For years, it has been obvious that school funding is unfair. Reliance on the local property tax widens inequities and assures that the students in the most affluent districts attend well-funded schools, while students in low-wealth districts attend under resourced schools. This arrangement assures that the poorest kids attend schools with the fewest resources.
Scholars at the National Education Policy Center have proposed a plan to wipe out funding inequities and assure that all students have the same opportunity to attend a well/resourced school. Ironically, the representatives in Congress least likely to support such a proposal are those who live in the districts that would benefit most.
School finance is unfair. Politicians should provide child’s school with the resources needed to support that child’s education. But some children live in areas that can (and do) adequately fund their schools, and others do not.
A recent report published by the Albert Shanker Institute explains this problem and proposes a plan to help fix it with a strategic use of federal funding. The report is authored by NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute, and NEPC Fellow Mark Weber of Rutgers University.
“This proposal, with full funding and compliance, would provide every school district with the estimated revenues necessary to reach the goal of average national outcomes in mathematics and reading,” the authors write.
The goal is intentionally very modest. The price tag? $52 billion per year—or roughly double what the federal government currently provides to K-12 schools, which are funded overwhelmingly by state and local revenue. (About eight percent of K-12 funding is currently provided by the federal government.)
In return, state and local governments would be required, in order to participate in the program and receive the additional funding, to increase their contributions to K-12 funding by about 13 percent, or about $80 billion. But this 13 percent increase would not be required of all states and localities. The increases would be concentrated in areas that currently have the ability to contribute additional revenue to K-12 education (based on aggregate income and/or gross domestic product) but choose not to do so.
This approach to incentivizing contributions differs from current federal K-12 education spending policy. Federal funding presently takes student needs into account but does not consider the “fiscal effort” that local and/or state governments are willing to spend on meeting these needs.
Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber write:
Effort (and capacity) is an important piece of the school funding puzzle because some states’ economies are so small relative to their students’ needs that they are essentially unable to raise enough revenue to fund their schools adequately, whereas other states simply refuse to provide sufficient resources despite having the option to do so.
They continue, “California, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina currently exhibit severe and widespread funding gaps despite having the means to rectify them.”
Other states, including New York and New Jersey, also have high aggregate incomes and gross domestic products, but they choose to use a relatively high share of those resources to fund education.
Unlike the new state and local funds, the new federal funding would, under the proposal, be concentrated in districts in 34 states where small economies and/or high expense levels (due to factors such as labor costs and/or higher student needs) make it very difficult to adequately fund education. States in this category include Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
Participation in the new funding program would be voluntary. States with the capacity to increase funding could choose to opt out rather than to boost K-12 budgets to adequate levels. However, if every state in the nation chose to participate, the share of students in inadequately funded districts would decline from 55 percent (about 26 million students) to 0 percent. In addition, the program would reduce the funding gap between the highest and lowest poverty districts in each state by more than 60 percent.
“While a handful of states’ finance systems do a reasonably good job of providing adequate funding for all students, most do not,” Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber write, continuing:
Insofar as roughly 90 percent of all K-12 revenue comes from state and local sources, any serious effort to improve this situation will require substantial additional investment from states and districts. The federal government cannot compel such investment directly, but it can play a crucial role in helping the students most in need, while also incentivizing new state and local investment by rewarding states that contribute a reasonable fair share of their resources to public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here is the central political problem as I see it. As informative as this report may be and as much as it should be acted upon to make educational opportunity fairer to all, it misses one glaring political reality. Those who are undermining education are doing so precisely because they don’t want fairness, they want advantages, the more unspoken and habit-based, the better. We can make all the arguments we want, our goals are different. Politics is not solving this, only exacerbating the society fissures.
Well said. Funding schools through property taxes shortchanges the schools in the poorest areas. We have known this for decades, but there has been little political will to address the problem. Instead, the faux narrative has been the “failure” of public education and “lazy, incompetent” teachers. All this dishonest nonsense about public education is an excuse to usher in privatization which, as you point out, results in further stratification of students by race and class. Privatization is the will of the wealthy, and it serves the interests of the affluent while it leaves poor minority students deliberately behind.
Sec. Cardona should do his homework, especially since he was once one of those poor Brown students that would have been left behind in privatization schemes. He is fortunate to have been raised in Connecticut where a sound public education for all was valued and offered to struggling immigrants.
Different issue, same tactics and lack of principles.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/debt-ceiling-house-republicans-kevin-mccarthy_n_643ff095e4b0d84038858a58
A CPA friend in Minnesota told me that property taxes on commercial (non-residential) buildings there is gathered at the state level and then provided to public school districts based on need as determined by a very complex funding formula. The same could be done with residential properties, although residents of more affluent areas – whatever their political leanings – like to be able to have control over those taxes and provide for their public schools as they see fit.
A big problem in some districts is what in effect is an unfunded mandate to provide public education for the children of illegal immigrants, with almost all of those parents earning very low incomes and paying little in taxes. That shortfall has to be made up by other local and state funding sources. It’s politically incorrect on the Left to note these facts, but math is math. Public school employees don’t work for free, and the overhead costs of operating schools also require taxpayer dollars. Minimal enforcement of immigration laws has financial consequences, as most prominent Democrats used to say before 2008.
And if those immigrants were suddenly granted legal status how would that change anything? The families would still have low incomes and pay the same taxes they currently pay and the district would still claim the same number of students to the state and federal governments for their share of those funds.
The problem has nothing to do with immigration status and everything to do with an inequitable system of funding based on property wealth.
The point is that allowing millions of low income people into the country results in much higher social service costs, including public education. Math is math.
Despite the cost of serving immigrants in public schools, multiple studies have shown they are actually a net plus for the economy due to the fact they pay taxes for services such as Social Security they will likely never collect. When they pay rent, part of their rent helps pay for the property tax of the building in which they live. One of the ways to shore up Social Security would be to allow the undocumented to obtain a green card to start paying into Social Security ASAP to extend the viability of the SS fund. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/4-myths-about-how-immigrants-affect-the-u-s-economy
It is incomprehensible that new immigrants now living in shelters are not allowed to work. Jobs are available. They want to work. It makes no sense.
The social services costs incurred by low-income illegal immigrants far outweigh whatever minimal taxes they pay. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and many other Democrats used to say the same before it became politically incorrect to say so. The costs of bilingual education by itself exceeds the total taxes paid by the undocumented/illegal. Math is math. Justify massive low-skilled immigration for other reasons, but don’t claim that economically it’s a net positive to public finances.
Public schools educate immigrant children. If immigrants are going to live in this country, they need to get an education in order to provide for themselves and their families. The cost of denying them an education would be far greater as they would likely commit crimes, cause harm to others and end up in prison which is far more costly than public education.
In 1982, the US Supreme Court ruled that immigrant children have a right to go to public schools. The case was Plyler v. Doe.
Now you’re making a case against immigration per se, except for those who are highly educated and/or highly skilled. That’s an entirely different argument than whether “illegal” immigrants are a burden for districts.
I’m sure glad your position wasn’t the practice when eight of my impoverished great and great great grandparents escaped the (British-controlled) potato famine.
And as Retired Teacher notes, undocumented immigrants pay into all levels of the tax base while disallowed from accessing many public services.
“is an unfunded mandate ”
Classic regressive supposedly libertarian boogey man!
IDEA was/is an unfunded mandate. I guess we should be railing against that also, eh!
xenophobe
noun
xe·no·phobe ˈzen-ə-ˌfōb ˈzēn-
a person unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin (from MW Dict online)
Public education benefits society, not just children. People say they don’t want to pay to help educate the children who would have no rights at all if it weren’t for the 14th or 19th Amendments. All the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny aside, those who want OUR children in OUR country to be unable to participate in civic democracy when they become adults are self-defeating fools. Clowns, I say! The cost of poorly educating the young massively outweighs the cost of educating them well. Equally in education is for all of us, not for those other than us.
“This proposal, with full funding and compliance, would provide every school district with the estimated revenues necessary to reach the goal of average national outcomes in mathematics and reading,”
No, it wouldn’t.
Do I need to explain why?
“California, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina currently exhibit severe and widespread funding gaps despite having the means to rectify them.”
I guess the flyover states don’t matter, eh!
Let’s see here in the Show Me State my rural poverty district spends about $8500/student/year. The wealthy suburban St. Louis district of Clayton spends around $25,000/student/year.
Those other states may have the means to rectify the situation but at least here in Missouri there is no political desire to do so. And knowing our idiot governor and legislature they’d refuse the federal funding on the principle that “Big Gubmint ain’t telling us what to do.”
California is really bad, though. Proposition 13 — gee, thanks, Howard Jarvis — is a big part of why that’s so. Some people think it led to the tax revolt and election in 1980 of Ronald Ray-gun. We’re so screwed out here on the coast. We can’t seem to get rid of Prop 13, even with our relatively liberal voters of today. We need federal assistance badly.
Since General Stanley McChrystal, former Joint Special Operations Commander, declared that education is our greatest national security concern some years back, perhaps we could take this 60 billion from the defense department and use it to fund schools.
Maybe billions of dollars for a rocket built by Elon the Dork that explodes as predicted could be better spent.