenue, for example, ranges from just 3.7% of total public-school revenue in Vermont and 18.2% in New Mexico, on the lower end, to a high of 63.4% in New Hampshire. The same is true with respect to state revenue. The state that contributes the smallest share to its education budget is New Hampshire at 31.3%, with Vermont contributing the largest share (89.9%). There is also quite a bit of variation in the share represented by federal funds—from just 4.1% in New Jersey to 15.9% in Alaska. (The cited values are highlighted in the table. We omit the District of Columbia and Hawaii from these rankings because of the unusual composition of their funding streams, but we provide their values in the table.)

As shown earlier in the discussion of the map in Figure E, there are also large disparities in funding effort—how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so, based on state GDP. High-effort, high-capacity s tates such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education and they generate high funding levels.

As a result of funding and effort variability across states, the levels of inequity and inadequacy across states also vary substantially (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020; Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Notably, funding variability translates into significant disparities in overall per-student revenue and per-student spending levels, as shown in Figures F and G . In Wyoming, for example, where effort is relatively high (4.36%; see Figure E) and there is a higher-than-average contribution of state funds to total revenue and a lower-than-average contribution of local funds to total revenue (56.8% and 36.8%, respectively, versus 46.8% and 45.3% averages across the U.S.), per-student revenue is among the highest of any state, nearly $21,000. In contrast, Arizona and North Carolina—which are among the lowest in effort in the country (2.23% and 2.28%, respectively), but where state funds account for 47.1% and 62.1% of the state’s total public education revenues, respectively, and local funds account for 40.4% and only 27.0%, respectively—collect about half of what Wyoming collects per student. (Data accounts for differences in states’ cost of living; see the appendix for more details on our methodology.)

Public education revenues vary widely across states : Per-student revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b).

Public education expenditures vary widely across states : Per-student expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020c).

These substantial disparities in all the school finance indicators, and in per-pupil spending and revenue across states, are mirrored in capacity and investment patterns across districts and, within them, individual schools.

As such, these systemic and persistent inequities play a decisive role in shaping children’s real school experiences. As Raikes and Darling-Hammond (2019) note, “As a country, we inadvertently instituted a school finance system similar to red-lining in its negative impact. Grow up in a rich neighborhood with a large property tax base? You get well-funded public schools. Grow up in a poor neighborhood? The opposite is true. The highest-spending districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times as much as the lowest-spending, with large differentials both across and within states (Raikes and Darling-Hammond 2019). In most states, children who live in low-income neighborhoods attend the most under-resourced schools” (see also Turner et al. 2016 for the underlying data). 11

These gaps in spending capacity touch every aspect of school functioning, including the capacity of teachers and staff to deliver effective instruction, and pose a huge barrier to the excellent school experience that each student should receive. In Pennsylvania, for example, where districts tend to rely heavily on local revenues to finance schools, per-pupil spending ranges dramatically. Indeed, in 2015, the U.S. Department of Education flagged the state as having the biggest school-spending gap of any state in the country (Behrman 2019). One illustrative example is in Allegheny County, on the western side of the state, where the suburban Wilkinsburg school district outside of Pittsburgh spent over $27,000 per student in the 2017–2018 school year, while the more rural South Allegheny school district spent just over $15,000, roughly 45% less.

With salaries being the largest line item in school budgets, these disparities substantially affect schools’ ability to hire the educators and other school personnel needed to provide effective instruction, the school leaders to guide instructional staff, and the staff needed to support administrative needs and to offer other services and extracurricular activities. As a result, these resources vary tremendously not only among states, but within them from one district, and even school, to another. 12 Overwhelming research exposes large disparities in access to counselors, librarians, and nurses, and in access to up-to-date technology and facilities. Facilities are literally crumbling in lower-resourced states and districts, painting a clear picture of the dire straits many schools face. (See, for example, Filardo, Vincent, and Sullivan 2019 regarding added consequences for low-income students and their teachers in schools that are too cold, full of dust or lead paint, and have broken windows or crumbling ceilings.)

Baker, Farrie, and Sciarra (2016) note that “increasing investments in schools is associated with greater access to resources as measured by staffing ratios, class sizes, and the competitiveness of teacher wages.” The findings presented here are backed by the extensive body of literature on the positive relationship between substantive and sustained state school finance reforms and improved student outcomes. Together, they make a strong case that state and federal policymakers can help boost outcomes and close achievement gaps by improving state finance systems to ensure equitable funding and improved access to resources for children from low-income families.

Economic downturns exacerbate the problems with our school finance system and, over time, cause cumulative damage to students and to the system

Recessions lead to depleted state and local budgets and, in turn, to cuts in education funding. Trends since the Great Recession demonstrate that it can take a long time to restore education budgets and that our practice of balancing budgets on the backs of schoolchildren is an unwise and, ultimately, costly one in terms of educational and societal outcomes. As we show in Figure H , reductions in revenue for public education often outlast the official length of the recession, lasting much longer than the point when state and local budgets have returned to pre-recession trajectories in other areas of spending. In addition, a poor allocation of resources across high- and low-poverty districts disproportionately harms students in the highest-poverty districts relative to their peers in better-off districts, compounding the existing challenges described above and impeding their recovery.

It took the United States nearly a decade to restore the national per-student revenue to its pre-recession (2007–2008) school-year levels. Figure H shows national trends in revenue per student, by source (federal, state, and local), from the onset of the Great Recession through 2017–2018. 13

Education revenues fell sharply after 2008 (and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years) : Change in per-student revenue relative to 2007–2008, by source (inflation adjusted)

Note: The chart shows change in revenue per student for public elementary and secondary schools compared with 2007–2008. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021). The Local line is all local sources, including property tax revenues.

Per-student state revenue fell precipitously between 2007–2008 and 2012–2013—it was down nearly $900 at the low point. While revenue from property taxes did not decrease, on average, other local revenues fell by $160 by 2011–20121, only recovering to 2007–2008 levels in 2014–2015. Federal funding for schools, together with the additional recovery funds targeted to education through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided an initial and critical counterbalance to these reductions; in 2009–2010 and 2010–2011, districts were receiving slightly over $600 more per student from the federal government than they were before the recession.

The peak in federal revenue is also visible in Figure I , which depicts the distribution of funding by sources by year . Total federal funds accounted for 12.7% of total revenue in 2009–2010, compared with just 8.2% in 2007–2008, an increase of over 50%. (Note that this increase was made larger by the reduced total amounts of revenues, i.e., it constituted a greater share of a smaller whole).

Importance of federal funding for education increased in the aftermath of the Great Recession : Share of total education revenue by source, 2007–2008 to 2017–2018

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

While these federal investments provided a critical boost by temporarily upholding education funding, our analyses suggest an opportunity to shorten the slow recovery to pre-recession levels was lost. Just as they effectively operated during the recession, it is likely that larger and more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession. We come back to this idea in sections below.

In keeping with the discussion on broad funding disparities by state, the road to recovery from the Great Recession also varies across states and districts, with some still lagging from the Great Recession as they struggled with the COVID-19 crisis.

Research demonstrates that well after the end of the Great Recession, a significant number of states were still funding their public schools at lower levels than before the recession. As late as 2016, for example, per-student funding in 24 states—including half of the states with over a million enrolled students—was still below pre-recession levels (Leachman and Figueroa 2019). For some of these states, the failure to return to prior funding levels was driven by the lack of recovery of the per-student state revenue (for example, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). In some of the “deepest-cutting states — including Arizona, North Carolina, and Oklahoma,” note Leachman and Figueroa, the state governments made significant cuts to income tax rates, “making it much more difficult for their school funding to recover from cuts they imposed after the last recession hit.” In other states, lack of local revenue was the culprit (as in Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, and Vermont, for example). Finally, in some of these states, this shortfall fell on top of a rapidly growing student population (i.e., even had their total revenues recovered to pre-recession levels, they would still fall far behind on a per-student basis). Exploring the various drivers of these trends and their variation across states is beyond the scope of this report but would undoubtedly be fruitful. 14

Putting aside state trends and underlying causes, a focus on school districts reveals a strong correlation between poverty rates and education funding recovery. The following figures show the trends over time in total per-student revenue and spending by school district poverty levels. As we see, high-poverty districts and their students experienced both the biggest shortfalls and the most sluggish recoveries.

Figure J shows that, as discussed above, districts with relatively small shares of low-income students (low-poverty districts) never saw revenues per student fall below pre–Great Recession levels, adjusted for inflation and state cost of living. By contrast, the one-fourth of districts with the largest share of students from poor families (high-poverty districts) stayed below their pre–Great Recession level of per-student revenues long after recovery was in full swing, through 2015–2016. In keeping with that spectrum, the medium-high poverty districts did recover to their pre-recession per-student revenue levels, but not until 2014–2015.

The drop in education revenues after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student revenue compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty level (adjusted for inflation and state cost of living)

Sources: 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Figure K tells a similar story regarding trends in per-student expenditure across school districts. As such, it took until 2017–2018, a decade after the Great Recession had first hit, for high-poverty school districts to surpass their pre-recession levels, though they still lagged far behind their wealthier counterpart districts. Moreover, though not shown in this graph, for high-poverty districts, getting back to pre-recession status means catching up to revenue and spending levels that were lower than in the wealthier districts to begin with. (Figure C earlier in the report illustrates the gaps between high- and low-poverty districts in 2017–2018.)

The drop in education expenditures after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student expenditures compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty (adjusted for inflation and state cost-of living)

Notes:  Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates (for children ages 5 through 17) are in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates are in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Balancing budgets on the backs of children during a recession has serious consequences

Inadequate, inequitable funding relegates poor children to attend under-resourced schools even in good economic times, and to suffer disproportionately during and in the aftermath of economic downturns. We have for far too long been balancing recession-depleted budgets on the backs of schoolchildren, in particular low-income children and children of color. This not only hurts these children immediately, but severely limits their prospects as adults. As such, this practice has broader implications for the future of the country, both economically and regarding the strength of our societal fabric, given that the students of today are the workers and the citizens of tomorrow.

Indeed, these negative patterns are just the first indications of a cascade of consequences that result from funding cuts. This section describes those consequences and their flip side, which is more frequently the focus of education researchers—the positive effects of increased investment. First, we review the literature demonstrating the impacts of various levels of funding on student outcomes. Next, we point to analyses that have shown some other associated school problems (education employment, class size, and student performance, among others) that were contemporaneous with the declines in spending and revenue. Thought it is difficult to quantify the exact and independent impact of the funding cuts on these factors, the strong correlations suggest that they are related.

Substantial evidence points to the positive effects of higher spending on both short- and long- term student outcomes, as well as on schools overall and on adult outcomes (Jackson and Mackevicius 2021; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016; Gibbons, McNally, and Viarengo 2018; Hyman 2017; Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson 2018; Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Baker 2018). This body of research also provides evidence that the impact of school spending differs by students’ family income (Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). And, though less has been studied in this specific area, the evidence also shows that a misallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending has a negative influence on student outcomes, as well as on some teacher outcomes (Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Greaves and Sibieta 2019). 15

A recent summary of the literature provides compelling evidence of the effects of school spending on test scores and educational attainment. Based on 31 studies that provide reliable causal estimates, Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) find that, on average, a $1,000 increase in per-pupil public school spending for four years increases test scores by 0.044 percentage points, high school graduation by 2.1 percentage points, and college-going by 3.9 percentage points. Interestingly, the authors explain that “when benchmarked against other interventions, test score impacts are much smaller than those on educational attainment—suggesting that test-score impacts understate the value of school spending.” Consistent with a cumulative effect, the educational attainment impacts are larger after more years of exposure to the spending increase, and average impacts are similar across a wide range of baseline spending levels, indicating little evidence of diminishing marginal returns at current spending levels.

Other research suggests that the effect of spending is greater on disadvantaged students. Bradbury (2021) investigates “how specific state and local funding sources and allocation methods (redistributive extent, formula types) relate to students’ test scores and, especially, to test-score gaps across races and between students who are not economically disadvantaged and those who are.” Her findings suggest that statewide per-student school aid has no relationship with test-score gaps in school districts, but that the progressivity of the state’s school-aid distribution is associated with smaller test-score gaps in high-poverty districts. 16

Other studies further affirm the implications of equity-specific funding decisions. Jackson, Johnson, and Persico’s (2016) study assesses the impacts on a range of student and adult outcomes of a series of court-mandated school finance reforms that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Linking information on the reforms to administrative data about the children who attended the schools, the authors found that the increase in school funding was associated with slight increases in years of educational attainment, and with higher adult wages and reduced odds of adult poverty, as well as with improvements to schools themselves—increased teacher salaries, reduced student-to-teacher ratios, higher school quality, and even longer school years (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). Specifically, a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public schooling leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25% higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty. As with the other studies, the benefits from increased funding are much greater for children from low-income families: 0.44 years of educational attainment and wages that are 9.5% higher.

In another study drawing on data from post-1990 school finance reforms that increased public-school funding in some states, Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018) estimate the impact of both absolute and relative spending on achievement in low-income school districts, as measured by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data. 17 They find that the reforms increase the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the increase in spending/adequacy. While the measures employed to estimate the impact tend to be technical, the authors emphasize that this “implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.” 18 Similar adequacy-related reforms that resulted from court mandates, rather than state legislative decisions, prompted significant increases in graduation rates (Candelaria and Shores 2019).

Conversely, research shows that both the reallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending have a negative influence on both teacher and student outcomes. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2020) find that the cuts to per-pupil spending that occurred during the Great Recession reduced test scores and college enrollment, particularly for children in poor neighborhoods. Shores and Steinberg (2017) reaffirm these findings, noting that the Great Recession negatively affected math and English language arts (ELA) achievement of all students in grades 3–8, but that this “recessionary effect” was concentrated among school districts serving both more economically disadvantaged students and students of color. Greaves and Sibieta (2019) find that changes that required districts to pay teachers following higher salary scales, but that provided no additional funding to implement the requirements, did lead to increased pay for teachers as intended, but at the expense of cuts to other noninstructional spending of about 4%, with no net effects on student attainment. That is, reallocating resources across functions, without increasing the overall levels, did not improve outcomes.

Other studies explore disappointing trends across multiple education parameters during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, including teacher employment, class size, aggregate student performance, and performance gaps by socioeconomic status and/or racial/ethnic background. Several analyses show that recession-led school funding cuts were contemporaneous with significant reductions of teacher employment. The number of teachers in the United States public-school system reached its highest point in 2008, and then dropped significantly between 2008 and 2010 because of the recession (Gould 2017; Gould 2019; Berry and Shields 2017). Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019) estimated a decrease in total employment in public schools of 294,700 from the start of the recession until January 2013. Gould (2019) estimated that, in the fall of 2019, there were still 60,000 fewer public education jobs than there had been before the recession began in 2007 and that, if the number of teachers had kept up proportionately with growing student enrollment over that period, the shortfall in public education jobs would be greater than 300,000.

Related to these challenges, in the aftermath of the Great Recession through the 2015–2016 school year, schools’ struggles to staff themselves increased sharply. García and Weiss (2019) showed that the share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but could not do so tripled from the 2011–2012 to the 2015–2016 school year (increasing from 3.1% to 9.4% of schools in that situation), and the share of schools that reported finding it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7% to 36.2%). 19

Although class size, and the closely related metric of student-to-teacher ratios, have declined over the long term, they are higher, on average, in 2020 than they were in 2005 (the closest data point prior to the Great Recession) in 29 out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia (NCES 2020d; Hussar and Bailey 2020). (See Mishel and Rothstein 2003 and Schanzenbach 2020 for a recent review of the influence of class size on achievement.)

Understanding overall trends in student performance over this period helps to put the impacts of trends in these other metrics in context. We have cited research that links school finance trends and educational outcomes in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but it is worth describing what the trends in student performance looked like across the country. It should not be surprising that scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable indicator over time of how much students are learning, show stagnant performance in math and reading for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2009 and 2019 (NAGB 2019). As Sandy Kress, who served as President George W. Bush’s education advisor, commented, “The nation has gone nowhere in the last ten years. It’s truly been a lost decade [and] [t]he only group to experience more than marginal gains in recent years has been students in the top 10th percentile” (Chingos et al. 2019).

Gains (both absolute and relative) vary by students’ background, with multiple trends visible. Carnoy and García’s 2017 research on achievement gaps between racial/ethnic groups shows that Black–white and Hispanic–white student achievement gaps have continued to narrow over the last two decades, and also that Asian students were widening the gap ahead of white students in both math and reading achievement. At the same time, Hispanic and Asian students who are English language learners (ELLs) are falling further behind white students in mathematics and reading achievement, and gaps between higher- and lower-income students persist, with some changes that vary by subject and grade. During the decade of stagnation, however, in keeping with trends in per-pupil investments over this period, these trends widened existing inequities. As National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr soberly notes, “Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains” (Danilova 2018).

Finally, we have also seen marked changes in the student body composition that have implications for these trends going forward. The proportion of low-income students in U.S. schools has increased rapidly in recent decades, as has the share of students of color (NCES 2020e; Carnoy and García 2017). A student’s race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status also affects the student’s odds of ending up in a high-poverty school or a school with a high share of students of color. For example, Black and Hispanic students who are not poor are much more likely than white or Asian students who are low income to be enrolled in high-poverty schools (Carnoy and García 2017).

All of these changes point to the need for increased resources across the board, and especially in schools serving the highest-needs students. As we revisit education funding in the aftermath of the pandemic-induced recession, the new structure must make greater investments to ensure the equitable provision of education and associated supports not only in stable times but also in the context of substantial disruptions and crises (García and Weiss 2021). As the analysis above makes clear, neither equity not adequacy—and, thus, excellence in public education—will ever be possible as long as local revenues play such a central role, and as long as states are the primary vehicle to address those disparities. While we leave it to policymakers to design the specifics of this public-good investment, we emphasize that the benchmarks we should reach to determine that those investments are stable, sufficient, and equitable should reflect meaningful, consistent advances for the highest-poverty schools and schools serving students of color. In other words, when the impacts of recessions no longer fall on the backs of our most vulnerable children, we will know that we are moving in the right direction.

Public education funding could also be deployed quickly to boost the economy and serve as an automatic stabilizer

The practice of cutting school funding during recessions is not only bad for students and teachers but also hurts the economy overall. The education sector has the potential to help stabilize the economy during downturns, but historically, our policy responses have failed to provide the necessary investment, as discussed in this report.

Up to this point, we have shown the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the existing education funding system. We have emphasized that fixing the system’s problems and achieving an excellent, equitable, robust, and stable public education system requires more funding —not just a reshuffling of existing funding. We have presented evidence indicating the need for a significantly larger contribution to the system from the federal government on a permanent basis. We have also demonstrated that targeting additional funds to schools during the Great Recession—via ARRA funds in particular— helped offset the large cuts schools experienced due to state and local shortfalls. As stated by Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019), “[…] the federal government’s efforts to shield education from some of the worst effects of the recession achieved their major goal.” Based on the observed trends, we considered whether even more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession.

There is another reason for both larger investments and a more robust federal role when state and local budgets experience shortfalls due to economic downturns: School funding can be part of the countercyclical public-spending programs that help the economy recover. While policymakers and economists have long recognized the need for, and the effectiveness of, such automatic stabilizers (programs that pump public spending into the economy just when overall spending is declining), they have not traditionally placed public education spending in this category—yet it belongs there. 20 Federal funding directed toward schools during and in the aftermath of economic downturns can further boost the economy, thereby jump-starting economic recoveries.

Stable, sufficient, and equitable education funding would give schools and districts the resources and flexibility to adapt to challenges that they need but have not had during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, automatic stabilization of public education protects students and school systems against depleted school budgets during recessions and volatile business cycles (Evans, Schwab, and Wagner 2019; Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2021). In addition to averting the harms to students and teachers described above, countercyclical investments would keep the public education workforce employed. The teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and others who work in public schools made up 53.2% of all state and local public-sector workers in 2019—accounting for nearly 7.0% of total U.S. employment. 21 School staff are also family and community members whose spending ripples through their local economies (known as the multiplier effect). Cuts to education revenues and employment thus also affect local communities more broadly, and retrenchment of spending acts as a type of reverse multiplier, resulting in a vicious downward cycle.

Federally provided countercyclical fiscal spending on public education set up to kick in based on defined triggers—akin to an expansion of unemployment benefits that kicks in when certain unemployment targets are reached—would have significant “bang-for-your-buck” multiplier effects. Such automatic spending constitutes smart investment that upholds public education while giving the overall economy a significant boost. Analyzing then President-elect Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which included public education spending, Zandi and Yaros (2021) reported a 1.34 fiscal multiplier for state and local government spending (the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was signed into law in March 2021).

Because the federal government already provides substantial support to state and local governments in such times, bolstering and further targeting that support in a defined and concerted manner would entail a relatively light lift. Despite some challenges, several programs of this nature have been shown to meet their goals in their given policy areas. For example, the federal unemployment insurance (UI) and food stamps (SNAP) 22 programs are often cited as having demonstrably positive outcomes when the federal government increases their funding. Both have been heavily criticized for their structural flaws and lack of sufficient resource (Bivens et al. 2021). However, through prior recessions and the pandemic, data illustrate that UI and SNAP nonetheless prevented millions of people from falling into, or deeper into, poverty, as well as averted hunger and evictions. The CARES Act’s first allotment of the Economic Impact Payments and expanded UI benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic kept 13.2 million people out of poverty (Zipperer 2020). 23 The Bureau of Economic Analysis broke out the effects of selected pandemic response programs on personal income, illustrating just how heavily Americans leaned on these benefits through the pandemic. In June 2020, UI payments accounted for 15.6% of all wages and salaries in the U.S (BEA 2020). By contrast, just prior to the pandemic UI benefits were negligible in comparison—just 0.27% of wages and salaries overall in February 2020.

We propose that policymakers create a program for funding education during downturns that is of adequate magnitude and provides immediate, sufficiently large, and sustained relief as needed.

In order to provide an immediate response, the system must have the capacity to adapt to emergencies; a key way to ensure that is to specify ahead of time the automatic triggers that prompt launching the contingency plans. 24 To clarify, we are not suggesting that public education spending be treated exactly like food stamps or unemployment insurance benefits—i.e., that states amass reserves for a “rainy day” or that reserves be built up during nonrecessionary periods. Rather, we are pointing to the economic benefits of an education system that is robustly, stably, and consistently funded throughout economic ups and downs, ensuring that it also has the resources to withstand the downturns and the flexibility to adapt. And we are recommending that Congress establish a program that kicks in when needed, rather than waiting until a crisis and coming together to pass a large, responsive bill, which requires political negotiation and can thus take a lot of time.

Sufficiently large investments imply that the spending numbers are adequate to the size of the problem. As we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the various public programs—even with all their flaws—have been critical to preventing a much worse disaster than the one we have experienced. 25

Finally, regarding sustained assistance, it was clear that relief and recovery spending fell far short in response to the Great Recession and was cut off too soon; it took 6.2 years to recoup the jobs lost and nearly eight years for the unemployment rate to get back to its pre-recession rate of 5%. And unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic workers took much longer to return to pre-recession levels (Allegretto 2016). In education, as shown before, it was not until the 2014–2015 school year that districts’ per-student revenue, on average, recovered to 2007–2008 levels nationally—and recovery took even longer for high-poverty districts.

In sum, while the purpose of this study is not to offer guidance on how to best design a public education automatic-stabilization program, we do argue that such a program would help public education during downturns, and provide a boost to the overall economy. At later stages, proof-of-concept designs such as Medicaid and transportation grants, and some of the existing large-scale public programs already mentioned, could be a useful place to continue the discussion. Identifying best practices—in program design, financing, and implementation in the United States and elsewhere—would help to conceive a strategy.

Conclusions and next steps

For too long in this country, we have normalized the practice of underinvesting in education while expecting that schools would still function well (or at least moderately well). We have also accepted the disproportionate burden that economic recessions place on public schools and students. These norms are very costly—to individuals and to society—and they shortchange our country’s potential.

As the data and research show, this approach is backward. If we are to have a chance of providing all students in the United States with an excellent education we must  build a strong foundation—one with sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools in practice, not just in theory. Ensuring broad adequacy and equity will require increased federal investment (to more fully complement a system that relies heavily on nonfederal sources). Moreover, federal provisions that provide for automatic boosts to education spending during downturns is critical. Our education system can and should include a countercyclical designed to help stabilize the economy when it is contracting—benefiting schools and communities.

Were we to truly acknowledge the benefits, it would be hard to argue politically against making these investments a reality. Here again the data are edifying: Extensive research indicates that a stable and consistent funding system with a much higher level of investment would generate large economic and social returns. 26

An increased federal investment to ensure sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools has an additional benefit: It could serve as another tool in our toolbox for faster, broader, and more equitable recoveries from recessions. Boosting school funding during downturns could boost the wider economy—and disproportionately benefit the low-income communities that tend to be hit hardest in hard economic times.

This proposal requires jettisoning the tendency to pit public policy areas against one another for resources, and to glamorize the purportedly efficient notion of “doing more with less.” The latter, often used to justify education budget cuts, actually entails a misguided denial of the need for resources and of the inevitable damage that ensues when those resources fall short—or fail to exist at all.

We are not arguing that increased access to federal resources alone will address all the issues outlined above. Simply throwing money at the goal of providing an excellent education equitably to all children won’t achieve it; we need to make the right investments. 27

In addition, it is also important to distinguish funding from decision-making. While the federal government is best positioned to ensure broadly adequate and equitable education funding nationwide, it is not necessarily well suited to make decisions about policy, practice, and implementation. Evidence should guide how decision-making is allocated across the federal, state, and local levels. 28

Advancing this proposal also requires that we dislodge the conversation from where it has been stuck for at least the past half-century—namely on whether the resources exist. They do. What we need to ask now is how to make those resources available, and how to deploy them to ensure that all students have the opportunities to learn, develop, and achieve their full potential—and that these opportunities are available during both ordinary and recessionary times.

About the authors

Sylvia Allegretto is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute. She worked for 15 years at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-founded the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED). She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Emma García is an economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy. She developed this study while she was at the Economic Policy Institute (2013-2021). She is now a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. García received her Ph.D. in economics and education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Elaine Weiss is the Policy Director at the National Academy of Social Insurance, and former National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education at the Economic Policy Institute (2011-2018). She received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to EPI Publications Director Lora Engdahl for having edited this report and for her help shepherding it to its release. The authors benefited from Ajay Srikanth’s guidance on school finance data sources at the beginning of the project. The authors appreciate EPI’s support of this project, EPI Research Assistant Daniel Perez for his assistance with the tables and figures, EPI Editor Krista Faries for her usual thoughtful insights, and EPI’s communications staff for their assistance with the production and dissemination of this study.

Appendix: Notes on the data sources and the analyses

We construct our own district-level longitudinal data set using information from three different sources:

• the National Center for Education Statistics’s School District Finance Survey (F-33, Local Education Agency Finance Survey microdata from NCES 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 (NCES-LEAFS 2021)
• the United States’ Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program (for districts 2007–2018, from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a) 29
• Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) Version 4.0 covariates file (Reardon et al. 2021).

The School District Finance Survey (F-33) is the source for revenues and expenditures for public elementary and secondary school districts in the country. The F-33 is a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD) and consists of local education agencies (LEA)-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The entire universe of LEAs in each school year and in each state plus D.C. are included. The F-33 report includes the following types of school district finance data: revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; revenues by source; current expenditures by function and object; and revenues and current expenditures per pupil.

We use the annual data from 12 school years from 2006–2007 until 2017–2018 (the most recent available data at the time of development of this research was the data for 2017-2018, last accessed in March 2021 (NCES-LEAFS 2021) , see https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp#Fiscal:1,LevelId:5,Page:1 for updates).

We use the following variables from NCES CCD 2020:

• Total Revenue (TOTALREV)
• Total Federal Revenue (TFEDREV)
• Total State Revenue (TSTREV)
• Local Rev – Property Taxes (T06)
• Fall Membership (V33 and MEMBERSCH if V33 is missing)
• Total Current Expenditures for Elementary/Secondary Education (TCURELSC) 30

We calculate revenues (total and by source) and current expenditures in per-student terms.

For findings expressed “in constant 2019 – 2020 dollars,” all spending and revenue data are expressed in dollars corresponding with the 2019–2020 school year (average July–June as explained by NCES 2019), using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021).

For findings involving states’ cost-of-living-adjusted (RPPs), we account for differences in the cost-of-living across states by using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s (BEA’s) Regional Price Parities (BEA 2021). 31

For analyzing metrics and outcomes by school poverty level, we link the school finance information with the poverty information.

Our preferred poverty data source is the United States Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program for districts for school years spanning 2007–2018, which we collect from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a). Census SAIPE district poverty data are available for the period 2007–2008 through 2017–2018 (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The variable of interest is the poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the district (ratio between poor children and total children in that age group). They are originally available as yearly data. To proxy for the school year (July–June) data, for a given school year, we take the average between the fall year-1 and the spring year.

We also use two other poverty data sources, which are linked to the F-33 data in sequential steps, for the following two purposes: (a) to offer sensitivity analyses of the results using alternative sources of data; and (b) to use the maximum number of observations possible, in cases in which some information is missing in one source but available in others.

Our second-preferred poverty data are SEDA’s shares of free and reduced price lunch eligible students in grades 3–8 in the districts (Reardon et al. 2021). This information is available in the covariates’ file, and it is available starting in school year 2008–2009 (which is least preferred because it is after the beginning of the Great Recession). 32

As an additional source checked in our sensitivity analyses, we use the county-level information from the Census, available (by year) at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe/data/datasets.html (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The information is equivalent to the district-level information, but at the county level. For this study, we use the data in the same manner (turning the year estimates into school-year equivalent estimates, etc.).

We perform the analyses using the different sources independently, plus one more in which we combine the three sources, when one is missing but the other is not (i.e., we define a poverty-all variable that “combines” sources: If Census’s SAIPE’s district poverty data are missing, SEDA’s district poverty data are used; for districts missing on both, Census’s SAIPE’s county poverty data are used).

In each case, we calculate the poverty quartiles each year by dividing the poverty variable(s) into four quartiles. 33 Low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the first quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the second quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-high-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the third quartile of the poverty distribution. High-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the fourth (top) quartile of the poverty distribution.

A note about analytic samples and weights: As the school finance variables of interest are in per-student terms, districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students are kept in our sample. In our preferred sample, we also restrict the analyses to observations from districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both, 34 and to districts with charter information nonmissing. Results using the full number of observations (unrestricted sample) are available upon request.

A note about the final sensitivity analysis: Following the nature of F33 and the weights available in the surveys, our unit of analysis is the district, and we present unweighted averages across districts. Sensitivity analyses are also available using the student population in the district to compute weighted averages across the districts, upon request.

A note about methods: The analyses presented in this report are descriptive in nature. We are interested in providing a description of the trends in revenues and expenditures over time, by state, and by district poverty level. We produce updated estimates for the main school finance indicators and we look at trends in the main variables (per-student revenue and spending) during recessions to see the potential of a solid response from the system to respond, counter, and recover from economic recessions.

We conducted multiple sensitivity analyses in our attempt to verify that the data that we provide are not sensitive to data sources or data procedures, as well as to understand possible ways to further expand this research. Each data source offers significant advantages, but there is no source that can be used for all the purposes intended. Additionally, the evidence improves if we use multiple sources. We are confident the main findings hold and are not driven by extraneous factors. We do not use regression analyses in this version of the report.

1. In addition to the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds the Head Start program for young children, and the Department of Agriculture, which funds the School Lunch (meals) Program are also part of the agencies that support programs or functions in education.

2. We use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

3. See the New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights backgrounder (NYSER n.d.) on Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. (CFE) v. State of New York , 8 N.Y.3d 14 (2006) and Srikanth et al. 2020. Michael A. Rebell, one of the most prominent school funding litigators in the country, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in CFE v. New Yor k , a school funding “adequacy” lawsuit that claimed that the State of New York violated the constitutional rights of New York City students by failing to adequately fund the city’s public schools (NYSER n.d.). See also Sciarra and Dingerson 2021.

4. Since 2010, the Education Law Center (ELC), housed at Rutgers University, produces report cards that ask Is School Funding Fair? (using the data collected annually, some of which we use in our analyses below). To paraphrase their response, “Generally, no.” As the authors emphasize, “The hallmark of a fair school funding system is that it delivers more funding to educate students in high-poverty districts [since] states providing equal or less funding to high-poverty districts are shortchanging the students most in need and at risk of academic failure” (Farrie and Schiarra 2021).

5. Moreover, these wealth-based disparities are mirrored in and compounded by race/ethnicity-based gaps. The Education Trust uses data to report on disparities by both income/poverty level and race/ethnicity. As the Education Trust’s report on funding gaps in 2018 reveals, “School districts serving the largest populations of Black, Latino, or American Indian students receive roughly $1,800, or 13 percent, less per student in state and local funding than those serving the fewest students of color. This may seem like an insignificant amount, but it adds up. For a school district with 5,000 students, a gap of $1,800 per student means a shortage of $9 million per year ” (Morgan and Amerikaner 2018, emphasis added).

6. Our peer Western nations view public schools as more of a national responsibility and provide resources accordingly. For example, Germany has a heavily state-based school system, France has a hybrid local–federal system in which the central government pays teachers’ salaries, and Finland’s national government takes virtually full responsibility for public education.

7. As a large study by Berry (2021) reveals, higher-income areas are taxed, on average, at just half the rate of their lower-income counterparts. Not only does this lead to structurally inequitable funding for schools, it exacts a harder toll on the residents who are least able to afford it—who pay double the taxes of their wealthier peers on much lower incomes. And, as Srikanth (2021) notes, “The study reveals structural racism at work.”

8. Funding for K–12 (21.5%) and higher education (9.4%) combined make up the largest segment of most state budgets. Spending on K–12 education alone is barely second in public budgets to public welfare spending (22.4%) (Urban Institute 2021b).

9. Bradbury (2021) explains that “the largest portion of state aid to local school districts is typically provided on a per-student basis through a ‘foundation,’ ‘power-equalizing,’ ‘flat grant,’ or ‘tiered’ program.…In addition, some states include cost adjustments in their formulas. Key attributes on which states base such cost adjustments are student poverty, English language facility, and special education or disability status.”

10. As part of his War on Poverty, which recognized the impacts of poverty on children’s well-being and the nation’s future, President Lyndon Johnson advanced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This flagship federal legislation, which has since been reauthorized multiple times and whose current iteration is the Every Student Succeeds Act, is designed principally to channel resources to schools serving low-income students. However, Title I, the largest section of ESEA, was never enough to make up for the inequities created by the local–state funding system (see Gamson, McDermott, and Reed 2015).

11. This pattern isn’t at all “inadvertent,” but is a built-in feature that is part of a pattern of systemic racism and related classism that merits attention in itself. See, for example Sosina and Weathers 2019.

12. For example, in 2018–2019, average teacher salaries ranged from less than $46,000 in Mississippi to roughly $86,000 in New York (NEA 2020). However, within New York (according to 2017 data), they ranged from as low as $55,976 in the low-income Finger Lakes region in the northern part of the state to nearly twice as high, $110,000, in the wealthiest Long Island districts (Malatras and Simons 2019).

13. We note that the Great Recession started as the 2007–2008 school year was underway, so we are using the term “pre-recession level” flexibly and assuming school budgets do not immediately respond to the economic recession.

14. See Leachman, Masterson, and Figueroa 2017; Leachman and Figueroa 2019; Baker 2018; and Allegretto 2020 for some more examples.

15. Note that we are not distinguishing here between the source of increased or decreased funding but focusing on total revenues and expenditures. Roy (2011) examined a redistributive school finance reform initiated by the state legislature in Michigan in the mid-’90s, called Proposal A. This reform, which eliminated local discretion over school spending by increasing state aid to the lowest-spending districts and limiting it in the highest-spending districts, reduced spending disparities between districts, and increased student performance (state test scores) in the lowest-spending districts, though it also had a negative effect on student performance in the highest-spending districts. For an analysis of state school finance reforms affecting Kansas (“block grant funding” that froze district revenue regardless of enrollment and reduced funding in districts where enrollment increased), see Rauscher 2020. See Biasi 2019 for an examination of the effect of equalizing revenues across public school districts on students’ intergenerational mobility; Biasi finds that equalization has a large effect on mobility of low-income students, with no significant changes for high-income students.

16. Note that these analyses are based on cross-sectional data.

17. This post-1990 period, often referred to as the “adequacy era,” represented a time in which state-court decisions in multiple states resulted in increased public-school funding, offering an opportunity for researchers to study the overall impacts of these substantial increases and to compare them to student outcomes in states that did not experience them.

18. Their preferred estimates, based on the gradient of student achievement with respect to district income, indicate that a school funding reform raises achievement in a district with log average income one point below the state mean, relative to a district at the mean, by 0.1 standard deviations after 10 years.

19. High-poverty schools found it more difficult to fill vacancies than did low-poverty schools and schools overall, and high-poverty schools experienced higher turnover and attrition rates than did low-poverty schools (García and Weiss 2019).

20. Note that in this report, our main goal is to document the need and concept for such a program, not to discuss how best to design a public education automatic-stabilization program. These considerations, including specifically raising federal supports to education, have been discussed before (Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019; Partelow, Yin and Sargrad 2020; Ogletree et al. 2017; Sahm 2019; Schott Foundation 2022; U.S. Department of Education 2013; Washington Center for Equitable Growth 2021; etc.).

21. Author Sylvia Allegretto’s analysis based on Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics data for 2019 (BLS-CES 2021). Education is one of the largest single components of government spending, amassing 7.3% of GDP across federal, state, and local expenditures (OECD 2013).

22. SNAP is the abbreviation for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as “food stamps.”

23. Data Household Pulse Survey (HHPS) from the U.S. Census Bureau found that 29.3% of respondents with children were food insecure in the week of April 23–July 21, 2020 (Schanzenbach and Tomeh 2020). Bauer (2020) estimates that there were almost 14 million children living in a household characterized by child food insecurity during the week of June 19–23, 2020, “5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many as during [the] peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million).” Typically, these programs disproportionately benefit low-income communities, which are often hit the hardest, thus preventing even more damage and the exacerbation of the large existing inequities.

24. The term “contingency plans” comes from the education-in-emergencies field and is mostly applicable to international contexts, but it has also been used in the U.S. to give broader responses to crises such as Hurricane Katrina (The White House 2006). See García and Weiss 2020, 2021 for more details. The term “automatic trigger” is used to indicate what activates benefits or programs. See Mitchell and Husak 2021 and Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019.

25. For flaws around one of those programs—unemployment insurance—see Bivens et al. 2021. Bitler, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach 2020 provide evidence for three reasons why the policy response left needs unmet: “(1) timing—relief came with a substantial delay (due to overwhelmed UI systems/need to implement new programs); (2) magnitude—payments outside UI are modest; and (3) coverage gaps—access is lower for some groups and other groups are statutorily excluded.”

26. See section summarizing the literature on the impacts of spending on education above.

27. We have discussed this point extensively in our other research on early childhood education, socio-emotional learning, and integrated student support, among others. See García 2015; García and Weiss 2017; García and Weiss 2016; Weiss and Reville 2019, among others, for guidance on smart education investments. See also Bryk et al. 2010 for a discussion on the role of context and how even after receiving funding, schools did not improve, and offering suggestions for school reform efforts.

28. California, which revamped the state’s education funding and accountability systems in the wake of the 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, offers a valuable model. See Furger, Hernández, and Darling-Hammond 2019 and Johnson and Tanner 2018.

29. For counties 2007–2019, see U.S. Census Bureau 2021.

30. As explained earlier in the report, we use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

31. For 2018: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/real-personal-income-state-and-metropolitan-area-2018 , and For Time Series: https://apps.bea.gov/regional/histdata/releases/0920rpi/SARPP.zip

32. Note that we obtain the minority concentration from this source. Not used in this report.

33. Variables with the poverty quartiles are called POV_CDIST (our preferred Census SAIPE district) and povall (the one combining all sources).

34. Excluded are districts of vocational or special education system; nonoperating school system that exists for administrative purposes only and does not operate its own schools; LEAs that closed shortly before the start of the fiscal year or are scheduled to open in a future fiscal year but still reported revenue or expenditure information for the current fiscal year; and education service agency (ESA) (variable labeled schlev).

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FACT SHEET: How the Biden- ⁠ Harris Administration Is Advancing Educational   Equity

As Schools Reopen, Vital PK-12 Investments Will Address Disparities, Build Back Our Schools on a Stronger and More Equitable Foundation, and Enable America to Compete Globally

The last year and a half have been extraordinarily challenging for America’s students. As we prepare for the 2021-2022 school year, the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to helping every school safely open for full-time, in-person instruction; accelerate academic achievement; and build school communities where all students feel they belong.    At the same time, President Biden understands that addressing the immediate impact of the pandemic is not enough. For too many Americans—including students of color, children with disabilities, English learners, LGBTQ+ students, students from low-income families, and other underserved students—the promise of a high-quality education has gone unfulfilled for generations. Studies show the remarkable benefits of preschool programs , but such programs are too often out of reach for children of color and low-income children. Dramatically unequal funding between school districts means some children learn in gleaming new classrooms, while students just down the road navigate unsafe and rundown facilities . Amid a nationwide teacher shortage , high-poverty school districts struggle to attract certified staff and experienced educators. And students of color and children with disabilities face disproportionately high rates  of school discipline that removes them from the classroom, with lasting consequences. With 53 percent of our public school students now students of color, addressing these disparities is critical for not only all our children, but for our nation’s collective health, happiness, and economic security. Consistent with the President’s Executive Order , the Administration is committed to advancing educational equity for every child—so that schools and students not only recover from the pandemic, but Build Back Better. As First Lady Dr. Biden says, “Any country that out-educates us is going to outcompete us.” We will meet the challenges of the coming decades only by harnessing the full potential of every young person. Taken together, the unprecedented investments already made in the American Rescue Plan—along with those proposed in the Build Back Better Agenda—will devote historic and vitally-needed resources that unlock opportunity for millions of Americans. These investments in evidence-based approaches will shore up schools struggling with the aftermath of COVID-19, tackle inter-generational educational disparities, address the holistic needs of children, and incentivize states to help our schools rebuild on a stronger and more equitable foundation. To support the equitable education of every child at every step, the Administration will:

• Safely reopen schools and support students, particularly those disproportionately impacted by the pandemic;
• Invest in high-quality early childhood education, including providing universal pre-school for all three and four-year-olds and access to affordable child care;
• Address the national teacher shortage by improving teacher preparation, strengthening pipelines for underrepresented teachers, and supporting current teachers;
• Upgrade and build new public schools and child care centers;
• Expand college and career pathways for middle and high school students;
• Make a historic $20 billion investment in high-poverty Title I schools;
• Fund additional transformational investments to support the needs of the whole child, including community schools that provide wraparound services like afterschool programs, and hiring more counselors, social workers and school psychologists.

ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL EQUITY IN THE AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN The President made clear on Day One of this Administration that safely reopening schools was a national priority, signing an Executive Order that launched a comprehensive effort across the White House, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services to safely reopen schools. The Department of Education has worked to support states and school districts in implementing CDC guidance for safe operations, and engaged education leaders across the country to collect and share best practices. The Administration has prioritized K-12 educator, staff, and child care vaccinations, and increased access to and awareness of vaccines among adolescents and their parents. States, school districts, and schools are supported in this work by the American Rescue Plan’s historic and needed investment in our schools. This included $130 billion to support the safe reopening of schools and address the academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs of students—including $122 billion through the American Rescue Plan’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ARP ESSER). This funding is being used to help schools safely operate, implement high-quality summer learning and enrichment programs, hire nurses and counselors, support the vaccination of students and staff, and invest in other measures to take care of students. Thanks to these efforts—combined with the Administration’s aggressive vaccination push and the hard work of state, district, school leaders, educators, and parents—the percentage of K-8 schools offering only remote instruction dropped from 23 percent in January to only 2 percent in May. The American Rescue Plan recognizes and addresses the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on underserved students . Districts and states must spend a combined minimum of 24 percent of total ARP ESSER funds on evidence-based practices to address lost instructional time and the impact of the coronavirus on underserved students, such as summer learning and enrichment programs, comprehensive afterschool programs, and tutoring. School and district leaders must ensure that these efforts respond to students’ social and emotional needs as well. ARP ESSER includes a first-of-its-kind maintenance of equity requirement to ensure that high-poverty school districts and schools are protected from funding cuts. The American Rescue Plan also includes additional funding for students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, Tribal education, nutrition security, broadband access, and child care for low-income families. ADVANCING EDUCATIONAL EQUITY IN THE BUILD BACK BETTER AGENDA The resources in the American Rescue Plan, however, are not enough to address the deep educational inequities that have existed in our country since its founding. President Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda directly addresses longstanding educational inequities and will revitalize our education system so that students have the opportunities to learn and prepare for jobs in tomorrow’s economy, which includes ensuring the needs of the whole child are addressed. Make a historic investment to support students in high-poverty schools . To ensure that every student—including those from underserved and under-resourced communities—can learn and thrive, the President’s discretionary budget request provides an additional $20 billion in funding for Title I schools. These investments will help address long-standing funding disparities between under-resourced school districts and wealthier districts:

• Providing meaningful incentives to examine and address inequalities in school funding systems. There is a $23 billion annual funding gap between white and nonwhite districts, and gaps between high- and low-poverty districts as well. A 2018 report from The Education Trust found that the highest poverty districts receive 7 percent less per pupil in State and local funding than the lowest poverty districts.
• Promoting competitive teacher pay. In 2017, public school teachers earned 18.7 percent less in weekly wages than their peer group of college educated workers, up from only 1.8 percent less in 1994. In many states, teachers with ten years of experience who head a household of four may qualify for public assistance.
• Increasing preparation for, access to, and success in rigorous coursework. Black and Native American students participate in AP coursework at half the national average . While 87% of low-poverty schools provide calculus, only 45 percent of high-poverty schools do. Lack of access to and preparation for success in mathematics and science coursework ultimately has a negative impact on the outcomes achieved by Black and Latino students in high-paying, in-demand STEM fields .   

Boost early childhood care and education The President’s Build Back Better Agenda makes historic investments in our youngest learners, so that every child can succeed, paving the way for the best-educated generation in U.S. history. Establishing universal preschool Preschool is critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school. However, children of color are less likely to have access to high-quality preschool programs, resulting in disparate educational outcomes before students even enter kindergarten . Research shows that kids who attend preschool programs are more likely to take honors classes and less likely to repeat a grade, do better in math and reading , and are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college . Impacts are particularly strong for children from low-income families , and children with disabilities benefit from inclusive, accessible preschool programs with their peers . President Biden’s plan would establish a national partnership with states to offer free, high-quality, accessible, and inclusive preschool for all three-and four-year-olds. This will benefit five million children, and save the average family $13,000 a year on preschool tuition. This historic investment in America’s future will prioritize high-need areas first, establishing universal programs in these communities, so that all students can access them, facilitating the creation of diverse classrooms that are best for all students. It will also enable communities and families to choose the setting that works best for them, whether that’s a preschool classroom in a public school, family child care provider or child care center, or a Head Start program. The President’s plan supports low student-to-teacher ratios, high quality standards, and inclusive classroom environments. Make high-quality child care affordable and accessible High-quality early care and education helps ensure that children can take full advantage of education and training opportunities later in life, especially for children from low-income families and children of color, who disproportionately lack access to good child care options and who face learning disparities before they even can go to preschool. President Biden’s proposal will ensure that low- and middle-income families can access affordable, high-quality, child care. The most hard-pressed working families would pay nothing, and families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income would spend no more than 7 percent of their income on child care for their young children. The plan will also provide families with a range of inclusive and accessible options to choose from, from child care centers to family child care providers to Early Head Start programs. Child care providers will receive funding to support the true cost of quality early childhood education, which will allow them to provide care that is accessible and inclusive of children with disabilities. The President’s investments in child care and preschool will also support early childhood educators, more than nine in ten of whom are women and more than four in ten of whom are women of color. One report found that nearly half rely on public income support programs. The President’s plan establishes a $15 minimum wage for these educators and ensures those with similar qualifications as kindergarten teachers receive comparable compensation and benefits. And the President’s proposal will extend the American Rescue Plan’s expanded Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit so that families can instead choose to get a credit for up to half of their child care expenses, saving up to $8,000 per year. Invest in our teachers.  Few people have a bigger impact on a child’s life than a great teacher. Unfortunately, the U.S. faces a large and growing teacher shortage . Before the pandemic, schools needed an estimated additional 100,000 certified teachers , resulting in key positions going unfilled, the granting of emergency certifications, or teachers teaching out of their certification area. Shortages disproportionately impact students of color and rural communities. In schools with the highest percentage of students of color, the percentage of teachers who are uncertified is more than three times as large as in schools with the lowest percentage of students of color. The percentage of teachers in their first or second year of teaching is 70 percent higher . While access to teachers of color benefits all students and has a particularly strong impact on students of color , only around one in five teachers are people of color, compared to more than half of public school students. The Build Back Better Agenda will increase support for teacher preparation and invest in Grow Your Own programs and year-long, paid teacher residency programs. These programs have a significant impact on student outcomes and teacher retention , and are more likely to enroll underrepresented teacher candidates, including candidates of color . The plan would also invest in teacher preparation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Minority-Serving Institutions. The President has also called for increased investments in certifications in high-demand areas like special education and bilingual education, and is urging Congress to invest in programs that leverage teachers as leaders, such as high-quality mentorship programs for new teachers. These investments will improve the quality of new teachers, increase retention rates, and grow the number of teachers of color—all of which will improve student outcomes like  academic achievement and  high school graduation rates , resulting in higher long-term earnings, job creation, and a boost to the economy . As more teachers stay in the profession, districts will save money on recruiting and training, and can invest more in programs that directly impact students. Expand career pathways for middle and high school students. Strong dual enrollment programs increase college enrollment, and graduation. High-quality career and technical education models have significant positive effects on high school graduation, increase college enrollment, and improve wages . The President’s plan would provide more students with access to high-quality career and technical education programs that expand access to computer science; connect underrepresented students to careers in STEM and in in-demand, high-growth industry sectors; that include partnerships with institutions of higher education, employers, and other stakeholders; and that allow students to engage in quality work-based learning opportunities, earn a credential, and/or earn college credit. Eliminate inequitable school infrastructure conditions . According to one national study, there is a $38 billion gap between the current infrastructure spending on schools and actual infrastructure needs. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives American school infrastructure a grade of D+. Students of color are more likely to attend schools with rundown and unsafe facilities . Poor physical school conditions are associated with increased rates of student absenteeism, with one study finding poor ventilation associated with a 10 to 20 percent increase in student absences . While the American Rescue Plan provides critical resources for improving ventilation systems, it does not provide sufficient resources to address all health and safety needs, let alone long-overdue investments to increase energy efficiency, ensure our schools have the technology and labs to prepare students for jobs in tomorrow’s economy, or build new buildings where needed. President Biden’s plan supports investments to upgrade and build new public schools, ensuring that all our children have equal access to healthy learning environments that prepare them for success. It also invests in upgrading child care facilities and increasing the supply of child care in areas that need it most. Addressing lead in schools . There is no safe level of lead exposure for children. Lead can slow development and cause learning, behavior, and hearing problems in children, as well as lasting kidney and brain damage. Communities of color are at a higher risk of lead exposure. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework would make significant investments towards the elimination of all lead pipes and service lines in the country, and reduce lead exposure in our schools and child care facilities, improving the health of our country’s children, including in communities of color. Increasing broadband access for students and families . Broadband internet is critical to learning. Yet, by one definition, more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds. In urban areas, there is a stark digital divide: a much higher percentage of white families report having a home broadband internet than Black, or Latino families . Native families in their tribal communities also lack sufficient access to high-speed internet. One Michigan study found that 47 percent of students who lived in rural areas had broadband access at home, compared to 77 percent of those in suburban areas. The last year made painfully clear the cost of these disparities, particularly for students who struggled to connect while learning remotely. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework would make historic investments in building “future proof” broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas, so that we finally reach 100 percent high-speed broadband coverage. Electrifying school buses for safe student travel . One study finds that when children ride buses with clean air technologies, they experience lower exposures to air pollution, less pulmonary inflammation, and reduced absenteeism. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework would make a down payment on electrifying our yellow school bus fleet. Increase support for children with disabilities. All children, including those with disabilities, should be provided the services and support they need to thrive in school and graduate ready for college or a career. The discretionary request provides an historic $2.6 billion increase for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) grants that support special education and related services for children with disabilities in grades preschool through 12. This funding would, for the first time in eight years, increase the federal share of the cost of providing services to children with disabilities, and is a significant first step toward fully funding IDEA. The discretionary request also includes an additional $250 million for IDEA Part C, which supports early intervention services for infants and toddlers with disabilities or delays, and funds services that have a proven track record of improving academic and developmental outcomes. This increase in funding would be paired with reforms to improve access to these vital services for underserved children, including children of color and children from low-income families. Prioritize the physical and mental well-being of students. The discretionary request provides $1 billion to increase the number of counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals in schools, prioritizing high-poverty schools. Support full-service community schools. Community schools play a critical role in providing comprehensive wrap-around services to students and their families, from afterschool to adult education opportunities to health and nutrition services. The discretionary request increases funding for these schools from $30 million to $443 million, an over ten-fold increase. Foster diverse schools. Schools play vital roles in bringing communities together. But, too many of the nation’s schools are still largely segregated by race and class , mirroring their communities. The discretionary request includes $100 million for a new voluntary grant program to help communities develop and implement strategies to build more diverse student bodies. As part of their application, applicants would be required to demonstrate strong student, family, teacher, and community involvement in their plans. Applicants would have flexibility to develop and implement school diversity plans that reflect their individual needs and circumstances, and improve educational opportunities and outcomes for students.

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The Education System of the United States of America: Overview and Foundations

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• First Online: 01 January 2022
• pp 1015–1042
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• Paul R. Fossum 3  

Part of the book series: Global Education Systems ((GES))

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Prevailing discourse in the USA about the country’s teachers, educational institutions, and instructional approaches is a conversation that is national in character. Yet the structures and the administrative and governance apparatuses themselves are strikingly local in character across the USA. Public understanding and debate about education can be distorted in light of divergence between the country’s educational aspirations and the vehicles in place for pursuing those aims. In addressing its purpose as a survey of US education, the following chapter interrogates this apparent contradiction, first discussing historical and social factors that help account for a social construction of the USA as singular and national system. Discussion then moves to a descriptive analysis of education in the USA as institutionalized at the numerous levels – aspects that often reflect local prerogative and difference more so than a uniform national character. The chapter concludes with summary points regarding US federalism as embodied in the country’s oversight and conduct of formal education.

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Funding from the University of Michigan’s Horace Rackham Graduate School and the UM’s Life Sciences Values and Society Program supported archival research and reproduction contributing to this work.

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Fossum, P.R. (2021). The Education System of the United States of America: Overview and Foundations. In: Jornitz, S., Parreira do Amaral, M. (eds) The Education Systems of the Americas. Global Education Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41651-5_14

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Isaac Kamola is the Director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom housed at the American Association of University Professors, which seeks to promote and defend academic freedom within higher education. The center is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Trinity College provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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Over the past few years, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus. Twenty-one of these bills have been signed into law.

This legislation is detailed in a new white paper published by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom , a project established by the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. Taken together, this legislative onslaught has undermined academic freedom and institutional autonomy in five distinct and overlapping ways.

1. Academic gag orders

As detailed in the report, state legislators introduced 99 academic gag orders during legislative sessions in 2021, 2022 and 2023. All of the 10 gag orders signed into law were done so by Republican governors. These bills assert that teaching about structural racism, gender identity or unvarnished accounts of American history harm students.

These gag orders are widely known as “divisive concept” or “anti-CRT” bills. CRT is an acronym for critical race theory, an academic framework that holds racism as deeply embedded in America’s legal and political systems. The partisan activists, such as Christopher Rufo , have used this term to generate a “ moral panic ” as part of a political response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

For example, in April 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 7, the “ Stop Woke Act .” The law defines a “divisive concept” as any of eight vague claims. They include claims that “Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker described this law as “ positively dystopian .” He noted that the government’s own lawyers admitted that the law would likely make any classroom discussion concerning the merits of affirmative action illegal. The vague wording of these gag orders has a chilling effect , leaving many faculty unsure about what they can and cannot legally discuss in the classroom.

2. Bans on DEI programs

The expansion of diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – services on campus was a major outcome of the racial justice protests in 2020. By 2023, however, the legislative backlash was in full swing. Forty bills restricting DEI efforts were introduced during the 2023 legislative cycle, with seven signed into law.

For example, Texas’ Senate Bill 17 drew directly from model policy language developed by Rufo and published by the Manhattan Institute , a right-wing think tank. SB 17 banned diversity statements and considerations in hiring. It also restricted campus diversity training and defunded campus DEI offices at Texas’ public universities.

As detailed in the AAUP white paper, only a handful of people testified in favor of SB 17, and almost all had stated or unstated affiliations with right-wing think tanks. In contrast, more than a hundred educators and citizens testified, or registered to testify, against the bill. Since its passage, Texas public universities have seen the closing of DEI programs and reduced campus services for students from minority populations. For example, after the Legislature accused the University of Texas-Austin of violating SB 17, the school was forced to shut down its DEI office. This involved laying off 40 employees .

3. Weakening tenure

Tenure was developed to shield faculty members from external political pressure. The protections of tenure make it possible for faculty to teach, research and speak publicly without fear of losing their jobs because their speech angers those in power. As detailed in the report, however, during the 2021, 2022 and 2023 legislative sessions, 20 bills were introduced, with two bills weakening tenure protections signed into law in Florida and another in Texas .

In Florida, for example, SB 7044 created a system of post-tenure review, empowering administrators to review tenured faculty every five years. The law further empowers administrators to dismiss those whose performance is deemed unsatisfactory. The law also requires that faculty post course content in a public and searchable database.

The AAUP criticized the law , noting that SB 7044 has “substantially weakened tenure in the Florida State University System and, if fully implemented as written,” would effectively “eliminate tenure protections.” Now even tenured faculty have reason to fear that what they teach might be construed as a “divisive concept,” as CRT, or as promoting DEI.

4. Mandating content

Lawmakers in several states have also passed legislation mandating viewpoint diversity, establishing new academic programs and centers to teach conservative content and shifting curricular decision-making away from the faculty.

For example, Florida’s Senate Bill 266 expanded the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, without faculty input or oversight. The original proposal for the Hamilton Center stated that the center’s goal was to advance “ a conservative agenda ” within the curriculum.

SB 266 also gave the governing boards overseeing the university and college systems the authority to decide which classes count toward the core curriculum. This power was exercised in November 2023 after Manny Diaz, the education commissioner in Florida, requested that the boards remove an introduction to sociology course . He stated on social media that the discipline had been “ hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.”

5. Weakening accreditation

The accreditation process is an obscure area of academic governance whereby colleges and universities regularly subject themselves to external peer review. Nonprofit accrediting agencies conduct these institutional performance reviews.

As detailed in the report, during the 2021-23 legislative cycles, six bills were introduced – three of them were passed into law – weakening the accreditation process, thereby making it easier for political interests to shape university policy.

For example, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, warned the school’s board of trustees that establishing the School of Civic Life and Leadership without faculty oversight and consultation raised serious concerns about institutional independence. The Legislature responded with Senate Bill 680 , which would require that North Carolina public universities choose a different accrediting agency each accreditation cycle. Eventually passed as part of the omnibus House Bill 8, this policy allows schools to “shop” for an accrediting agency less likely to object to such political interference in the curriculum.

These five overlapping and reinforcing attacks on academic freedom and institutional autonomy threaten to radically transform public higher education in ways that serve the partisan interests of those in power.

• Academic freedom
• US higher education
• Education law
• Higher ed attainment
• Diversity, equity and inclusion

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Most US students are recovering from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions are making up little ground

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Jana Lamontagne, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student explains a math answer to his classmate during a math lesson at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Alex Ventresca, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student attends a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students work on computers during a math class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade teacher Jana Lamontagne, center, teaches a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Osbell, 9, works on the Ignite program with a live tutor, during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Bridget, 9, attends a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Jaelene, 9, works on a computer during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Students work on a writing assignment during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School principal Vincent Izuegbu talks about the school’s mission to overcome the effects of remote pandemic learning Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, said Izuegbu. “We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The Wells Preparatory Elementary School Student Creed hangs on the wall behind principal Vincent Izuegbu on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School student Olorunkemi Atoyebi, responds to a question during an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade behind a computer screen, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense. When she returned to in classroom learning other students worked in groups, her math teacher helped her one-on-one. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click. “They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My confidence started going up, my grades started going up, my scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better."(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Students at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School make their way to the cafeteria past reminders of the education and subjects they are receiving on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The desktop of a student at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School reflects the literature they are studying in Charlotte Owens’ fifth grade class on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School teacher Charlotte Owens, left, works with her fifth grade students during the literature segment of their day, Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors.

For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.

America’s schools have started to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven across geography and economic status, with millions of students — often those from marginalized groups — making up little or no ground.

Nationally, students made up one-third of their pandemic losses in math during the past school year and one-quarter of the losses in reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard , an analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to fall during the 2022-23 school year after previous decreases during the pandemic.

Clouding the recovery is a looming financial crisis. States have used some money from the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic relief to help students catch up , but that money runs out later this year.

“The recovery is not finished, and it won’t be finished without state action,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist behind the scorecard. “States need to start planning for what they’re going to do when the federal money runs out in September. And I think few states have actually started that discussion.”

Virginia lawmakers approved an extra $418 million last year to accelerate recovery. Massachusetts officials set aside $3.2 million to provide math tutoring for fourth and eighth grade students who are behind grade level, along with $8 million for literacy tutoring.

But among other states with lagging progress, few said they were changing their strategies or spending more to speed up improvement.

Virginia hired online tutoring companies and gave schools a “playbook” showing how to build effective tutoring programs. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said last year’s state test scores were a wake-up call.

“We weren’t recovering as fast as we needed,” Coons said in an interview.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has called for states to continue funding extra academic help for students as the federal money expires.

“We just can’t stop now,” he said at a May 30 conference for education journalists. “The states need to recognize these interventions work. Funding public education does make a difference.”

In Virginia, the Alexandria district received $2.3 million in additional state money to expand tutoring.

At Mount Vernon, where classes are taught in English and Spanish, students are divided into groups and rotate through stations customized to their skill level. Those who need the most help get online tutoring. In Fletcher’s classroom, a handful of students wore headsets and worked with tutors through Ignite Learning, one of the companies hired by the state.

With tutors in high demand, the online option has been a big help, Mount Vernon principal Jennifer Hamilton said.

“That’s something that we just could not provide here,” she said.

Ana Marisela Ventura Moreno said her 9-year-old daughter, Sabrina, benefited significantly from extra reading help last year during second grade, but she’s still catching up.

“She needs to get better. She’s not at the level she should be,” the mother said in Spanish. She noted the school did not offer the tutoring help this year, but she did not know why.

Alexandria education officials say students scoring below proficient or close to that cutoff receive high-intensity tutoring help and they have to prioritize students with the greatest needs. Alexandria trailed the state average on math and reading exams in 2023, but it’s slowly improving.

More worrying to officials are the gaps: Among poorer students at Mount Vernon, just 24% scored proficient in math and 28% hit the mark in reading. That’s far lower than the rates among wealthier students, and the divide is growing wider.

Failing to get students back on track could have serious consequences. The researchers at Harvard and Stanford found communities with higher test scores have higher incomes and lower rates of arrest and incarceration. If pandemic setbacks become permanent, it could follow students for life.

The Education Recovery Scorecard tracks about 30 states, all of which made at least some improvement in math from 2022 to 2023. The states whose reading scores fell in that span, in addition to Virginia, were Nevada, California, South Dakota, Wyoming, Indiana, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington.

Only a few states have rebounded to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math achievement increased past 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana accomplished that in reading.

In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared with 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief.

The district trained hundreds of Chicago residents to work as tutors. Every school building got an interventionist, an educator who focuses on helping struggling students.

The district also used federal money for home visits and expanded arts education in an effort to re-engage students.

“Academic recovery in isolation, just through ‘drill and kill,’ either tutoring or interventions, is not effective,” said Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer. “Students need to feel engaged.”

At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the city’s South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours.

In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, principal Vincent Izuegbu said. By building lessons around discussion, officials found students took more interest in learning.

“We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.”

Olorunkemi Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade learning at home, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense.

When she returned to school, she struggled with multiplication and terms such as “dividend” and “divisor” confused her.

While other students worked in groups, her math teacher took her aside for individual help. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click.

“They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My grades started going up. My scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better.”

Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chrissie Thompson in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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ACE, Other Groups Urge Congress to Address FAFSA Issues for 2025-26 Application Cycle May 28, 2024

As the conclusion of the 2024-25 award year's application period nears, it is imperative for the Department of Education and Congress to focus on preventing similar disruptions in the 2025-26 cycle. Immediate measures are essential to ensure a smoother and more efficient process for future applicants.

Along with 35 other higher education associations, ACE sent a letter to the House and Senate education committees last week, urging lawmakers to undertake a long-term assessment of the FAFSA delays' impact on students—particularly low-income students—and institutions.

The groups also called for safeguards to prevent future problems and adjustments to ensure certain categories of students receive the aid they need. They requested that the assessment be made publicly available, along with a comprehensive analysis of how the need-analysis formula changes affect student aid eligibility.

The associations asked Congress to mandate that the FAFSA be available for completion by Oct. 1 of each year, a critical change that would go a long way to preventing the frustration experienced by students, parents, and counselors this year.

The Higher Education Act currently allows a Jan. 1 deadline for release, and given that permission, ED did not release the new form until late on Dec. 30, 2023, with limited accessibility. The department's inability to make a firm commitment to an Oct. 1 release for the 2025-26 FAFSA further emphasizes the urgency of this action.

The groups hope Congress will act swiftly to implement these changes and ensure the FAFSA process remains efficient and effective for all students. Read the letter and the full list of recommendations here . 

For more details on the timeline of FAFSA delays and further information, please visit ACE's timeline .

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