How much does the government spend on education? What percentage of people are college educated? How are kids doing in reading and math?

Table of Contents

What is the current state of education in the us.

How much does the US spend per student?

Public school spending per student

Average teacher salary.

How educated are Americans?

People with a bachelor's degree

Educational attainment by race and ethnicity.

How are kids doing in reading and math?

Proficiency in math and reading

What is the role of the government in education?

Spending on the education system

Agencies and elected officials.

The education system in America is made up of different public and private programs that cover preschool, all the way up to colleges and universities. These programs cater to many students in both urban and rural areas. Get data on how students are faring by grade and subject, college graduation rates, and what federal, state, and local governments spending per student. The information comes from various government agencies including the National Center for Education Statistics and Census Bureau.

During the 2019-2020 school year, there was $15,810 spent on K-12 public education for every student in the US.

Education spending per k-12 public school students has nearly doubled since the 1970s..

This estimate of spending on education is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics. Instruction accounts for most of the spending, though about a third includes support services including administration, maintenance, and transportation. Spending per student varies across states and school districts. During the 2019-2020 school year, New York spends the most per student ($29,597) and Idaho spends the least ($9,690).

During the 2021-2022 school year , the average public school teacher salary in the US was $66,397 .

Instruction is the largest category of public school spending, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Adjusting for inflation, average teacher pay is down since 2010.

In 2021 , 35% of people 25 and over had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Over the last decade women have become more educated than men..

Educational attainment is defined as the highest level of formal education a person has completed. The concept can be applied to a person, a demographic group, or a geographic area. Data on educational attainment is produced by the Census Bureau in multiple surveys, which may produce different data. Data from the American Community Survey is shown here to allow for geographic comparisons.

In 2021 , 61% of the Asian 25+ population had completed at least four years of college.

Educational attainment data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey allows for demographic comparisons across the US.

In 2022, proficiency in math for eighth graders was 26.5% .

Proficiency in reading in 8th grade was 30.8% ., based on a nationwide assessment, reading and math scores declined during the pandemic..

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative data that measures student achievement. NAEP is Congressionally mandated. Tests are given in a sample of schools based on student demographics in a given school district, state, or the US overall. Testing covers a variety of subjects, most frequently math, reading, science, and writing.

In fiscal year 2020, governments spent a combined total of $1.3 trillion on education.

That comes out to $4,010 per person..

USAFacts categorizes government budget data to allocate spending appropriately and to arrive at the estimate presented here. Most government spending on education occurs at the state and local levels rather than the federal.

Government revenue and expenditures are based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Each is published annually, although due to collection times, state and local government data are not as current as federal data. Thus, when combining federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the most recent year for a combined number may be delayed.

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The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Education Law

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The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Education Law

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

What Is Education Federalism and Why Does It Matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Federalism’s Benefits and Drawbacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restructuring Education Federalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See id. at 294–305, 307–314, 322–330.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 48.

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

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

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

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

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

Id. at 358–359 tbl. 235.10.

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

Kirst, supra note 18, at 14, 36–37.

Hill, supra note 21, at 78.

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

Ryan, supra note 9, at 60.

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

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

Manna,   supra note 27, at 12–14.

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

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

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

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

Kirst, supra note 18, at 38.

Saiger, supra note 30, at 519–520.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilson, supra note 43, at 633.

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

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

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

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

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

Robinson, supra note 17, at 979–982.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See id. at 307–314.

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

See id. at 47–48, 54–55.

See id. at 44.

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

Robinson, supra note 6, at 210–220.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 31.

See id. at 1, 5–7, 179, 201.

Black, supra note 4, at 1340–1361.

Robinson, supra note 17, at 983–1005.

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

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

Robinson, supra note 17, at 985–987.

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

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

Darling-Hammond,   supra note 47, at 74.

Cohen & Moffitt,   supra note 83, at 14.

Manna , supra note 27, at 49.

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

Robinson, supra note 17, at 995–997.

Id. at 998.

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

Robinson, supra note 17, at 999.

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

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

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

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

See Robinson, supra note 17, at 985.

Id. at 1003–1004.

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

McGuinn,   supra note 7, at 29.

Robinson, supra note 5, at 927.

See id. at 938–974.

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

Robinson, supra note 5, at 984–988.

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

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

Robinson, supra note 5, at 988–992.

Id. at 992–995.

Id. at 995–997.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tenth Amendment Center

Is Education a Constitutional Right?

By: Laurence M. Vance | Published on: Oct 25, 2018 | Categories: Education

An article in the September issue of  The New Yorker  makes the case that education is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Public schools in Detroit are failing to educate students. Just like they are failing to do so in many large cities throughout the country. A case in the federal court system,  Gary B. v. Snyder , filed by Public Counsel and Sidley Austin LLP on behalf of a class of Detroit students, argues that students in Detroit public schools who failed to learn how to read were denied their due process and equal protection rights under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The case was dismissed by a federal district court in Michigan in June, but has been appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.

The plaintiffs, as well as the writer of the piece in  The New Yorker  (Jill Lepore) cite the Supreme Court case of  Plyler v . Doe  (1982). In his book  The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind  (Pantheon, 2018), Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, maintains that this case “rests among the most egalitarian, momentous, and efficacious constitutional opinions that the Supreme Court has issued throughout its entire history.”

The case came about after Texas education laws were changed in 1975 to allow the state to withhold funding from local school districts to educate the children of illegal aliens. The Court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that the revised law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The law “severely disadvantaged the children of illegal aliens” by “denying them the right to an education.”

But of course, the law didn’t deny the children of illegals the right to an education; it denied them the right to an education at taxpayers’ expense. Their parents could have educated them at home, hired a tutor, or sent them to a private school. The fact that the parents didn’t have the ability to educate their children at home and couldn’t afford to hire a tutor or send their children to a private school is immaterial.

But regardless of what the Supreme Court said, education is not a constitutional right.

The Constitution doesn’t grant rights; the Constitution guarantees rights. The Constitution specifically guarantees certain natural rights, imposes limits on the government’s power, and explicitly declares that all powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.

The United States was set up as a federal system of government where the states, through the Constitution, granted a limited number of powers to a central government. As James Madison succinctly explained in  Federalist  No. 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

There are about thirty enumerated congressional powers listed throughout the Constitution. Most of those powers are found in the eighteen paragraphs of Article I, Section 8. One concerns commerce. One concerns naturalization and bankruptcies. One concerns post offices and post roads. One concerns copyrights and patents. One concerns federal courts. One concerns maritime crimes. One concerns the governance of the District of Columbia. Four of them concern taxes and money. Six concern the militia and the military. The last one—the “elastic” clause—gives Congress the power “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”

Elsewhere in the Constitution we read that Congress may also admit new states into the Union, propose amendments to the Constitution, regulate national elections, establish courts inferior to the Supreme Court, direct the location of the place for the trial of a crime not committed within a state, declare the punishment for treason, provide the manner in which the public acts and records in each state are accepted by the others, dispose of and regulate the territory or other property of the United States, give the states consent to lay imposts or duties on imports or exports, and provide for the case of the removal, death, resignation, or inability of the president or vice president.

Everything else is reserved to the states—even without the addition of the Bill of Rights and its Tenth Amendment.

But what about the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, says that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

I would ask the same question: What about the Fourteenth Amendment? What does the Fourteenth Amendment have to do with the education of the children of illegal aliens? Absolutely nothing, of course. They are not citizens, they are not being deprived of life, liberty, or property, and they are not being denied the equal protection of the laws.

Although all states have provisions in their constitutions for public education, they do not have to have such provisions. Education is not a natural right. But whether they do or don’t have such provisions, education is strictly and entirely a state matter.

The Constitution doesn’t mention education, public schools, teachers, teachers’ unions, private schools, tutors, students, student loans, FAFSA forms, Pell Grants, Title IX, classrooms, desks, special education, curriculum, Head Start, Common Core, math and science initiatives, the Higher Education Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, school breakfast or lunch programs, teacher education, teacher certification, research grants to colleges and universities, special-education mandates, school buses, bilingual-education mandates, school accreditation, charter schools, educational vouchers, mandatory attendance laws, graduation rates, the No Child Left Behind Act, busing to achieve racial desegregation, Race to the Top funds, or a Department of Education.

And neither does the Constitution authorize the federal government to spend one penny on education.

If there is no constitutional right to receive basic necessities like housing, clothing, and food, then there is certainly no constitutional right to receive a government-provided or government-funded education.

This article was  originally published at LewRockwell.com , and is reposted here under a CreativeCommons 4.0 license .

Tags: Education , rights

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A primer on elementary and secondary education in the United States

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

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

Who does what?

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

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

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

Local School Districts

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

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

State Governments

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

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

Federal Government

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

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

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

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

Non-Governmental Actors

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

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

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

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

Paying for school

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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The 14th Amendment Protects the Right to a Public Education

Over the years, the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution has had an enormous impact on protecting individual rights in public elementary and secondary education. This has occurred through the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the incorporation of other rights (like freedom of speech) to the states through the 14th Amendment.

Equal Protection Clause

The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment provides that a state may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It applies to public elementary and secondary schools, as they are considered to be state actors. In 1954, the Supreme Court interpreted the Equal Protection Clause’s requirements in  Brown v. Board of Education . In perhaps one of the most famous and important cases issued by the Court, it stated:

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs…are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

That language, and the Court’s decision, had a dramatic impact on public education. Schools were required to end the discriminatory practice of segregating students based on race. While segregation was more prevalent in some states than in others, all public schools in all states that had segregated students needed to desegregate, or face claims that they were in violation of the 14th Amendment. What followed was roughly 50 years of desegregation efforts in public schools, and numerous court decisions regarding the constitutionality of those desegregation efforts.

Over time, the focus evolved from ending and remedying the vestiges of discriminatory practices to integration efforts that sought to promote the diversity of the student population in public schools. In some instances, these integration efforts were voluntary, meaning they were done by schools that had not segregated students in the past. These integration efforts continue to this day, and the predominant legal issues revolve around the extent to which race can be used as a factor in the assignment of students to certain schools in order to diversify the student body.

The language, and the logic, of the  Brown v. Board  decision also found its way into other types of Equal Protection claims. For example, in the mid-1970s, students with disabilities challenged their exclusion from public school on equal protection grounds. Two very influential lower court decisions,  PARC v Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , and  Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia , relied on  Brown v. Board  and determined that students with disabilities could not be excluded from public school because of their disabilities.

Those court decisions led to a federal statute that imposed similar requirements on all public schools that accepted certain federal funds. That law turned into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which today applies to all public schools. The law requires public schools to provide all students with disabilities with a  Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) . It also prohibits schools from expelling or suspending students with disabilities for longer than 10 days, when the student’s actions are caused by their disability.

Due Process Clause

Due process is another area of the 14th Amendment that has had a dramatic impact on individual rights in public education. The Due Process Clause says that states may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to have substantive and procedural protections. With substantive due process, the 14th Amendment protects a parent’s right to direct the educational upbringing of their child. Because of this right, the Supreme Court ruled that a state statute that prohibited the teaching of foreign language, and a state statute that required all students to attend public schools, as opposed to private schools, violated the 14th Amendment. See  Meyer v. Nebraska  and  Pierce v. Society of Sisters . The Court also ruled that a state statute that required Amish children to attend school past the eighth grade violated the substantive due process rights, and the religious freedom rights, of Amish parents to direct the educational and religious upbringing of their children. See  Wisconsin v. Yoder .

As a result of these substantive due process protections, all states currently have exceptions in their state compulsory attendance statutes that require students of certain ages to attend school. The exceptions allow for attendance at private schools, religious schools, and homeschool to meet the compulsory attendance requirements.

The procedural due process protections of the 14th Amendment have also played an important role in public education, particularly in the areas of student discipline and teacher employment. With student discipline, the Supreme Court has ruled that students have a “legitimate entitlement to a public education as a property right.” See  Goss v. Lopez . That right may not be taken away without first providing due process protections, which are generally notice of what the student is accused of doing, and the opportunity to be heard before the student is disciplined.

The required amount of notice and opportunity to be heard increases as the severity of the discipline increases. With minor disciplinary actions, an informal discussion with the principal may be sufficient to meet the requirements. For more severe discipline, such as expulsion, a more detailed hearing is generally required to give the student a chance to present evidence, and to cross-examine witnesses. As a result of these constitutional due process protections, all states have enacted statutes and regulations that provide due process protections for students during the discipline process.

A similar due process right applies to tenured teachers at public elementary and secondary schools. Once a teacher receives tenured status, they have a property interest in their continued employment, and must be provided with notice and a hearing before it may be taken away from them. See  Perry v. Sindermann .

Incorporation

The third area where the 14th Amendment has impacted public schools is in the application of other constitutional rights to the states through the 14th Amendment, via a concept known as  incorporation . Perhaps the biggest impact here has been the First Amendment’s right to free speech, although other protections like freedom of religion have also made their mark on public education.

In the area of free speech, the Supreme Court has said that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” See  Tinker v. Des Moines . While courts do give some deference to school administrators in making decisions about whether to prohibit certain student speech, the First Amendment requires schools to justify their decisions when they infringe on free speech rights. The level of justification required depends on the nature of the speech, and the nature of the restriction.

For example, in  Tinker v. Des Moines , students were protesting the Vietnam War by wearing armbands, and the school disciplined the students for doing so. The Supreme Court ruled that the discipline violated the First Amendment, because the school could not show that the speech could reasonably be expected to cause a substantial disruption with school activities or the rights of others. By contrast, in  Morse v. Frederick , the Supreme Court deferred to a school administrator’s judgment that a sign that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” promoted drug use, and upheld the discipline of the students that displayed the sign at a school event.

These are just a few examples of the many ways that the 14th Amendment impacts individual rights in public education. Many of these issues arise on a daily basis in public schools, and the 14th Amendment provides some constitutional protections of individual rights that schools must take into account when addressing them.

Scott F. Johnson

Scott F. Johnson is a Professor of Law at Purdue Global Law School (formerly Concord Law School), where he teaches Education Law and Special Education Law, among other topics. He has written a number of books and articles in the education law area. Professor Johnson’s law practice included education and special education cases, and he currently serves as a special education hearing officer for a state agency.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the view of Purdue Global Law School.

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Report | Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment

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

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

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Summary 

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

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

Following are key findings from the report:

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

We conclude the report with final thoughts and next steps.

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

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

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

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

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

A funding primer

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

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

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

A quick note on data sources

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

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

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

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

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

The data underlying the figure.

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

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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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García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019.  U.S. Schools Struggle to Hire and Retain Teachers:   The Second Report in the ‘Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ Series . Economic Policy Institute, April 2019.

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Teaching Students About Concubines: Unveiling the History

Teaching students about the iconic “martin” show, teaching students about karen duffy: an inspiration for overcoming challenges, teaching students about stingray barbs: uncovering the mysteries of a unique marine adaptation, 12 colleges with the most nba players, what you can buy with the 529 plan, teaching students about shaun alexander: a lesson in perseverance and success, how to set up and start using a cash app account, teaching students about sean avery: embracing unconventional lessons in sportsmanship, how to become a tafe teacher, why isn’t education a constitutional right.

education in the united states there is no federal

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are our unalienable rights. But where does education fit in? It may be surprising, but the right to a quality education is not considered a constitutional right in the United States, even though it is included in all 50 states’ constitutions. To understand why, we’ll investigate the history and regard of education as a constitutional right here in the US, and abroad.

The History of Education as a Constitutional Right

During the reunification of the former Confederacy and the Union states, Congress made it a requirement that the Southern states include education as a right in their constitutions. This condition was explicit, and in fact, three states were denied entry to the Union until they corrected their omission of education as a right. During this time, Congress released a report from the Committee on Education that even expressed “…that the general and universal diffusion of education and intelligence among the people is the surest guarantee of the enhancement, increase, purity and preservation of great principles of republican liberty.” This is a powerful statement and a clear recognition of the importance of education in a country. Still, though, education is not mentioned in our federal constitution.

Education as a Right Internationally

Education is considered a human right by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the   International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights . Education is also included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – a human rights treaty that describes the rights to which children are entitled. Remarkably, the United States is the only member country that has yet to ratify the treaty. Additionally, 193 countries mention “education” in their constitutions – including all 30 countries that outrank the US in math and science test scores. One of the benefits of this inclusion is, according to Pearson , the creation of a national culture of education, and the recognition that “the cultural assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or undermine it than the system can do on its own.”

Education in the Courts

Almost every US state has been involved with a lawsuit based on education inequality. However, only one such case has made it to the Supreme Court. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez was a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the way states distribute funding for schools is not unconstitutional, because there is no basis for the assertion that education is a right under the U.S. Constitution. The case was brought forth by a group of (mostly Latino) parents that charged the state with violating constitutional rights by providing more resources to wealthier school districts than to low-income districts. This ruling by the Supreme Court is regarded by some as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions since 1960. “It played a major role in creating the separate and unequal schools that exist today,” says Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California.

Many scholars point out that the omission of education from our nation’s constitution is not an oversight – it is intentional. It has been a long-held belief that education should be locally controlled and defined by each state. Leaving education out of the federal constitution, though, ignores the responsibility of the government to ensure all of America’s children, no matter where they live, are provided the opportunity for an education that will prepare them not only for a successful career but to become a productive and informed citizen.

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FactCheck.org

FactChecking Biden’s State of the Union

His speech included misleading claims on inflation, crime, clean energy investments, wages and other subjects.

By Robert Farley , D'Angelo Gore , Saranac Hale Spencer , Catalina Jaramillo , Kate Yandell , Jessica McDonald , Alan Jaffe , Eugene Kiely and Lori Robertson

Posted on March 8, 2024

Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.

In his final State of the Union address prior to the November general election, President Joe Biden focused on Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, the economy, reproductive rights, prescription drug costs and border security. Biden also criticized many of the policies of “my predecessor” — without naming former President Donald Trump. But he sometimes stretched the facts or left out important context.

  • Biden boasted that under his leadership “wages keep going up.” But over the entirety of Biden’s presidency, wages are down when adjusted for inflation.
  • Biden claimed that the more recent U.S. inflation rate of about 3% is the “lowest in the world!” But several nations reported lower rates than the U.S. in December.
  • He again claimed to have “cut the federal deficit by over $1 trillion” — although declining deficits have mostly been the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending.
  • Biden said he had created a “record” 15 million new jobs. His 14.8 million new jobs is a record for any president in the first three years, but it’s not the highest job growth rate that any president has achieved in that period of time.
  • He suggested that “many” of the new jobs in U.S. semiconductor factories will be “paying $100,000 a year and don’t require a college degree.” But an industry trade group previously reported that only workers with bachelor’s or graduate degrees make that much.
  • Biden said that, “My policies have attracted $650 billion in private sector investment in clean energy [and] advanced manufacturing.” Those are announcements about intentions to invest, not actual investments.
  • Biden highlighted recent decreases in murder and violent crime rates, but neglected to mention that they are still coming down from their pandemic peak.
  • Biden omitted context of a Trump comment following an Iowa school shooting.
  • The president said billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of only 8.2%, but that’s a White House calculation that includes earnings on unsold stock as income.
  • Biden said that because of the Affordable Care Act, over 100 million people can no longer be denied health insurance due to preexisting conditions. But pre-ACA, employer plans covered many of those people and couldn’t deny policies.
  • Biden said he was “cutting our carbon emissions in half by 2030.” That’s the U.S. goal, relative to 2005 emissions, but studies suggest current policies will not reduce emissions by that much.

Biden spoke to Congress on March 7.

Biden boasted that “wages keep going up, inflation keeps coming down.” But over the entirety of Biden’s presidency, wages are down when adjusted for inflation.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers  went up 14.8%  during Biden’s first three years in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But inflation ate up all that gain and more. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually  declined 3.1%  since Biden took office.

The inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings of  production and nonsupervisory workers — who make up 81% of  all employees in the private sector — and the inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings of all employees have both been on the rise for the last year and a half, with real weekly earnings rising 1.5% since hitting the low point under Biden in June 2022.

Inflation has also moderated greatly since hitting a peak increase of 9% for the 12 months ending in June 2022, the biggest such increase in over 40 years. The unadjusted Consumer Price Index rose 3.1% in the 12 months ending in January, the most recent figure available, and as Biden said, it has been trending down.

But looking at the entire three years of Biden’s presidency so far, the  Consumer Price Index  has risen a total of 18%.

Biden claimed that inflation in the U.S. “has dropped from 9% to 3% – the lowest in the world!”

The year-over-year inflation rate was 3.1% in January, down from 9% in June 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that’s still higher than the 1.4% rate when Biden took office.

Furthermore, the current U.S. inflation rate is not the lowest of any country.

education in the united states there is no federal

December data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that Italy — a member of the G7, a group of seven of the world’s most advanced economies — had a lower year-over-year inflation rate than the U.S. While the U.S. inflation rate was 3.3% for the 12 months ending that month, Italy’s was 0.6%.

Other countries with “advanced economies,” as defined by the International Monetary Fund, and millions of residents, including Denmark (0.7%), Lithuania (1.2%), Belgium (1.4%) and South Korea (3.2%), also had lower inflation rates than the U.S., as of December.

Even by the White House’s own calculations , which adjust for differences in how countries calculate inflation, Biden’s claim was inexact.

In a Jan. 11 post on the social media platform called X, the White House Council of Economic Advisers wrote that, as of November, the latest month with complete G7 data, “both core & headline U.S. inflation were among the lowest in the G7” — not the lowest.

That’s because Italy had a lower headline inflation rate than the U.S., according to the CEA’s post. Supporting documentation provided by the White House shows that Italy’s rate was 0.5% and the U.S. rate was almost 2.5%.

Headline inflation – unlike core inflation – factors in food and energy prices.

Biden continues to misleadingly claim, as he did during his address, that’s he’s “already cut the federal deficit by over $1 trillion.”

Budget deficits have declined from the record spending gap of $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020, the last full fiscal cycle before Biden took office. In FY 2021, the deficit was about $2.8 trillion; in FY 2022, it was almost $1.4 trillion; and in FY 2023, which ended Sept. 30, it was roughly $1.7 trillion.

But as we’ve explained several times , the primary reason that deficits went down by about $350 billion in Biden’s first year, and by another $1.3 trillion in his second, is because of emergency COVID-19 funding that expired in those years.

Budget experts said that if not for more pandemic and infrastructure spending championed by Biden, deficits would have been even lower than they were in fiscal 2021 and 2022.

As of February, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that under current law, the deficit would fall to $1.6 trillion in fiscal 2024, rise to $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025, then return to $1.6 trillion in fiscal 2027. “Thereafter, deficits steadily mount, reaching $2.6 trillion in 2034,” the CBO said.

‘Record’ Jobs

As he has done in recent speeches , Biden boasted that he has created a “record” 15 million new jobs in his first three years in office. He frequently adds on the campaign trail that that’s more than any president had created in three years or in the first four-year term .

“Fifteen million new jobs in just three years – a record, a record!” he said on Thursday night, right after saying “our economy is literally the envy of the world.”

He’s right on the new jobs — to a point.

Since Biden took office, the U.S. economy added 14.8 million jobs (not quite 15 million) — which is a record number of jobs, at least since 1939, for any president in his first three or four years in office, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that go back to January 1939.

But Biden isn’t accounting for population and job growth. Other presidents have seen a greater percentage increase.

The 14.8 million additional jobs under Biden represent a growth rate of 10.3%, as measured from January 2021, when Biden took office, through January 2024, the latest month for which data are available from the BLS. While impressive, the 10.3% growth rate isn’t as high as under some past presidents when there were fewer jobs.

In President Jimmy Carter’s only four years in office, from January 1977 to January 1981, the U.S. added 10.3 million jobs. That’s an increase of 12.8%. In Carter’s first three years, the U.S. added 10.1 million jobs, or 12.5%.

In President Lyndon Johnson’s only full term in office, from January 1965 to January 1969, the U.S. economy added 9.9 million jobs — a 16.5% job growth. In the first three years of that term, from January 1965 to January 1968, the U.S. added 7.2 million jobs, which was an increase of 12.1%.

In President Bill Clinton’s first term, from January 1993 through January 1997, the U.S. added 11.6 million jobs, an increase of 10.5%. That’s a slightly higher rate of job growth than in Biden’s first three years. But in Clinton’s first three years, the number of jobs increased by 7.8%, which is smaller.

However, the U.S. added a total of 22.9 million jobs in Clinton’s two terms, an increase of 20.9%, from 109.8 million jobs in January 1993 to 132.7 million in January 2001. It remains to be seen if job growth continues at such a pace under Biden in a second term, if he wins reelection.

Semiconductor Jobs

On multiple occasions , Biden has left the misleading impression that new jobs in U.S. semiconductor factories would pay above $100,000 annually for those without a college degree.

During his speech, he said: “Private companies are now investing billions of dollars to build new chip factories here in America, creating tens of thousands of jobs. Many of those jobs paying $100,000 a year and don’t require a college degree.”

In a 2021 report , the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group, and Oxford Economics found that 277,000 people worked in the industry with an average salary of $170,000 in 2020. While the report said industry workers “consistently earn more than the U.S. average at all education attainment levels,” it noted that “average wages vary based on educational attainment.”

But only those with a bachelor’s degree ($120,000) or a graduate degree (over $160,000) had wages that topped six figures. Workers with a high school education or less could expect to earn a little more than $40,000. Those with at least some college experience could make $60,000, while earning an associate’s degree could increase that to $70,000.

According to the report, only 20% of semiconductor workers at the time had not attended college. Conversely, 56% of workers had a bachelor’s or graduate degree.

Clean Energy/Advanced Manufacturing Jobs

Biden boasted that, “My policies have attracted $650 billion in private sector investment in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of jobs here in America.” But those are announcements about intentions to invest, not actual investments.

The policies Biden is referring to are mainly the CHIPS Act , which includes $39 billion to fund manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and $11 billion for semiconductor research and development, the Inflation Reduction Act , which includes an estimated $369 billion to combat climate change while also investing in “energy security,” the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan , and the  bipartisan infrastructure law , which included  $550 billion  in new infrastructure spending.

The claim about the amount of private sector investment in clean energy and manufacturing that those policies have created is based on a White House tabulation of public announcements about investments, or as a White House press release puts it, “commitments to invest.”

“These are announced plans for investments,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin , president of the center-right American Action Forum, told us in a phone interview. “They may take years to happen, or they may not happen at all.”

“He makes it seem like the investments have happened already or that they are happening this year, and they are not,” Holtz-Eakin said. “They may not come to fruition. Market conditions change.”

And, he said, while $650 billion sounds like a lot of investment, with gross capital stock in the U.S. over $69 trillion, even if that amount were invested this year, “it wouldn’t exactly transform the economy.”

Biden highlighted the continued drop in murder and violent crime rates since he took office, but he left out some important context.

“Last year the murder rate showed the sharpest decrease in history,” Biden said. “Violent crime fell to one of its the lowest levels in more than 50 years.”

It’s true that there has been a sharp decline in murder and homicide rates recently.

The number of homicides was 10% lower in 2023 than in 2022, according to a January report from the Council on Criminal Justice, which gathered data from 32 participating cities.

And, as we’ve written before , a November report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association showed a 10.7% decline in the number of murders from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, 2023, compared with the same time period in 2022, in 69 large U.S. cities.

Similarly, violent crime has also gone down, according to the most recent data released by the FBI, and the Council on Criminal Justice report found that there were “3% fewer reported aggravated assaults in 2023 than in 2022 and 7% fewer gun assaults in 11 reporting cities. Reported carjacking incidents fell by 5% in 10 reporting cities but robberies and domestic violence incidents each rose 2%.”

But in both cases, the homicide and violent crime rates are higher than they were in 2019 — the year before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

While it’s unclear exactly why, there was a sharp increase in homicide and violent crime during the pandemic that may have been broadly due to the wide availability of guns and the insecurity brought on by the pandemic, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice.

While Biden was correct in pointing out a recent decrease in murder and violent crime, he didn’t account for the preceding increase during the pandemic.

Trump’s ‘Get Over It’ Comment

While speaking about the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and other gun violence, Biden said, “Meanwhile, my predecessor told the NRA he’s proud he did nothing on guns when he was president. After another school shooting in Iowa recently, he said — when asked what to do about it — he said, ‘Just get over it.’”

But Biden omitted much of what Trump said after the Jan. 4 shooting at Perry High School in Iowa, where a 17-year-old student killed a sixth-grader and injured four other students and the principal.

The following day, at a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump offered his “support and deepest sympathies” to the victims of the school shooting. “We’re really with you as much as anybody can be. It’s a very terrible thing that happened. It’s just terrible to see that happening,” Trump said. “That’s just horrible. It’s so surprising to see it here.”

He added, “But we have to get over it. We have to move forward. But to the relatives, and to all of the people who are devastated right now, to the point they can’t breathe, they can’t live, we are with you all the way.”

Taxes Paid by Billionaires

As he  has said  many times  before , Biden claimed that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of 8.2%, less than the rate paid by “a teacher, a sanitation worker, or a nurse.” But that’s not the average rate in the current tax system; it’s a White House calculation that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income.

When looking only at income, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in the income groups below them, as  we’ve explained . Biden’s point — which he doesn’t make clear — is that the current tax system does not tax earnings on assets, such as stock, until that asset is sold, at which point they are subject to capital gains taxes. Until stocks and assets are sold, any earnings are referred to as “unrealized” gains.

The president has used the 8% figure to argue that wealthy households, those worth over $100 million,  should pay  a  25% minimum tax , as calculated on both standard income and unrealized investment income combined.

The problem with the current system, the White House has said, is that unrealized gains could go untaxed forever if wealthy people hold on to them and pass them on to heirs when they die. 

Under what’s called  stepped-up basis , the value of an asset is adjusted to the fair market value at the time of the inheritance. This wipes out any taxes on the unrealized gains that accumulated from the time the investor bought the asset and the time it was inherited.

When we wrote about this last year,  Erica York , a senior economist and research manager at the Tax Foundation, explained that wealthy households can also borrow money against the assets they own “to consume their wealth without paying tax.” After the family member passes away, the assets can go to heirs, who won’t have to pay taxes on the unrealized gains. York referred to the strategy as “buy, borrow, die.”

Biden’s brief talking point leaves the misleading impression that billionaires are only paying 8% on average in federal taxes under the current tax system.

Preexisting Conditions

Biden said that because of the Affordable Care Act, “over 100 million of you can no longer be denied health insurance because of preexisting conditions,” claiming that Trump wants to repeal the ACA and take away this protection.

The 100 million figure is  an estimate  of how many Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid have preexisting conditions. But if the ACA were eliminated, only those buying their own plans on the individual, or nongroup, market would immediately  be at risk  of being denied insurance.

The ACA instituted sweeping protections for those with preexisting conditions, prohibiting insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on health status. Those protections were most important for the individual market. Even before the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.

We last wrote about this issue in December, when Biden said “over 100 million people” had protections for their preexisting conditions “only” because of the ACA, a figure he also used during the 2020 campaign.

Again, those with employer plans did have protections before the ACA. The law’s broad protections would benefit people who lost their jobs or retired early and found themselves seeking insurance on the individual market. As of 2022, 20 million people, or about  6.3%  of the U.S. population, got coverage on the individual market.

As for Trump, he has said he wants to get rid of the law, posting on social media in November that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the ACA. Trump said he was “seriously looking at alternatives,” but he hasn’t provided a plan. And he never released one while he was president, either.

Given what Trump has backed in the past, he may well support a plan that wouldn’t be as comprehensive as the ACA and would lead to an increase in the uninsured and fewer protections for those with health conditions. But Biden makes the assumption Trump wouldn’t replace the ACA with anything at all.

Carbon Emissions

In one of his few, short references to climate change in the speech, Biden said, “I’m cutting our carbon emissions in half by 2030.”

Biden is likely referring to the  emissions target  for heat-trapping greenhouse gases his administration set for the U.S. in April 2021 as part of rejoining the  Paris Agreement , the international accord that ideally aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — and from which Trump had officially  withdrawn  the country in 2019. The goal under Biden is to reduce American emissions by 50% to 52% from 2005 levels by 2030.

The Biden administration has made substantial progress in meeting the goal, most notably with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation that  includes   investments  in clean energy. But as we’ve  written , when the president has previously claimed the U.S. is “on track” to achieve its Paris goal, estimates suggest existing policies will not quite get the country all the way there.

“Based on Congressional action and currently finalized regulations, we are not on track to meet 50-52% below 2005 by 2030,”  Jesse Jenkins , who leads the Princeton Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, told us in an email last April. Jenkins said then it was possible “the gap could be closed” once certain rules are finalized and others are proposed. The Biden administration, however, has recently announced or is reportedly planning changes that some say would weaken rules related to  vehicle  and  gas power plant  emissions.

In a  January update , the research firm Rhodium Group estimated that under current policy, the U.S. will cut emissions 29% to 42% below 2005 levels in 2030.

A recent  analysis  by Carbon Brief, a U.K.-based climate-focused website, similarly projected that if Biden were reelected, the U.S. would get to a 43% reduction. That’s much higher than a second term for Trump — who, assuming he would undo Biden’s policies, would cut emissions by just 28% — but also still not to the full halfway mark.

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“ FACT SHEET: President Biden Sets 2030 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Target Aimed at Creating Good-Paying Union Jobs and Securing U.S. Leadership on Clean Energy Technologies .” White House. 22 Apr 2021.

“ The Paris Agreement .” United Nations Climate Change. Accessed 8 Mar 2024.

Pompeo, Michael R. “ On the U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement .” Press release. U.S. Department of State. 4 Nov 2019.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “ Warming Beyond 1.5 C Harmful, But Not a Point of No Return, as Biden Claims  .” FactCheck.org. 27 Apr 2023.

Davenport, Coral. “ Biden Administration Is Said to Slow Early Stage of Shift to Electric Cars .” New York Times. 17 Feb 2024.

Friedman, Lisa. “ E.P.A. to Exempt Existing Gas Plants From Tough New Rules, for Now .” New York Times. 29 Feb 2024.

Kolus, Hannah et al. “ Pathways to Net-Zero: US Emissions Beyond 2030 .” Rhodium Group. 23 Jan 2024.

Evans, Simon and Verner Viisainen. “ Analysis: Trump election win could add 4bn tonnes to US emissions by 2030 .” Carbon Brief. 6 Mar 2024.

Robertson, Lori. “ Biden’s Tax Rate Comparison for Billionaires and Schoolteachers .” FactCheck.org. Updated 16 Mar 2023.

Biden, Joe (@POTUS). “ A billionaire minimum tax of just 25% would raise $440 billion over the next 10 years. Imagine what we could do if we just made billionaires pay their taxes like everyone else .” X. 30 Nov 2023.

Tax Foundation. “ Step-Up In Basis .” Accessed 7 Mar 2024.

Lopez, Ernesto and Bobby Boxerman. “ Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2023 Update .” Council on Criminal Justice. Jan 2024.

Kiely, Eugene et al. “ Biden’s Numbers, January 2024 Update .” FactCheck.org. 25 Jan 2024.

Major Cities Chiefs Association.  Violent Crime Survey — National Totals, January 1 to September 30, 2023, and 2022 . Accessed 22 Jan 2024.

Major Cities Chiefs Association.  Violent Crime Survey — National Totals, January 1 to December 31, 2020, and 2019 . Accessed 22 Jan 2024.

Grawert, Ames and Noah Kim. “ Myths and Realities: Understanding Recent Trends in Violent Crime .” Brennan Center for Justice. Updated 9 May 2023.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Consumer price indices. All items, percentage change on the same period of the previous year . Accessed 7 Mar 2024.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. All items in U.S. city average, all urban consumers, seasonally adjusted . Accessed 7 Mar 2024.

Council of Economic Advisers (@WhiteHouseCEA). “ Measured on an apples-to-apples HICP basis to allow global comparisons, both core & headline U.S. inflation were among the lowest in the G7 in November, the latest month with complete G7 data .” X. 11 Jan 2024.

Congressional Budget Office. The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034 . 7 Feb 2024.

Robertson, Lori. “ Biden’s Misleading Talking Point on $100K No-Degree Jobs .” FactCheck.org. 26 Oct 2023.

Semiconductor Industry Association and Oxford Economics. “ Chipping In: The Positive Impact of the Semiconductor Industry on the American Workforce and How Federal Industry Incentives Will Increase Domestic Jobs .” May 2021.

“ Remarks by President Biden at a Campaign Event | Henderson, NV .” The White House. 4 Feb 2024. 

“ Remarks by President Biden at the National Governors Association Winter Meeting .” The White House. 23 Feb 2024. 

“ Remarks by President Biden at a Campaign Event | Las Vegas, NV. ” The White House. 4 Feb 2024.

“ Remarks by President Biden During Greet with MGM Resorts Management and Culinary Leaders | Las Vegas, NV .” The White House. 5 Feb 2024.

“ Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject .” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 8 Mar 2024.

C-SPAN. “Former President Trump Holds Rally in Sioux Center, Iowa.” 5 Jan 2024.

Eller, Donnelle. “Trump sends ‘deepest sympathies’ over Perry school shooting: ‘But we have to get over it.’” Des Moines Register. Updated 8 Jan 2024.

Savage, Charlie. “Trump Administration imposes Ban on Bump Stocks.” New York Times. 18 Dec 2018.

Tumin, Remy, Victor Mather and Leah McBride Mensching. “Sixth Grader Killed and Five Others Injured in Iowa School Shooting.” New York Times. 4 Jan 2024.

Avalere. “ Repeal of ACA’s Pre-Existing Condition Protections Could Affect Health Security of Over 100 Million People .” Press release. 23 Oct 2018.

Robertson, Lori. “ Biden Misleads on Preexisting Conditions .” FactCheck.org. 1 Sep 2020.

“ Pre-Existing Conditions .” Department of Health and Human Services website. Updated 17 Mar 2022.

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“ Trump Says He Will Renew Efforts to Replace ‘Obamacare’ If He Wins a Second Term .” AP News, 27 Nov 2023.

How creating the new FAFSA unraveled

education in the united states there is no federal

Congress tasked the incoming Biden administration with carrying out one of the most consequential updates to the federal financial aid system.

The project was ambitious. The budget was lean. But delivering the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid — a simpler, shorter version of the decades-old form — could have been a major win for the administration. Instead, it has been a major headache .

The financial aid form debuted in December 2023, more than a year later than promised. It contains technical errors that make it impossible for some families to complete the application. Submissions are piling up at the Education Department, where officials are behind in processing applications, preventing colleges from issuing financial aid awards. A federal watchdog has launched two investigations and lawmakers are furious.

Congressional Republicans accuse the Biden administration of being so preoccupied with canceling student loans that it bungled the implementation of the new FAFSA, a key step for students to gain access to grants, scholarships and loans. The administration, meanwhile, blames lawmakers for setting unrealistic deadlines and denying requests for more resources. Higher education experts say that both arguments are valid and that there is enough blame to go around.

“Both administrations, Congress and the contractors all played a role in the mess,” said Bryce McKibben, who helped write the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020 while working for Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “We drafted a transformative yet imperfect law but should have given it more time and funding to be implemented.”

Across two administrations

Although the Biden administration did the heavy lifting on the new FAFSA, the project started taking shape during the Trump era.

Streamlining the FAFSA was a top priority for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). The now-retired politician introduced legislation in 2018 to reduce the 108-question form. The application had long been derided as too complicated and too labor-intensive for families , asking for detailed tax information.

To support Alexander’s effort, the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office created a mobile app in 2018 with the capacity to eventually pivot to a shortened FAFSA, according to Arthur Wayne Johnson , who led the office at the time and is now running for Congress.

In a letter sent Thursday to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Johnson claims his office developed a short form in 2018 that included calculations to deliver more grant aid to students, which could have served as a framework for the new FAFSA later approved by Congress.

“This mobile app cloud-based technology and system, with fully functioning FAFSA, was handed over to the Biden administration ... and killed off with malicious negligence,” Johnson said.

While employees at the Federal Student Aid office and congressional staffers confirmed the existence of the shortened form, some said it had little utility because there was no meaningful alignment with the law Congress passed in December 2020. The Biden administration retired the app in 2022 due to low usage and effectively scrapped the short form.

The Education Department said it assessed its options — including using the short form — and determined that substantial system changes were needed to revamp the financial aid form.

The 2020 legislation, dubbed the FAFSA Simplification Act, pared down the number of questions from 108 to 36 and increased the amount of income shielded from a formula used to determine aid eligibility. The changes expanded access to the Pell Grant , a form of aid for undergraduates with exceptional financial need.

How the FAFSA is changing

  • Some applicants will answer as few as 18 questions on the form, down from as many as 103 questions on the 2022-2023 FAFSA.
  • 610,000 students from low-income backgrounds will receive Pell Grants for the first time because of changes to eligibility guidelines.
  • Pell Grant recipients will receive more aid, with nearly 1.5 million more students receiving the maximum Pell Grant of $7,395 for 2023-2024.
  • Approximately 300,000 students who are experiencing homelessness or are unable to obtain their parents’ income information because of estrangement will have an easier time completing the FAFSA.

Congress told the Education Department to have all of the work wrapped up by October 2022. Despite warnings from staff in the student aid office that it would be impossible to meet that deadline, a Trump administration official assured lawmakers it could be done, according to three people involved in the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Lawmakers only expected the Education Department to redesign the application and update the underlying formula, according to people involved in negotiations, not replace the entire processing system.

“On the one hand, if you want a better-run, efficient program ... the system needs to be updated. Now, did that update need to happen to make the improvements for the FAFSA? No,” said one congressional aide, who was involved in negotiations and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

But the Education Department said the old system, which used an outdated programming language, would have hindered implementation of the new FAFSA. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office said the older system was among the 10 federal systems in most need of modernization.

Multiple priorities

When the Biden administration took over in 2021, former student aid staffers said the FAFSA update was treated as a purely technocratic venture that civil servants could manage on their own. Meanwhile, senior leaders at the department were also focused on other priorities, including a litany of new regulations and cleaning up poorly run student loan forgiveness programs.

Staffers said they tried to convince senior officials of the need for more time to complete the technology upgrades necessary to finish the new financial aid application. The student aid office wanted two extra years. Department officials asked Congress for one.

Lawmakers granted the request in June 2021 after learning for the first time that the department was remodeling the entire FAFSA system infrastructure, said McKibben, now the senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center at Temple University.

To build out the new processing system, the Education Department tapped General Dynamics Information Technology, Accenture Federal Services, Peraton Enterprise Solutions and Jazz Solutions. When the vendors flagged problems in developing the system or missed deadlines, student aid staff said they felt like it was sometimes difficult to get political leadership to pay attention.

In August 2022, President Biden unveiled a plan to forgive up to $20,000 per recipient in federal student loans. The White House that fall pressed the student aid office to deliver a flawless process, according to three people familiar with the matter. That meant peeling off a few people from other projects, including the new FAFSA.

The Education Department pushed back against assertions that student debt relief contributed to delays in FAFSA, saying it played no role. The department said it made significant progress on the financial aid project in the summer and fall of 2022, including releasing guidelines to help students prepare for changes to the calculation of the formula for the need-based grant aid.

But Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the House Education Committee, said the focus on debt relief was a problem. “FAFSA imploded because the Biden administration has been so focused on marketing its flashy free college gimmicks that it forgot about doing anything to help students and families,” she said.

Some higher education advocates say congressional Republicans placed the Federal Student Aid office at a disadvantage by refusing to provide additional funding in 2022 to finish the FAFSA update.

“Legislators, appropriators put them in a bad spot,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the Education Trust, an advocacy group. “The department was scrambling, trying to do all of this additional effort with no additional resources.”

Republicans had agreed to increase the office’s budget, but with a caveat that not a dime could be spent on Biden’s debt relief program, according to congressional staffers. Democrats and the White House balked at the offer, accusing the GOP of reneging on a promise not to include any conditions that were not featured in prior budget bills.

Foxx has pushed back against the assertions that a dearth of funding created the problems with the FAFSA. Poor management, she insists, is the source of the botched rollout.

In March 2023, the Education Department was still struggling with the FAFSA upgrades and announced the form would not debut until December , two months later than the traditional Oct. 1 rollout of the aid application. A person familiar with the project said problems persisted with General Dynamics Information Technology, which department officials had asked to bring on more engineers and project managers to stay on track.

A GDIT spokesperson declined to comment and referred questions to the Education Department.

In early 2023, the department had turned to U.S. Digital Service, created after the disastrous Healthcare.gov rollout to aid government agencies with technical projects. The tech agency helped with the FAFSA timeline and oversaw contractors on the project, according to the department.

A GAO report in June raised concerns about the Education Department staying on schedule and failing to account for the costs of the more than $336 million upgrade. To help it meet the December goal, records show the department hired Jazz Solutions to integrate the new system — work that experts say should have long been completed.

Deadline time

As the release date neared, lawmakers, colleges and other stakeholders say the Education Department kept them in the dark. Despite regular briefings to Congress on the FAFSA, congressional aides say the department did not divulge the problems it was contending with. College access and financial aid groups, not department officials, told lawmakers about the agency’s failure to update a crucial income formula in the FAFSA, these aides say. The department announced in January that it would update the formula, a month after The Washington Post reported on the problem .

As colleges grew anxious about delays in receiving FAFSA data and the potential impact on enrollment, Cardona made the rounds at conferences hosted by financial aid and admissions organizations in February. He assured schools that the department would do all in its power to support them through this challenging FAFSA cycle.

“I know it’s stressful right now,” Cardona told a room full of financial aid officers last month. “But a better FAFSA will be worth it.”

Still, the errors and delays, including last-minute communication of problems, have colleges losing trust in the department, said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

He said the biggest objective at this point is getting students the financial aid packages they need to weigh offers. Many colleges have pushed back deadlines for deposits or other commitments to give students time to make decisions.

“The time for accountability and learning from all of this will eventually come. For now, our goal is to remain committed to getting this over the finish line for students,” Draeger said. “But when that day of accountability does come, I hope what we don’t find is that decisions were made to save face, or prioritize public relations over transparency and partnership with stakeholders and students.”

education in the united states there is no federal

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What to know about the SAVE plan, the income-driven plan to repay student loans

FILE - Wheaton College students stop to chat on the Norton, Mass. campus, Feb. 13, 2024 as snow falls. More than 75 million student loan borrowers have enrolled in the U.S. government's newest repayment plan since it launched in August. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, File)

FILE - Wheaton College students stop to chat on the Norton, Mass. campus, Feb. 13, 2024 as snow falls. More than 75 million student loan borrowers have enrolled in the U.S. government’s newest repayment plan since it launched in August. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — More than 75 million student loan borrowers have enrolled in the U.S. government’s newest repayment plan since it launched in August.

President Joe Biden recently announced that he was canceling federal student loans for nearly 153,000 borrowers enrolled in the plan, known as the SAVE plan . Forgiveness was granted to borrowers who had made payments for at least 10 years and originally borrowed $12,000 or less.

The SAVE plan was created last year to replace other existing income-based repayment plans offered by the federal government. More borrowers are now eligible to have their monthly payments reduced to $0, and many will qualify for lower payments compared to other repayment plans.

For Lauran Michael and her husband, the SAVE plan has reduced student loan payments by half.

Since getting married, they’ve both been paying off her husband’s student loans, which would have amounted to about $1,000 a month when payments resumed after a pause during the pandemic. Under the SAVE plan, their payments are now $530 a month.

“We don’t want our loans dictating our life choices, and us not being able to do other things because we’re paying so much money. The SAVE plan is definitely a game changer for us,” said Michael, a 34-year-old interior designer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

FILE - A TikTok sign is displayed on their building in Culver City, Calif., March 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Michael’s family is paying for daycare for their two children using the money they saved from not making payments during the pandemic and the reduced payments under the SAVE plan.

If you are interested in applying for the SAVE plan, here’s what you need to know:

WHAT IS AN INCOME-DRIVEN REPAYMENT PLAN?

The U.S. Education Department offers several plans for repaying federal student loans. Under the standard plan, borrowers are charged a fixed monthly amount that ensures all their debt will be repaid after 10 years. But if borrowers have difficulty paying that amount, they can enroll in one of several plans that offer lower monthly payments based on income and family size. Those are known as income-driven repayment plans.

Income-driven options have been offered for years and generally cap monthly payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income. If a borrower’s earnings are low enough, their bill is reduced to $0. And after 20 or 25 years, any remaining debt gets erased.

HOW IS THE SAVE PLAN DIFFERENT?

More borrowers in the SAVE plan are eligible for $0 payments. This plan won’t require borrowers to make payments if they earn less than 225% of the federal poverty line — $32,800 a year for a single person. The cutoff for other plans, by contrast, is 150% of the poverty line, or $22,000 a year for a single person.

Also, the SAVE plan prevents interest from piling up. As long as borrowers make their monthly payments, their overall balance won’t increase. Once they cover their adjusted monthly payment — even if it’s $0 — any remaining interest is waived.

Other major changes will take effect in July 2024. Payments on undergraduate loans will be capped at 5% of discretionary income, down from 10% now. Those with graduate and undergraduate loans will pay between 5% and 10%, depending on their original loan balance.

The maximum repayment period is capped at 20 years for those with only undergraduate loans and 25 years for those with any graduate school loans.

WHO QUALIFIES FOR THE SAVE PLAN?

The SAVE plan is available to all student loan borrowers in the Direct Loan Program who are in good standing on their loans.

Read more about the SAVE plan here .

HOW DO I APPLY FOR THE SAVE PLAN?

Borrowers can apply to the SAVE plan using the Income-Driven Repayment Plan request through the Education Department’s website.

HOW WILL I KNOW THAT MY DEBT HAS BEEN CANCELED?

If you are one of the borrowers who is benefitting from forgiveness under the SAVE plan, you will receive an email from the Education Department.

WHAT ARE OTHER PROGRAMS THAT CAN HELP WITH STUDENT LOAN DEBT?

If you’ve worked for a government agency or a nonprofit , the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program offers cancellation after 10 years of regular payments, and some income-driven repayment plans cancel the remainder of a borrower’s debt after 20 to 25 years.

Borrowers should make sure they’re signed up for the best possible income-driven repayment plan to qualify for these programs.

Borrowers who have been defrauded by for-profit colleges may also apply for relief through a program known as Borrower Defense.

If you’d like to repay your federal student loans under an income-driven plan, the first step is to fill out an application through the Federal Student Aid website .

WILL THERE BE FUTURE FORGIVENESS?

Several categories of borrowers would be eligible for relief under Biden’s second try at widespread cancellation after the Supreme Court rejected his first plan last year.

The proposed plan includes relief for borrowers who have been paying their loans for at least 20 or 25 years, automatic forgiveness for borrowers who are eligible for income-driven repayment plans but are not enrolled, and loan cancellation for borrowers who attended a for-profit college that left them unable to pay their student loans, among others.

Whether any of the relief will materialize is a looming question as conservatives vow to challenge any attempt at mass student loan cancellation. The new proposal is narrower, focusing on several categories of borrowers who could get some or all of their loans canceled, but legal challenge is almost certain.

Currently, borrowers who are eligible for forgiveness under the SAVE program will get their loans discharged on a rolling basis, according to the Education Department.

The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.

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IR-2024-10, Jan. 12, 2024

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today announced that IRS Free File Guided Tax Software service is ready for taxpayers to use in advance of the opening of tax season later this month.

Marking its 22nd filing season, IRS Free File went live today, more than two weeks before the 2024 filing season start date. The IRS starts accepting and processing individual tax returns on Jan. 29.

Millions of taxpayers across the nation can access free software products provided by IRS Free File trusted partners by visiting IRS.gov.

"The IRS continues its partnership with Free File Inc. to give taxpayers an opportunity to file their taxes electronically for free," said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. "Taxpayers will always have choices for how they file their taxes. They can file using tax software, a trusted tax professional, Free File, or free tax preparation services through IRS partners. Through the years, Free File has helped millions of taxpayers, and it remains an important option for people to consider using to quickly and easily file their taxes."

IRS Free File is one of many free options available to taxpayers for filing their returns either online or in person. It's offered via a public-private partnership between the IRS and the Free File Inc., formerly the Free File Alliance. Through this partnership, tax preparation and filing software providers make their online products available to eligible taxpayers. Free access to online products is only available by starting from IRS Free File .

Eight private-sector partners will provide online guided tax software products this year to any taxpayer with an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $79,000 or less in 2023. One partner will offer a product in Spanish.

Because the filing season does not start until Jan. 29, IRS Free File providers will accept completed tax returns and hold them until they can be filed electronically on that date. Other software companies also offer this option.

Those with an AGI over $79,000 can use the IRS's Free File Fillable Forms (FFFF), the electronic version of IRS paper forms beginning Jan. 29. This product is best for people comfortable using IRS form instructions and publications when preparing their own taxes.

How IRS Free File works

Each IRS Free File provider sets its own eligibility rules for products based on age, income and state residency.

Taxpayers with an AGI of $79,000 or less in 2023 will find a product that matches their needs. Some providers also offer free state return preparation. Active-duty military can use any IRS Free File product if their AGI was $79,000 or less in 2023.

IRS Free File is a great way to claim valuable tax credits for those eligible

IRS Free File is a free, easy way to claim the full amount of tax benefits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit and other credits a taxpayer qualifies for. The EITC is a tax credit for qualified taxpayers who have earned income under $63,398. The EITC Assistant can help taxpayers see if they qualify. It's available in English and seven other languages.

EITC is just one refundable tax credit related to family and dependent care that someone without a filing requirement may be eligible to receive. Refundable tax credits mean a taxpayer can claim them and get a refund even if they don't owe taxes. A refundable credit may also reduce the amount of tax owed and that could result in a refund. Go to Earned Income Tax Credit for more information on these and other credits.

To find the right IRS Free File product, taxpayers can:

  • Go to IRS.gov/freefile ,
  • Click on Explore Free Guided Tax Software button. Then select the Find Your Trusted Partner tool for help in finding the right product, or
  • Use the Browse All Trusted Partners tool to review each offer,
  • Select the desired product , and
  • Follow the links to the trusted partner's website to begin their tax return.

No computer? No problem. IRS Free File products support mobile phone access. Taxpayers can do their taxes on their smart phone or tablet.

IRS Free File participants

For 2024, the following trusted partners are participating in IRS Free File:

  • Drake (1040.com)
  • ezTaxReturn.com
  • FileYourTaxes.com
  • On-Line Taxes
  • TaxHawk (FreeTaxUSA)

For 2024, ezTaxReturn.com will provide an IRS Free File product in Spanish.

IRS Free File is a great resource to help taxpayers save money and file their taxes with ease. Visit IRS Free File: Do your taxes for free for more information or to start filing your tax return today.

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IMAGES

  1. Education in the United States of America

    education in the united states there is no federal

  2. Education in the United States

    education in the united states there is no federal

  3. Education System of USA

    education in the united states there is no federal

  4. Lecture 8 EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THE USA

    education in the united states there is no federal

  5. Education in the United States of America

    education in the united states there is no federal

  6. Education in the United States: A Brief Overview

    education in the united states there is no federal

COMMENTS

  1. PDF Report on the Condition of Education 2021

    Institute of Education Sciences. Mark Schneider . Director. National Center for Education Statistics . James L. Woodworth. Commissioner. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations.

  2. PDF Report on the Condition of Education 2022

    The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting ... a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish ... 44 percent reported that there was no

  3. US Education Statistics and Data Trends: public school spending

    During the 2019-2020 school year, there was $15,810 spent on K-12 public education for every student in the US. Education spending per K-12 public school students has nearly doubled since the 1970s. This estimate of spending on education is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics.

  4. Federal Role in Education

    The Federal Role in Education. Overview. Education is primarily a State and local responsibility in the United States. It is States and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation.

  5. Education in the United States

    The 2019 graduation ceremony at Pitman High School in Pitman, New Jersey. In the United States, education is provided in public and private schools and by individuals through homeschooling. State governments set overall educational standards, often mandate standardized tests for K-12 public school systems and supervise, usually through a board of regents, state colleges, and universities.

  6. Policy

    Legislation, regulations, guidance, and other policy documents can be found here for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and other topics. Please note that in the U.S., the federal role in education is limited. Because of the Tenth Amendment, most education policy is decided at the state and local levels. So, if you have a question about a ...

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

    Although the federal role in education has grown substantially over the last half century, education federalism in the United States typically promotes primary state and local authority over education and a limited federal role. 2 Maintaining this approach to education federalism serves as a key driver of education law and policy in the United ...

  8. FACT SHEET: How the Biden-Harris Administration Is Advancing

    Consistent with the President's Executive Order, the Administration is committed to advancing educational equity for every child—so that schools and students not only recover from the pandemic ...

  9. Is Education a Constitutional Right?

    The United States was set up as a federal system of government where the states, through the Constitution, granted a limited number of powers to a central government. ... And neither does the Constitution authorize the federal government to spend one penny on education. If there is no constitutional right to receive basic necessities like ...

  10. A primer on elementary and secondary education in the United States

    Most 5- to 17-year-old children - about 88%- attend public schools. 2 (Expanding universal schooling to include up to two years of preschool is an active area of discussion which could have ...

  11. Here's How Different the US Education System Is Vs. Other Nations

    The United States puts heavy emphasis on decentralization and delineation between public and private options, while most other countries have private or religious schools that can receive public ...

  12. The 14th Amendment Protects the Right to a Public Education

    With substantive due process, the 14th Amendment protects a parent's right to direct the educational upbringing of their child. Because of this right, the Supreme Court ruled that a state statute that prohibited the teaching of foreign language, and a state statute that required all students to attend public schools, as opposed to private ...

  13. Is There a Federal Right to a Basic Education in the U.S.?

    The appeals court's 2-1 decision establishing the federal right to education as a legal precedent relied heavily on the history of public education, with its emphasis on preparing people to be ...

  14. Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul

    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.

  15. State Educational Systems

    The education system in the United States is actually a set of state-based systems. There is, however, a federal government role in education, and national education organizations and activities exist. But the ultimate authority - what is called plenary authority - for schooling in the United States resides with the individual states.

  16. PDF Report on the Condition of Education 2023

    On behalf of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), I am pleased to present the 2023 edition of the . Condition of Education. The . Condition. is an annual report mandated by the U.S. Congress that summarizes the latest data on education in the United States, including international comparisons. This year's edition of the ...

  17. Updated November 28, 2022 A Summary of Federal Education Laws

    U.S. Department of Education Federal Support for Education In the United States, primary responsibility for establishing policy and providing funding for elementary and secondary education rests with the states and instrumentalities therein. Federal financial support typically supplements state and local funding. Postsecondary education is financed

  18. Think Again: Is education funding in America still unequal?

    7.11.2023. Historically, many American students from poor families have been trapped in sorely underfunded public schools. The conventional wisdom suggests that school funding remains unequal across low- and high-income schools and that equal funding equates to equitable resources for students. This brief challenges the notion that economically ...

  19. Why Isn't Education a Constitutional Right?

    Still, though, education is not mentioned in our federal constitution. Education as a Right Internationally. Education is considered a human right by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Education is also included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the ...

  20. PDF 50-STATE DIG IN. REVIEW

    In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that there is no fundamental right to education in the Constitution of the United States.1 Because of this, the burden for providing a system of public education falls to the states. While the Supreme Court cleared up

  21. U.S. Spending on Public Schools in 2019 Highest Since 2008

    The nation spent $752.3 billion on its 48 million children in public schools in fiscal year 2019, a 4.7% increase from the previous year and the most per pupil in more than a decade. Instructional salaries, the largest expenditure within current spending, totaled $239.9 billion in fiscal year 2019 or 31.9% of total expenditures for public ...

  22. Home

    Press Releases. U.S. Department of Education Announces Updates and Additional Preparation Support for 2024-25 FAFSA Implementation. Biden-Harris Administration Releases Resources to Support Preschool Expansion and Early School Success. U.S. Department of Education Releases Voter Toolkit.

  23. FactChecking Biden's State of the Union

    Biden claimed that inflation in the U.S. "has dropped from 9% to 3% - the lowest in the world!". The year-over-year inflation rate was 3.1% in January, down from 9% in June 2022, according ...

  24. U.S. wants to give states more authority over online colleges

    U.S. Wants to Let States Enforce Their Own Regulations for Online Education. A group of state attorneys general said in 2021 that NC-SARA's policies didn't "adequately guard against the unique risks" associated with distance education—an area they argue is more ripe for deceptive and unlawful practices that take advantage of students ...

  25. How did the new FAFSA form problems begin?

    March 11, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images) Congress tasked the incoming Biden administration with carrying out one of the most ...

  26. Education at a Glance 2023: Putting U.S. Data in a Global Context

    U.S. spending on education is relatively high across all levels of education compared with the OECD average. The largest difference is in postsecondary spending, where the United States spent $36,172 per full-time postsecondary student in 2020, the second highest amount after Luxembourg ($53,421) and nearly double the OECD average ($18,105 ...

  27. PDF Title VIII, Part F of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

    There is no Federal prohibition on paying for out-of-State professional development for private school educators. However, an LEA must ensure that costs associated with the professional development, whether within or outside of the State, are reasonable and necessary for the provision of equitable services. (2 C.F.R. §§ 200.403(a) and 200.404).

  28. What to know about the SAVE plan, the income-driven plan to repay

    NEW YORK (AP) — More than 75 million student loan borrowers have enrolled in the U.S. government's newest repayment plan since it launched in August. President Joe Biden recently announced that he was canceling federal student loans for nearly 153,000 borrowers enrolled in the plan, known as the SAVE plan. Forgiveness was granted to ...

  29. IRS Free File now available; free service through IRS.gov available for

    IR-2024-10, Jan. 12, 2024 — The Internal Revenue Service announced that IRS Free File Guided Tax Software service is ready for taxpayers to use in advance of the opening of tax season later this month.

  30. Texas election results for president, senate, Congress and more

    By Carla Astudillo March 5, 2024. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization dedicated to helping you navigate Texas policy and politics — including the 2024 elections. We're tracking the results of the Texas 2024 primary election happening March 5. Texas voters will choose party nominees for statewide seats ...