essays on school funding

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

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The data underlying the figure.

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

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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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Understanding the Effects of School Funding

Julien Lafortune , with research support from Joseph Herrera

Supported with funding from the Stuart Foundation and the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation

Table of Contents

Key takeaways, introduction, school funding levels and student outcomes, what policymakers can learn from the research, other financial challenges for california schools, conclusion and discussion.

• Authors and Acknowledgments

PPIC Board of Directors

• Notes and References

Funding for California’s schools has reached record-high levels, although the pandemic has exacerbated longstanding inequities in student outcomes. As policymakers grapple with questions around how much to fund schools and how that funding should be distributed, existing research can provide insights into where and how to use additional funds to improve outcomes. In this review of the research, several key themes emerge:

• Several years of sustained spending increases improved student outcomes . A robust body of research shows that across a variety of outcomes such as test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance, student performance improves with greater spending. Over the long term, students gain important benefits on economic outcomes such as wages. Benefits tend to be greater for lower-income students and districts. →
• How—and to whom—spending is targeted matters . Policies that target district characteristics may not fully address gaps in spending and student outcomes, depending on how funding is targeted across students and schools within the same district. In California, spending is higher for low-income, Black, and Latino students—but current spending progressivity is not enough to close existing test score gaps. →
• The labor market for educators may constrain spending policies and create tradeoffs . Often, high-poverty schools rely on lower-paid and less experienced teachers, but have smaller class sizes. Large-scale policies to increase spending on new staff—such as the class size reduction of the 1990s—may adversely affect experience and credentials over the short run, limiting potential benefits per dollar. →
• Cost pressures in California schools affect the efficiency of funding . Declining enrollment, rising employee benefit costs, and staffing shortages in some areas limit how efficiently funding translates into better school resources. →

California serves roughly 6 million K–12 students, spending $61 billion in state and $36 billion in local funding annually to operate them. After several years of declining or lagging funding in the aftermath of the Great Recession, school funding increased substantially in California. It is now at record highs, over $22,000 dollars per student in 2021–22, including federal stimulus funding, and is projected to be around $21,000 per year in 2022–23.

Significant new sources of state and federal funding—provided to help schools respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and provide supplemental services—mean that, for the time being, California’s K–12 system has more financial capacity than at any point in its history. Per student, current K–12 spending (i.e., staff, materials, operations, but not capital)  in California has quickly risen since the depths of the Great Recession, recently surpassing the average in other states for the first time since 1986–87 (Figure 1 reports nationally comparable data up to 2018–19, the most recent available year; see Technical Appendix Figure A1 for a longer time series back to 1967 using district-level data).

Similarly, test scores in California have lagged behind other states, but grew faster than the rest of the nation in the 1990s and 2000s before stagnating in the 2010s in some grades and subjects, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Growth since has been inconsistent across grades and subjects (Technical Appendix Figures A2–A5).

California K–12 spending per student has grown 60 percent since 1987, but has been lower than in other states most years

SOURCES: National Center for Education Statistics (F-33 survey); author’s calculations.

NOTES: Average current per-pupil spending at the state-level. Average for the rest of the nation is weighted by student enrollment. Expenditures are inflation-adjusted to June 2021 dollars using the CPI-U.

Despite expanded fiscal capacity, the California K–12 system has faced an array of challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic led to school closures, reduced instructional time, and uneven access to remote learning. Preliminary data on the pandemic’s effects suggest lower test scores, widening disparities across racial and income groups, and higher rates of social and emotional distress (Lee 2020; Little Hoover Commission 2021; Pier et al. 2021). The infusion of state and federal funding and the return to safe in-person learning should help relieve these challenges.

However, other demographic and financial pressures will pose difficulties over the coming decade. Enrollment is projected to further decline across most of the state, meaning many districts will be forced to make difficult downsizing decisions year after year as the number of children recedes from its plateau over the past decade and a half (California Department of Finance 2021). Rising health and benefit costs will continue to increase staffing costs (Koedel and Gassman 2018; Krausen and Willis 2018). Staffing shortages in key subjects add further difficulty, especially in lower-income schools and districts (Darling-Hammond et al. 2018).

State policymakers find themselves with greater tax revenues and greater capacity to spend more on K–12 education. Furthermore, longstanding disparities by race, income, and language motivate calls to improve school resources, perhaps by paying higher salaries, reducing class sizes, providing wider access to technology, or by offering additional services to students and families. What insights does the existing research provide into using additional funds to improve student outcomes? Policymakers face difficult questions and tradeoffs when crafting school funding policy, but unfortunately much of the research has been inaccessible to a policy audience. For many years, academic debates on the questions have centered on whether “money matters,” providing little consensus or actionable insights useful for policymakers.

In this report, we summarize the key takeaways from recent research on the effects of school funding, providing a discussion of the findings, nuances, and unanswered questions. We examine quantitative research from around the United States—both nationally and in specific states—and provide additional discussion of some of the key research on school spending in California.

A Brief History of School Funding in California

For most of California’s history, public schools were locally funded—primarily through property taxes—with some supplemental aid from state and federal governments. Given large differences in property wealth and revenue-raising capacity across districts, lower-income areas generally spent less on public education than wealthier areas.

This school funding system was found to be unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court in 1971 in Serrano v. Priest . The court ordered the state legislature to devise a system that would equalize funding across districts. The state responded by capping the amount of per pupil revenue each district could receive, effectively equalizing funding across districts.

After Proposition 13 (1978) capped local property tax rates and shrank the funding available for local public schools, the burden of school funding shifted to the state government. In 1988, Proposition 98 set minimum state spending requirements for K–12 education; the state must spend roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues in its public schools (including community colleges). Most school district funding came through Prop 98 in the form of “revenue limits”—a base amount of per pupil funding needed for school operations—for each district. Districts with local revenues that fell short of their limits received additional state funding to fill the gap.

In addition, the state and federal governments provided restricted funding through categorical programs. These programs supported services such as teacher professional development and special education. By the onset of the Great Recession, roughly 20 percent of state revenues were allocated through dozens of categorical programs, which placed restrictions on how the money was to be spent. One notable category of restricted funding in California was the K–3 Class Size Reduction (CSR), enacted in 1996. CSR allocated roughly $1 billion annually statewide for districts to lower class sizes to 20 or fewer students per teacher in kindergarten through third grade.

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) overhauled California’s school finance system in 2013–14. Under the LCFF, districts receive a base grant per student, and get additional funding based on their share of high-need students: low-income, English Learner, and/or foster youth. In addition, many categorical aid programs were consolidated or eliminated, giving districts more spending flexibility. Under LCFF, districts now have greater local control over spending decisions than before, with the expectation that supplemental funding for high-need students be spent to improve services for these students.

Debates over school funding often have centered on whether “money matters” in education—not whether schools can operate without any resources, but rather, whether additional funding would lead to improved outcomes. The origins of this debate go back decades, at least as far as the 1966 federal report on the “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” also known as the Coleman Report (Coleman et al. 1966). The report gathered data on roughly 600,000 students across 3,000 schools, concluding that school resources played little role in student achievement independent of family background.

In the decades that followed researchers continued to study the relationship between school funding levels and student performance, with little consensus (e.g., Hanushek 2003; Krueger 2003). Given the lack of a consistent relationship between spending and outcomes, many education policy debates shifted towards a focus on more efficiently utilizing existing resources. For example, so called “accountability” policies, such as No Child Left Behind, provided incentives for schools to perform better.  Research also quantified the importance of teachers, and how teacher quality—measured by effectiveness at improving test scores—varies significantly, motivating calls to improve teacher quality (Hanushek et al. 2011; Chetty et al. 2014).

The historical lack of research consensus may in part reflect difficulty determining cause and effect when studying school funding. Funding is determined by a complex interaction of local, state, and federal rules, and reflects the socioeconomic conditions and preferences of nearby residents. Such relationships create confounds —factors that obscure a true relationship when trying to compare two things. In general, confounds have made it very difficult to uncover the actual effects of school funding on student outcomes. Past research was generally unable to account fully for potential outside factors related to both spending and outcomes (Jackson 2018), likely contributing to the lack of consensus.  However, more recently, a strong consensus has emerged in the research: that increased school spending improves student outcomes.

Research Shows that Higher Spending Improves Student Outcomes

More recently, a robust body of research on school spending has emerged that uses higher-quality data and more convincing methods to establish cause and effect. A clear consensus has emerged from this research: increasing school spending improves student outcomes along a variety of outcomes including test scores, graduation, college attendance, adult earnings, and intergenerational mobility (see Jackson and Mackevicius [2021] for a review). Many of these studies rely on so-called “quasi-experimental designs”—or “natural experiments”—that provide compelling estimates of the causal effect of a change in school spending.

What is quasi-experimental research and why does it matter?

In general, when we speak of an “effect,” we are making a causal statement about how changing one thing affects another, holding all else equal . Ideally, we want to compare what happened to what would have happened in the absence of a policy change , such as a spending increase. Unfortunately, we cannot actually know what would have happened , because it is a state of the world that was never realized: this is referred to as the “fundamental problem of causal inference” (Holland 1986). The next best thing is to run an experiment where we randomly assign one group to receive a given intervention and compare outcomes to a control group that did not receive the intervention. The best medical trials operate this way, and there are some policy settings where experiments may be feasible.

When it comes to questions about school resources, however, it is generally not feasible to run a true experiment. For financial, practical, and perhaps moral reasons, we cannot design a study that, say, doubles the amount of funding a random set of school districts receive and holds constant spending for another set of districts. Alternatively, simple before-and-after comparisons, or comparisons between districts that have higher and lower spending may not give us the correct answer. This is because many contemporaneous factors influence both spending and the school outcomes we seek to improve.

Fortunately, with advances in quantitative social science research, studies can provide credible estimates of causal effects, even without a true experiment (Angrist and Pischke 2010). The solution is to use “natural”—or “quasi-experiments”: situations that arise in real life that resemble randomized experiments. These may result from direct policy changes, institutional rules, or other factors that drive changes in spending but are otherwise unrelated to any confounding factors, as would be the case in a true experiment. Across disciplines, these quasi-experimental methods are now widely used to study causal effects of social scientific questions. Most of the studies in this review on school spending effects meet this standard and provide plausible estimates of causal impacts in different education settings.

State-level finance reforms benefit students in the short and long run

To examine the impact of increased school spending, many researchers have studied state-level school finance reforms. These reforms were most often court-ordered mandates directing states to correct funding inequities resulting from differences in local property tax bases across districts.

Serrano v. Priest (1972) in California was the first major decision, spurring dozens more cases over the next five decades. Since 1990, over half of states have had at least one significant reform (Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018).

School finance reforms generally imposed discrete and significant changes in a state’s school finance system. These changes led to varying spending changes for students in different districts within a state, or born in different years. The reforms offer a set of natural experiments for researchers to isolate spending changes due to the timing and mechanics of reforms. As such, the reforms provide some of the most compelling national evidence on school spending effects.

In national studies, increased spending under these reforms led to a number of positive outcomes. Test scores improved, graduation rates rose, and students were more likely to pursue and complete college; on the economic side, students commanded higher wages as adults, economic mobility expanded across generations, and in some districts, house prices rose. On average, these reforms led to increased spending in high- and low-income districts, and therefore provide evidence that is relevant to statewide spending policies at scale.

Among the most notable of these results is in Jackson et al. 2016, who examine the impacts of spending on student outcomes over the long run. They find that a 10 percent increase in school spending for 12 years led to 7.7 percent higher wages and a 9.8 percent increase in family income when students reached adulthood. Higher spending also led to higher rates of high school graduation, more years of completed education, and lower incidence of adult poverty.

Higher spending that capitalized into higher local housing prices is another notable result (Bayer, Blair, and Whaley 2021), with property values going up especially when spending increases went to teachers and other staff. Such estimates imply that real estate markets value spending increases in local schools more than the taxes needed to fund them. In economic terms, this suggests that nationally, district spending is inefficiently low on teacher and staff salaries.

In state-level studies, specific reforms also tend to show positive effects. Studies of Michigan’s 1994 reform provided evidence that spending improved student academic performance, graduation, and college attendance (Papke 2008; Roy 2011; and Hyman 2017).

California’s LCFF reform brings more recent and relevant evidence to California school spending debates. The switch to a weighted student funding formula led to spending increases in districts with more low-income and high-need students (Lafortune 2019). In the first four years of the reform, LCFF-induced spending increases led to higher graduation rates and 11th-grade test scores (Johnson and Tanner 2018). Concentration grant spending—additional funding for districts with high concentrations of student need—led to higher test scores in grades 3–8 (Lafortune 2021). Though LCFF was passed in 2013–14, it was not fully funded until 2018–19; more research will be needed over the coming years to understand the full effects of California’s school finance overhaul.

Some critics have argued that school finance reforms are not an ideal natural experiment. For example, positive outcomes could reflect benefits gained from other policy changes in schools or communities around the same time, or they may reflect the political “conviction” a state’s populace has around improving its schools rather than the effect of any realized spending changes (e.g., Greene 2020).

However, these reforms led to discrete increases in spending for targeted districts in a state—with no significant changes in other factors related to performance like demographics, socioeconomic conditions, or other public safety net spending (Liscow 2018; Lafortune et al. 2018, Candelaria and Shores 2019). The consistency of results across states, time periods, empirical methods, and outcomes reinforce confidence that these reforms provide useful evidence on the impacts of school spending.

Situations other than reforms influence spending and outcomes

Other settings beyond state-level reforms have been studied to identify the impact of spending on outcomes (see Table 1 for an overview of the research, grouped by study type and finding). For example, close elections in school bond and tax referenda are one scenario that can generate natural experiments around spending changes. Quirks or discontinuities in state funding formulas are another, as the formulas may allocate more or less per-pupil dollars to some districts in a seemingly random fashion. Alternatively, housing market dynamics can interact with school funding mechanisms, leading to varying funding changes when property values change, due to the specifics of a state’s funding formula.

These natural experiments document stronger student test scores, higher graduation rates and educational attainment, and even reduced criminality. Furthermore, when researchers examined how the spending declines of the Great Recession affected students—leveraging differences in spending cuts across districts—they found a negative impact on student outcomes (Table 1).

In quasi-experimental studies, spending has positive short- and long-run impacts on key student outcomes

NOTES: Unless otherwise indicated, studies are national. Not all school spending studies using quasi-experimental methods are shown; capital spending studies are discussed in further detail below. For a more complete review, see Jackson and Mackevicius (2021).

Higher funding leads to better test scores, according to meta-analysis

When Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) synthesized findings across studies, they found robust consensus among causal studies that examined relationships between funding and outcomes: most studies indicate that funding had positive effects on student outcomes. Because the tests that students take vary, researchers often use standardized scores to compute the impact, based on standard deviation units .

To do this, researchers set the average score to zero, and measure impacts in standard deviation units. When a student scores one standard deviation above or below the average, it implies that student is 34 percentile points above or below the mean. In other words, a student scoring one standard deviation above the average scores higher than 84 percent—or lower than 16 percent—of their peers. Standardized in this way, Jackson and Mackevicius find that $1,000 more in school spending for four years leads to a 3.5 percent of a standard deviation increase in test scores, and a 5.4 percent of a standard deviation increase in educational attainment.

Positive effects are generally larger for operational spending—that is, spending on teachers and classroom materials—than for capital spending. For capital spending on school facilities, Jackson and Mackevicius find positive and significant effects after several years, and argue that individual studies do not have sufficient statistical power to detect what appear to be small but meaningful impacts.

Overall, the meta-analysis offers several notable takeaways for policymakers. First, higher levels of school spending improve student test scores and educational attainment. Of course, this need not mean that all spending matters equally, or that current uses of local, state, and federal funding are efficient, or “optimal.”

Second, much of the research considers unrestricted spending increases. That is, districts tend to use additional funding to purchase school resources—smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, more support staff, better materials, and so on—in ways that often improve academic outcomes such as test score and long-run adult outcomes such as wages, even when the extra funding has no strict incentives or accountability pressure.

While better incentives or oversight might help districts spend more efficiently or equitably, the research in this area is more limited. Some studies indicate that accountability pressures, such as those under No Child Left Behind, improved student test scores (e.g., Dee and Jacob 2011).

Finally, the positive effects occurred across many contexts and many years, which should reassure policymakers that effects could be generalized to current contexts. Some experts caution that estimates from studies of prior spending increases may be less relevant to future ones, reflecting diminishing returns from a higher spending level (e.g., Hanushek 2015).  However, Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) show that the size of the effects for more recent student cohorts are similar per dollar to older ones—evidence does not yet suggest that we have reached a point of diminishing returns, on average.

Greater funding has the most impact for low-income students and districts

In many individual studies, increased funding had larger impacts for students from low-income families and/or districts. For example, Jackson et al. (2016) found larger wage gains for low-income students: those who grew up in families earning 200 percent of the federal poverty line or less saw wage gains of nearly 10 percent in adulthood from $1,000 more per year in school spending, compared to 6 percent for higher-income students.

Overall, Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) report that nearly 75 percent of studies show larger effects among low-income students and/or districts than higher-income ones. On average, estimates for test score effects are nearly twice as large for low-income than higher-income students (4.9% of a standard deviation per $1,000 in annual spending vs 2.6%), but this difference is not statistically significant as too few studies separately identify effects for both student subgroups. Thus, the evidence seems to suggest that dollar-per-dollar spending on lower-income students may yield larger academic improvements than spending on higher-income students.

Capital spending produces more mixed results

In studies that focused on school capital spending—spending on the construction and renovation of school facilities—findings are more mixed, ranging from positive effects to no effects. When Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) aggregated studies, capital spending appeared to improve test scores after several years; overall, the impact on student outcome may be smaller dollar for dollar—and may vary more across contexts. For example, effects likely depend on prior building conditions, environmental contexts, and grade level, as well as what the expenditure goes towards (e.g., instruction space, technology upgrades, or athletic facilities).

When studies look at specific districts or at specific facility issues, evidence is stronger that funding has quantifiable, positive effects. Large, urban districts that engaged in large-scale projects to construct new schools and renovate existing ones had notable positive effects on test scores and attendance (Neilson and Zimmerman 2014 in New Haven, CT; Lafortune and Schönholzer 2022 in Los Angeles Unified).

Air conditioning and climate control is one aspect of school facilities that has been linked to student learning, as air conditioning mitigates the negative impacts of hot school days (Park et al. 2020). More generally, building conditions have been linked with student performance on average, but this link varies across specific facility features, grade levels, and subject areas (Gunter and Shao 2016).

Conversely, findings of positive effects are more limited in statewide or national studies. Several have examined local capital spending shocks, often driven by bond elections, finding small and/or statistically insignificant effects on test scores (see Table 1). On the other hand, there are some statewide studies that find positive effects (e.g., Hong and Zimmer 2016; Conlin and Thompson 2017; Rauscher 2020). In particular, Rauscher (2020) studies local capital bonds in California, finding positive effects specifically for low-income students. Similarly, Cellini, Ferreira, and Rothstein (2010) study California school bonds, and while they do not conclude that test scores rose after the bond was passed, they did find higher home prices, which suggests that school quality improved beyond test scores.  Importantly, these two studies suggest that additional capital spending may have greater effects in California than in other states, perhaps due to underlying building conditions, funding constraints, or differences in student populations.

What should policymakers make of these variable effects? For one, the research on this question is not settled. It is difficult to quantify the impact of facilities funding because this spending is infrequent and any impacts must be measured over a longer timeframe. Most studies cannot link capital spending to specific schools or to changes in conditions. Thus, it is difficult to detect individual impacts from the districtwide level; even a very small districtwide change could have a sizable impact on the affected students. For example, building a new school for 500 students in a district of 5,000 would have an impact on the outcomes of only 10 percent of students.

Second, effects likely vary across educational contexts facility conditions, and the specific facility component(s) in which schools invest. It is not hard to believe that improving buildings in more serious need of renovation/replacement may have a larger impact. Also, researchers can generally observe only certain outcomes, like test scores. Spending on school facilities also goes towards facilities that could be deemed “non-academic,” such as athletic facilities, auditoriums, and performing arts facilities. These may or may not translate into improved test scores—but may have other positive impacts for students and schools that are harder to quantify.

California-specific Research Shows Nuances of Statewide Policies

The research specific to California spending yields important and nuanced insights for policymakers. On one hand, research that links better academic outcomes to spending based on LCFF changes provides evidence that California’s landmark school finance reform is paying dividends and improving outcomes in high-need school districts. On the other hand, research on an earlier reform—the statewide class size reduction, or CSR—shows that large-scale targeted policies to increase school resources may not always be effective if there are supply constraints, such as a limited number of new educators.

For the CSR reform, initial findings were mixed—with inconclusive impacts on student test scores, reports of teachers engaging more with students, and a drop in teacher qualifications (EdSource 2002; Wexler et al. 1998; Sims 2008). Later evaluations painted a more nuanced picture: students exposed to smaller class sizes saw improved test scores, holding teacher qualifications fixed (Jepsen and Rivkin 2009; Gilraine, Macartney, and McMillan 2018).

Taken together, CSR led to more novice teachers—those without full certification, and those with no postgraduate certifications; with greater exposure to novice teachers, test scores fell at roughly the same percentage as the gains observed from smaller classes (Jepsen and Rivkin 2009). In other words, the policy led to both positive and negative impacts on students’ academic performance—that is, smaller class sizes but with more novice educators— that may have cancelled each other out in aggregate.

Thus, CSR had inconsistent effects. Large, restricted spending raised demand for early elementary teachers without increasing the supply of new, credentialed teachers. Policymakers may therefore want to approach large restricted statewide spending policies with caution: if schools are bidding against each other for a fixed supply of staff or other educational resources, it may diminish the positive effects of a program. Furthermore, the competition may deepen existing inequities, insofar as more affluent and “desirable” schools can outcompete less affluent schools for staff or other resources.

In the case of novice staff, the potential “losses” would also be short-lived—eventually these new staff become experienced and have more impact, so long as schools can retain them. More generally, this case exemplifies why large-scale spending increases may not immediately yield benefits.

A similar pattern emerged under LCFF: districts used additional funding to hire additional teachers and support staff, many of whom were novice. Academic improvements were not immediate, but accumulated over time as LCFF reached full implementation (Johnson and Tanner 2018; Lafortune 2021). While suggestive, existing research cannot definitively connect the delay in impact that occurs after spending increases to novice staff becoming more experienced; this represents a fruitful area for future policy-relevant research.

Fundamentally, the question of by how much an additional dollar improves outcomes is more relevant than understanding only whether or not increased spending improves outcomes. Schools will spend any additional funding on extra staff, higher salaries, new materials, and so on, and one would expect any such investments to have some effect on student outcomes. Understanding the benefits of additional funding, and how that funding should be distributed, are key concerns for policymakers.

Contextualizing Spending Impacts at Current Levels

When we have a more precise understanding of impact, we can then judge the value of investments, or at the very least, have more informed debates over how limited state and local funding should be applied. After all, many other beneficial state programs compete with K–12 education for funding.

On average, the research shows that $1,000 in additional spending for four years improves test scores by 0.035 standard deviations, and closer to 0.05 for low-income students.  To put these effect sizes in context, we can examine existing disparities in test scores, also known as achievement gaps.

Table 2 shows 2018–19 English Language Arts (ELA) test scores for eighth-grade students in different subgroups. Over two-thirds of higher-income students are meeting grade level standards, compared to 37 percent of low-income students. Large gaps also exist by race, with Asian and white students scoring significantly higher, and by English Learner (EL) status. These gaps have persisted with little movement for much of the last two decades (Technical Appendix Figure A6).

Achievement gaps by subgroup, eighth grade ELA

SOURCES: California Department of Education, SBAC data; authors’ calculations.

NOTES: Difference rows show the stated difference in average test scores, in student-level standard deviation units relative to the statewide mean, using the statewide mean and standard deviation for a given grade-subject-year examination. Note that an increase of one standard deviation reflects an increase of 34 percentile points from the mean.

Using these estimates, we can hypothetically extrapolate the amount of funding it would take to close the gap between low- and high-income students. If we assume the effect is linear for spending—that is, it does not diminish or accumulate (a strong assumption)—it would take an additional $10,200 dollars annually for eight years to close the gap for eighth-grade low-income students.

If we assume that gains are larger for low-income students—0.05 standard deviations per $1,000 over four years, as estimated in prior studies—this additional amount falls to $7,200. The amount of funding required to close the Black-white gap would be slightly larger (between $7,700 and $11,000), and smaller for Latino-white gaps (between $5,800 and $8,300).

How do current spending differences across student groups compare to the spending that might be needed to reduce existing gaps? Table 3 shows that in 2019–20, spending per student is higher for low-income than higher-income students by $807 per student per year. There is essentially no difference between EL and non-EL students ($42). The most substantial differences are by race/ethnicity: spending is higher in the districts serving the average Black student than the average white student by roughly $1,900, and is higher for Latino students by almost $600. Spending for Asian students is more similar to spending for white students, though slightly higher ($285).

Spending by student subgroup

SOURCES: California Department of Education, SACS files, enrollment files; authors’ calculations.

NOTES: Total expenditures per student in 2019–20 reported for each student subgroup. Low-income (vs. non-low-income) refers to eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. Inflation-adjusted amounts are reported (2020$).

At current spending levels, achievement gaps may take years to close

These levels of spending progressivity are much lower than the hypothetical estimates of the spending required to close existing achievement gaps above. Using our back-of-the-envelope calculations, the extra funding allocated to low-income students is only between 8 percent to 11 percent what would be necessary to close gaps in eight years.

Put differently, it would take 70 or more years to close income or achievement gaps at current progressivity levels —holding all else equal and assuming that the additional funding annually produces the average effects documented in the literature. Given comparatively higher funding for Black students, current spending differences might close Black-white achievement gaps somewhat faster, though still in more than 30 years.

These numbers are purely extrapolations, and are meant to provide context around what current estimates and differences imply; they are not predictions of how things will evolve, nor are they prescriptions of an exact level of funding that is necessary. Importantly, lots of other things are happening at the same time that may lessen or worsen achievement gaps; the COVID-19 crisis is a prominent recent example, where gaps widened on standardized tests (Pier et al. 2021). Furthermore, if the effects of additional spending diminish at higher levels of funding, then these extrapolations would overestimate the impact of spending increases, and underestimate the time it make take to close gaps at current levels of spending progressivity.

Do estimates imply that spending policy is ineffective to reduce achievement gaps?

Caveats aside, more progressive spending could address disparities—as the above extrapolations suggest, but the state would need a degree of progressivity far beyond current levels. However, in the face of the slow progress on shrinking gaps in recent decades even as funding progressivity grew, experts have argued that spending policies are ineffective.

Setting aside the fact that effective often implies normative values and expectations that vary across individuals, two important pieces of context are worth considering. First, the same research identifying modest effects in the face of large disparities shows that increased spending passes a cost-benefit test (Jackson et al. 2016; Lafortune et al. 2018). Increased school spending acts as an investment, producing savings to the government in the form of future tax revenues (due to higher earnings) that exceed their initial cost (Hendren and Sprung-Keyser 2020).

Second, the amounts suggested by the evidence—roughly $7,000 to $10,000 per student per year—are large, but not implausibly so. Some states spend more than California by a similar margin per pupil—for example, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut—though no state has such high levels of spending progressivity (Shores, Lee, and Williams 2021). Of course, differences across states reflect differences in labor market, socio-economic, and educational circumstances, so such comparisons should be undertaken with caution.

How Spending Is Targeted Matters for Students and Districts

The estimates of spending progressivity used above assume that districts spend equally on each of their students. However, spending data at the school site level show that this is not the case in California, nor nationally: in fact, within districts, spending is slightly higher at schools with more lower-income students (Lafortune 2019, 2021; Shores, Lee, and Williams 2021). Given that school districts often serve students of varying backgrounds, how districts spend across students and school sites can determine how much finance policy affects gaps in resources and outcomes.

The literature on school finance reforms offers some important evidence in this regard. Relative spending increases of roughly $500 per student per year in low-income districts reduced test score gaps between low- and high-income districts by roughly 20 percent (Lafortune et al. 2018). However, differences in spending had no impact on test scores between low and non-low-income students . This was largely true because low-income students attend a variety of school districts, and are not perfectly concentrated in districts of a certain type (e.g., low-income or low property wealth). In other words, spending reforms targeted based on district-level characteristics improved achievement where funds were targeted, but as they were not well targeted to specific student groups, they were not effective at reducing achievement gaps across student groups.

Concerns over how districts target funding have been an area of great policy concern since California implemented LCFF (California State Auditor 2019; Hahnel and Humphrey 2021). For example, after Michigan’s 1994 reform, relatively more-affluent schools within a district saw larger increases than less-affluent schools in the same district (Hyman 2017). In California, available federal data suggest districts spend more at high-need school sites, but less than what would be implied if districts fully targeted funds based on the amount generated at a specific school site (Lafortune 2021).

Insofar as districts have schools of varying racial and socioeconomic composition—which is the case for most of the state’s medium and large districts—within-district targeting can act as either a complement or an impediment to the state’s intended spending distribution. Efforts to distribute funds more directly to students and schools would be worth considering by policymakers interested in addressing disparities.

Spending on Staff Quantity and Quality Can Be a Tradeoff

Spending effects are computed per dollar in most research; the effect represents an average over some combination of school resources, such as new staff, higher salaries, classroom materials, facility improvements, or educational technology. Each of these resources may have different effects on student outcomes. For example, spending $1 more on teachers may be more effective than spending $1 more on school administrators.

In practice, it is difficult for research to determine which resource has an effect, as there are fewer settings where a natural experiment drives the level and composition of spending. Furthermore, districts may have varying needs, and what is best for one district may not be the best pattern of spending for another.  Even when a researcher could identify a specific dollar amount spent on a specific resource, these dollars may not be spent equivalently.

For teachers and other staff, there is a notable dichotomy: districts can spend on either staff quantity or staff quality (or some combination of the two). In practical terms, this is often a tradeoff—we can spend more to hire additional teachers, but we may have to hire more novice educators that are initially less effective.  Indeed, the evidence from the CSR of the late 1990s makes this tradeoff clear.

Furthermore, effects may lag for policies that could improve teacher quality (such as increased salaries, benefits, or professional development): it may take several years for a higher-quality teaching pool to accumulate via recruitment and retention, and new teachers may initially be less effective. As staffing makes up the lion’s share of school spending, these dynamics are important for policy evaluation. Indeed, many school spending studies tend to find positive effects on students only after several years.

In California, higher-need districts have less-experienced teachers. And within districts, higher-need schools have less-experienced and lower-paid teachers—but spend slightly more on teachers, due to having smaller class sizes (Lafortune 2019; Lee, Fuller, and Rabe-Hesketh 2021). Would our dollars be better spent having more even class sizes but more qualified teachers across higher-need schools and districts? Unfortunately, existing research can offer no clear answers about whether a dollar spent on teacher quantity or quality is better spent; this is an area where further research could be of great importance to policymaking.

Per-student spending in California grew consistently over the past several decades, with robust spending growth in the recent recovery since the Great Recession (see Figure 1, earlier). Increases since 2012–13 have coincided with LCFF, which directed additional funds to higher-need districts. However, these increases have also coincided with added cost pressures for districts.

Benefit Costs Are Rising

Nationally, health care costs have been rising continuously (at a rate faster than inflation in most years), putting pressure on school budgets even with no changes in staffing levels or regular compensation. In addition, pension contribution costs have climbed for districts—more than doubling since the state’s 2013 pension reform.

These benefit contributions have crowded out increased spending on students under LCFF. Given higher spending on staff salaries due to new hiring, raises, and annual step increases, we estimate that in 2019–20, roughly $650 per student in annual spending went towards covering higher contribution rates, rather than towards school resources. This amount is higher in the highest-need districts—over $700 per student—due to larger spending and staffing increases since 2013 (Technical Appendix Figure A7). The amount per student represents nearly 25 percent of the annual increase in operational spending since LCFF began in 2013–14.

Notably, the rise in contribution rates can be viewed as a spending cut, as the $650 per student is money that could be spent on other school resources. Of course, this rise occurred during a period of robust annual funding increases, meaning most districts had the financial means to absorb these increases. Still, when policymakers contextualize spending and funding increases from recent years, they must consider the higher costs schools face to provide the same resources, resources that ultimately determine a school’s ability to improve the academic outcomes of its students.

Teacher Shortages Constrain Districts

Teacher shortages—particularly in hard-to-staff subjects like math, science, and special education—have been a major area of policy concern in recent years (Darling-Hammond et al. 2018).  And despite additional state and federal funding since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, staffing challenges may constrain districts’ ability to use the available funding.

As the pandemic wanes and as enrollments decline in many districts, these challenges may lessen. However, if early reports hold true that many educators are considering leaving the profession —and prospective teachers are choosing to forgo it altogether—districts may face a situation where wages must increase to attract and retain a consistent labor force. Inflation may also put similar upward pressure on district salary and other expenditures.

But even if these predictions do not hold over the longer term, other factors may drive salaries higher. Wage growth has been substantial for California’s labor market in recent years (Bohn, Lafortune, and Malagon 2022). Cost of living increases, particularly for housing, mean that teaching salaries are often insufficient to live comfortably in many high-cost coastal and metro areas.  Any rise in teacher salaries will require greater funding to achieve the same staffing levels and quality, meaning that some portion of spending increases ought not be expected to provide improvements in student outcomes.

This general phenomenon—that increases in wages in other sectors can cause increased compensation in another sector, despite no underlying increase in productivity—is often referred to as Baumol’s cost disease (Baumol and Bowen 1993). In the context of increasing benefit costs, increases in staffing costs driven by higher cost of living or dissatisfaction with the teaching profession may impose a growing financial constraint on school districts in the coming years, and one which we would not expect to generate a commensurate improvement in outcomes.

One-Time Funding Effects Are Uncertain

Much of the increased funding provided to schools since the onset of the pandemic is “one-time” in nature, meaning that it will expire without renewal at some point in the future. Federal COVID stimulus funds must be spent by 2023–24, and many one-time state programs may subside in the coming years, especially if the budget retreats from record highs.

Unfortunately, research is limited on the efficacy of such limited-duration spending increases. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, federal stimulus during the Great Recession fit this category. Much of this funding was used to backfill budget cuts, for which it was partially effective in California (Lafortune, Mehlotra, and Paluch 2020). Federal stimulus during the recession also included competitive grant programs to foster innovation and school improvement—School Improvement Grants (SIGs) and Race to the Top (RTTP)—though available evidence suggests little impact on student outcomes (Dragoset et al. 2016, 2017).

Importantly, research finds that when school spending increases are sustained for several years, schools see positive effects. State and federal stimulus dollars have helped districts maintain operations and provide safer in-person learning environments. Beyond this, however, additional academic gains may depend crucially on whether schools prioritize investments that may have long-term returns, how spending is phased in and out, and the extent to which schools persist with the increased services provided (e.g., Willis, Krausen, and McClellan 2021).

Declining Enrollment Poses New Challenges—and Opportunities

Statewide, California projects public K–12 enrollment to decline by roughly 9 percent over the coming decade (Department of Finance 2021). Most counties expect to see declines, particularly in Southern California, along the coast, and in much of the Central Valley. Projected declines are largest in the Los Angeles area, continuing a pattern of lower student enrollments that began in the mid-2000s for most LA County districts. These are largely due to a drop in fertility rates and in net migration; COVID-19 has exacerbated recent declines (Lafortune, Prunty, and Hsieh 2021).

Financially, districts in decline are protected from enrollment declines in the year in which they occur—often referred to as a one-year “hold harmless.” However, enrollment declines are typically not one-year events: sustained declines continue in many districts for a decade or longer (Warren and Lafortune 2020). Because district funding depends on the number of students enrolled, districts often need to reducing staffing levels, cut student services, eliminate special programs, or even close school sites to balance their budget.

California’s hold harmless policy has an important implication when it comes to funding received per student while losing enrollment: per-student funding is actually higher for many years, for as long as the decline persists. On average, for the declines in California over the last three decades, this amounts to an additional $500 per currently enrolled student (Warren and Lafortune 2020). Downsizing may be inefficient and requires more than just proportional decreases in teachers and classroom materials, meaning this extra funding may not help students as much as it otherwise would in a stable or growing district.

On the other hand, research from a similar provision in New York State suggests that this may not be the case: students in districts that saw an additional $1000 per year under the hold harmless policy saw test score gains of 4 percent to 5 percent of a standard deviation (Gigliotti and Sorensen 2018). Statewide, declining enrollment also allows for increasing funding per student: because state funding is a roughly fixed share of the budget, lower enrollment will mean more resources per student in future years. As enrollment declines are projected to accelerate over the coming decade(s), more research on how declines affect students and school resources could help policymakers better determine how to allocate resources to aid districts in managing declines.

In past decades, prominent academic and policy debates over whether “money matters” clouded the ability of school finance research to provide meaningful advice to policymakers seeking to understand whether and how to craft school finance policies. Recent quantitative research has yielded important and credible estimates. Using better data and research methods, the research finds that increases in spending lead to improved student outcomes, ranging from test scores, to graduation, to college attendance, to adult earnings and poverty.

These findings hold across a variety of studies and settings in the United States. Notably, dollar-per-dollar effects are larger for low-income students. Effects are also larger and more consistently positive with operational spending—teachers, support staff, materials—than for spending on facilities, though the literature on capital spending in California is more positive than studies in other states.

Importantly, the research does not say that spending will always translate into improved outcomes, nor that how money is spent does not matter. The effects identified in the existing research are averages; some types of spending are likely more important for outcomes than others, and some districts may allocate resources in more efficient ways. To be more useful for policymaking, future research should seek to provide more specific guidance on the most effective types of spending—and under what circumstances spending is most effective.

The research also makes clear that how funding is targeted—be it to students, schools, or districts—matters. Given existing patterns of residential segregation and school attendance boundaries that sometimes exacerbate segregation within districts (Monarrez and Chien 2021), how districts choose to spend across school sites has significant implications on spending equity, and ultimately, on the efficacy of state-level policies to promote more equitable outcomes.

Furthermore, when it comes to staffing, a dollar in spending can represent very different strategies and student experiences. In general, districts face tradeoffs between increasing staff quality and quantity. Research shows that while spending is similar or slightly greater at less-affluent schools within a district, these spending levels are achieved in different ways: more-affluent schools spend more per teacher, but have larger class sizes, while less-affluent schools rely on more novice teachers, but with smaller class sizes.

As California policymakers confront the continued challenges—such as the COVID-19 pandemic, declining enrollment, and teacher shortages—it will be important that research evidence provides a foundation for statewide policy decisions, where good evidence exists. While state and federal funding are currently at record-high levels, longstanding inequities by race and socioeconomic status bring continued urgency to policy debates over the adequacy, equity, and efficiency of school spending.

Still, there are many important questions where further research is needed. To date, most studies consider the effects of general spending increases, but there is greater debate and less recent evidence about how best for states to structure incentives and accountability to ensure funding is spent efficiently and equitably. Clearly, how dollars are spent matters, but so far the research has yielded relatively few actionable insights. In particular, many districts have responded to student needs in the pandemic with an increased emphasis on mental health and social-emotional learning. More research is needed on the effects of these investments, and when and where they may be most effective. In addition, there are few definitive answers about the best level of oversight and accountability when allocating state funds. Should state funding be restricted to certain categories and/or be contingent on pre-defined benchmarks? Unfortunately, we do not have clear answers to such questions.

Finally, most school spending research has considered a limited scope of outcomes, generally student test scores. However, schools spend significant time, money, and energy on non-academic services and supports; for such expenditures, it is unlikely that test scores are a complete proxy for effectiveness. Plans to launch a statewide longitudinal data system in California will aid considerably in this regard, allowing for more precise and compelling research, and examination of important longer-run impacts beyond test scores that are often unable to be considered in most school spending studies. As we continue to ask schools to play large roles supporting student mental, emotional, and social wellbeing, so too should research seek to broaden the set of outcomes used to define an “effective” spending policy.

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Monarrez, Tomas, and Carina Chien. 2021. “ Dividing Lines: Racially Unequal School Boundaries in US Public School Systems. ” Urban Institute.

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About the Author

Julien Lafortune is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specializes in K–12 education. His primary areas of focus include education finance, school capital funding policy, and educational tracking and stratification. He has published research on the impacts of school finance reforms on student achievement in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics . He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Laura Hill for many rounds of valuable feedback and guidance. Kristen Blagg, Edgar Cabral, Kenneth Kapphahn, and Hans Johnson provided immensely helpful reviews and commentary. I also wish to thank Steph Barton for several rounds editorial assistance and feedback. This work benefitted from helpful conversations with many, including Susie Kagehiro and Deborah Gonzalez. I also gratefully acknowledge the Stuart Foundation and the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation for their gracious support of this work.

Steven A. Merksamer, Chair Of Counsel Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni LLP

Mark Baldassare President and CEO Public Policy Institute of California

Ophelia Basgal Affiliate Terner Center for Housing Innovation University of California, Berkeley

Louise Henry Bryson Chair Emerita, Board of Trustees J. Paul Getty Trust

A. Marisa Chun

Chet Hewitt President and CEO Sierra Health Foundation

Phil Isenberg Former Chair Delta Stewardship Council

Mas Masumoto Author and Farmer

Steven J. Olson Partner O’Melveny & Myers LLP

Leon E. Panetta Chairman The Panetta Institute for Public Policy

Gerald L. Parsky Chairman Aurora Capital Group

Kim Polese Chairman and Co-founder CrowdSmart

Cassandra Walker Pye President Lucas Public Affairs

Helen Iris Torres CEO Hispanas Organized for Political Equality

Gaddi H. Vasquez Retired Senior Vice President, Government Affairs Edison International Southern California Edison

© 2022 Public Policy Institute of California

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Inequality in Public School Funding: Key Issues & Solutions for Closing the Gap

Millions of students and educators in the US grapple with disparities in their schools on a daily basis. The harsh reality is some schools have the benefit of quality buildings and facilities, while others must make do with leaking ceilings and makeshift gymnasiums. Some schools provide up-to-date instructional materials and equipment, while others have outdated computers and textbooks. It’s no wonder that achievement gaps exist when the playing field is so uneven. What accounts for these dramatic differences, and how can they be fixed?

While no single factor creates these stark contrasts, inequality in public school funding certainly contributes. Addressing the unfortunate disparities in public education requires taking a hard look at gaps in funding, among other things, and coming up with solutions that ensure public education in the US gives all students the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Despite the intense challenge and years of failed policies to eliminate deep inequities in public education, funding reforms have the power to shift the status quo. Some states and local districts have already revised their funding systems and made significant strides in student achievement as a result. By examining such successes, other policy makers can adopt strategic changes and help ensure US public schools give every student a quality education.

The Flaws of the Current Funding System

The financing systems of public schools in the US ensure that community wealth disparities carry over into education. By relying largely on property taxes to fund schools, which can vary widely between wealthy and poor areas, districts create funding gaps from the word go. Affluent areas end up with well-funded schools and low-income areas end up with poorly funded schools. District sizes also distort funding levels. Predominantly white districts are typically smaller, yet still receive 23 billion more than districts that are predominantly students of color, according to a recent EdBuild study. This results from the tendency to draw district lines around small affluent islands of well-funded schools within larger poorer areas that serve mostly students of color.

Smaller districts offer more local control which can encourage more investment in education since the investment is directly observable in a person’s community. However, local funding and locally controlled school systems tend to create perverse incentives that lead to inequitable outcomes.

The current funding approach across most of the nation leaves schools serving low-income and minority students at an inherent disadvantage. Despite additional funding from states meant to offset these differences, the budgets of low-income districts typically fall very short of reaching anything comparable to that of their wealthier neighbors.

According to the Education Trust’s analysis “Funding Gaps 2018,” school districts with the greatest concentrations of black, Latino, or Native American students receive around $1,800 less per student than districts educating the least students of color. Between low-income and high-income areas, the funding difference is $1,000 per student.

Spending differentials exist both between states and within them. For example, the same analysis found that surrounding suburban counties outspent Chicago by more than $10,000 per student. Despite these dismal reports, some states have chosen a different path, implementing measures to ensure the districts with the highest levels of poverty receive more equitable funding.

The Debate Over Funding

Some debate whether funding makes a difference in student achievement, including the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who argued before a Senate committee, “The notion that spending more money is going to bring about different results is ill-placed and ill-advised.” However, mounting data suggests otherwise.

Numerous studies have found that the benefits of increased funding can include improved test scores, higher graduation rates, and increased earnings for students in adulthood. For example, a review of research conducted by Northwestern University economist C. Kirabo Jackson demonstrates substantial benefits to spending more money on schools and students including:

• Adult wages boosted by 7 percent for students in districts that increased spending on students by 10 percent during their 12 years in public school
• Graduation rates boosted by several percentage points for students in schools that increased spending by 12 percent
• A 0.5 to 0.8 percent fall in high school dropout rates for New York students when funding increased by 2 to 3 percent

Another important study involving Jackson projected that by increasing per pupil spending by 22 percent during low-income students’ years in school, states could completely eliminate the achievement gap between children from affluent and economically disadvantaged homes.

The Center for American Progress’s article “A Quality Approach to School Funding” discusses research that found reforms to school financing that were focused on allocating more money to low-income schools managed to reduce achievement gaps by 20 percent on average. On the other hand, cuts to school budgets tend to have a deleterious effect on student achievement. A study by the American Educational Research Association found that counties who made significant cuts to their school funding after the Great Recession saw steep declines in student achievement, most notably among economically disadvantaged students.

Overall, the data suggests in study after study that states adopting funding systems that distribute money more equitably see rising levels of student achievement, especially among students from the poorest areas.

Funding Reforms That Work

Inequities in education are not inevitable. States and districts can adopt policies that distribute money in ways that alleviate inequality in public school funding and level the playing field. For example, to correct local funding inequities, states can create formulas to calculate additional funds for districts with less capacity to support schools due to lower property values. Some states already use this approach. However, it’s critical that states scientifically validate and weight their formulas according to student needs. Additionally, states must ensure they meet their own targets for sufficient and equitable funding.

In Utah, districts serving low-income students receive approximately 21 percent more than districts serving affluent students, according to The Education Trust. The states of Ohio, South Dakota, and Georgia, among others, also give more money per student to high-poverty districts.

Funding practices that have produced notable differences in student achievement include:

• Funding schools serving economically disadvantaged students at higher levels
• Investing money in developing the skills and knowledge of educators
• Targeting money toward the development of more quality early childhood education programs and access to them

Several states have undertaken reforms based on these practices and, in turn, have narrowed achievement gaps. Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey, for example, have instituted the following changes based on the practices mentioned above:

• Provided additional funds to districts serving high concentrations of economically disadvantaged students
• Raised standards for teachers and principals, increased their salaries, and provided them with ongoing professional development
• Invested significantly in pre-K programs such as Head Start, school readiness programs, and scholarship programs to increase access to quality early childhood programs for low-income students

How have these reforms played out? Studies suggest they’ve been worth it. Since implementing changes, Massachusetts has received the number one educational ranking in the nation, according to the Learning Policy Institute. Perhaps even more encouraging is New Jersey’s ascent. After shifting its funding practices, the state, whose population is majority minority, ranked second in the nation for eighth grade reading and fourth for eighth grade math. Minnesota also raised its national ranking in eighth grade reading and math after adopting changes to its funding policies.

Michigan has also worked to address inequality in public school funding. The state has centralized school funding and equalized funding levels across the state. Few funding differences exist between districts, regardless of their racial and economic backgrounds. Michigan’s average per-student spending, however, falls behind the national average. This may reflect the reduced incentive mentioned earlier to invest in school funding when it’s spread out across a system and less readily seen.

Increased Federal funding can help as well. Title I, the largest Federal funding program in education, aims to deliver additional resources to students in poverty. However, the research community generally agrees that Title I needs substantial reform. In addition to making more money available for the program, the Federal government can revise the funding formula to better target high-need districts. It can also redesign the oversight system so it doesn’t unnecessarily burden states or lead to ineffective use of money simply to comply with Title I regulations.

Bring Equity to Education

Finding solutions to the challenges in education and bringing equity to all students takes innovation and devotion. Those inspired to tackle issues such as inequality in public school funding need the right expertise. By pursuing an advanced degree in education, educators can develop the skills required to conduct the critical research and develop the evidence-based curriculums needed to close achievement gaps and help all students thrive.

Discover how American University’s Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership empowers educators to create equitable learning environments and ensure all students have the opportunity to achieve their greatest potential.

EdD vs. PhD in Education: Requirements, Career Outlook, and Salary

Teacher Retention: How Education Leaders Prevent Turnover

What Is Education Policy? A Peek Behind the Curtains

AERA Open , “Schooling During the Great Recession: Patterns of School Spending and Student Achievement Using Population Data”

American University, EdD in Education Policy and Leadership

Bepress, “Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from the Great Recession”

Center for American Progress, “A Quality Approach to School Funding”

Chalkbeat, “Does Money Matter for Schools? Why One Researcher Says the Question Is ‘Essentially Settled’”

EdBuild, “Nonwhite School Districts Get $23 Billion Less Than White Districts Despite Serving the Same Number of Students”

Education Finance and Policy , “Court-Ordered Finance Reforms in the Adequacy Era: Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sensitivity”

Education Law Center, “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card”

The Education Trust, “Funding Gaps 2018”

Education Week , “Data Reveal Deep Inequities in Schools”

Learning Policy Institute, “How Money Matters for Schools”

Learning Policy Institute, “Why Our Education Funding Systems Are Derailing the American Dream”

National Bureau of Economic Research, “Does School Spending Matter? The New Literature on an Old Question”

NEA Today, “Have Lawmakers Learned Anything from the Great Recession?”

United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Public Education Funding Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation”

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The Ultimate Guide To Writing a Winning Scholarship Essay

Stand out from the rest.

With the cost of higher education skyrocketing in the last few decades, it’s no surprise that many students seek out scholarships to help cover tuition. As a result, it’s a very competitive endeavor, which is why students need to find ways to stand out. We’ve put together this resource to help write a scholarship essay that will get the application committee’s attention.

How To Find Scholarships

Many students know that they want to apply for scholarships but don’t know where to find them. Honestly, this can be the most difficult and intimidating part of the process for students! Here are some suggestions for where to start. 

Ask a Guidance Counselor

One of the best resources for high school students is their guidance counselor. They are prepared to help students make academic and career plans and should be aware of scholarship opportunities to align with your needs and goals. 

Talk to the College or University

Already have a college or university picked out? Reach out to the school’s financial aid department. In addition to the many scholarships you can find online, they may offer information about funding offered directly through the school. 

Submit a FAFSA Application

Even if a student isn’t planning to accept student loans, they should definitely consider completing a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Not only will the resulting report inform them of any financial assistance for which they qualify, but many scholarship committees require applicants to submit a FAFSA. 

Search Scholarship Websites

There are many scholarship websites where students can find awards and applications. Sites such as Scholarships.com and Scholarship 360 allow you to use filters to narrow down your search results based on your needs and interests. 

We’ve also put together the following guides:

• How To Get a Full-Ride Scholarship
• Best Merit-Based Scholarships  
• Excellent Scholarships for High School Seniors
• Great Scholarships for Black Students
• Scholarships for Women
• Best Scholarship Opportunities for Future Teachers

Do an Internet Search

Head to a search engine, social media platform, or sites like Reddit to look for scholarships. You can even create posts inviting other users to share suggestions.

Ask an Employer

Some workplaces offer tuition benefits or other financial assistance for higher education. If a student is employed, it’s an option to reach out to someone in the HR department to see if they offer any programs or scholarships. 

The Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Scholarship Essay

Do: know the rules.

The most important thing anyone can do before writing a scholarship essay is this: Read all of the rules and guidelines and then reread them! Students can even ask someone else to read them too, to make sure they fully understand what they need to do. Failing to follow the rules is one of the main reasons why students are unsuccessful in getting scholarships. 

Do: Set Aside Plenty of Time

Start working on scholarship essays right away. Do not wait until a week (or day!) before the deadline. This gives students time to write several drafts of the essay if needed. Also, you never know when a technology-related issue might strike, so having a little extra time can save you from disaster. 

Do: Research the Scholarship Provider

Dig deep when applying for a scholarship. Find out who is funding the award and spend some time researching the provider. Do they have a vision or mission statement? Do they support any specific causes or types of students? Is there any way that applicants can make themselves more attractive candidates for the specific audience? Students should use this information to their advantage! 

Do: Brainstorm

Students should take some time to think about what they’ve learned about the scholarship essay guidelines and the provider. Then, brainstorm about what they want to say and share and why. Here are some questions to ask as they pertain to education and career goals:

• Who are you? Think of yourself but also your background.
• What makes you who you are?
• What have you done?
• What do you want to do?
• How are you going to get there?
• Why do you need a scholarship?
• How will it make a difference?
• Are you a first-generation college student?
• Do you have any unique qualities or needs?
• What makes you proud?
• What lessons have you learned?

These are heavy questions, but finding the answers to at least some of them will help provide the substance needed to write a truly effective scholarship essay. 

Do: Find Ways To Stand Out

Many, many students are applying for scholarships. They have to find a way to stand out from the rest. Students should think of the things they learned when they researched the scholarship provider. Are there any ways they can appeal to that audience? If so, focus on those areas. 

Do: Be Honest

Do not lie on a scholarship application. Let’s say that again: Do not lie on a scholarship application. Students should remind themselves that they are worthy on their own. If an applicant is discovered to be dishonest, it can really hurt them in the long run. 

Do: Stay on Topic

When reading the guidelines for the scholarship and doing brainstorming, be sure to keep the topic of the essay in mind. Everything students share and communicate should be related to the topic. 

Do: Be Professional

Students should use their very best skills when writing a scholarship essay. They should not use slang, casual language, unconventional fonts, emojis, or texting abbreviations. 

Do: Proofread and Edit Multiple Times

It’s a good idea to prepare to write this essay at least three times. First, there’s a rough draft that should be carefully proofread. Students can ask a teacher or other professional to also look at their paper. Then students should repeat this process once or twice more until they’re happy with the results. They shouldn’t just write it and submit it all at once! 

Don’t: Brag

While students want to highlight their strengths and accomplishments, they should not brag. They also don’t want to put down other candidates or people to make themselves look good. Tell a story without embellishments. 

Don’t: Reuse a Scholarship Essay

Students put a lot of effort into writing scholarship essays, but please don’t reuse them! 

Scholarship Essay Sample Outline

Ready to get started? Having a solid outline provides a road map for the journey. Here are some suggestions for making it easier to write a scholarship essay! 

Introduction

Students should explain who they are and try to make it engaging. Hook readers by sharing a few details that will be elaborated on in the body of the essay. 

Educational and Career Goals

Students should share what they want to study and hope to gain by getting an education, as well as how it will prepare them for their future career. They should be passionate! 

Who Are You?

Student should briefly explain their background, which can include details about family, personal values, and how they got to where they are today. 

Why Are You a Good Candidate for the Scholarship?

This is where students need to really think about what they learned about the scholarship provider. What are they looking for in a candidate? Students should do their best to not only shine as a good student and leader, but also find solid ways to connect with the scholarship provider’s mission. After including some teasers or breadcrumbs in the introduction to hook the reader, this is a good place to share the rest of the story. 

To wrap up a scholarship essay, students should reiterate their commitment to their education and career. Restate how the story shared demonstrates a readiness for college and how winning the scholarship can help the applicant follow their dreams. Best of luck!

Do you have tips on how to write a scholarship essay? Share them below! Plus, check out  The Ultimate Guide to College Scholarships!

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10 Winning Scholarship Essay Examples From Real Students

Make your application shine. Continue Reading

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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.

Learn more about the state of education in the US , and get the data directly in your inbox by signing up for our email newsletter .

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EssayEmpire

School funding essay.

Funding of U.S. public schools has long been a focus of contention, primarily because children living in high poverty and high-minority neighborhoods so often attend schools that have relatively few resources. Decades of litigation document a clash between commitments to “local control” of schools, on one hand, and the provision of equal educational opportunity, regardless of where one lives, on the other. This entry examines sources of funding for U.S. public schools, disparities in resources, and legal challenges to the continuing situation.

Sources Of Funding

Unlike most industrialized nations, the United States relies heavily on local property taxes to fund its public schools. These revenues, which account for about 45 percent of total school funding, create significant disparities among school districts because local property values vary so much. Even when property-poor communities tax themselves at higher rates than property rich communities, as is often the case, they cannot raise comparable revenues because property values are so much lower.

State revenues are another significant source of funding for public schools. Because budget priorities and tax policies differ from state to state, the size of the state share varies considerably, but on average, it is about 47 percent of the total. Some states allocate funds in such a way as to reduce the disparities created by local property tax revenues, but many do not. A report by The Education Trust, a research and advocacy organization, found that in the six years it has been tracking the funding gap, the disparity between highland low-poverty districts has remained unchanged. In 2003, in the nation as a whole, low-poverty school districts received approximately $900 more in state and local funds than high-poverty districts. (High-poverty districts were defined as the 25 percent of districts with the highest levels of poverty, and low-poverty districts as the 25 percent with the lowest levels.)

The third source of funding for public schools, federal revenues, comprises only about 8 percent of the total. These revenues come primarily through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (reauthorized most recently as the No Child Left Behind Act). Although Title I funds often are used to bring spending in schools in poor neighborhoods up to par with spending in other neighborhoods, some funding is diverted to schools in wealthier neighborhoods.

Widespread Disparitie

How large are disparities in school funding? In its 2006 Quality Counts report, Education Week reported that in 2003, average per-pupil spending (adjusted for regional cost differences) ranged from a high of $11,031 in Washington, D.C., to a low of $5,087 in Utah. Gaps among districts within states and among schools within districts exacerbate the state-to-state differences.

Funding disparities between large, predominantly minority city districts and nearby predominantly White suburban districts are particularly significant. Illinois Board of Education data for 2003, for example, show per-pupil spending of $8,482 in Chicago (87 percent minority), but $17,291 in nearby suburban Highland Park (10 percent minority). Similar patterns can be found in the Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Boston, and New York City areas.

Recent research has uncovered “hidden” disparities among schools within a single district resulting from the way teacher salaries are factored into district budgets. If one or more schools in a district have a disproportionate share of the highest paid teachers, this does not necessarily show up in districtwide budget reports. The highest paid teachers commonly are found in schools with the lowest poverty levels.

A 2006 report by the 21st Century School Fund documents additional inequities in spending on school construction and renovation. Despite record-level spending between 1995 and 2004, the most disadvantaged students received only about half as much per pupil as their wealthier counterparts. Furthermore, in the poorer schools, most of the funding went toward basic safety provisions (roof repairs or asbestos removal, for example) rather than educational enhancements such as science labs and computer rooms, as was the case in the wealthier districts.

Legal Challenges

Although the question of whether “money really matters” in schooling continues to arise in school-funding lawsuits, the ongoing litigation itself attests to broad agreement that much is at stake. Significant disparities in funding mean that students in property-rich districts typically attend classes in well-maintained buildings, with well-qualified and adequately compensated teachers and abundant opportunities to participate in art, music, and sports programs. Students in property poor districts, however, often face years of schooling in buildings in disrepair, with teachers lacking credentials (or even full-time positions), outdated textbooks that must be shared, and few extracurricular activities.

As of 2006, school funding lawsuits had been brought in forty-five states, and plaintiffs had prevailed in almost two thirds of the cases. A landmark case, San Antonio v. Rodriguez, was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. This case focused on large disparities in funding among property-rich and property-poor school districts in Texas. The Supreme Court acknowledged the disparities but found no constitutional violation and no justification for altering the school funding system in a way that might lessen “local control.” This decision closed the door to appeals to the U.S. Constitution but did not stop lawsuits over school funding. Almost every state has language in its constitution that obligates it to provide some quality of public schooling statewide. Since Rodriguez, plaintiffs generally have asked courts to interpret provisions in state constitutions in ways that require states to provide funding that is more equitable, more adequate, or both.

“Adequacy” arguments constitute the most recent legal strategy in the ongoing battles over school funding. Adequacy sometimes has been defined as the level of funding required to provide all students with an opportunity to learn what they need to know to pass high-stakes tests—that is, tests used to determine promotion or graduation. However, it also has been defined as a baseline level of funding. Recognizing that “equal” funding can nevertheless be insufficient, many scholars and lawyers regard the pursuit of “adequate” funding as a more desirable objective than “equity” or “equality.” Others, however, see the pursuit of adequacy as tacit acceptance of a system of schooling that is both separate, in the sense of racially segregated to a significant extent, and unequal, in the sense of unfairly funded. Funding that allows for an adequate education for some children, but for a far more expensive (and much better) education for others, undercuts the ideal of equal educational opportunity.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, reauthorized in 2007, promises to intensify these arguments in the years ahead. Questions will continue to be raised, in and out of courts, about how a law that attempts to hold all students and schools to the same high academic standards can be reconciled with structures of funding that year after year underwrite a top-quality education for some students (disproportionately White students in middle-class and wealthy communities) and a barebones minimum for others (disproportionately students of color in poor communities).

Bibliography:

• Books, S., & McAninch, A. R. (2006). Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: A 15-year reconsideration: A special issue of Educational Studies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Education Trust. (2005). The funding gap 2005. Retrieved from http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/default
• Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Crown.
• Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown.
• Schrag, P. (2005). Final test: The battle for adequacy in America’s schools. New York: New Press.
• ACCESS: http://www.schoolfunding.info/index.php3

This example School Funding Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

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Report: States Struggle With ‘Unfair’ School Funding

Per-pupil funding is especially lacking in Southern and Western states, according to the nonprofit Education Law Center.

States Get Graded on School Funding

Michael Loccisano | Getty Images

Students line up in the morning at a school in New York City on Sept. 27, 2021. New York has, by far, the highest cost-adjusted per-pupil funding level among states, according to the Education Law Center.

More than half of states have per-pupil funding levels below the national average – part of an overall bleak picture of U.S. public education painted by a report released Thursday .

The findings from the Education Law Center, a nonprofit focused on education equity, point to the "persistence of unfair school funding across the country," according to a news release . States in the South and West are struggling the most to provide adequate funding for public school students, and a majority of states fail to provide higher dollar amounts to the high-poverty schools and districts that are the most in need, the annual "Making the Grade" report found.

"This year's report makes clear that, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the condition of school funding in many states was bleak," Danielle Farrie, the Education Law Center's research director and report co-author, said in a statement. "While the obligation to fully invest in public education rests primarily with the states, it is time for the federal government to use the tools in its toolbox to incentivize fair and equitable school funding across the country."

Photos You Should See - October 2021

The authors assigned grades to each state based on three education funding measures: level, distribution and effort. Funding level refers to per-pupil spending, distribution refers to the allocation of funds to districts relative to their concentration of students from low-income families and effort measures the share of a state's gross domestic product that is made up by its K-12 public education system. Data was compiled from 2019-based surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

A whopping 22 states received F grades in at least one of the three metrics. Two states – Florida and Nevada – got Fs in all three, while five others got the lowest possible grade in at least two categories. Most of these states also had school-aged children poverty rates in the high teens. Mississippi – which had the highest poverty rate among states, according to the report – got an F in funding level but a C and B in distribution and effort, respectively.

States With at Least Two F Grades and Their Per-Pupil Funding Levels

Utah provides an interesting case, as its progressive funding system – when higher per-pupil funding is provided to high-poverty districts – led it to an A grade in the distribution measure, but it received F grades for level and effort. The state's low funding level – just over $10,000 per pupil, the second-lowest in the country – means that even its highest poverty districts "are funded at the overall national average, which is unlikely to provide the opportunities and resources those students need," according to the report.

For the distribution metric, 20 states scored a D grade or lower, meaning that low-poverty districts in those states received more per-pupil funding than high-poverty districts. Most of those states have a regressive system, which means that high-poverty districts get lower funding levels. The most drastic example was Nevada, where students in high-poverty districts received 32% less funding than those in low-poverty districts. Connecticut and New Hampshire were other states that saw similar gaps.

Not all of the report's findings were grim. More states have progressive funding systems (18) than regressive (15) or flat (14), where there is no meaningful difference in funding by poverty level, according to the Education Law Center. Wyoming was the only state with across-the-board A grades, while Alaska – which was tied with Utah for having the most progressive funding system in the country – received a B grade for its funding level and As for the other two metrics. The report also highlighted California for recently overhauling its school funding system and subsequently seeing both its funding level and distribution rank jump.

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Tags: education policy , K-12 education , public schools , poverty , Utah , California

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Schools Lost Ground on Funding in Recent Years. The Recovery Could Be Slow

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Schools in many states lost funding in the early days of the pandemic—and they may not fully recover for years to come, especially as federal relief aid goes away.

That’s one of several takeaways from the 2023 edition of the research and advocacy nonprofit Education Law Center’s annual “Making the Grade” report, which assigns grades to all 50 states on the progress schools have made toward robust and equitable funding for K-12 schools.

The latest report , published Dec. 11, covers the 2020-21 school year—the first one that took place entirely during the pandemic.

States and local districts were preparing budgets for that school year in the early months of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered America’s schools and plunged the country into massive economic uncertainty. The bulk of federal pandemic recovery dollars—colloquially known as “ESSER funds”—didn’t arrive until months later.

Schools in 14 states saw a decrease in state and local revenue that year compared with 2019-20. In recent years, the same was true for only three or fewer states.

Many states have increased education funding since then on the strength of surpluses helped by the massive infusion of federal economic stimulus funds. But education funding from state and local coffers—the primary sources of education funding in the United States—likely hasn’t fully bounced back even now, said Danielle Farrie, the Education Law Center’s research director and the report’s co-author.

The Education Law Center conducts research and supports litigation with the aim of ensuring states meet their constitutional obligations to adequately fund schools.

“When states pull back on funding, it happens oftentimes rather quickly, but the recovery from that is often very slow,” Farrie said. “What we fear is whether we’re going to see a repeat of what happened during the Great Recession.”

Farrie believes some states have rushed to take political advantage of rising revenues to provide tax relief to residents . While a number of states have also devoted portions of their surpluses to boosting aid for public schools, the education sector could suffer in the long run as surpluses dry up, she said.

“Now we’re in a position where a lot of these states have lowered their tax rates and are now going to say that they don’t have enough money to increase investments in education,” Farrie said. “But they have made specific policy choices that are leading to these outcomes.”

Here are three other takeaways from the report.

1. Some states are getting worse at funding schools equitably

In most states, schools in high-poverty areas—where at least 30 percent of students come from families living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—receive on average the same amount of, or less, state and local funding per student than schools in low-poverty areas, the report shows. The report considers a low-poverty district to be a district where 5 percent or fewer students live in poverty.

A wide body of research shows students from low-income families need more resources to achieve the same academic outcomes as their high-income peers.

Most state education formulas include provisions that attempt to direct more aid to high-need students or schools. But those efforts don’t always play out as planned. In Washington state, for instance, researchers have found that school funding reforms from the 2010s have directed more aid to wealthy districts than poor ones , even though the goal was to do the opposite.

High-poverty schools in only 22 states receive more money on average per student than low-poverty schools, the ELC’s report shows.

Lower-poverty schools in 16 states got more funding per student from state and local sources than schools with higher levels of poverty. And schools in five states—Alaska, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming—saw funding gaps between low- and high-poverty schools grow from 2019 to 2020, the report shows.

In Oregon, for instance, high-poverty districts got $11,357 per student on average, while low-poverty districts got $16,492 per student.

2. In most states, school funding lagged behind broader economic growth

Education funding from states and local governments typically grows each year. But the rate of growth nationwide in the years examined by the Education Law Center was smaller than in previous years.

Meanwhile, national GDP grew by 10 percent in 2021, compared with annual growth of 3 to 5 percent in the preceding years. And many states saw better-than-forecasted returns.

As a result, nearly every state’s level of “effort"—the percentage of a state’s GDP that goes toward state and local funding for schools—decreased between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. Missouri was the only exception.

3. Even the best-performing states need major improvement

Each edition of “Making the Grade” reinforces the same point: School funding differs wildly from one state to the next.

In states like Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, school districts get an average of more than $20,000 per pupil from state and local sources. In Arizona, Idaho, and Utah, the same funding streams provide only slightly above $10,000 per pupil.

But even the states where schools get the most money, and where funding is most effectively targeted to higher-need districts, have more work to do, Farrie said.

Pennsylvania schools, on average, get $20,000 per pupil from state and local sources. But in September, a researcher for Pennsylvania State University presented state lawmakers with an analysis showing that the state is underfunding public schools by at least $6 billion .

The findings support a judge’s conclusion from earlier this year that, despite a large overall investment in K-12 education, the state is failing to provide adequate funding for students from districts in areas without a substantial base of local property tax revenue.

And litigation is currently challenging the constitutionality of existing public school investments in Wyoming , another state ranked highly in the report. The Wyoming Education Association, which filed the lawsuit, argues the state has failed to provide school funding that keeps up with inflation and other new costs.

“Just because a state is performing relatively well on our indicators, there’s still so much more room for growth everywhere,” Farrie said.

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New funding for school budgets will bring relief to 15% of NYC schools this fall

A n agreement between Mayor Adams and the City Council to  hold school budgets steady that otherwise faced cuts for enrollment declines  will benefit hundreds of local schools this fall, officials announced Tuesday.

Close to 250 schools, or 15% of the nation’s largest district, will see their budgets boosted through an extension of a pandemic-era program known as “hold harmless,” which maintains school funding at the same levels for fewer students. The city will spend $75 million as part of the announcement, the Daily News first reported.

“This is a huge win,” Adams said at a news conference at P.S. 184 Shuang Wen School. “We’re going to have to deal with this issue long-term, but right now we want to stabilize our schools.”

The policy will ensure all principals reopen this fall with at least the same level of funding they were allocated after students were counted during the current school year. Schools projected to gain enrollment will not be impacted.

“Hold harmless” was expected to end this year with the expiration of COVID-19 federal stimulus dollars . Tuesday’s announcement extends that reprieve.

Melanie Katz, principal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, said the policy “will bring much-needed stability to our school budgets.”

“We know how to plan for next year, and we will start the year off strong,” she said.

The Adams administration isn’t making any guarantees to continue the policy for the full school year. In a typical term, principals who enroll fewer students than projected have to give back money in the middle of the school year, while those with additional kids gain extra dollars. That process was put on hold during the pandemic to stabilize schools.

“The most important thing is that schools know, as they are now planning to open up schools in September, they can walk with a certain level of assurity that they will be able to have a full budget,” Chancellor David Banks responded to a question from The News. “What happens in the future after that, that’s always open to conversation and negotiation.”

On top of the extra funding for schools losing enrollment, Adams and the City Council allocated $20 million to reverse cuts to summer school programming, The News reported Monday. Under reductions announced in November, middle school families in Summer Rising would have faced reduced hours throughout the week and lost Friday programming.

Lawmakers also agreed to use $32 million to fund initiatives jeopardized by the loss of federal stimulus, including restorative justice programs — a Council priority. About $6 million of the $8 million officials said were being spent on progressive disciplinary practices at a budget hearing this year will be replaced, according to a press release.

“Our Council has been consistent in calling for funding for restorative justice programs, because we know the positive difference that can make in the lives of our students,” said City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens).

A final city budget is due by July 1.

©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Pandemic aid for schools is ending soon. Many after-school programs may go with it

Beth Wallis

LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla.

“I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle.

At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year.

It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that rely on federal pandemic-era relief dollars known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. But those federal dollars are starting to expire this fall, leaving the future of many after-school programs – including the one at Eugene Field – up in the air.

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“The unfortunate reality is that some of those programs are going to close,” says Erik Peterson, senior vice president for policy at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.

His organization analyzed 6,300 school districts across all states and the District of Columbia, and found that those districts spent at least $8.1 billion in ESSER funds on after-school and summer programs. As a result, an estimated 4 million more students were able to access these programs.

Peterson says schools will need to find diverse funding streams to sustain the after-school programming boom that temporary federal funds made possible.

“There’s not going to be one funding stream that just comes in and takes over. It’s going to be a patchwork,” he explains.

Even if schools do pull that off, he says “it’s not going to be enough to match” what the federal government was providing.

Many of Tulsa’s afterschool programs are supported by an organization called The Opp . Leaders there say ESSER funds allowed The Opp to expand its program offerings from seven school sites to 63. It supports 450 programs across those schools. But once the ESSER funds are gone, that will shrink to just 75 programs, unless they can find funding on their own.

The return on investment for after-school programs

Peterson says quality after-school programs come with all kinds of benefits. Not only do they help foster relationships with trusted adults, but they also help students develop important skills .

“Communication skills — both written and oral — learning to problem solve, learning to resolve conflicts with peers and with others,” Peterson explains. “And really, all those skills that employers look for in terms of so-called ‘21st-century skills’ or workforce skills, but also really the skills just anyone needs to be successful — both in school, but really, in life.”

Battling student absenteeism with grandmas, vans and a lot of love

A growing body of research shows students who participate in out-of school activities, including after-school programs, are more likely to have higher vocabulary scores, better reading comprehension, better math achievement and better social confidence.

These programs also provide a safe place for students to keep learning after the school day ends.

“I had an opportunity to chat with a fourth-grade student as she was waiting for her chess club to begin,” says Lauren Sivak, executive director at The Opp . “And she said to me, ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be home alone.’ And I have not forgotten that statement since those words left her mouth. And that is a big concern to me.”

According to The Opp’s data, students who participated in The Opp’s after-school programs were 43% less likely to be chronically absent — that’s when students miss at least 10% of school days in a school year.

Sivak says these programs also provide a place where students can expand their interests and work on life skills without worrying about grades or other classroom pressures.

When after-school funding competes with in-school needs

Caroline Crouch, of Tulsa Public Schools, says prioritizing state dollars for after-school opportunities – over in-school ones – can be a tough sell. And in fact, in Oklahoma, lawmakers are focusing their funding priorities on teacher recruitment and retention, not filling the gaps for after-school programs once the ESSER money expires.

Without paid family leave, teachers stockpile sick days and aim for summer babies

Crouch previously oversaw after-school programs for the district, and she currently works in the communications office. She says policymakers and donors need to know about the return on investment after-school programming provides.

“It feels to a lot of people like it’s soft and fuzzy, right? You know, this ain’t no reading, writing and arithmetic,” Crouch says.

But the district has seen the difference these programs can make for Tulsa students: “A few years ago, we had the first- or second-year [after-school] debate club at Walt Whitman Elementary. And every single student who was in their debate club did better on their English language [and] math assessments than they had before.”

Sivak, of The Opp, says she doesn’t think policymakers in Oklahoma will step in with funding unless they feel a sense of urgency from their communities — and that probably won’t happen until the programs go away.

“I don’t know if the appetite for sustainable funding will be there until we see what is lost.”

After-school lessons in pesto

At Eugene Field Elementary, the after-school gardeners aren’t thinking about funding; they’re more focused on making a harvested carrot-top pesto spread.

Students gather around a table to chop carrot greens, spinach, basil and kale. They add oil, lemon juice and garlic into a food processor, and garden educator Mary Smith talks through potential flavor profiles as she folds in the pesto with whipped butter.

The students spread the pesto over slices of bread and take a bite. Many go back for seconds, and some for thirds.

Afterward, Smith gathers the students on the carpeted floor and asks what they appreciated that day. Surrounded by gardening calendars, an enormous indoor grow tower, photos of the students in the garden and cooking supplies, the kids say they appreciate the teachers at this after-school program, the carrot-top pesto and getting to do a garden scavenger hunt earlier that afternoon.

Then they put their hands together and count off: “Three, two, one — pesto rocks!”

Beth Wallis covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma.

The W president speaks on 2024 funding by the MS leg and current projects being worked on

The Mississippi University for Women didn't receive a dime from one state bill that sent a total of $110 million in funds for capital projects to the state's other seven public universities. But Nora Miller, The W's president, wants everyone to know her school received all the money they requested this year.

A part of Senate Bill 2468 , an annual appropriations bill that was signed into law by Gov. Tate Reeves in May, transfers money to a capital improvements fund within the Mississippi Institution for Higher Learning. This year's bill sent a total of $110 million in funds, distributed through the IHL, to seven universities and the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Noticeably absent from SB 2468 was The W, receiving zero funds from the bill. Delta State University received the least amount, but it was still more than $4 million.

The W, located in Columbus, may not have received any funds in SB 2468, but the school did receive $3.4 million in another appropriations bill: Senate Bill 3006. Miller said this was the full amount her school requested from the Mississippi legislature's 2024 session.

"Our request this year was fully funded. $300,000 for pre-planning the renovation of Painter Hall and $3,140,000 to be used for general repairs and renovations," Miller said in a May 31 interview. "We are reviewing all of the projects, we've got a lot of things going and we are hopeful and excited about our future."

The W will be requesting more funds in the coming years

Miller explained that each university has a 4-year plan for capital funding requests.

"The IHL works out a four-year bond request plan (for each school)," Miller said. "Over this current four-year period, Alcorn, Delta State, Mississippi Valley State and The W will all be requesting $35.4 million."

Schools with a larger enrollment will receive more funds. Jackson State University is requesting $40.9 million over four years for capital projects, while Mississippi State University, the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are requesting $58.4 million over four years.

The four-year-plan works well, Miller said, because though some years universities will receive much smaller funds, other years they will receive "a big chunk of funding in a given year that you can actually do something with."

"If it's just doled out 1/4th over each of the four years, you are going to be sitting around waiting for next year's money to drop before you can do anything," she said. "It's an agreement with everybody that we'll agree to ask for less this year, but we're going to need a bigger amount next year ... So it's just some years schools are asking for more, some years they'll get less."

Next year, The W is requesting $15 million, Miller said.

"We're thankful that we got what we need to do the projects," Miller said. "Right now we have funded about $20 million worth of projects that are in various stages and taking place, so we can wait until the next year to get the funding for the next big project. We've got enough going on right now."

Current projects underway

Here is a list of the capital projects The W currently has in the works, according to Miller:

• The Orr Chapel is being rehabilitated, including structural repairs, stabilization to the multi-level front porch and the replacement of rotten or damaged wood and paint. 
• The W is repairing the roofing of multiple buildings such as Painter Hall, Reneau Hall, Grossnickle Hall, Stark Natatorium and Pohl Gymnasium, among others. The project will also include repairs to the roof of The W's famous clock tower.
• MUW's Exterior Building Renovations project includes exterior restorations of all painted surfaces. The buildings and areas included in this project are the Orr Chapel's front porch, the Stovall House, Painter Hall, McDevitt Hall and the Mary Wilson Home. 
• MUW's Cafeteria Steam Kettle Replacement project includes replacing the existing steam kettles with new individual self-contained kettles. This replacement will allow the deactivation of the large Duffner steam boiler currently providing steam to the original kettles. The result will be increased efficiencies and a substantial reduction in natural gas consumption.
• Waste Collection & Conveying and Stormwater Detention: This project will identify cross-connections between the sanitary sewer and stormwater sewer systems. It will include the construction of an underground detention system to help alleviate flooding on campus. 
• Jones Hall Interior and Exterior Renovations: Planning and construction of renovations is planned for Jones Hall. The 47,000 square foot facility has only received minor improvements since it was first built in 1964. The project will include asbestos abatement, restoration of interior and exterior elements, interior reconfiguration, ADA improvements and major renovations of the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and life safety systems. 
• South Campus Mechanical Plant Improvements: A new chiller plant is planned for construction to provide cooling for Jones, Kincannon, Goen and Frazer halls. This new plant will provide chilled water delivery with improved efficiencies and backup cooling. 
• Bathroom Renovations in South Campus Residence Halls:  This project will renovate the bathrooms in Goen Hall, Frazer Hall and Kincannon Hall.
• Culinary Arts Landscape and Irrigation project will add new landscaping and irrigation around the new Culinary Arts building.

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Supporters of Congestion Pricing Are Furious at Hochul’s ‘Betrayal’

Advocates who have been fighting for decades for the program were shocked by the governor’s sudden move and lamented its impact on funding for the city’s subway.

With weeks to go before the launch of a plan to toll drivers in Manhattan’s core commercial district, advocates and organizers of congestion pricing had been celebrating a victory years in the making.

They were shellshocked on Wednesday and furious with Gov. Kathy Hochul after she indefinitely suspended the plan, saying she didn’t think the time was right for a tolling scheme that could deter visitors to Manhattan and slow the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic.

Those who had fought for congestion pricing had been eagerly awaiting the implementation of an idea conceived here 72 years ago — one that aimed to transform the city’s busiest streets and set an example for other American cities battling traffic and pollution.

But they woke up to shattering news on Wednesday, when it was revealed that Ms. Hochul had quietly been working to postpone the program . Advocates said they were crestfallen.

“We’ve been blindsided,” said Kate Slevin, executive vice president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning nonprofit in New York. “It’s a betrayal of millions of transit riders and the future of New York’s climate and economy.”

Upon hearing about a possible delay, the Riders Alliance, a grass-roots organization of transit riders, assembled a protest in front of Ms. Hochul’s New York offices. The anger grew after her announcement.

“Congestion pricing must move forward,” Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the Riders Alliance, shouted outside Ms. Hochul’s New York City offices as he led a crowd of demonstrators, according to a video posted on social media. “Congestion pricing is the linchpin of New York’s recovery. This city runs on our subway. It runs on the millions of buses we have on the street.”

Officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which would have overseen the program and collected the $1 billion that it was expected to raise annually, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the development was a crushing setback to the authority, which had been defending itself from at least eight lawsuits fighting the program.

Opponents of congestion pricing cheered Ms. Hochul’s reversal. They had complained that the planned tolls would have unfairly burdened commuters who needed to reach Manhattan and that traffic would be diverted to other neighborhoods.

“Governor Hochul heard the concerns of educators and ordinary New Yorkers that this plan for congestion pricing just shifts pollution, congestion and costs onto already struggling communities,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which has filed one of the lawsuits against the program. “We applaud the governor for making the right decision.”

Congestion pricing had been sold as a way to rein in traffic and pollution while improving travel speeds in some of the world’s most traffic-clogged streets. The money raised from drivers would have been used by the M.T.A. to secure $15 billion in bond financing to help pay for much needed improvements to New York City’s transit network, which is the largest and busiest in North America.

Under the congestion pricing plan, which would have been the first of its kind in the United States, most motorists would have paid $15 to drive into some of the city’s most famous destinations and neighborhoods, including the theater district, Times Square, Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea and SoHo.

Other major cities around the world, including Stockholm, London and Singapore, have charged tolls to enter central business districts for years. New York City would have been the first in the nation to deploy such a program.

“I was always holding my breath until the first car would go through, which I hoped would be mine,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner and longtime supporter of congestion pricing. Mr. Schwartz noted that motor vehicles contribute heavily to greenhouse gases, and he lamented the construction jobs that will be lost because the M.T.A. will not carry out infrastructure upgrades using congestion pricing money.

He said the suspension of the program would be an economic blow to New York.

“That bottle of champagne — the cork remains in it,” Mr. Schwartz said. “It’s been there for close to 50 years.”

Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering New York City’s mass transit system and the millions of passengers who use it. More about Ana Ley

How Much Has Changed 70 Years After Brown v. Board? SLS’s Rick Banks Weighs In

• June 3, 2024
• Ralph Richard Banks; Q&A with Professors Richard Thompson Ford and Pamela Karlan
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To mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark school desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education , Stanford Law School’s Ralph Richard Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, joined a recent episode of the Stanford Legal podcast to discuss the legacy of one of the most celebrated Supreme Court cases. Banks also recently wrote an essay for Stanford Lawyer about the unanimous decision, which held that state-mandated segregation of public schools violated the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution.

The legacy of the case, Banks observes, might be less far-reaching than many people suspect.

Podcast co-hosts Richard Thompson Ford , the George E. Osborne Professor of Law, and Pam Karlan , the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, interviewed Banks. 

The following is an edited version of the full transcript, which can be found here .

Rich Ford: Tell us about Brown v. Board of Education and why you think that its legacy is less impressive than some people might believe today in 2024.

We might think of Brown in two different dimensions. One is its significance in American society generally, and in that regard, Brown was truly transformative. It was the beginning of the end of the formally segregated system known as Jim Crow. We cannot overstate the significance of that. But we might also expect Brown to have transformed the primary and secondary schools in the United States, and to have created better opportunities for the Black children and other minorities and disadvantaged students. On that score, Brown has not been nearly as effective.

Sometimes, when I’ve taught this case, I would bring a friend to class who is an African American Stanford professor who grew up in the South, and he would talk about being in the very first class of students who had the opportunity to go to a desegregated school—in the 1960s. The students will say, “I thought Brown was decided in 1954?” But the reality was that there was virtually no desegregation for 10 full years, until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Then we had a period, from the 60s through the 70s, where we did have some desegregation. But I think it’s fair to say that since the 80s, we’ve been in retreat in terms of the effort to desegregate the schools.

Pam Karlan: If you look at the five school systems that were actually at issue in Brown itself, one of them just closed the schools altogether, rather than desegregate. You started us off by saying how important Brown was as a signal and the beginning of the modern Supreme Court as an institution that gets a lot of respect out of America, and I feel like they’re often living off the fumes of Brown , if you will.

The legislators in the South made very clear that they thought the decision in Brown was illegitimate. The Supreme Court stood up to that in a way, and became sort of the hero in this story, but the irony is that they only became the hero through not actually engaging on the ground with the challenges of trying to create integrated and quality schooling. If you look at the years immediately after Brown , we can count in single digits the number of Black students who attended schools that had any appreciable number of white students, so that’s a checkered sort of history at best in terms of desegregation.

Pam Karlan: Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown for one of the groups of plaintiffs, said it was going to take ten years to desegregate, and now here we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of Brown , and we still haven’t achieved it.

People had high hopes when Brown was young, but as Brown has become a senior citizen, perhaps those high hopes have transitioned to resignation or frustration.

Rich Ford: Rick, I think you and I are roughly the same age, and I know I attended schools that were under court order to desegregate in the late 1970s and 1980s, and that was a period of time in which the schools were getting less segregated as a result of those court orders, so we had that 10 years of massive resistance where nothing happened. Then some things did start to happen and so you could imagine why people would have felt optimistic. I think my parents were cautiously optimistic that things were improving on the score, so what happened?

That’s a big story. We have two sets of resources here that are really constraining progress. One set of resources is money, the funding for schools. The other is people—families and students—and to have effective schools for all, I think we actually do need to try to bring all of those together and not have the funding disparities. And not have people segregated based on their income levels and affluence. But we haven’t been able to do that> One factor that doesn’t get enough attention for why we haven’t been able to do that is that we’ve had an extraordinary growth of economic inequality in the period since Brown . The last half-century, we’ve seen a starker growth in inequality than at any time during our lifetimes, and we’ve also seen education become ever more important in determining people’s outcomes in life. As a result of this, parents have completely changed their strategies compared to the 1950s. Parents have really doubled down on education, in terms of their time, in terms of their resources, in terms of where they decide to live. And all of these factors have led to schools being less equal across socioeconomic classes now than they were 50 years ago.

Pam Karlan: Upper middle-class and middle-class parents have the choice of where to live. Parents who aren’t affluent don’t really have that choice, and one of the ironies is that the Supreme Court was deciding Brown at exactly the moment that there was this explosion of the suburbs.

In cities like Detroit or in Cleveland, where I’m from, there were ways to desegregate the schools, but the impediment was the idea of local control that created a boundary or a barrier, so that we were not legally permitted to do what, frankly, would make a lot of sense from the standpoint of providing education to all the citizens of the state. Local control is just a stand-in for the ways in which the law and courts have allowed people to segregate themselves and also allowed the financial resources to be segregated as well.

Pam Karlan: Can you say a little bit about cases like Parents Involved ?

Parents Involved is the case where the Supreme Court held that strict scrutiny should apply to efforts to integrate schools if they take into account individuals’ race in doing so, and many people decried Parents Involved as a perversion of Brown and a distortion of the meaning of Brown . Frankly, I don’t know if that interpretation is correct, though, because the reality is that Brown v. Board of Education was neither as progressive and anti-subordination-oriented as the people on the Left want, nor was it as colorblind as the people on the Right want. The hallmark of the decision is precisely that the decision was extremely narrow. The most plausible reading is that all it prohibited was the formal segregation of the schools in order to promote Jim Crow. That’s all it prohibited, and efforts to make it more than that on either the Left or the Right, frankly, are after-the-fact interpretations about what people want Brown to mean rather than what the Justices actually wrote.

Pam Karlan: Can you contrast Brown with what the Supreme Court does a dozen years later in Loving v. Virginia , which is a case where they really do come right out and say, ‘what’s been going on here is about white supremacy, and it’s got to stop.’

Loving is the only case where the Supreme Court has ever used the term “white supremacy” in a disparaging way. The Court, of course, had an opportunity to take a case comparable to Loving at the same time as Brown , which it declined to do. And the difference there is, of course, is the cultural context surrounding the decision. Things changed in ways that might’ve seemed unimaginable, frankly, to people living between 1954 and 1967, when you think about going from the post-World War II era to the Civil Rights Era. That was an extraordinary period of tumult, and the Court felt able to talk about miscegenation laws in a way it did not feel able to talk about segregated schools in 1954. Part of that, of course, is that miscegenation laws were already on the way out. States were already rolling back those laws.

Rich Ford: Desegregating schools requires a huge administrative apparatus and cooperation with local school districts, and fairly elaborate consent decrees and money, as you mentioned. Those were impediments that the Court didn’t face in a case like Loving .

That is very true. Brown required some enforcement, and this is an issue that we’ve struggled with as a society. You can’t have the Court simply make a decision and expect that effective or integrative schooling will result, so one of the challenges that we have to think about as a nation is how much is racial justice and education worth?  Are we willing to give up some of the local control? Are we willing to give up some of the autonomy that people have to keep their money in their district? Maybe we’re not, right? I think that’s a mistake, though, because ultimately, when we have these disparities in education, we all bear the cost of them as a nation, so if we’re all going to bear the cost, it would be sensible for us all to pitch in and try to create a solution.

Rich Ford: Integration, at least socioeconomic integration, promotes some positive educational outcomes, arguably in and of itself, so that might be an argument for continuing to push on the integration side?

Yes, this is an issue that I was thinking about when I talked about seeing families and students as resources. It is the case that the composition of the school matters for the achievement of the students within the school, so if you have a group of poor students and the class is all poor students, that, frankly, is probably not as good of a learning environment as if you were to have some middle-income or upper-income students mixed into that mix, so we need some diversity, not only in terms of race but also in terms of income and socioeconomic status and parents’ educational levels.

Rich Ford: One of the legacies of Brown has been that for many decades, we put a great deal of focus on the integration of public schools. But in today’s environment, we might need a mix of approaches, some of which would potentially involve integrated schools, but others of which might focus more on educational quality choice, and perhaps we’re stymied because people have an almost reflexive reaction to the debate, rather than one that’s more cooperative.

I think that’s right, that we do need some experimentation. We need collection of evidence. We need people to be able to evaluate the evidence with an open mind and to really be pragmatic and solution-oriented, so I think that’s all true. I want to be clear, though, that I don’t think we should give up on integration because the reality is that we haven’t tried it that long. We didn’t try it at all until the 1960s, and then we tried it for about a decade or so, and then the retreat began, so it’s not as though we’ve tried integration for 40 years, and it didn’t work.

Integration is a heavy lift. What we need to remind ourselves in that process is that racial justice is not cheap. It costs money. It costs resources. It takes time, and that’ll be true whether we go the integration route or if we arrive at integration indirectly by creating schools that are more effective for disadvantaged students so that, over time, they become more fully integrated into society.

Rich Ford: In one sense, housing desegregation was the least successful part of the Civil Rights revolution, and the problems in school desegregation are directly related to that, so maybe one way of thinking about the disappointing legacy of Brown was that the federal courts kind of reneged on the promise of Brown . But another way of looking at it is that the costs of integration of schools, given the segregation of neighborhoods, was extremely high. You know, busing was an expensive and cumbersome remedy, and a remedy that you could imagine people disliking for reasons that have nothing to do with race.

Yes, part of the resistance is very understandable. The reason I think that our situation is somewhat tragic is that it’s actually not a story of prototypical racists who are blocking progress.

It’s actually a story of impulses that every parent feels. That they want the environment they think is best for their child. They want more resources for their child rather than less, and every parent feels that, but that leads us to a situation where you can have people acting rationally based on goals that are reasonable and impulses that are understandable, but then that leads to a world that is dramatically segregated, dramatically unequal in our society, and that’s where we are. 

One possibility when I think about the relationship between housing segregation and school desegregation, is whether there is some possibility for using education to help desegregate housing, because the quality of schools in a district is a powerful determinant of the housing prices in that district, and you can see this in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Literally, when you go across a school district line, the housing prices can increase or decrease by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so if we could solve the school problem, that also could give us some leverage, maybe, on the housing problem.

Listen to the Full Podcast

Read Banks’ Recent Essay

Ralph Richard Banks (BA ’87, MA ’87) is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, and Professor, by courtesy, at the School of Education. A native of Cleveland, Ohio and a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School (JD 1994), Banks has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1998. Prior to joining the law school, he practiced law at O’Melveny & Myers, was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and clerked for a federal judge, the Honorable Barrington D. Parker, Jr. (then of the Southern District of New York). Professor Banks teaches and writes about family law, constitutional law, and race and the law. He is the author of ‘Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone’. He has a new book forthcoming: ‘The Miseducation of America: How College can Make or Break the American Dream’.

Are school nurse jobs in jeopardy? As pandemic relief expires, some are worried

The american academy of pediatrics says every school should have a full-time nurse. districts still have a long way to go, and now crucial federal funding is expiring..

School nurses are increasingly anxious their workloads might expand – or their jobs may disappear entirely – when federal pandemic relief funds for U.S. schools expire by the end of the year.

School districts have until the end of September to allocate what remains of the billions of dollars in coronavirus relief Congress sent their way in separate tranches during the pandemic, the Education Department has said. 

That deadline has prompted warnings from education advocates about looming budget shortfalls nationwide. The imminent fiscal cliff could have “ severe implications ” for students, including teacher layoffs and school closures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Though U.S. schools have long faced a shortage of nurses, the disparity eased slightly when the federal government approved Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funding, which many districts used to hire nurses. With access to those federal coffers closing, some school leaders are scrambling to find the money elsewhere to retain nurses. Districts in Oregon and Oklahoma have reportedly considered layoffs. At a city budget hearing last week, New York City education department officials warned that roughly $65 million in federal funding for about 400 school nurses is set to expire.

“We’re grateful to the stimulus funding that has allowed us to ensure every school has a school nurse on site,” Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for NYC public schools, said in a statement to USA TODAY. “And we will continue to advocate for and prioritize this need through the budget process.”

Kate King, a school nurse in Ohio and the president of the National Association of School Nurses, said that while it’s tough to pin down how many nurse salaries come from pandemic relief money, she has been hearing from nurses in districts across the country who are worried about what’s to come. 

“When districts started hiring during the pandemic, what they realized is how valuable school nurses are in a school building,” she said. “Unfortunately, when they hired nurses with ESSER funds, there was no thought of sustainability in those positions.” 

Nursing shortage, explained: The school nurse is often still out as kids' health problems like suicide, allergies soar

Pandemic eased the school nurse shortage 

About two-thirds of public schools have a full-time nurse, according to the latest survey data from the school nurses’ association. While that number is higher than some estimates of pre-pandemic staffing, it’s still below national standards. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics officially recommended schools have at least one full-time nurse.

“Every school should have a full-time nurse,” said Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst with the nonprofit group Advocates for Children of New York. “That was true before the pandemic. It’s still true.” Part's group has urged New York City Mayor Eric Adams to find money elsewhere in the budget to keep the nurses being paid with federal dollars.

The fact that federal funding is running out doesn't mean students' health needs have lessened. If anything, they have expanded in recent years, said Robin Cogan, who has worked as a New Jersey school nurse for more than two decades .

"It is very disheartening for school nurses who have spent years and years devoted to school health to be losing their jobs in this way," Cogan said. "It is so preventable.”

In rural areas, public school districts are disproportionately underresourced – only about 56% employ full-time nurses, compared to approximately 70% of urban schools, the school nurses' association says. Roughly 6% of schools nationwide don’t have any nurses on campus.

Read more: School districts address nurse shortage in creative ways

Chronic absenteeism and school nurses

The threat to school nursing jobs comes as chronic absenteeism – a problem nurses may be uniquely positioned to address – continues to grip American schools.

Research shows the number of students who miss at least 10% of the school year jumped by about 6.5 million between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years. Last week, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona acknowledged the problem and said the Biden administration is working on new resources to reduce absences. 

Chronic absenteeism has run rampant. Here's what the Biden administration is doing about it.

A study published last year in The Journal of School Nursing suggests school nurses often play a crucial role in keeping students at school. According to the study, students who routinely miss part of the school day often interact regularly with their nurse. Those close relationships give nurses the opportunity to intervene and curb absenteeism before it becomes chronic.

Leaders in districts like New York City should keep those findings in mind when they consider budget cuts, said Knoo Lee, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s nursing school and one of the authors of the research. 

“School nurses can really help out,” he said. “A lot of schools are just missing that.” 

Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for   USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele .

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NIH Announces Winners of 2023-2024 High School Mental Health Essay Contest

May 31, 2024 • Institute Update

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is pleased to announce the winners of the  2024 Speaking Up About Mental Health    essay contest. Out of more than 370 submissions across 33 states, NIH awarded 24 youth (ages 16-18) finalists with gold, silver, bronze, and honorable mention prizes.

Supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the  Eunice Kennedy Shriver  National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the essay contest invited youth to address mental health and reduce mental health stigma that young people may face when seeking mental health treatment.

The winning essays addressed complicated topics such as stigma, trauma, resilience, equity, anxiety, and more. Teens also wrote about specific ideas for improving well-being, such as broader access to leisure sports, reducing time spent on social media, and normalizing mental health treatment and care.

NIH awarded a total of $15,000 in cash prizes to gold, silver, bronze, and honorable mention recipients. Read the winning essays at  nimhd.nih.gov/EssayContest   .

Gold winners

• Max, California - Tenacity Through Tumultuousness
• Michaela, Maryland - Exposing the Impact of Social Media on Teenage Mental Health: A Journey of Self-Discovery
• Raphael, Hawaii  - Let's CHAT: Mental Health Impact on Teens Living with Speech Challenges

Silver winners

• Aditi, California – Embracing Authenticity
• Anna, New York - Change Our Approach: How Sports Can Play a Role in Mental Health
• Ciniyah, Illinois - The Roots Affect the Fruit: A Personal Journey of Trauma to Triumph
• Kathleen, Maryland - Behind A Perfect Life
• Paige, Texas - Learn to Live and Accept Your Journey
• Rylie, Maryland - Drowning in Plain Sight

Bronze winners

• Argiro, Pennsylvania - Out in the Open: A Conversation about Mental Health
• Dresden, Maryland - Normalize the Care to Destigmatize the Conditions
• Gabriel, New Jersey - Keeping My Head Up: My Experience with Dad's Brain Cancer
• Hailey, Arkansas - Access for Adolescent Athletes
• Jordan, New Jersey - A Weighted Wait
• Kathryne, North Carolina - Embracing Openness: Unveiling Silent Struggles Surrounding Mental Health
• Maya, Maryland - Speaking up for Change
• Rachel, California - Embracing the Journey Towards Mental Health Acceptance
• Savannah, New Jersey - Taking a Step Today, for a Better Tomorrow

Honorable mentions

• Agaana, Maryland – Accountability for Authority: The Responsibilities of Schools
• Gisele, Pennsylvania - Breaking the Silence
• Jillian, Illinois - Navigating Mental Illness in Teens
• Kyle, North Carolina - How the Neglect of Mental Health Within Black Communities Causes Underlying Issues
• Mason, Maryland - Social Media as a Possible Method to Reduce Mental Health Stigma
• Minsung, Georgia - Hope to Bridge the Gap

If you are in crisis and need immediate help, call or text the  988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline     at  988  (para ayuda en español, llame al 988) to connect with a trained crisis counselor. The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. The deaf and hard of hearing can contact the Lifeline using their preferred relay service or by dialing 711 and then 988.