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By Christopher Nellum
Executive Director, The Education Trust—West
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A new report from the Public School Forum shows that the wealthiest counties in North Carolina spend nearly $4,000 per student each year on average, while the less affluent counties spend about $1,000 per student. If you think this is confusing and counterintuitive, that it means schools are providing fewer resources in the very places that need them most, you're not wrong.
Jonathan Kozol's visceral descriptions of differences between schools in wealthier areas versus those just a neighborhood away in lower-income communities were damning when he published them in 1991. And in years since, hundreds if not thousands of news articles, documentaries, and research projects have pointed to a clear truth: the uneven, unequal, and unfair ways school funding is distributed is a longstanding challenge with big consequences.
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It means students in Baltimore, the vast majority of whom are Black, suffer and lose out on entire school days in classrooms without functioning HVAC systems. It means poor students in rural Mississippi attend schools with teachers practically begging for updated textbooks, or in some cases, no textbooks at all. When a nonprofit in New York looked into what teachers were requesting donations for at two neighboring school districts, they found the wealthier school district seeking money for field trips and robotics lab supplies, while teachers in the less affluent district a few miles away needed donations just to purchase basic school supplies and food for students. This isn't fair; this isn't right — but this is fixable.
Put simply, money matters for how students experience schools and for improving student achievement. But education funding is far from simple. In California and across the country, leaders piece together funding from the federal government, state investments, revenue from local tax measures, and other sources to provide funding to school districts for everything from teachers and facilities to school counselors and textbooks. Part of what has made this so messy and uneven is how some of those funding sources are linked to housing policy and property taxes.
The story of California's education funding history, for instance, includes taxes, oil wells, and gambling. In this state, as is the case in many others, differences in property tax revenue served to deepen divides in which school districts had the resources they needed for decades. And as we know, any public policy connected to housing will be intertwined with the well-documented history of discrimination around who was able to purchase property in certain neighborhoods. Housing policies that created multi-generational wealth also created multi-generational discrimination — and our schools and our students suffer from this.
In recent decades, however, a push for distributing funding to schools differently has successfully shifted towards fairer funding, aka "weighted funding formulas" or "student-based formulas" — meaning making sure funds are distributed fairly so all students have resources and opportunities to succeed. In 2013, California passed the Local Control Funding Formula, aka "LCFF," and our research on a decade of data shows the formula was the right move — but there's more to be done to really get it right. Here are three things we learned that California leaders and other states should pay attention to:
1. Passing a weighted student formula policy is just one step.
As our research at EdTrust-West pointed out, big gaps in access to resources like librarians, counselors, and courses remained in the early years of LCFF. California leaders need to improve how we hold school districts accountable for how they're spending these funds to make sure the formula does what it's supposed to — making sure students' access to resources is fair and schools are making decisions that improve student learning and achievement for underserved students.
2. Ensure transparent use of funds.
States considering adopting or improving a weighted student formula must also make sure there's clear and actionable information on how school district funding is spent. California's formula, for instance, includes requirements that students, families, and educators are included in making these decisions. But what is often happening in the state now — asking these folks to read through hundreds of pages of spreadsheets — adds barriers to the process rather than removing them. Leaders also need to take advantage of tools like user-friendly websites and AI chatbots that are far easier to understand without advanced accounting training.
3. Improve community engagement.
Flyers, surveys, and occasional, impersonal midday meetings are not true engagement with communities. In California's legislation, school districts are required to engage students and families in their local spending decisions. Yet only a few dozen districts — out of nearly 1,000 school districts in the state — are taking part in a program to improve community engagement. District leaders, students and families all benefit when engagement efforts foster trusting relationships and collaboration rather than focus on compliance.
Fairer school funding isn't new in some states. In addition to California, places including Massachusetts and others around the country operate under such an approach. The lessons from these efforts tell us fairer school funding can work without "taking" from already well-resourced and high-performing schools — but it will only be truly successful if we learn from these states and improve policies and approaches to make sure these laws work as intended.
State leaders have a responsibility to guarantee all schools have adequate funding to provide all students with a high-quality education and also to guide school leaders and districts to understand how best to use the money available effectively. What does that mean? We must take an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity approach and focus on raising revenues for schools that receive fewer resources and are too often serving students living in impoverished communities and students from racial and ethnic communities. We're urging California's leaders to hold legislative hearings so we can learn from the places doing LCFF well in the state, and improve the policy overall so it works for all schools and students.
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