Strangely, the subject of revenues and expenditures is never addressed in A Nation at Risk (ANAR). That omission makes the cascade of calls to increase funding for schools, often justified by reference to the message of urgency in ANAR while disregarding use of funds, ironic. By ignoring the role of funding and budgeting, the recommendations from the US National Commission on Excellence in Education are untethered from any grounding in choices and trade-offs that all public policy required. On the other side, the calls for funding that are divorced from ideas of how the funds are to be used are equally problematic.

Spending on schools is frequently used as a summary statistic of the quality of schools. And in discussions of how to make schools better and more equitable, the first order of business is frequently the necessity of increasing our investment in schools—in other words, our spending on schools. Unfortunately, history has not been very supportive of this strategy.

A conventional perspective is that legislatures and school districts should decide how much to spend based on the trade-off between the expected benefits of school spending and the taxes required for any given revenue. Once the revenue is determined, school districts would make budget allocations in order to produce the best student outcomes.

However, this picture is complicated in the case of schools, since states—which have primary responsibility for schools—are concerned not only with overall student outcomes but also with the equity of public provision. Two factors enter into the equity discussions. First, education is not entirely a function of schools but has components of families and circumstances that enter into student outcomes. Thus, children from more educationally disadvantaged households, English language learners, and children with various handicaps need more from the schools if they are to pull even with students not facing such difficulties. Second, because local funding is heavily reliant on local property taxes, the size of the district tax base will directly influence the ability of a school district to raise revenues. Students who happen to reside in districts where the value of residential property and the presence of commercial and industrial properties are high have an advantage in raising revenues for their schools.

The legislature in each state is charged with making political decisions about both the level of spending and how statewide education and funding differences are addressed. How to reach decisions that weigh the underlying trade-offs is vigorously debated, and every state has its own solution to this.

Legislatures are not the only actors in these discussions. Various parties who have not liked the legislative outcomes have gone to the courts to try to change the legislative decisions. Starting in California in 1968, courts in all but two states (Hawaii and Utah) have had litigation about school funding. The early cases in the 1970s and 1980s focused on equity issues largely related to differences in property tax bases and spending differentials across school districts, but the cases evolved throughout subsequent decades to focus more on the overall adequacy of funding to meet educational objectives.

The largest difficulty with the pattern and outcomes of revenue decisions is, however, the lack of a clear relationship between added spending and student outcomes. In simplest terms, the division of decisions between how much to spend and how to spend it has historically led to highly variable and quite disappointing results in terms of student outcomes. Specifically, it appears that how funds are spent is crucial—and generally more important than how much is spent. This does not say that more resources are never important for student outcomes. Nor does it say that more resources cannot be important for improved student outcomes. It does say that divorcing decisions on “how much” from “how” has not been successful within the current structure of school decision-making.

This chapter documents these overall conclusions. It then discusses alternative perspectives on funding for schools.

A short history of funding

In order to frame the school finance discussion, it is helpful to describe briefly the nature of financing of schools in the United States. The overall picture of enrollments, structure of the schools, and funding shows significant changes over time. Further, the aggregate picture hides significant variation across the states. The variety provides an important backdrop both for the analysis of school finance issues and for decision-making in the schools.

An overview of U.S. schooling

Public school enrollment in the United States, while rising during the 1990s, reached fifty million students in 2013 and stabilized there until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. The full impact of the pandemic is not yet known, but public school enrollment fell by 3 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021 and remained at the lower level through fall 2022.

These students are spread very unevenly across states and, within states, across separate local school districts. At the state level, Vermont had a total of 82,000 students while California had six million. The prime operating level is the school district, of which there were 13,452 in 2019, down from 117,408 in 1940. Moreover, the states are broken up into widely varying numbers of local districts. While Hawaii and the District of Columbia each have only one school district, five states had more than one thousand districts.

But even these aggregate variations understate the degree of heterogeneity in the schools, because the growing importance of school choice leads to even more decentralized operation of education. The public school district is the prime operating unit, but it does not cover the full provision of education services. Charter schools were first established in Minnesota in 1991, and the model spread across the country. Charter schools are public schools that operate with varying degrees of autonomy, depending on the state. Typically, they are free to operate outside of many of the education regulations in a state, and importantly, they can set their own requirements for teacher preparation, salary schedules, and personnel rules independent of local teachers’ unions. They receive public funding, and they are almost always required to take all applying students or to randomize admissions if more students apply than they can accommodate. They are also required to participate in the state student assessment systems.

Students can also attend private schools or be homeschooled. While this is changing, private schools almost always receive no direct public funding, as is the case for homeschooling. These parts of the system are generally very unregulated, and they can set their own curricula, standards, and hiring rules. They generally do not participate in state student assessment systems, and little is known about their performance except as indicated by parental choices.

Figure 1 shows the substantial changes in the structure of US schools in the twenty-first century in terms of parental choices that interact with school finance. There has been a steady rise in charter school attendance with relatively stable homeschool attendance and some decline in private schooling. The private school attendance is one-quarter nonsectarian and three-quarters religious based, with the religious component evenly split between Catholic and other denominations.

Note, however, that these data are pre-pandemic. With the pandemic, traditional public school attendance fell, while the other choice options increased. Within the public school sector there was also a shift from the traditional public schools to charter schools. The longrun distribution of students remains unclear at this time.

Revenues for U.S. education

The structure of the education sector and the attendance patterns that were highlighted relate directly to school finances. Because private schools and homeschooling are not publicly supported (to any significant degree), any increased attendance in these sectors relieves state and local governments of resource demands.

Figure 2 traces revenues for the public schools from 1960 to 2019. The bulk of funding comes from state and local revenues, which each correspond to roughly 45 percent of per-pupil funding. The federal share, which began rising in the 1960s as the federal government assumed a larger role in financing schools for disadvantaged students and subsequently for special education students, rose around the 2008 recession and then returned to its historic levels. While not shown, the federal government also contributed large additional amounts of temporary funds with the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The steady increase in per-pupil funding over the entire period puts public school revenues per student in 2019 at more than four times that in 1960 in real terms. In fact, except for the dip in school revenues after the end of federal support for the 2008 recession, real per-pupil spending (i.e., adjusted for inflation) has risen continuously for more than one hundred years.

State revenues come from a variety of sources that differ across the fiscal structures of the different states. At the same time, with few exceptions, property taxes are the dominant source of local revenues.

Public school spending incorporates both traditional public schools and charter schools. For a variety of political and institutional reasons, charter school spending is systematically below that for traditional public schools, although there is debate about the exact magnitude of differences.

The aggregate revenue data hides the wide variation that is seen at the state level. States differ significantly in how revenues are raised and in the level of spending. Table 1 shows the extent of compositional differences in school funding. Typically, most of the revenue is derived from state and local sources with the federal government contributing a smaller portion, but the federal share across states differs from 4 percent to 15 percent of funding because the federal revenues are driven largely by poverty rates and special education classifications that differ across states. States like Hawaii, with its one district, and Vermont provide almost all funding at the state level, while funding for schools in Washington, DC, is provided almost entirely at the local level. For Alaska schools, 15 percent of the funding comes from the federal government, the highest percentage of all states.

Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of state per-pupil spending levels in the 2018–19 academic year. Northeastern states spend more than $15,000 per student, significantly higher than the $9,000 to $11,000 per pupil spent by the majority of southern states.

Student performance

The United States has reliably assessed student performance with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the Nation’s Report Card. The long-term trend (LTT) assessment of NAEP makes it possible to get representative national data for math and reading performance of students aged nine, thirteen, and seventeen since the 1970s. Beginning in 1992, a second version of NAEP, called Main NAEP, was started with testing of math and reading in grades four and eight.

Table 2 provides data on NAEP testing results both in terms of changes in standard deviations (SD) and in terms of these changes relative to school expenditure. The pre-pandemic results fall into two distinct clusters. There are strong gains in the level of math performance for younger students—age nine (grade four) and to a lesser extent age thirteen (grade eight). But there are much more modest gains for age seventeen math and for reading at all ages.

The scores cover different periods of time, so it is also useful within this discussion to place them in comparison to the spending on schools. When normalized by spending over the relevant time periods, the younger cohort math gains are all greater than 0.07 SD per 10 percent larger spending, while the remaining gains are all less than 0.03 SD per 10 percent larger spending.

The results were, unsurprisingly, dramatically altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The MainNAEP had testing in spring 2019 (included in Table 2) and spring 2022. In math and reading for both grade four and grade eight, average scores fell dramatically with the largest declines being recorded for math performance (Table 3). Grade eight (grade four) gains from 1990 through 2022 were down to 0.33 SD (0.72 SD). For reading, virtually all gains since 1992 were erased by the pandemic; the 1992–2022 gain was 0.01 SD for grade eight and 0.02 for grade four. It is of course difficult to know how to interpret the scores after the pandemic. Clearly, the substantial added funds over the pandemic period were insufficient to overcome the learning disadvantages of the pandemic period.

The achievement gains in Table 2 are unconditional changes in student performance. In interpreting this performance data, it is important to note that, because achievement is a function not only of schools but also of parents, peers, and neighborhoods, the data do not indicate the causal impact of schools or spending, but they do provide an important backdrop to finance discussions.

One related pattern that does consider some of the nonschool factors is the historical evolution of achievement gaps by socioeconomic status (SES). Concerns have been raised that the widening of the US income distribution led to expanding SES achievement gaps (Reardon 2011). That concern is unfounded because test information that is linked over time shows a slow shrinking of gaps for birth cohorts born between 1961 and 2001 (Hanushek et al. 2022).

Court involvement

While the federal courts were involved in school funding issues for a while after the school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court in 1973 declared school finance outside the federal role (Rodriguez v. San Antonio), effectively moving all litigation to state courts.

Litigation in the state courts is filed under the state’s equal protection clause or the state’s education clause as covered by individual state constitutions (see Hanushek and Lindseth 2009). The equity cases under the equal protection clause argue that state efforts to ameliorate either cost of education differences (e.g., for English language learners) or differences in property tax bases are insufficient. The adequacy cases under state education clauses argue that the current level of funding is insufficient to meet the constitutional obligations of the state.

The judicial branch has been asked to assess the level and pattern of school spending in 205 separate court cases adjudicated across forty-eight of the fifty states. There is no distinct geographical pattern to where these court cases have been found. The prevalence of cases is almost evenly split between below-average and above-average spending states, but the success of defendants in maintaining the existing finance structures is relatively greater in low-spending states. Perhaps surprisingly, decisions in cases focused on adequacy tend to be more successful in states that are already at above-average achievement levels as measured by NAEP.

Interestingly, while the court cases are focused on school spending, there is no overall relationship between spending growth and either decisions that favor the plaintiffs or the number of cases in any state. States with mandates from the courts to increase spending average somewhat larger immediate growth (within five years of the decision) than states where there is no such court mandate, but these short-run changes do not lead to differences in long-term growth of spending. Thus, the school finance litigation has occupied the attention of state legislatures across the country, but it has not changed the overall funding outcomes across the states.

The spending-achievement dilemma

Since the first major study of school resources and student achievement (Coleman et al. 1966), there have been questions about the strength and consistency of any relationship between the two. This very influential study, the Coleman Report, suggested that school resources were not closely related to student outcomes; instead, families and peers had the primary influence. While the study was not well executed by current scientific standards, it evoked a huge response, with many researchers pursuing related questions about the determinants of student achievement.

The early research confirmed the doubts about whether strong impacts on student achievement would follow added spending (Hanushek 2003). But the early research was marked by studies of highly variable quality, and many would not meet current empirical standards. There are a variety of problems faced by this research, but the main problem is that insufficient attention is given to finding the “causal impact” of added funding. In other words, the correlations of resources and achievement could well be affected by other unmeasured factors that bias any empirical analysis.

A more recent body of research has developed that emphasizes careful identification of the causal impact of resources on student outcomes. The ideal approach to investigating the causal impact of resources is a randomized controlled trial where some group of schools is randomly chosen to receive more resources while another group does not. Such a research design is, of course, not really feasible with schools (or in many other circumstances). As a result, a variety of other approaches that are designed to mimic randomized controlled trials have been developed. These approaches have two common elements: the existence of a change in resources that is not correlated with other factors that affect student outcomes and the availability of a control group that can indicate what would happen in the absence of the added resources.

Finding circumstances that meet the requirements for these quasi-experimental approaches is not easy. Observations of most actual school operations do not meet these stringent requirements. In fact, the relevant scientific conditions are relatively unusual. But over the past two decades a number of such circumstances have been uncovered by researchers, lending the possibility that evidence on the causal impact of added resources can be more thoroughly investigated.

The studies falling into this category come from a variety of circumstances, ranging from added funding that results from court decisions in finance cases to the impact of budget decreases following the 2008 recession. Because these studies reflect such a wide range of circumstances, it is difficult to provide a direct comparison of the various estimates, but there are now two reviews of the work over the past two decades (Jackson and Mackevicius 2021; Handel and Hanushek 2023b).

Two general conclusions come from the recent studies:

• With high probability, adding resources to schools has a positive effect on student outcomes.

• The estimated impact of resources is highly variable and depends on the context and constraints on the spending.

The first conclusion largely underscores the contentious political nature of the research in this area. Nobody believes that adding resources to schools is likely to harm students and learning, but because parts of the research enter directly into legislative and judicial decisions about funding, there has been some effort to make this the focus of attention. By phrasing the issue as “does money matter?” the intent is to set the low hurdle of “no harm.” Of course, rational public decision-making would not fund all public programs that don’t harm the recipients.

The second conclusion of the research is much more relevant. The estimates of spending impacts range from too small to reject the possibility of no impact to very large effects on both student achievement and attainment of more schools. The small estimates would not justify added public expenditure because the costs would exceed the social benefits. The large results, on the other hand, would justify considerable commitment of added public funds.

Table 4 provides a summary of the results from the separate studies of student outcomes that meet modern empirical standards for estimating the causal impact of funding. All estimates represent the expected improvement in outcomes for a 10 percent increase in funding. The preferred estimates relate to achievement test scores. While most are positive and nine of sixteen are statistically significant, they vary widely. Part of the variation just represents normal sampling errors that are present in all studies, but most of it represents true differences in the underlying impact of funding. The estimates for test scores range from a reduction in achievement of −0.24 SD (not statistically significant) to +0.54 SD (statistically significant). This large range leaves substantial uncertainty in what can be expected from added funding. Clearly, averaging across these estimates to get a predicted impact would be misleading: in addition to having a small number of estimates in the sample, we could not be confident that they are typical of the full set of funding decisions that have not been measured.

While all of the results for school attainment (high school graduation, not dropping out, and continuing to college) are positive, they also cover a very wide range. They, too, have the same challenges for interpretation.

The major difficulty is that it has not been possible to describe when funds are particularly effective or ineffective (Handel and Hanushek 2023a). The estimated impacts of resources, as noted, come from very different circumstances. They do not reflect differences in the underlying methodology, in whether funds are targeted at a particular group such as disadvantaged students, whether they come from court directives, or whether they reflect differences across states in policies. To date, little headway has been made in describing the features of the particular contexts or the particular use of funds that yields significant learning gains.

In many ways, it is not surprising that the underlying methodology does not provide clear information about the underlying structure of effectiveness. The appeal of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs is that it is possible to provide causal impact information without knowing or being able to specify the full range of factors that enter into determining the outcomes. But this does not mean that the specific impact estimates are unaffected by the circumstances or even the design of the specific use of resources. The combination of the use of resources and the context within which they are applied is in how funds are used. The current research underscores the importance of how funds are used if student achievement is to be improved.

An ideal funding policy

Education policy has two broad goals: reach high levels of achievement and do this in an equitable manner. The way that we fund schools should clearly relate to meeting these goals. The overall level of funding is a political decision, not a scientific decision. Legislatures decide on funding levels on the basis of both their judgments about reaching the desired learning standards of the state and their views on the trade-offs with other public expenditures and with private expenditures (as related to tax rates). But because the outcomes of the funding depend on how the funds are used, the education policy surrounding any funding cannot be ignored.

A fundamental problem is that we do not have a set of simple policies that can be put in place and that have a high probability of successful impact on student achievement. We know some things that have an impact, but it is often not clear how they can be put in place at scale.

For example, there is extensive information about the importance of effective teachers (e.g., Hanushek 2011; Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff 2014; Bacher-Hicks and Koedel 2023). Knowing how important teachers are is different from having a clear set of policies that can be legislated and put into place. There are examples of the application of teacher policies that work in some locations, such as Washington, DC (Dee and Wyckoff 2015, 2017) and Dallas (Hanushek et al. 2023). It is nonetheless difficult to legislate adoption of these complex plans that have been honed to the circumstances of the individual areas.

There are institutional structures that tend to promote better achievement—and that are likely to work in part through promoting better teachers. For example, recent evidence points to good overall performance results from allowing the greater flexibility and parental choice that come with charter schools (see CREDO 2023). Yet the details remain difficult to legislate.

In discussing guiding principles for an effective funding system, Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) proposed seven general principles:

• If the objective is to improve outcomes, the system should focus on outcomes. Accountability for performance should be substituted for restrictions on local decision-making. 

• The system should reward those who contribute to success—that is, those who bring about high achievement.

• Rewards should be based on each person’s contribution to success and not on external factors such as the education inputs of families and neighborhoods.

• School funding formulas should minimize unproductive “gaming” by avoiding rewards for things that are easily manipulated by school personnel.

• School funding policies must recognize the underlying heterogeneity of students and their education challenges and ensure that all schools have the means to succeed. 

• School authorities must gather relevant programmatic and performance data and use it to refine and improve performance. 

• New policies or programs should be introduced in a manner that enables direct evaluation of their results.

These principles can, of course, be filled in a variety of ways, but they revolve around setting up incentives so that the decision-makers take actions that lead to better student outcomes. An example of the application of these principles is what Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) call “performance-based funding.”

The central elements of such a system, building on what has previously been successful, include a strong accountability system with incentives and direct rewards for successful performance, empowered local decision-making by both schools and parents, and an ongoing information and evaluation system. This would all be built on a rational and equitable base of funding that provides basic support and that recognizes both different abilities of districts to raise revenue and different costs for educating individuals (e.g., for children from poor families and for students with special needs).

Perhaps the key idea, however, is recognizing and rewarding success. Today many public funding programs actually do the opposite: they reward failure. For example, if a school shows poor performance from its students, more funds are provided; if the school shows improvement, funds are reduced. In other words, they provide an incentive for failure, not for success.

Policies based on incentives for outcomes do not call for completely understanding what works and why. They implicitly acknowledge that there might be alternative ways to achieve the same outcomes and that the choices might reflect both differing demands and differing capacities of schools.

Headwinds

An incentive-based funding program faces headwinds from a variety of sources. Perhaps the largest is simply the inertia in the system: “That is not how we do it.” There is a long history of approaches to funding that avoid policies offering direct positive incentives. This history is deeply embedded in both state policies and local decision-making—and leads to a majority of personnel in the current system being happy with the overall structure. Moreover, public views remain supportive of the institutional structure of the public schools. As a result, the system itself resists attempts at alteration.

The strongest force of resistance to change is the teachers’ unions. They, as a matter of principle, push back against any attempt to make policies based on differential performance (Moe 2011). As part of this, they resist accountability of schools and of personnel in general, and they resist linking resources to good performance.

At the same time, the unions do not stand alone. This is perhaps easiest to see in states that do not permit collective bargaining and that still resist changes in terms of accountability and incentives. It is also seen in the fact that right-to-work states do not systematically perform better.

COVID-19 brought new challenges to schools, and it has been common to blame all concerns and policy challenges on the pandemic. In reality, NAEP scores began falling after 2012 and simply continued their slide during the pandemic. The prior falls in scores have hit minorities and disadvantaged students exceptionally hard. The COVID cohort as a group has been seriously harmed by learning losses that accrued during the pandemic (Hanushek 2023). Just getting schools back to their 2020 levels appears to be a major challenge in a range of schools. But if we just get back to 2020, the COVID cohort will be permanently harmed. Eliminating the learning losses for this generation is a major policy challenge, but as described, it is far from the only challenge facing the schools. COVID underscores the urgency of the situation but does not provide a long-run solution.

In another matter that affects budgets but is not closely related to student outcomes, many schools are facing significant budget overhang from their retirement programs. The impact of the retirement system varies widely, depending on state rules on funding and depending in part on the character of prior contract negotiations. Most of these issues are beyond the scope of this discussion—with one exception. There is now evidence that schools tend to put too much teacher compensation into retirement plans that are valued by the teachers as having lower value than salary dollars (Fitzpatrick 2015). Thus, the state funding formula must be sensitive to the incentives sent to districts when they negotiate contracts.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

Sixteen months ago, North Carolina’s highest court ordered the state legislature to spend $800 million to improve K-12 education — a landmark ruling that seemed to end a decades-long legal battle over adequate funding for schools.

The opinion, delivered 28 years after the suit was filed, was supposed to fund efforts in some of the state’s poorest districts for teacher and principal training, more books and supplies and expanded pre-K.

But those remedies are now in jeopardy as the Supreme Court, with a fresh political makeover, once again considers the case. 

When a trial court ordered the state to spend surplus funds on the remedies, Republican leaders who control the legislature appealed. They argue that the court never had the authority to issue “a sweeping statewide order” based on the claims of the original plaintiffs: five poor, rural districts. 

To the districts and equity advocates, however, the move smacks of a political power play. Under the former Democratic majority on the court, the ruling was tight — a 4-3 vote for the districts. Following the November 2022 election, the court flipped to a 5-2 majority in the Republicans’ favor.

If the court overturns the opinion, today’s students would be the “third generation of children since this lawsuit was filed to pass through our state school system without the benefit of relief,” Melanie Dubis, lead attorney for the districts, said during oral arguments in late February. The state, she said, has the “constitutional duty to provide the children the opportunity for a sound basic education.”

Matthew Tilley, the attorney who argued the case for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, said it is his firm’s “policy not to comment on ongoing client cases.”

It could be months before the court issues an opinion on the case. That leaves districts in the state, which ranks nationally in per-student funding, in limbo. But experts suggest the case has implications beyond the education budget. In a state where lawmakers seek over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and last year overrode 19 of his vetoes, the court’s decision to rehear the case raises questions about whether the legislature is exceeding its authority.

“This case is about having power over the courts,” said , a lawyer who co-founded The Innovation Project, a school leadership network. “The balance of power that helps government function properly is … at stake.”

‘Righting that wrong’

With the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision ending school segregation this spring, other observers see the conservative court’s decision to reopen Hoke County Board of Education v. North Carolina — also known as the “Leandro” case — as a setback for efforts to address segregation’s legacy. 

“It’s important for us as a country to be righting that wrong and to ensure that we invest in schools and districts having high concentrations of students of color,” said Ary Amerikaner, co-founder of , a nonprofit promoting integration. “Underfunding of public schools in certain districts and states is deeply connected to racial segregation and racial inequities. That is certainly no different in North Carolina.”&�Բ�����;

The statewide between poor and non-poor districts has grown wider in recent years, according to a 2020 report from Public School Forum, a research and advocacy group. School systems without a strong tax base, like the five original plaintiffs, predominantly serve minority students — those who were more likely to because of the pandemic and need extra help. Meanwhile, districts have turned to for-profit companies to provide and long-term substitutes to fill vacancies as they await the additional funding the was supposed to provide.

To Anthony Jackson, superintendent of the Chatham County Schools, west of Raleigh, the plan would address some of the growing district’s greatest needs, including more funding for competitive salaries and additional pre-K slots for 4-year-olds on waiting lists.

“It would mean resources to recruit, retain and reward the best teachers and get them in front of our kids,” he said. “It would mean a strong leader standing at the schoolhouse door in every one of our schools.”

Jackson previously served six years as superintendent of Vance County schools, one of the original plaintiff districts. Located next to the Wake County district, the state’s largest, Vance struggles to fill classrooms with qualified staff, Jackson said.

Under the plan, Vance would receive an extra $16 million by 2028, a that could pay for 35 more teaching assistants, 47 more nurses and mental health professionals, and 46 more spaces for pre-kindergartners, according to Every Child NC, an advocacy group that calculated the impact on each district. 

According to the most recent from an early-childhood education research and advocacy group, the state serves 19% of its 4-year-olds in public pre-K, but no 3-year-olds.

“We’ve got to support parents from the day they have that child. Kids go home for five years and then we expect them all to show up at the schoolhouse door at the same place,” Jackson said. Noting the state’s passage last year of a universal that provides up to $7,500 per student for private school tuition and other educational expenses, he added that if the state can find resources for school choice, “I’m sure we could find resources for universal pre-K.”

But others say the plan does not directly address student achievement.

“Will the teachers get paid adequately? Will people be able to go to schools without mold? Those are things that are important, but they’re not about performance,” said Marcus Brandon, executive director of NorthCarolinaCAN, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice. A former Democratic state representative, he said he supports the Leandro plan in principle, but still thinks the court has the authority to throw it out.

During February’s oral arguments, Tilley, who represents legislative leaders, argued that the remedial plan “dictates virtually every aspect of education policy and funding” and that the court’s ruling removed “those decisions … from the democratic process.” He stressed that an earlier court order in 2004 limited the relief to just one county, Hoke, and said the court should not have found a statewide violation.

In her response, Dubis accused the lawmakers of “gamesmanship” and said it’s illogical to apply the solutions only to Hoke, but not to other districts with, for example, similar teacher vacancies.

“It is a system that works on a statewide basis,” she said.

The outcome of the long-running case also rests on a second, but no less significant, matter.

Just months after the 2022 opinion, the new conservative court undercut the decision by ruling, in what McColl called “shadow litigation,” that the state controller can’t transfer surplus funds to pay for the relief. That means that even if the school districts win, it’s likely that funding for the plan would be further delayed.

“That’s what makes this so odd,” McColl said. “Without the ability to enforce a money remedy, these cases just don’t serve a lot of purpose.”

Like McColl, Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor and a member of the Brown’s Promise advisory board, has followed the Leandro case for years. He was among the legal scholars who submitted a January amicus brief, arguing that, unlike state legislatures, which often repeal prior laws when the party in power changes, courts are obligated to uphold prior judicial decisions even when they disagree.

The brief noted that over the course of the litigation, both Democratic and Republican justices authored unanimous decisions in the case. 

“If overturned, it would be a huge shock to the rule of law,” Black told The 74. “To allow do-overs would mean that litigation would never end and that no judicial decision would ever be binding. I hope and believe that this court understands that.”

As for its other mission — to work with state legislators to fix the problem — founder Rebecca Sibilia now admits that EdBuild did this “very, very poorly.” In 2020, after just five years, the group closed up shop. 

Sibilia, who previously worked on school finance with Washington, D.C., schools and for the education reform group StudentsFirst, remembers that at the time she and others at the organization decided that while they’d done much to raise consciousness about the problem, they lacked the tools to move the issue forward.

As it turns out, the move coincided with the COVID pandemic, which threw school budgets into chaos nationwide. If anything, the need for clear, actionable information on funding now is greater than ever. “One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks,” she said.

Policymakers “have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools.”

So four years later, Sibilia is debuting a new venture, EdFund, which goes live today. She spoke this week with The 74’s Greg Toppo about the need for better funding research and dissemination — and a new model for collaborating not just with legislators and policymakers, but for underwriting researchers, journalists and others to help make sense of the data. Sibilia plans to issue EdFund’s first request for proposals shortly.

She expects to eventually have “many more proposals than what we have money to fund.” At the moment, the new organization has three main funders — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation — providing about $1.5 million annually. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Thinking about EdBuild, you focused so much on unequal funding. I wonder: What’s the evolution? What’s next?

Rebecca Sibilia: EdBuild was really constituted with two missions: The first was to raise national awareness around the problem, which we did pretty well. And the second was to work with legislatures to actually fix it, which we did very, very poorly. And so at the end of the five years, we were like, “I’m not sure there’s much else to tell. We’ve raised the collective consciousness on what the problem is with school funding in terms of local funds. But we certainly aren’t structured, we certainly don’t have the tools to move this forward. And so, we need to shut down.” That was why we shut down.  

Four years later, what’s your focus? 

We need much more policy-relevant research because for 60 years, we’ve been arguing about whether or not money matters, and it is the dumbest debate of all dumb questions that exist in the world. Because at the end of the day, states exist in a limited-resource environment. What we don’t need is an answer to an ethereal question about endless resources and what they’ll do for student achievement. What we need are answers to practical questions, like “Where should I put a marginal dollar when I have it?” Or, “What are the right tax policies that states should be setting around local dollars in order to create more equitable, but also adequately funded systems?”

This complete disconnect between research and policy has led us to a place where policymakers have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools, and I frankly believe that’s one of the reasons why very few legislators actually understand their funding formula. There’s very little science behind it because we just haven’t provided that.

So who is your audience?

We’re trying to bridge the gap between research and policy. So we see our stakeholders as three groups, with two very different workstreams: the research community, advocates and journalists. I would love to be able to say that policymakers are the endgame on this, but really, advocates and journalists are the ones who are going to be able to interpret this work, and get the overall thrust of what is new and what it means for kids, into the hands of policymakers. I should also mention that we’re a 501(c)3 [nonprofit].

When you talked to The 74 in 2020, you said the next step wouldn’t be through a 501(c)3. It sounds like you’ve changed your mind.

I have not. I’m just not the one to do it. There is an organization that you may have heard of that recently started up with some seed money from the Gates Foundation called . They are at the Southern Education Foundation and they’re shaping up a litigation strategy for school district borders and school funding and integration. So they’re kind of pulling on both of those strings. I’ve given up on legislators actually making a fundamental change to the system. I really think that that’s going to happen through the courts. But in the meantime, the research has to inform what we’ve got in place right now, because that endgame in the courts is in 10, 15, 20 years.

Your “exit interview” with us happened right as COVID hit. And I wondered: What have the past four years done to this issue?

One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks. School finance data sucks. It sucks, it sucks. And it’s one of the biggest restrictions to good research in this field, and certainly timely research that could inform better decisions. We had a focus group of about 40 or so graduate and Phd students, and we asked them if they were studying school finance. They said, “No.” We asked them, “Which of these 10 factors would make you more likely to study school finance?” And 80% of them said, “Better data.” 

The second thing is that we’re understanding a lot more that school districts tend to invest in the things that do matter for raising student achievement, and that’s human capital. Whether it’s teachers, tutors, guidance counselors, etc. It’s human capital. This question of whether putting an additional dollar into a school district will raise student achievement —what Kirabo Jackson will tell you is, “Yes, just the dollar will.” What EricHanushek will tell you is, “Well, it depends on how it’s spent.” And the answer that we’ve learned through ESSER funds is that it tends to be spent on the people in the school, which means that everyone’s right. So those are kind of the two things that have come out of COVID.

Let’s go back to the first issue: How can you make the data suck less? Is this what your RFP is about?

Yes, in part. Let me go through the four C’s of who we are: We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. So instead of letting funders determine what they’re going to fund and making researchers chase that money, we’re instead going to go to policymakers and say, “What are the questions you’re going to have to grapple with in the next five years,” and then fund research to answer those questions. We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. That was the first thing we did. That’s why we’ve been quiet for the past six months.

The second thing we’re going to do is commission research against that policy agenda. That’s the RFP that we’re releasing this year. We hope to double the size of the investment next year and so on. And what you’ll see in the RFP is that we say: In some cases, we are flying so blind as it relates to school funding, that just putting together a data set will move the entire research field forward. So if students want to do this, if journalists want to do this, if policy organizations want to do this, in some cases collecting better data is just part of the solution. 

O.K. 

And then the third thing that we’re hoping to do is communicate the research that does exist and will come out of these RFPs in a way that it’s friendly for policy audiences — journalists and advocates primarily. We’re going to do so by white-labeling stuff. What we’re going to try to do is put together interactives and graphics and briefings and that sort of stuff, but it’ll all be available to advocates through an [an embeddable element on a website], and they can just stick it straight on their website. Or we’ll have podcasts that someone can send to a policymaker to listen to. We’re really trying for this to become an opportunity for advocates to learn what the research says, and a way for advocates to actually incorporate that into their everyday work so that everything is just more grounded in research. 

Then the fourth is connect. I got a call just the other day: There is a state that we happen to have been linked to in the past that happens to be moving school funding reform this year. And they were like, “We need somebody who can come down and talk about this one element of our funding formula.” So we sent one of our board members down, because he is an economist and has studied the issue. He can talk about that and educate policymakers on what his research says. We’re hoping to do more of that — just make those direct connections.

I was struck by something you said a couple years ago. You singled out California, New York and New Jersey, arguably three of the most progressive states in the country, that have “the most shameful set of borders around schools.” And it really made me think that if they can’t budge on this issue, what hope do you have for anybody solving it?

The states where all of the school finance reform mojo is happening are in the South! Tennessee their funding formula and went to a very progressive funding system. The Mississippi House , a very progressive funding system. The two co-chairs in Alabama have been talking about it — I wouldn’t be surprised to see them move in the next year or two.

It’s the southern states that are recognizing that the way they’re funding schools through these resource formulas just isn’t aligned with the science. This is one area where we actually can do some bootleg research and it can inform stuff. We used to say all the time at EdBuild that we need to move to a student-based funding formula for two reasons: One, different students have different needs. Two, when you think about how things work in the state capitol, you want advocates to be able to advocate for kids rather than themselves. And so in a resource-based formula, the people who are advocating in the capitol are the nurses association, the teachers association, the superintendents association, the principals. And the people in a weighted-student-formula environment who are lobbying in the capitol are special ed parents and English-language-learner communities and that sort of stuff. That’s really where you start to tilt the system in favor of kids instead of in favor of resources. 

It doesn’t sound like you’re abandoning the border fight. Taking a new approach maybe?

I’ve given up on borders changing through the legislature. The power dynamic just works against school districts that serve predominantly students of color.

I live in Maryland and we have county schools, which is not to say that they’re equal, but I live in a county that’s pretty diverse. I’d imagine somebody like you would say that’s a step in the right direction. Tell me where a place like Maryland sits in this discussion.

New Jersey has just over a million students, and they have over 600 school districts. Maryland has 850,000 kids, and they’ve got 24. That’s where Maryland fits in the conversation. So here’s the deal: What Maryland can do is they can take these enormous inequities in local funds and pool them because they’re sharing them across a much larger geography. The state has to do less to equalize because it’s equalizing at the local level first.

In New Jersey, the state has an enormous burden to equalize because they have to fix things for the 550 school districts that aren’t the bastions of wealth in the state. We can either move to systems that look like Maryland — and I believe that has to happen through the courts — or, short of that, we can change funding formulas to make much more sense as it relates to the way that we’re funding schools. And that’s what we can do through legislatures, policymakers, researchers all talking.

O.K. This is becoming clear to me now.

You can headline it as, “Rebecca Sibilia has given up hope.” [Laughs.]

I’m going to assume that you’re going to be done in five years, because that’s the way you do everything. What would you consider success in 2029? 

You know , right? He’s my ex-husband. And we’re still very good friends. We got engaged trying to change Tennessee’s funding formula 10 years ago. And we got it done last year. We started in 2016 to try to change Mississippi’s funding formula. And this year the House passed something. It takes a decade from the point that you start to educate the legislature and advocates and journalists about how their formula works and what research says for that to translate into policy. I believe that an organization can exist for five years and have a 15-year impact. We are seeing that bear out from the EdBuild time. 

One of the reasons we have these four distinct workstreams is because I think that several can be absorbed in different places. So maybe EdFund continues to run just as a funders’ collaborative. It just takes in money from foundations and puts it out for research, but the people who are curating the research agenda are the National Conference of State Legislatures. And the people who are communicating are at a specialized shop in the Urban Institute. And we’ve already created the bridges. Everyone’s talking and singing “Kumbaya,” so we don’t need to do the connecting anymore.

When you think about the construct of what EdFund could be, it could continue to exist past me. I could peace out and EdFund could continue to exist as it is, or we can start thinking about whether or not it makes more sense for these activities, once they have worked well together for a few years, to be absorbed in different places. Frankly, many other organizations out there in the education space could also afford to think about their work in the same respect.

I couldn’t let you go without asking you about this tweet from you at South by Southwest. Somebody took a picture of you talking to the Education Writers Association and you tweeted, “A bunch of journalists just created a better school funding formula than any current state model. How about them apples? Want more equitable funding? Elect your local reporter.” Thank you, by the way. We won’t take credit for that, but I wonder: Conceptually, is it a simple thing that we are just mucking up, or is it truly a complicated matter? 

There’s a part of every school funding formula called an . If you boil it all down, the state decides how much every school district needs to operate. They subtract out how much they think each community should raise, and then they give the rest. That’s what happens in every state. On the allocation side, people tend to understand how their state allocates: There’s a base amount and then there’s a weight for different kids, etc. That’s a policy that’s kind of easy to understand.

Ohio’s expected local contribution, I’m not kidding, goes for four pages, 12-point font, just in the mathematical equation alone. So if you’re a legislator and you’re looking at your state code and it’s 16 pages worth of, “Divide by, add two, regress four,” you’re just going to be like, “I give up.” But if you boil it down to, “Ohio uses a matrix that starts with the property wealth of every school district and gives a deduction for districts that have lower median household incomes,” I get that. What’s happened in school funding is that we’ve gotten so scared of the way it’s written because the code looks so scary.

It is scary, but we haven’t conveyed the concepts. Why haven’t we conveyed the concepts? Because research is what conveys concepts. And we haven’t had research to do it.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to EdBuild and The 74.

Since the mid-20th century, the town of Highland Park has resisted annexation and today operates a separate, roughly 6,700-student school district that is surrounded on all sides by the 139,723-student Dallas Independent School District. Student demographics between the two school systems — and the services they’re able to offer — are markedly different, from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, which explores how school district borders across the U.S. create racial and economic segregation — often intentionally. 

Included in the report is that allows users to explore school district segregation by race and class in their own communities. 

In Dallas, students of color comprise 94% of enrollment and in Highland Park,  just 18%. Such segregation extends beyond race. In Highland Park, less than 4% of students live in poverty. In the Dallas school system, a quarter of kids are impoverished, with some of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from Highland Park. 

Such jarring school district disparities, which create real-world gaps in learning opportunities for students, exist across the country. America’s patchwork school district borders carry serious consequences for communities and children’s academic outcomes, according to the report by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nationally, about 30% of school funding is generated by local property taxes, a reality that creates haves and have-nots between property-wealthy districts and those that serve predominantly low-income families. 

Much of the disparities can be blamed on inequitable housing policies, such as redlining and , which were explicitly implemented to segregate neighborhoods along race and class lines, ultimately showing up “not just in residential patterns but also in school budgets,” said Zahava Stadler, a project director at New America who shared the findings of her research during a workshop last week at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. 

“These are policy choices that are being made not just in the way we’ve designed school funding systems, but also in the way we actively maintain school funding systems year to year,” she said. “All of those things are policy choices that are being made by state policymakers every single year.”&�Բ�����; 

In total, researchers analyzed more than 13,000 school districts across the country, along with more than 25,000 pairs of neighboring school district borders, to identify how such arbitrary divisions work to generate inequality. Nationwide, they found that, on average, enrollment of students of color fluctuated by 14 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Along the 100 most racially segregated school district borders, however, the average difference was 78 percentage points. In other words, in one school district, students of color comprised 2% of the total enrollment while, in a district directly next door, they accounted for 80% of the student body. 

Economic segregation was similarly stark. On average, the enrollment of impoverished students fluctuated by 5.2 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Yet along the 100 most economically segregated school district borders, researchers found the average divide was roughly six times that, at 31 percentage points. One example, the Utica, New York, school district where 33% of students live in poverty, compared to the neighboring New Hartford district where 5% do. 

While school district border changes have been used by communities interested in concentrating their affluence, Stadler said the opposite — district consolidation — should be viewed as “a tool in the toolbox of creating more equitable school districts,” establishing schools that are more diverse while ensuring that all students have fairer access to educational resources. 

But local context matters. Simply merging school districts to eliminate racial and economic segregation isn’t always the most equitable solution, the report argues, as each area has its own individual policies and contexts. In South Dakota, for example, researchers observed striking racial and economic segregation between the predominantly white Custer School District and the neighboring Oglala Lakota School District, located on the high-poverty Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Indigenous students represent 96% of enrollment on the reservation and less than 4% in Custer. 

An influx of federal and state dollars has left the Oglala Lakota County Schools among South Dakota’s best-funded, but they remain among its lowest-performing. These high levels of funding “do not ensure our children a rich education,” Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, argues in the report. Along with historical challenges and the scars of trauma and colonialism, Cournoyer said, the reservation’s schools also have to contend with bureaucracy and limitations on how they can spend those government dollars. That creates barriers in how they can use funds “to address the unique needs of Native students, which results in inequitable access to opportunities.”&�Բ�����;

Despite the imbalance in school resources, Cournoyer notes that students on the reservation benefit from cultural and language support — something they could miss if they attended schools in Custer, even with its “nicer facilities and more advanced technology.” The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn. 

“They would not be in a school environment that reflects or values their native culture,” Cournoyer wrote. “They would be isolated, away from the protection of their family and tribal leadership. They would be more likely to encounter racism and stereotyping, making them less comfortable with expressing their Native identity.”

As we set out to make plans for the 2023 academic year, my team knew that we needed to somehow simultaneously ‘right-size’ the district while also enabling investment in new initiatives to enhance academic outcomes and the student experience. 

I often read and hear about the fiscal cliff. It’s a serious matter we can’t ignore. But there is seemingly a void of ideas, solutions or tools to equip us as district leaders to better confront and work around these looming financial challenges. Thankfully, we landed on an innovative and replicable strategy that allowed us to find budget efficiencies without sacrificing the student experience, without requiring any program elimination, and without laying off any staffers. We did this through an unconventional route: smarter school scheduling. 

Thanks to a partnership with Timely, a new organization dedicated to helping schools build better master schedules, we utilized middle and high school scheduling as a vehicle to balance our academic, staffing and budget priorities for the new school year. 

In total, across 14 middle and high schools, we identified significant savings by scheduling class sizes and teacher loads more consistently across schools. For the second consecutive year, our district maintained an overall average class size target of 24, a figure still below the Texas state average. But initial analysis revealed significant variation of class sizes and teacher loads across schools, and often within individual schools, driven by inefficient staffing and scheduling.

Through careful and intentional resource allocation enabled by Timely, we addressed a long-term challenge of mismatched resources and student needs – some schools and classrooms were unintentionally over-resourced while others were under-resourced. In total, our district identified 37 positions we eliminated through vacancies created by attrition, representing a savings of $2.2 million, which we then reinvested into new priority areas, hiring additional core subject teachers and staff for special populations. And, critically, we avoided teacher layoffs and took the first step of a multi-year plan to more efficiently allocate resources to schools given budget pressures while strengthening transparency and partnership between schools and the central office.

Why Scheduling Matters 

The master schedule is the beating heart of a school. It is an incredible fulcrum of the student experience, teacher experience, and innovative staffing and budget solutions. And yet in districts across the country, school leaders routinely struggle with the development of their schedules. And their counterparts within central offices are often not equipped to support them and lack visibility into the staffing and scheduling decisions made at individual school sites. 

When done poorly, we miss opportunities to build a schedule that addresses students’ needs while efficiently maximizing resources. For example, a common practice of schools is to roll over the prior year’s schedule with the teachers who are returning the following year. This may seem like the safest approach given the complexities of a secondary schedule, but there are often inefficiencies in schedules, and over time they can be calcified and assumed to be the norm. Instead, we built a bottom-up schedule based on what our students were requesting and needed, which changed the paradigm. 

The reality is student course offerings don’t always align to the needs and requests of students, there is an overall mismatch of resources across schools, certain classes are under-enrolled while others are over-subscribed, and students from historically marginalized backgrounds can be disproportionately impacted. As a result, schools may find themselves unintentionally allocating resources in a manner that goes against their own goals and objectives, with the lowest class sizes in advanced classes, electives and/or upper grades. 

Scheduling has regularly been one of the hardest things we’ve had to do each year in Lubbock. But our recent work has taught us that it need not be a process we simply suffer through and endure. 

To the contrary, it’s a process that can now help us prioritize and enable broader academic, staffing, and budget goals. And most importantly, strategic scheduling can help ensure that all students get access to the courses they want and need to be on track to graduate, remain inspired to attend and excel in school, and be empowered to pursue a postsecondary pathway. 

Schedules = Values 

The school schedule reflects values and priorities. With upwards of 85% of a district budget dedicated to personnel, there are few questions more paramount than how your staff and students spend their time every day, what positions you’ll hire for, how many teachers you will hire, and how students will be able to interact with them. Equitable resource allocation across schools, proper access to core courses and electives, and dedicated support to sub-groups begins with the development of a school schedule. And perhaps the most overlooked aspect of scheduling is the ability to develop innovative staffing and budgeting solutions. 

When scheduling is approached strategically, which requires the right tools and support, there is an immense opportunity to address critical priorities with district staffing, budgets, and academic goals. Lubbock demonstrated this is possible. Without this approach, we would have faced the possibility of teacher layoffs and program eliminations. What’s more, our district has built on this progress by enhancing our timelines, systems, processes, and tools so that the annual scheduling process will be an ongoing opportunity to ensure efficient and strategic use of resources.

But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.

That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year. 

In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their “help wanted” signs.  and  issued a  this spring. , , and Baltimore County .  and Seattle are already doing . And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.

What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.

​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

With all these extra staff in schools and declining enrollment, a rightsizing is coming. These trends aren’t just afflicting large urban districts, either. Rather, in states where we have the data, the patterns are playing out statewide. Over the last decade, districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%.

In , staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in . Even in , where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.

True, . So, job seekers might find more opportunities there (though both states offer notoriously low teacher salaries). And just as staffing and enrollment patterns can vary by state, same goes for districts within states, too. Even so, when job openings are down statewide, it means the available candidates are vying for a smaller number of positions. (States or districts wanting to better understand their own staffing and enrollment patterns can use .)

ESSER hangover 

Federal COVID relief funds fed a hiring habit that can’t be sustained.  was once treated as some abstract future threat. But we’re now watching that threat play out in real time as districts work to finalize next year’s budgets this month.  released by schools this spring. 

With last week’s debt limit deal, it’s clear that more federal funding won’t come to districts’ rescue. And states aren’t likely to fill the hole either, as . 

Georgia recently  a one-year drop of 16.5% in net tax collections. Massachusetts had a whopping 31% year-over-year . And 

For educators in high-demand roles, like , there will still be jobs. But for others, it’s likely to get much tougher as districts start to shrink their labor force to align with their new enrollment numbers.

The public discourse about widespread teacher shortages may be confusing to some, particularly when the data show we’ve just finished a period of staffing up our schools. In most regions, however, the new reality is this: Those seeking jobs in schools will soon be facing a job market quite different than what we’ve seen for several years.The upside for districts that are hiring? When there are fewer jobs and more job seekers, districts can afford to be choosier, and the  of new hires rises.

Now, as courts and politicians decide the future of the state’s school voucher program, a study released in December indicates that private school choice hasn’t had the damaging impact that many of its detractors claim. In fact, its author argues, racial segregation of students tended to decline in school districts where more students were eligible to receive vouchers from the state. 

The was commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a reform-friendly think tank with a special focus on research and advocacy in Ohio. Its arrival could help shape the debate over the effects of school vouchers and the course that the state’s ambitious choice agenda will take in 2023, though voucher critics may contest its findings on school funding.

Alleging that the public funding of private schools is unconstitutional, and that the current system “discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools,” a coalition of school districts last year. A Columbus judge by the government to dismiss the case just a few weeks after the Fordham report was issued. At the same time, Republican lawmakers to massively expand the voucher program, known locally as EdChoice, to all of Ohio’s K–12 students after stalled in December. 

Roughly 60,000 kids statewide receive EdChoice scholarships ($7,500 for high schoolers, $5,500 for younger children) to defray tuition costs at private schools, including religious institutions. That number over the last decade, leading supporters of public schools to complain that their enrollment, finances, and academic offerings have been harmed by the rapid movement of families and funding from districts.

But study author Stéphane Lavertu, a political scientist at Ohio State University, argued that his research didn’t support those claims. The report shows that vouchers’ effects on student achievement and per-pupil funding in public schools are ambiguous, but not obviously negative — and far from increasing racial segregation in affected schools, he argued, EdChoice seems to actively decrease it.

“What we can say with some level of certainty is that segregation did not go up in district schools,” Lavertu said. “In fact, we can say with some confidence that it went down. That’s the only finding where I would say that there’s a clear direction, and it’s down.”

Lavertu examined school- and district-level figures for 47 Ohio districts where students in at least one school were entitled to scholarships between the 2006–07 and 2018–19 academic years. While eligibility was eventually expanded to students from comparatively low-income families, the study focuses almost exclusively on the original eligibility threshold, which hinged on students attending a school designated by the state as underperforming. 

The availability of vouchers clearly impacted student headcounts: On average, a district with at least one EdChoice-eligible school experienced a decline of between 10 and 15 percent of its students over a little more than a decade. 

But those exits were disproportionately driven by non-white students, Lavertu found. Data from the Ohio Department of Education revealed that 56 percent of participants in EdChoice during the period under study were African American, Hispanic, American Indian, or Alaskan Native. Consequently, the average district that was exposed to EdChoice saw a 13 percent decline in its percentage of minority students; those departing students left for private schools with higher concentrations of white and Asian students, while the district schools they left became less racially isolated (falling from roughly 57 percent minority-enrolled to roughly 50 percent). 

Happily, academic outcomes also improved somewhat. Using Ohio’s “district performance index,” a composite measure that includes the proficiency levels of students in all tested subjects and grades, Lavertu found that achievement climbed in the typical district with EdChoice-eligible schools. Those gains were reached from a startlingly low baseline, with average academic performance rising from the second percentile statewide (roughly the twelfth-lowest-performing district in Ohio) to the sixth percentile (roughly the 37th-lowest-performing district). 

Those findings were far less definitive than those for segregation, the study notes, because it can’t be known why the index ticked upward. The impetus might be improved teaching in public schools as a product of private school competition, but it could also stem from relatively lower-performing students being more likely to receive vouchers, changing the composition of the existing school system.

While the academic results were “very noisy,” Lavertu said, the results make it hard to claim that the remaining public school students are worse-off academically than they would have been if vouchers didn’t exist.

Funding questions

The study’s most disputed assertions relate to the financial consequences of EdChoice, which are central to the arguments of its opponents. 

Because voucher funding originates with the state, school districts only lose that portion of K–12 revenue when their students leave for private schools (according to , 42 percent of Ohio’s total K–12 spending came from the state in Fiscal Year 2020, though the percentage allocated from Columbus to each district is determined through a complex formula). Local dollars, which are principally collected through property taxes, are not affected.

Once some families use their vouchers, that money is also spread over fewer public school students. In fact, per-pupil expenditures rose by 1.39 percent in districts exposed to EdChoice; operating expenditures (i.e., those unrelated to capital spending on things like land, buildings, and equipment) rose by 4.55 percent per-pupil. While those results aren’t big enough to be considered statistically significant, Lavertu argues in the study, they can effectively rule out the notion that tax-funded scholarships lead to declining spending on public school students.

Even if those calculations are accurate, however, voucher critics say that they ignore a disquieting reality: Some localities find themselves needing to raise their own property taxes in order to cover costs when students and state funding are gone. Their efforts to do so often fall short — the people of Parma, the state’s seventh-largest city, that were brought to the ballot — and even when they succeed, cash-strapped towns and cities are left reaching deeper into their own pockets to fund essential services.

Thomas Sutton, a professor of political science at the private Baldwin Wallace University, pointed to that has occurred since 2019, when the Ohio legislature lifted income thresholds for families to become eligible. Some districts have been left asking their residents to pay more for the same schools, often while attempting to cut costs by closing or consolidating buildings that cost the same to maintain no matter how many students are enrolled. 

“The amount of money those districts are using per-pupil hasn’t declined precipitously,” Sutton said. “But the reason it hasn’t declined is because they’ve had to make it up through local taxation, not because there’s been no impact on the local district.” Meanwhile, state spending on private schools .

Lavertu acknowledged that the immediate effects of losing students to programs like EdChoice could be “difficult to deal with.” But he added that the influence of school choice could still be neutral, or even beneficial, over time — particularly when combined with necessary reforms to adjust for shrinking enrollment.

“When you’re losing students and losing revenue, but those fixed costs are there, you’ve got to make some really hard choices going forward. In the short term, that can be really, really painful,” he observed. “What I’d say with the funding is that, in the long run, it doesn’t appear to have a negative financial impact.”

The fiscal challenges facing Ohio’s schools could grow even more tangled with of HB 126, legislation that limits public challenges of property tax valuations. In recent decades, school districts have clawed back significant amounts of annual revenue by appealing to county boards when they believed that nearby properties — the — were undervalued. Under the new law, the avenues to such challenges are sharply curtailed. Local authorities have also struggled to that allow millions of dollars of tax revenue to go uncollected.

Matthew Chingos, vice president for education data and policy for the Urban Institute, has conducted several reviews of the effects of private school choice on phenomena . Much of the existing research, he noted, looked at small-bore programs that were intended only for poor children or those with disabilities. But with more and more states attempting to rapidly scale their voucher initiatives — Ohio could be next if Republican lawmakers are successful — there could be a need for “a new generation of evidence” to shed light on how a more muscular approach to choice helps or hurts traditional public school systems.

“[Scaling up] increases the potential for these programs to make a difference for the better, but it also raises the risk that, if they have negative effects, they’ll be more widely felt,” Chingos said.

In a 4-3 ruling handed down Nov. 4, the North Carolina Supreme Court took the matter out of the legislature’s hands after almost 30 years of litigation and ordered officials to transfer the funds directly from the state treasury to agencies overseeing education and teacher preparation.  

“Far too many North Carolina schoolchildren, especially those historically marginalized, are not afforded their constitutional right to the opportunity to a sound basic education,” Associate Justice Robin Hudson wrote in the majority opinion in Hoke County Board of Education v. North Carolina. The state, she said, “has proven — for an entire generation — either unable or unwilling to fulfill its constitutional duty.”

Part of a wave of lawsuits from the 1990s that challenged inequitable school funding systems, the case — first known as Leandro v. North Carolina — shed light on the lack of educational opportunities in five rural counties, where underqualified teachers, scarce supplies and outdated textbooks were the norm. The plaintiff districts argued that the state was responsible for making up the funding gap between poor and wealthy districts.

The case languished in the courts even as the state amassed a budget surplus following the Great Recession. Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said the ruling sends a signal to other states that legislators can’t ignore the law.

“The games that legislatures play are … wars on the right to education, wars on the constitution,” said Black, who attended “marathon” hearings on the case when he was in law school at the University of North Carolina. “When the judiciary speaks, there is not some other option.”

Republicans, who dominate the legislature, are already pushing back, and with the GOP gaining a 5-2 majority on the Supreme Court in last week’s election, some are floating the possibility of a reversal. 

“Prediction: Not a dime of taxpayer money is ultimately spent on this unprecedented and unconstitutional order before it is blocked and reversed by a newly seated N.C. Supreme Court next year,” Brent Woodcox, a Republican senior policy counsel for the North Carolina legislature. 

In his dissent in the case, Associate Justice Phil Berger Jr. set the stage for a backlash. He wrote that the ruling “strips” the legislature of its authority over education policy and funding and amounts to “pernicious extension of judicial power.”

But in the majority opinion, Hudson sought to limit the ruling’s scope, writing that it applies “in exactly one circumstance” — this case — and wouldn’t have been necessary if “recalcitrant state actors” had addressed the funding inequities. 

Lawrence Picus, a school finance expert at the University of Southern California, said the closest example to this ruling he has seen is a 2015 order from the Washington Supreme Court that held the state legislature and issued a $100,000-a-day fine until lawmakers agreed on a way to adequately fund schools as mandated by the court’s opinion in .

That day didn’t come until June, 2018, when the court ruled that the state had increased the education budget enough to be in compliance. Penalties, which by that time had reached over $100 million, also went to schools. 

“Courts are generally extremely reluctant to order the legislature to do something,” Picus said. “In North Carolina, they’re doing it for them.”

Funding the ‘remedial’ plan

Originally named for Hoke County Schools student Robb Leandro and his mother, the North Carolina case began in 1994 when families from five rural districts sued the state and its board of education. The lack of well-qualified teachers, they argued, left students less likely than those in wealthier counties to be proficient in core subjects and to enter college without needing remediation. 

Despite the trial court siding with the plaintiffs year after year, lawmakers never complied with the orders and, following the Great Recession, cut education by a further 13.9% in per-student funding, according to . 

But then the financial picture improved — a lot — and this year, the state has a $6 billion surplus. 

A year ago, the trial court ordered the state to spend $1.7 billion to help fund an eight-year developed byWestEd, a consulting firm. The funds would cover teacher and principal training, revisions to the school funding formula and expansion of the state’s pre-K system. 

The state later passed a budget partially funding the plan, and the trial court revised the figure to $785 million. The Supreme Court’s ruling upholds that decision.

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore told local reporters the legislature the ruling, while attorneys with Parker Poe, a law firm that represents the plaintiffs, said that’s not an option.

‘Whether they agree with it or not’

Like Black, Ann McColl has seen her law career intertwined with the Leandro saga. Co-founder of The Innovation Project, a school leadership network, she represented and wrote briefs in the case on behalf of educator and school board associations. 

“It’s always the case that people react to a court opinion, and see how they can maneuver around it,” she said. But North Carolina lawmakers, she added, are showing a “certain vigor” in their objections.

There’s a potential for the ruling to influence a school finance lawsuit in Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, an appellate court heard four months of testimony in that case, with attorneys for legislative leaders arguing that students don’t need to go to college if they’re on  The case is expected to make its way to the state supreme court.

Until now, Black added, the so-called 1989 “Rose decision” in Kentucky stood as the most forceful ruling in school finance. The state supreme court ruled that Kentucky’s entire education system was unconstitutional and of an adequate education.  

The North Carolina decision goes further by ruling that schools needn’t wait for lawmakers to act.

“The court just put down a flag post,” Black said, “and every single court that grapples with this issue in the future will discuss this flag post, whether they agree with it or not.”

The average increase was 10.8% from 2020-21 to 2021-22 and 16.5% from 2020-21 to 2022-23, according to a late August of 118 large school system budgets published by Burbio, which has tracked K-12 policy through the pandemic.

Nearly 1 in 5 district budgets within that group had grown by more than 25% since 2021.

In many cases, those investments translate to direct benefits for students, said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. School systems have invested in tutoring programs and summer learning experiences to catch students up after many experienced significant delays in their learning due to COVID disruptions such as virtual learning and quarantines. Other districts have used the cash to make long-needed infrastructure improvements such as upgrading ventilation with or .

But with American Rescue Plan money set to expire in 2024, and with U.S. student enrollment projected to drop by due to slowed birth rates nationwide, the Georgetown K-12 finance expert warns that schools for a period of “bloodletting” by 2024-25 when budgets must adjust back down.

“You don’t have to look too far out to see pain coming,” Aldeman said. “That could look like flat or stagnant salaries, that can look like layoffs, that could look like closing schools. The federal money has deferred some of those tough choices or even made it so people can ignore them for a little bit. But they will come and it’s just a matter of when and how hard they hit.”

In Los Angeles, where enrollment has been , the school system released projections for total spending to drop nearly 20% from 2022-23 to 2024-25 — from roughly $11 billion to about $9 billion. Much of the difference represents the ending of stimulus funds.

L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has described that impending fiscal cliff, conjoined with enrollment drops, as a quickly approaching “Armageddon.”&�Բ�����;

Most school leaders have worked to avoid a 2024-25 economic catastrophe in their stimulus spending, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

“Many superintendents have been careful, anticipating the fiscal cliff, not to use the dollars in ways that would create a problem for them down the line. For example, teacher salaries or the hiring of significant staff that then will have to be let go.”

For 20 years, Domenech worked as school superintendent in Long Island, New York over a period when the region lost 40% of its students.

“For all those years, I never built a school,” he said. “All I did was close schools.”

That’s a difficult task, the school leader acknowledged, because while families understand in the abstract the district must consolidate to prevent taxes from soaring, they usually want to see other schools close rather than their own. But cutting through the noise, school leaders can also understand the process of what Domenech calls “right-sizing” schools as an opportunity to “balance” student populations, he said, desegregating schools racially and socioeconomically.

Aldeman advises superintendents looking at enrollment declines not to kick the consolidation can down the road. Though school closings will inevitably cause disruptions, he said, policymakers can ease the pain with investments like more guidance counselors or improved transportation.

“Now would be a good time to start thinking about [consolidating],” Alderman said. “If we delay it, then the money will run out.”

Hartford, Connecticut is a $5,000 signing incentive for educators in high-demand subjects like math, science and bilingual education. Taos, New Mexico a $50,000 starting salary for any new teacher hire, plus a $10,000 bonus. Stanly County Schools in North Carolina also a $10,000 signing incentive.

“We wanted to give teachers [an] … incentive to come to beautiful Taos,” Superintendent Lillian Torrez told The 74 via email. Funding provided by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan “has helped with this project,” she said.

In an extreme example, Gallup-McKinley County Schools in New Mexico is incentivizing teachers to join the district’s ranks by dangling bonuses ranging between , plus $2,500 to 4,500 for relocation — a grand sum that could top out around $25,000.

Bus drivers, too, are in short supply. Lower Merion, a school system outside Philadelphia, announced a for drivers to join the district’s ranks. California’s Eureka Union School District is offering .

“Hiring school bus drivers with BIG incentives!” one Eureka posting reads.

Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic, said that while districts have been using incentives to attract workers for months, the dollar amounts recently have ballooned — perhaps reflecting a last-ditch effort to get fully staffed by the first day of school. 

“In the past few weeks, we have noted a marked increase in the size and duration of these payments,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche wrote in the company’s .

The generous bonuses are only the latest examples of the extreme lengths school systems are taking to handle what some experts are calling a staffing “.”&�Բ�����;

In Texas, several rural districts are due to lack of staff. In Florida, leaders are asking with no teaching experience to serve in classrooms. In Arizona, some children may soon receive instruction from rather than certified teachers. And in Buffalo, New York, a driver shortage has prompted leaders to consider providing a to parents who opt to drive their children rather than put them on the bus.

Throughout the pandemic, K-12 staff shortages have disproportionately affected impoverished districts. Yet even large school systems have felt the effects. In early August, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools in North Carolina announced they had — more than six times the number of open positions this time last year.

Nationwide, there were roughly 300,000 openings for education jobs in June, according to the most recent numbers from the . Other data indicate the total could be even higher: A representative sample of the nation’s nearly 100,000 schools reported an average of three teacher vacancies and another three unfilled non-teaching positions such as for custodial staff, cafeteria workers or bus drivers in a June survey from the National Center for Education Statistics — hinting there could be close to 600,000 openings.

Vacancies, however, do not necessarily mean that campuses are short-staffed. Unfilled positions can also arise because schools added new roles, explained Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.

“Districts are currently flush with cash thanks to the infusion of $190 billion in federal aid. As a result, many districts have ambitious hiring plans to add more teachers, mental health supports, instructional aides, or tutors,” he wrote in an email to The 74.

More than three-quarters of school systems have increased their total number of employees above pre-pandemic levels, including both teaching and non-teaching roles, a recent from the Rand Corporation found. 

“In short, we believe it is districts’ increase in number of staff that they seek to employ rather than an exodus from teaching that is straining the teacher labor market,” the authors wrote.

Meanwhile, the economy added an unexpectedly large number of new jobs, according to the just-released federal report, including a seasonally adjusted in July. With unemployment rates down to just and a continued decline in the share of Americans working or actively seeking work, there’s no indication the hiring landscape will ease anytime soon.

“Unemployment rates are low, meaning almost everyone who wants a job already has one,” said Aldeman. “All this competition may be hard on employers, but it’s good for the workers who are on the receiving end of these stipends and bonuses.”

“Districts are going to have to be aggressive and creative to find and keep employees in critical shortage areas,” he on Twitter.

That’s been the name of the game for Supt. Torrez in Taos, New Mexico. On her district’s is a scrolling, full-screen slideshow of the benefits for new hires: 

“WE’RE HIRING! Receive a $10,000 Additional Recruitment Incentive” 

“LISTEN TO WHY TEACHERS LOVE TEACHING AT TAOS SCHOOLS! Click below for video and then click on the right arrow for the application!”

“WOULD YOU LIKE A $10,000 SIGN-ON RECRUITMENT INCENTIVE FOR A NEW JOB AS A TMS TEACHER? Click below for the application!”

She is not concerned with why the market is strained, but rather on how she can navigate those conditions and still ensure her district has a full teacher corps when her 2,100 students return to buildings Aug. 11. The $10,000 signing bonuses, she says, have enticed 10 candidates, but 7 open positions remain.

“We still have a few openings,” she said. “However, I would call [the incentives] a success, overall.”

Students learning in storage closets. Cockroach-infested campuses without heat, reading specialists or updated textbooks. Learning facilities in such disrepair they’ve become dangerous. 

“A system that strands children capable of learning in districts that lack the resources necessary to teach them cannot be considered thorough and efficient,” attorney Katrina Robson said during closing arguments Thursday in a high-profile legal battle in Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Robson is one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in a historic school funding trial that has stretched over four months and involved more than 40 witnesses. Thousands of low-income students have been trapped in districts that produce poor academic achievement, preventing them from success in college and life, she argued, despite a more than 150-year-old mandate in the state Constitution requiring Pennsylvania to provide a “thorough and efficient” education system.

Attorneys for the defendants, including Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman and House Speaker Bryan Cutler, both Republicans, maintained that state lawmakers have met their constitutional obligations and that the six school districts, three families and two Pennsylvania advocacy groups suing the state failed to prove the funding scheme ran counter to the constitution. Ultimately, lawmakers have upheld their duty to provide an “adequate education” because public schools are now available to students in “every nook and cranny” of the state, said Patrick Northen, Cutler’s attorney. 

“Today, in 2022, Pennsylvania has a vast system of public schools that provides all kids in every part of the commonwealth an opportunity to get a free education,” he said. “Compare what exists today versus the 1870s, before the education clause was enacted, when kids in rural areas were deprived of any public education.”

At issue is Pennsylvania’s state funding system that relies heavily on local property taxes, a system the plaintiffs — including the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools — charge also violates the state constitution’s equal protection clause by providing less money to schools in areas with low property values and less personal wealth. Pennsylvania ranks in the percentage of education costs the state picks up versus what falls on local districts and some districts tax their residents at far higher rates than their more affluent neighbors only to raise less money. 

The closely watched case, filed eight years ago, could ultimately spur huge changes for Pennsylvania students if Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer rules the current funding scheme is unconstitutional and requires one that sends more state tax money to low-income schools. However, she until this summer, and an appeal to the state Supreme Court is expected no matter which side prevails.

Defendant lawmakers have argued that the legislature maintains authority over school funding and it’s not the role of the court to act like a “super school board.” Robson said children in low-income districts have been relegated to crowded, rotting and under-resourced schools precisely because state school funding “has become a victim of politics.”

Similar to Pennsylvania, state constitutions nationally grant children the right to a public education, but as former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in a recent op-ed, they don’t promise a “great one.” In multiple states, including New Mexico and Minnesota, advocates are campaigning to change that by enshrining the right to a high-quality education in their state constitutions. 

The Pennsylvania trial is one in a long run of similar school funding equity litigation that has found varying degrees of success, including in neighboring states like New Jersey and New York. The most recent high-profile example unfolded in Connecticut, where in 2016 lawmakers were ordered to completely reconfigure the state’s school funding system only to have the state Supreme Court overturn the lower-court ruling two years later.

In the Pennsylvania case, defendants’ attorneys pointed to Connecticut as a path forward. Northen said the Connecticut Supreme Court was “sympathetic to the plight of struggling students,” but it’s not the role of courts to create education policy or to solve the societal problems that children bring to school. Poor scores on standardized tests, he continued, are not the result of underfunded schools, but of how factors like poverty affect cognitive development and academic performance. 

The state education department and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, are also defendants in the lawsuit but have not fought to counter plaintiffs’ claims. In fact, Wolf proposed an additional in his latest budget proposal. Wolf’s attorney, Sophia Lee, contradicted co-defendants’ position in her closing argument Thursday. With proper resources, she said, schools can support students to the point of alleviating the conditions they bring to school, including the effects of poverty and trauma.

Though “significant progress has been made” under Wolf’s leadership, Lee said it remains “unfortunately true that our schools are underfunded, that the quality of education is determined by zip code and that historical investments in education aren’t equitably allocated.”&�Բ�����;

A supports the notion that increased school spending leads to better educational outcomes for students. 

But other defendants questioned whether the plaintiff districts had spent their limited resources responsibly and noted that many of the deteriorating building conditions used to illustrate their plight had since been fixed. One district, Greater Johnstown, recently upgraded the lights in its football stadium and another, Panther Valley, offers a course in broadcast journalism. 

“No one has actually looked at how the funding is spent by petitioner districts,” said attorney Thomas DeCesar, who represents Corman. “You see, they are not using funding in a way that maximizes efficiency and directs money to the programs they claim they need.”

Along with casting doubt that additional money would result in better educational outcomes, DeCesar noted the constitution requires an education system that “meets the needs of the commonwealth” and that not all jobs depend on a college education. The state needs police officers, IT professionals, retail workers and truck drivers, he said.

“Just because a job doesn’t require a college degree doesn’t make the job less honorable or important,” he said. 

DeCesar’s argument resembles one made during the trial, when “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?” 

“Lest we forget the commonwealth has many needs,” Krill continued. “There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”&�Բ�����;

It’s this argument that Robson, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said was particularly egregious. Such comments, she said, make “a mockery of the education clause” in the state constitution that was meant to “ensure there would not be a two-tiered system of education” in Pennsylvania.

Correction: The Greater Johnstown School District upgraded its football stadium lights. An earlier version of this story misidentified the district.

Beginning Friday and , the trial centers on a state funding system that relies heavily on local property taxes that plaintiffs allege provides inequitable state money to districts in areas with low property values and less personal wealth in violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s equal-protection provision. The current system fails to meet the commonwealth’s obligation to provide students with a “thorough and efficient system of education,” their attorneys argue.

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The six districts who are suing will ask the Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg to declare Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional and order lawmakers to create a new one that directs more money to low-wealth districts. The non-jury trial of William Penn School District, et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, et al., will include as many as 50 witnesses, who will present a dizzying array of statistics on school finance and its effects on student outcomes that could extend into January. 

“This trial is really important for children throughout the commonwealth who are going to finally get the opportunity to tell the story of how they have been deprived of the opportunity for an effective education that so many students in well-funded districts in the state have the opportunity for,” Michael Churchill, an attorney with the nonprofit Public Interest Law Center, explained during a press conference Wednesday. 

In addition to the six school districts, the lawsuit filed in 2014 is being brought by four parents,  the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools and the NAACP – Pennsylvania State Conference. Plaintiffs are represented by the Public Interest Law Center, the Education Law Center-PA and the law firm O’Melveny. 

Defendants include the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the state Senate and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. The defense has argued that the legislature, not the courts, maintains authority over school funding. 

“The question in this case is not whether Pennsylvania’s system of public education could be better,” Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, a Republican, , adding that lawmakers regularly pass bills to improve schools. “But imperfect is not unconstitutional.”&�Բ�����; 

The case was previously dismissed by the Commonwealth Court, which agreed that school funding decisions are the responsibility of the legislature, not the judicial branch, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the case must go to trial. 

“It is a mistake to conflate legislative policymaking pursuant to a constitutional mandate with constitutional interpretation of that mandate and the minimum that it requires,” Justice David Wecht wrote in a 2017 opinion for the court majority. 

In total, plaintiff districts allege the state’s schools are being shortchanged $4.6 billion a year, said Maura McInerney, the legal director at the Education Law Center-PA. 

“Many of our witnesses will tell a common story about the impact of entrenched inequities in resources in low-wealth school districts,” she said. “That takes the form of overcrowded classrooms, antiquated science labs, nonexistent libraries and a lack of staffing in the school buildings as well as unsafe schools.”

The trial is one in a long history of similar school funding equity litigation that has found varying degrees of success. In neighboring New Jersey, in 1990 — nine years after the case was first heard in court — the Supreme Court and required lawmakers to direct more resources to low-income districts. The most recent high-profile example unfolded in Connecticut, where in 2016 lawmakers were ordered to completely reconfigure the state’s school funding system only for the Supreme Court to overturn the lower-court ruling two years later in a 4-3 split decision.

It is not the function of the courts “to create educational policy or to attempt by judicial fiat to eliminate all of the societal deficiencies that continue to frustrate the state’s educational efforts,” Connecticut’s then-Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers wrote in a 2018 opinion. 

Even in some states where courts have found education funding schemes unconstitutional, the road to resource equity has been an uphill battle. In New York, for schools to settle a legal battle that stretches back decades. In 2006, the state owed schools more money to provide students a “sound basic education,” but the 2008 recession undercut state efforts to bolster funding, which is only just now being addressed.

Meanwhile in North Carolina, on Wednesday to increase education funding by $1.7 billion. The issue stems from a 1994 funding equity lawsuit that alleged students in low-income communities weren’t offered the same educational opportunities as those in wealthier counties, claims the court agreed with three years later. More than two decades passed, however, before this week’s edict finally forced state lawmakers to come up with the money to fully satisfy the 1997 decision.

A supports the notion that increased school spending leads to better educational outcomes for students. 

In the Pennsylvania case, plaintiffs include the Johnstown School District where the middle school’s library remains locked because it lacks a librarian. In the Panther Valley School District, attorneys have blamed high teacher turnover on low pay and difficult working conditions, leaving the teachers who stay to manage increasingly large class sizes. In the Shenandoah Valley School District, a school psychologist works as an assistant principal. 

Overall, in Pennsylvania is distributed at the state level, meaning districts have to rely on local property taxes for a larger share at 43 percent. That ratio ranks the commonwealth 45th nationally, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

On average, Pennsylvania’s wealthiest districts spend $4,800 more per student than its poorest districts, according to the Education Law Center, and that per pupil gap grew by more than $1,000 over the last decade after factoring for inflation. 

While the state has increased education funding in recent years — and federal pandemic relief funding added an influx in new education money — the plaintiffs argue the disparities and funding levels remain unacceptable. 

Critics have maintained, however, that Pennsylvania schools are adequately resourced and the “state share” is meaningless. Jennifer Stefano, the vice president and chief strategist at the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank, that Pennsylvania ranks within the top 10 nationally for overall education funding. 

“Total spending per student is thousands of dollars above the national average, thanks to ample state funding and local funding that is far above what most local taxpayers in the rest of the country provide,” Stefano wrote. “It’s only because of this outsized local tax haul that an objectively high state funding level can be made to look small — basic fractions.”&�Բ�����;

But McInerney held that the state average funding is misleading. Pennsylvania is home to “many high-wealth communities and children are doing well in those communities,” she said. It’s the children in low-wealth areas, disproportionately youth of color, who are struggling. Half of the state’s Black students and 40 percent of its Hispanic students attend the 20 percent of school districts with the lowest wealth. Meanwhile, higher-income communities are able to raise more for schools through local taxes because they have a richer property tax base. 

“Pennsylvania has some of the largest gaps between low-wealth and high-wealth districts of anywhere in the nation and they also have some of the greatest disparities in academic outcomes,” she said. “For example, 94 percent of students graduate in four years at our high-wealth districts whereas in poor districts, that percentage is 74 percent.”

But if the family wants to move their child to better schools in the nearby Elwood, Union or Manhattan districts they would be hard-pressed to find housing in that price range. 

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These invisible boundaries are what researchers at Bellwether Education Partners call “border barriers” — lines between districts that frequently keep low-income families out of higher-quality schools. The Chicago area, the authors write, has 45 such divisions, where families in low-income housing brush up against districts with more resources and better schools but few, if any, affordable rental units. 

Bellwether explores these differences in “Priced Out of Public Schools,” released last week that adds a new layer to our understanding of how closely housing and education are intertwined. Districts with out-of-reach rental prices spend, on average, at least $4,600 more per student — the result of higher property taxes. While states’ school finance formulas aim to equalize funding across districts, they don’t make up the gap. 

“As we think about what we need to do moving forward, it’s not just an education solution alone,” said Alex Spurrier, co-author of the report and a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, an education think tank. States, he said, should consider multiple policy levers to address “what is a very thorny challenge.”

The report comes as continue to rise and many low-income families , long delays for federal rental assistance funds and landlords who reject . When families relocate to more affordable housing, their children often must leave not only their schools, but their districts as well — especially in states like Texas, California and Illinois, where metro area maps are dotted with dozens of small school districts. The authors label the phenomenon “educational gerrymandering,” the creation of smaller, exclusive districts that cater to higher-income, less racially diverse student populations. While the report recommends multiple approaches to address the disparities, experts note that altering district boundaries is politically risky: People with money are likely to vote against those who meddle too much.

“People who have wealth are willing to use it to get high-quality schools.” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The rules of the game do produce some inequities.” 

Mergers and secessions

Some of those rules date back to nearly a century ago when the nation entered a movement that by 1970 had cut more than 100,000 districts down to less than 20,000. Now there are 13,000.

But district mergers tended to lack high-minded ambitions to create more racial or socioeconomically balanced schools. Rather, they were likely to be unions of districts with similar demographics, explained Tomas Monarrez, a research associate at the Urban Institute who has studied racial and ethnic segregation in schools.

Some of the starkest examples of drawing boundaries to benefit wealthier populations include recent efforts by some communities to break away from larger, often county-level, school districts. the 2017 report from EdBuild, noted 73 secessions since 2000, with another 55 either attempted or in progress.

Several have launched in the Northeast, but the Bellwether report also includes examples in the South. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, communities within Shelby County split off into smaller districts in 2014 after the majority Black Memphis district dissolved and merged into the county district. In Alabama, there have been 10 successful attempts since 2000, with in the works. 

“At the very least, we should be wary of those secession trends,” Monarrez said. Mergers, however, can minimize disparities in access to quality schools if leaders pursue them with the goal of improving equity, he said.

Some states have created where multiple districts share tax revenue or allow students to transfer into schools across district lines as a way to reduce disparities. The Nebraska legislature created such a plan involving 11 Omaha-area districts. In Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, encompassing Boston and the surrounding area, is another example.

But Malkus, at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned that such options only tend to “nibble around the margins.” Daniel Thatcher, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted that open enrollment programs can make school funding disparities worse because the receiving district gets the state funding for those students.

School choice programs are another way to allow students to attend a school outside their neighborhood, the authors suggest. The results of that approach are mixed. that within a district, charters lead to a slight decrease in student diversity. But across a metro area, the presence of charters can create schools that are more racially mixed.

That’s what leaders in School District 49, adjacent to the Colorado Springs, Colorado, district have found. The district is considered “inaccessible” to lower-income families because there’s not enough affordable housing to meet the demand, according to the Bellwether report. But more than a third of the district’s students come from outside the district for traditional, charter and online options, said Peter Hilts, the system’s chief education officer. Half of the Colorado Springs district’s students are nonwhite, compared to 43 percent in District 49.

“There’s no question that open, inclusive choice has made us a more diverse district,” Hilts said. “If you genuinely want educational equity, you must believe in school choice, and if you truly advocate for inclusive choice, you must address other factors like transportation, affordable housing, and childcare options that can inhibit choice.”

Housing affordability not only affects families wishing to move into a district, but also those who want to stay put. In Tacoma, Washington, low-income families are beginning to leave because of a lack of housing options, said Elliott Barnett, a senior planner for the city. Proximity to quality schools is a key element of , a project that recommends building additional types of housing in neighborhoods that were previously reserved for single-family homes.

“We know that where a person lives has a link to their access to opportunities that have a big impact on our lives such as education achievement, income, life expectancy and others.” Barnett said. “Even if kids can travel from elsewhere to a high-performing school outside their neighborhood, that is another burden to overcome.” 

Some states, like and , have recently passed legislation to increase the supply of affordable housing. While such efforts haven’t always taken school locations into account, Monarrez said that’s beginning to change. California governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the need for a wider array of housing options near schools as one goal of his state’s legislation. 

The next step, Monarrez said, is for policymakers to reconsider district boundaries as well.

“We need to find out more about what would happen if we changed these lines,” he said. “A viable solution is drawing better lines.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on The 74’s board of directors.

Seriously, don’t relocate across state lines, K-12 finance experts warn. Along with changing careers, it’s one of the easiest ways to lose out on your retirement savings. In all, only about one out of five teachers receive their full pensions, while roughly 50 percent don’t remain in a single pension system long enough to qualify for minimum benefits at the end of their service.

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Those dreary findings come from on teacher retirement systems released last month by Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit research and consulting group. Ranking each state retirement system on an A-F scale, the authors find that only a handful can claim to serve both teachers and taxpayers well: Twenty states received F grades, while none received an A.

Andrew Rotherham, one of Bellwether’s founders and a co-author of the paper, noted that a wide variety of states earned spots near the top and bottom of the list, with both Democratic- and Republican-leaning political environments scattered throughout. But across the board, he observed, the status quo in too many states punishes a wide swathe of educators.

“One of the ways this system is sustainable is that it creates millions of small losers and a much smaller number of big winners,” said Rotherham.

Chad Aldeman, a former Bellwether analyst who now serves as policy director of Georgetown University’s , said that there had been some “slow movement” in a few states to offer public employees more choice and portability in their retirement benefits, but that the intertwined issues of back-loaded pensions and colossal debts owed by states were generally going in the wrong direction.

“I would say, in broad strokes, the financial problems keep getting worse,” said Aldeman, who worked on a previous version of Bellwether’s rankings and consulted on this publication. “And the related problem about the way the benefits are structured — it’s moving in fits and starts, but it’s also getting worse.”

Bellwether’s newest report evaluates states on a “comprehensive” basis that rates how each system performs for four separate constituencies: short-term teachers (those who teach in the system for less than 10 years), medium-term teachers (those who remain within the system for 10 years but leave before retirement), long-term teachers (those who spend their entire careers in the system), and taxpayers within each state. Retirement systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia were ranked in terms of their performance for each category, and they all received an overall score.

Grades were determined through the use of 15 separate variables, including overall funding levels, the length of the vesting period, whether teachers in the state are eligible for Social Security, required teacher contribution rates, and investment returns averaged over 10 years.

South Dakota earned the top score, 88.4 percent, while Tennessee and Washington were the only two other states to notch even B grades. Among the lowest-rated jurisdictions were a litany of red, blue, and purple enclaves: California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Louisiana, the District of Columbia, and Massachusetts, and more than a dozen others.

Those summative scores can conceal significant variation within systems, however. West Virginia, for instance, earns an overall grade of D, partly because it is one of the worst states in the country for short-term teachers (its 10-year vesting period means that huge numbers of educators won’t stay in the job long enough to earn benefits). But it lands just outside the top ten systems for taxpayers because it participates in Social Security, nets fairly high investment returns, and makes relatively high state contributions.

Among all four constituencies, short-term teachers clearly make out the worst, with 33 states and the District of Columbia earning F grades in the category. Of the rest, only five (South Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Florida, and Michigan) even rated a C or higher.

Aldeman said that the policy moves that have contributed to that reality — lengthening vesting periods, slashing benefits for newer teachers, and raising teacher contributions — can sometimes improve a given state’s budgetary picture, but they also tend to disadvantage younger employees and those who don’t stay their whole careers.

​​”When states historically have seen a big-budget bill for pension obligations, they have tended to cut benefits for new workers,” he said. “The cuts mean that newly hired workers have to stay longer to qualify for any benefit at all, have to contribute more of their own salary toward the benefits, and have to wait longer to retire and receive a lower benefit.”

Citing from the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute, which found that 39 percent of the education funding disbursed by Illinois for the coming school year will be used to pay down the state’s huge debt obligations, Aldeman professed himself “amazed.”

“I mean, you can see the trend; it just keeps going up and up. At some point, will leaders say, ‘That’s enough, we need to do something else about this’?”

‘Life happens’

Teachers in 36 states and the District of Columbia are enrolled in defined benefit pensions programs, through which they make regular contributions to their plan and receive guaranteed payments in retirement. Fourteen states have created “defined contribution” systems, often resembling 401(k) plans, which tend to vest over a shorter period of time and offer greater portability across state lines.

Rotherham argued that education policymakers should not focus exclusively on plan type in debates over how to improve their systems. Defined benefit packages — often caricatured as “gold-plated” vestiges of the mid-20th century, when many employees could expect to retire early with enviable financial security — are not necessarily financially irresponsible for states, he said, and alternative systems can sometimes fail the test of adequacy for the retirees who depend on them.

“This debate has often become very reductionist, and it’s become a debate over what should be the form of the plan — is it defined benefit or defined contribution? — rather than which elements would make it good or bad,” Rotherham said. “And that’s what we need to be talking about because for the plan participants, it’s those elements that affect their lives, not these ideological debates between 401(k)s and pensions.”

Whatever specific structure a state commits to, he said, leaders can no longer condition their retirement benefits on career-long tenures within a given system; any expectation that employees will stay in place for decades is “not a match for our labor market,” Rotherham added.

“If you know you’re going to teach in one place for 30 years, the pension plan works for you, and you should do that. The problem is that people decide they don’t like teaching. They get sick, they have to move, they fall in love with someone whose job requires relocation, they need to be a caregiver. Life happens, people make plans that don’t work out, so these structures have to have some flexibility.”

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners and serves on the board of directors of The 74.

Thanks to a surprisingly strong and courtesy of the federal government, school districts across California are now flush with cash. But if district leaders aren’t careful now, they could trigger a round of painful cuts in the very near future.

Consider the case of San Diego Unified (SDU). Student enrollment has been for years, and it suffered a in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December, the district and, as one cost-cutting measure, spent millions on early retirement buyouts for highly-paid veteran employees.

One contributing factor to SDU’s budget crunch was its history of awarding out-sized raises to teachers. Next year, for example, a ten-year veteran in the district will earn $33,000 more than when she started out. That’s an 85% increase over ten years, in a period when inflation rose only 17%.

Temporary Funds, New Permanent Commitments

The latest infusion of state and federal relief dollars have bought the district a temporary reprieve. But rather than using the opportunity to re-evaluate its past decisions, the district is making big new commitments that could bring more financial troubles down the road. Last month it to hire more full-time workers and again boost teacher salaries.

The pay increase makes for a particularly abrupt swing once you consider how it will affect individual workers. News reports have it as a “4 percent raise for educators,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Most SDU teachers will actually get 7-8% raises next year.

Take a beginning teacher who was new to the district last fall. She earned the minimum annual salary of $48,792. If she returns next year, she’ll get the 4% raise and also advance a “step” along the new schedule and be paid as a second-year teacher earning $52,648. That’s a raise of $4,007, or an increase of 7.9%. Similarly, a 10-year veteran with a Master’s degree will get a raise of $5,557 by collecting both the 4% raise and the step increment, an increase of 7.8% year-over-year.

There’s more. Teachers can boost their pay even further if they enhance their academic credentials. While researchers have found in effectiveness between teachers with only a bachelor’s versus those with a Master’s degree, in San Diego, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree tops out at $80,000, whereas a teacher with more college credits can earn up to $105,000.

In addition to the pay increases, SDU is also making an abrupt turn on staffing. Back in December, when the district was looking to cut its higher-paid veterans, it paid 370 employees up to $15,000 to leave mid-year. Six months later, the district’s with the union calls for hiring more of the same types of employees—teachers, nurses, and counselors—that were paid to walk away just a few months ago.

Of course, SDU is by no means unique in facing pressure to boost salaries and hire more full-time staff. But using temporary funds to hire more workers and raise base salaries across the board will ultimately worsen the district’s long-term financial problems.

Non-Traditional Compensation Strategies to Solve District Challenges

There are other ways to both raise pay and build capacity that don’t set up districts for financial stress down the road.

In contrast to SDU, are offering one-time, flat-dollar bonuses that don’t affect base pay. Those are more in line with the temporary nature of the federal infusion, and they don’t disproportionately drive money on the basis of seniority.

Some districts are going even further by using their state and federal windfalls to more directly address specific recruitment and retention challenges. is offering a $4,000 signing bonus to bilingual teachers, and is offering $15,000 bonuses to special education teachers. To combat higher turnover among junior teachers, in Michigan is offering an incentive package worth $10,000 to cover moving expenses plus retention bonuses after one, two, and three years in the district.

Some are tying pay to other district priorities. in North Carolina is offering $20,000 to recruit highly effective teachers who agree to teach in the district’s highest-needs schools for three years. And Austin ISD made a 2% bonus contingent on whether the district meets its student enrollment target or not.

Next to these initiatives, San Diego Unified’s recent agreement looks like a lost opportunity. Rather than using its windfall to tackle persistent challenges, it has added to its long-term financial commitments. And when the federal money runs out, will it have the operating funds to pay for all the new employees it’s planning to hire?

That will depend on what comes next. But by adding more full-time employees and giving existing staff large base raises tied only to seniority and master’s degrees, SDU increased its chances of another abrupt budget reversal in the years to come.

Correction: Jackson Public Schools is in Michigan.

This article was written and published while the author was with Edunomics Lab at McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Affluent people were affected, certainly, but not nearly as much as their impoverished neighbors, who felt COVID’s disproportionate impact on multiple fronts: losing jobs and child care, missing meals and lacking even the most basic technology necessary for their kids to participate in distance learning, as nearly half of the state’s school districts kept classrooms closed. 

Coincidentally, the news on Oct. 12 also brought word of a settlement in a lawsuit addressing another longstanding disparity: a Jim Crow-era school funding system that sends dramatically fewer resources to impoverished schools than to wealthy ones. While the nexus between COVID-19 and the lawsuit might not at first be obvious, the agreement in Delawareans for Educational Opportunity v. Carney was celebrated as a first small step toward interrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty — necessary to a full pandemic recovery.

Because the state’s system for distributing money to schools was created at a time when segregation was enshrined in its constitution, separate but equal — rather than a quality education for disadvantaged children — was the goal. Because of this, and in marked contrast to other states, Delaware schools do not receive any funding to compensate for the costs of meeting the needs of low-income students, those learning English or the youngest children with disabilities. 

Indeed, Delaware is one of a handful of states that reimburse school districts for the cost of their teacher corps, rather than the demographics of their students. Under this system, the districts with the best-paid educators receive more money than those that offer lower salaries, which, as a consequence, end up with novices and teachers whom affluent schools don’t want to hire. 

Pre-pandemic, there wasn’t much debate about the system’s unfairness, or much urgency among state lawmakers to undertake the wholesale overhaul educators have called for since the last recession.

“The equity challenges in our funding system have roots that run deep, so they’ve been challenging to uproot, so to speak,” says Paul Herdman, CEO of Rodel, a nonprofit that has worked on the issue for more than 15 years. “The cold reality is that it’s a relic from the 1940s. It wasn’t built for the group of students we have today. Equity and addressing the unique needs of students simply was not built into the system back then because that was not its charge.”

But COVID heightened the public’s understanding of both the human and the economic costs of the educational inequities. With disadvantaged students and children of color trailing their affluent, mostly white peers, the state’s future prosperity was already imperiled. The pandemic-driven shutdowns of schools and businesses only widened these gaps — and made them visible to more people.

Over the last 16 months, with schools toggling in and out of in-person classes, some students — mostly the children of affluent parents with the time and money to supplement lackluster remote schooling — were freed to learn at an accelerated pace. But many more will return to classrooms having missed foundational lessons, unable to catch up without carefully crafted interventions and support for recovering from COVID’s traumas. The historically wide achievement gap, in short, will be much harder to bridge.

When COVID forced schools to close, affluent Delawareans, like wealthy Americans elsewhere, were confronted with headline after headline about their less privileged neighbors. Parents who shop at the Apple store woke up to the number of children who have no access to the internet. White-collar workers oversaw distance learning in big houses chosen for their proximity to good schools, while children in poor and working-class neighborhoods struggled to find a place to log on. 

Never had inequity — and the relationship among wealth, education and opportunity — been so starkly on display. And never had it been harder to ignore the correlation between race and poverty. The question was whether now would be the moment for Delaware to do something about it.

A reckoning to address the historical disparities is long overdue, says Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha, a Wilmington-area Democratic lawmaker and social worker. Without it, recovery from the pandemic will be impossible. “We will hide the true impacts of COVID. It’ll be this blanket approach. It will never be the process of determining what our students need,” he says. “There has always been a way to hide.”&�Բ�����;

A K, versus a V

Normally, when economists analyze shifts in employment, consumer spending and other indicators of a community’s financial well-being, they have to wait for state and federal bureaucracies to produce reams of statistics. But as COVID-19 first swept across the country, Opportunity Insights, a team at Harvard University, acquired a number of datasets, some of them from private companies that typically guard their internal financial information.

Using records of individual credit card transactions, payroll processing records, cell phone GPS movements and other information — essentially, trade secrets — they built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code. What they found was stunning.

In a typical recession, Friedman told The 74, economists generally see a V shape: Everyone’s fortunes take a fall, then everyone rebounds together. This time, the Opportunity Insights team saw a K. Money is flowing, but not the way it used to, and this shift in spending sent shock waves through low-income neighborhoods. Instead of buying high-end restaurant meals, for example, affluent people signed up for wine tastings on Zoom. There were waiting lists for home treadmill deliveries, while gyms hemorrhaged members.

WATCH: Beth Hawkins details her latest investigation into COVID’s K-shaped recession and how the fallout will challenge America’s schools

On Oct. 12, in New Castle County, where Wilmington is located, employment among residents earning $27,000 or less a year was down 17 percent — most of the decrease a result of higher-income residents not spending at the businesses that employed their lower-income neighbors. Revenue was down 54 percent statewide at eateries, brew pubs and nail salons. Yet employment was up a percent among higher-income New Castle residents. In New Castle County, small-business revenue overall was down 29 percent, but consumer spending had fallen only 1 percent.

(Friedman and Chetty update the tracker as the underlying information changes. The data in this story was downloaded June 29, 2021.)

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.   

New research . and the nonprofit assessment concern found wide disparities between white/affluent students and their low-income peers/children of color. Depending on grade and subject, low-income students ended the 2020-21 school year with up to seven months of unfinished learning.

A slew of studies by economists and education scholars have established how poverty, instability and school closures affect children’s chances of academic success, research that has allowed educators and policymakers to project what setbacks schools should be prepared to address.   

According to state data from 2017, of students in grades 3 through 5, 64 percent of low-income children, 85 percent of English learners and 86 percent of students with disabilities could not read at grade level. Broken down by race, the same data showed yawning disparities between white and Asian students and Black, Latino and Native American children.

“This current system is rooted in failure. It is rooted in racism.” —Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha

Disadvantaged students are likely to start the new academic year even further behind. In Delaware, they will show up at schools that since 1940 — despite Brown vs. Board of Education, despite passage of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act and despite a large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants into the state — have had virtually no money to meet their needs.  

This, many economists and education policymakers agree, is where the inequitable fissures in any community’s economy — and, by extension, its rates of college graduation, employment and earnings, home ownership and even health — begin to open. Left unaddressed, these cracks become chasms, denying opportunity to successive generations.  

“What COVID has provided is an opportunity to really see how glaring the disparities are,” says Chukwuocha. “We just don’t get to the point in our state of saying, ‘We’re going to buckle down and fix this.’”

‘Rooted in failure … and racism’

It was 1950, and Sarah Bulah was fed up. Every day, a bus passed her house, transporting white children to a whites-only school nearby. But Bulah was forced to drive her daughter to the nearest school for Blacks, Hockessin Colored School #107, two miles away. She wrote to the governor of Delaware asking for a school bus to take her 6-year-old, Shirley, to class.

After Gov. Elbert Carvel rejected the request, Bulah turned to Louis Redding, the first Black lawyer admitted to the Delaware bar. 

“He said he wouldn’t help me get a Jim Crow bus to take my girl to any Jim Crow school, but if I was interested in sending her to an integrated school, why, then maybe he’d help,” Bulah would later tell historians. “Well, I thanked God right then and there.”&�Բ�����;

Help Redding did, laying the groundwork for a case that, consolidated with four other suits that eventually became Brown vs. Board of Education, led the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw segregation in schools. Indeed, two of the cases in Brown vs. Board of Education involved segregated schools in or near Wilmington.

There are two things particular to Delaware that are important to understand. One is that, wedged against the Mason-Dixon line, it was a slave-holding state, yet loyal to the Union. Because it did not secede, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to slaves in Delaware, who were freed in 1865 — more than two years later, at the end of the Civil War. The state would not ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, outlawing slavery, until 1901.

The other is a holdover from Delaware’s early status as a British colony. Redding pressed Bulah’s case in the state’s Court of Chancery, which, unlike a conventional court, is a place where people may challenge injustices or push for needed laws or policies. A place, its English boosters said, to address “that which ought to be done.”

The Court of Chancery sided with Bulah and Redding, giving the high court a roadmap for deciding Brown — if not for ensuring that states and localities would comply with either the spirit or the letter.

For 25 years after the landmark decision, Delawareans endured their own version of the painful back-and-forth plaguing school systems throughout the United States as courts issued desegregation orders. White families decamped to suburbs and urban districts were consolidated, sparking fresh lawsuits. Busing battles were joined. 

In 1981, the state created four school districts in New Castle County, with the intent of making sure each had a mix of students from Wilmington, where Black households were concentrated, and surrounding suburbs. In 1995, the court declared those districts — Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial and Christina — integrated. 

But in ensuring a relatively equal racial balance in each of the new school districts, the state ended up effectively gerrymandering families of color into smaller voting jurisdictions where, divided politically, they were minorities. Their children were more likely to attend schools with white pupils, but Black and brown parents lacked the political clout to hold education officials accountable for delivering results for their kids. 

Soon after court supervision ended, schools in the new districts resegregated. By 2015, just six of the 24 schools located within Wilmington city limits had a reading proficiency rate equal to or above the state average of 52 percent. Citywide, just 46 percent of students read at grade level. In math, the city proficiency rate was 35 percent.

“This current system is rooted in failure,” says Chukwuocha. “It is rooted in racism.”&�Բ�����;

An inequitable Catch-22

Photographs of Shirley Bulah riding a bus to her new school were said to depict a watershed moment. But the vestiges of Jim Crow remain alive and well in the state’s education funding system. 

Most states weight funding according to student need, with a base per-pupil amount supplemented by additional dollars sent to schools and districts depending on the demographics they serve. A mountain of research has shown that disadvantaged children need more resources to flourish in school.

In recent decades, many states have made efforts to direct more of their dollars to the classrooms with the greatest need. With small exceptions, Delaware to offset the costs of educating children in poverty, those learning English or the youngest children with disabilities. 

On top of this, it is one of nine states that fund districts not according to enrollment or student needs, but based on the number of teachers they employ and those teachers’ salaries. Under this system, a certain number of students adds up to a unit; the number of units determines how many teachers a school can have, as well as some operating costs, such as utilities and facilities. 

On a given day each fall, typically Sept. 30, schools count their students and report enrollment to the state. Officials use this information to tally . For example, in grades K-3, 16.2 students add up to a unit. In higher grades, the number of students constituting a unit is larger. 

Depending on the intensity of their needs, a small number of students in special education starting in grade 3 can constitute a unit. Younger children with disabilities are not counted separately from their classmates in general education, and so do not receive extra resources.    

Once the requisite number of units has been established, districts report their teachers’ seniority levels, degrees and other credentials to the state, which in turn pays the school system according to a salary schedule that reflects each teacher’s seniority and level of education. A district or school is free to pay its teachers more than this amount. 

This creates an inequitable Catch-22: Schools that have more money can hire more expensive teachers, which in turn results in more funding. Schools that pay educators less are typically those that can’t raise local taxes to boost salaries, and thus are locked out of higher state funding.

An additional problem with the formula is that it leaves just 8 percent of state funding for a school’s or district’s discretionary needs. Again, as a result of their small local tax bases, the poorest school systems can’t raise money to fund expenses not in the state formula.

Because of the unusual way payments to schools are calculated, the amount districts spend per pupil is all over the map. Among Wilmington-area districts in 2017, Christina had the highest poverty rate, at 41 percent, but received the least funding, at $16,574. Brandywine, where 29 percent of students are low-income, had the smallest poverty rate and the second-highest revenue, at $18,299 per pupil.

The funding system contains one more confounding element. Though the cost of operating schools has risen steadily between inflation and deepening unmet needs, Delaware law requires districts to base local tax rates on decades-old property values. School levies in Sussex County — the southernmost swath of the state, home to a mix of poultry processors and coastal vacation homes — are based on 1974 property values. Values in northernmost, urban New Castle are fixed at 1983 assessments; in Kent County, home to Dover, the state capital, at 1987 levels. 

COVID, says Chukwuocha, makes reforming the system’s structural inequities more urgent than ever. In the schools with few resources and intense needs, students often were already disengaged. Bringing them back will be an intense, multi-step process. 

“When you look at the impact of the last year, it’s devastating,” he says. “When the pandemic started, we had all these contact tracers. We need something like that — social workers and others to go out into the community and find our kids and understand their needs.”

‘This is our opportunity to fix it’

In 2007, following years of declining enrollment, school closures and poor academic results in Wilmington-area schools, lawmakers appointed a task force to consider potential solutions. Chief among its recommendations were an overhaul of the funding system and consolidation of the four districts created in 1981. 

Over the next decade, some 30 civic, education and nonprofit organizations signed on as members of the coalition Education Equity Delaware, as well as several other campaigns. Adding to the chorus of voices were members of the business community who saw a need for high school graduates with the skills to work in health care, technology and other growing sectors of the economy. 

There was bipartisan agreement that change was needed — yet it didn’t happen. Bills to change the system failed to gain support among lawmakers representing suburban Wilmington districts, who like the predictability of the unit-based system, and those representing the southern parts of the state, who felt the shift would direct a disproportionate amount of money to urban schools.   

And so, in 2018, 70 years after Bulah’s case was heard, the state’s NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, a nonprofit made up of parents of disadvantaged students, sued the state and its three counties in the same Court of Chancery where Brown began.

“Delaware fails to provide all low-income children, children with disabilities and children whose first language is not English (collectively, ‘Disadvantaged Students’) with a meaningful opportunity to obtain an adequate education, one that will enable to them to participate as active citizens in a democracy, to be employed in a modern economy and to enjoy the benefits of our country’s social and cultural life,” the lawsuit asserted. 

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The settlement announced Oct. 12 was widely celebrated as a good first step, but one that doesn’t address the structural problems. In 2019, Democratic Gov. John Carney asked lawmakers to approve a new financing mechanism called opportunity funding — extra money for disadvantaged children. Under the terms of the settlement, the size of this pot will more than double, reaching $60 million by 2025.

Totaling an extra $300 per low-income student and $500 for each English learner, the money is welcome even though it is just 4 percent of the state’s education budget. But it’s no substitute for overhauling the way schools are financed, educators and advocates say. 

A few days after members of the General Assembly approved the boost in opportunity funding, two dozen lawmakers, from both parties and both chambers, signed authored by Chukwuocha committing to taking up a comprehensive funding reform.

“WHEREAS, the COVID pandemic has exacerbated existing educational gaps and brought new attention to the need for racial justice in schools, beginning with, but not limited to, how schools are funded,” it states. 

“WHEREAS, there is a need to build upon the urgency of this moment. The confluence of the COVID pandemic and the movement toward racial justice require that we define a path forward for future generations that raises and allocates funding for schools in ways that are more flexible, transparent, equitable [and] based on the needs of students.”&�Բ�����; 

Chukwuocha is optimistic that this time, there will be a greater willingness to tackle the longstanding issues. In addition to the heightened awareness created by the pandemic, the lack of substantial funding for students learning English is a mounting problem for schools in Kent and Sussex counties, where the Latino population is growing rapidly. 

“I truly believe that the more work we put into it, the more we speak to lawmakers in other parts of the state, the more they see the need,” he says. “They had no idea what was really at play.”&�Բ�����;

A return to the status quo, Chukwuocha concludes, would be a mistake:  “We have to have a new foundation. This is our opportunity to fix it. With that, Delaware will truly be what we say it is.”&�Բ�����; 

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

After more than a century, the end came swiftly for Hallsville Elementary School.

The smallest school in Manchester, New Hampshire, enrolling around 260 children from kindergarten to fifth grade, is also the oldest continually operating facility in the school district. First opened in 1891, it now requires millions of dollars in renovations and, like several schools across the city, is under-enrolled. In December, a consulting group studying Manchester’s school capacity and utilization recommended shuttering four elementary schools as a way of cutting costs and operating more efficiently. A few months later, the local board approved just one for closure: Hallsville.

“It was a proposal in the middle of the school year, and then, next thing you know, it was happening,” said Tina Krajewski, who has sent two children to Hallsville. “Looking back at it, it’s just insane to know that it’s going to be gone. It breaks my heart.”

Long before the emergence of COVID-19, schools around the United States were experiencing an erosion in their enrollment numbers. Our nationwide K-12 enrollment, roughly 55 million kids, remains one of the largest in the world. But birth rates have slipped ever since the Great Recession, first abruptly, then persistently. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on population growth in May, few experts were surprised to see that total births had fallen to their lowest number since 1979. Over 700,000 in 2020 than in 2007, the year the financial crisis began, even though there are now significantly more women in their child-bearing years.

Fertility rates , from the comparative peaks in the Dakotas to . New Hampshire, with 48.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44, ranks above only its Green Mountain neighbor in general fertility. If not for the impressive influx of migrants from other states, by its natural beauty and high quality of life, New Hampshire’s population shrinking. And fewer children means fewer students; Manchester, the state’s economic capital and largest school district by far, has lost more than one-fifth of its enrollment over the last decade.

With no rebound in sight — the pandemic has clearly suppressed family formation — what’s already happened there may well be coming to a school near you.

The nationwide slowdown in natural population growth isn’t limited to a few regions or segments of society. Though researchers have of births decreasing among younger women and rising somewhat for their older counterparts, fertility sank this year for all age ranges between 15 and 44 (including record lows for those between ages 20 and 29). Women in all racial and ethnic categories are having fewer children, but recent years have brought for Hispanic women, who previously made up for much of the collapse among other groups. And while states with the very lowest growth are clustered largely in the West and Northeast, the “birth dearth” has now spread to every area of the country.

In New England, the nation’s hardest-hit region, local leaders increasingly feel the need to respond. The adjustment is leading Manchester to consider moves that will go much further than closing a single elementary school. At a special school board meeting last month, Superintendent John Goldhardt unveiled a plan the district’s three traditional high schools into one new building. Originally hired two years ago from Utah, one of the fastest-growing parts of the country, Goldhardt said in an interview that the city’s shifting demographics meant that urgent action was required.

“We are becoming grayer,” he said. “I’m new to the state, but a lot of our high school and college graduates don’t stay, so the population as a whole is older. I’m not sure what is causing that, but I know that birth rates and family sizes are way down.”

Krajewski said she was waiting to hear more about the consolidation plan, and that she understands the challenge of maintaining aging facilities with fewer students. But that doesn’t take the sting out of losing a school where her father was a student decades ago, and where her niece now attends as a fifth-grader. As the academic year winds down, she is busy assembling the building’s 130 years of institutional memory into one last yearbook.

“It’s really emotional for me because this is the final yearbook that Hallsville will ever have,” she said. “And I’m grateful to be the one to help put it together for the students, but at the same time, it’s like, ‘This is gone.”

The Great Recession’s long hangover

The United States has historically been a kind of demographic unicorn, enjoying both world-leading levels of education and economic development while also posting year after year of comparatively high population growth. Even as international competitors like Europe and Japan had to cope with ever-worsening ratios of retirees to prime-age workers, America’s big families and relatively welcoming posture toward immigration made us the exception.

The long hangover of the Great Recession changed all that. Policymakers initially saw the drop in births beginning in 2008 as typical of a contractionary economy and likely to recover once catastrophic joblessness and uncertainty dissipated. But even a decade later, as the pre-pandemic labor market neared full employment, fertility continued to dwindle. All told, according to the calculations of demographer Kenneth Johnson, have been born over the last 13 years than would have arrived if 2007-era birth rates had continued.

Johnson, a professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, said that the question in recent years has been whether those missing births were either delayed — by younger women who decided to start families later in life — or foregone entirely. Even before the pandemic, he noticed that fertility among older women, while steady, was not compensating for the lower numbers earlier in the decade; in its wake, he added, even fewer births are likely to follow.

“If you think about it, the women who delayed their births in their early 20s, who are now in their early 30s, may well have been planning to have babies about now,” Johnson said. “But the latest data I’ve seen [suggests] that one-third of women were planning to delay births because of COVID. If that’s the case, we’ve got another delay on top of the ones we’ve already seen.”

New Hampshire is a case in point: This year, it was that saw more deaths than births (13,511 vs. 11,773). That might not come as a total surprise in a year when COVID killed hundreds of thousands, but in New Hampshire, the trend actually dates back to 2017. The , most apparent in the rural precincts near the Canadian border, is also felt downstate, where transplants from Massachusetts and other New England states have often fled in search of more favorable tax rates.

Formerly an industrial capital that housed in the world, Manchester is as a “Silicon Millyard.” Its 112,000 residents make up the largest urban center in northern New England, but between 2007 and 2017, over 14 percent, from 1,664 to 1,423. At the same time, home prices throughout New Hampshire the pandemic-era run on real estate, in large measure due to more retirees choosing to “age in place,” which prevents housing supply from turning over.

Krajewski, whose parents each came from families of nine or more children, argued that the climbing cost of childcare and prevalence of one-parent households have led more young people to have fewer children, or even abstain from parenthood altogether.

“It’s a very different dynamic than what it used to be when my dad went to elementary school, where the classes were bigger and there were more kids in general,” she said. “It’s not like that now. A lot of my friends only have one or two children; some of my friends don’t have any children and don’t want children.”

Peter Lubelczyk is the principal of Jewett Street Elementary School, which will be of students displaced from Hallsville this fall. A former Jewett student himself, he pointed to the lack of young families as a key explanation for Manchester’s enrollment shortfalls.

“The neighborhood where I grew up, 50 or 60 percent of the neighbors are still there who were there when I was a kid,” Lubelczyk said. “My mother is still living in the house I was raised in, where she’s been for 50 years. I think there are a lot of families who stay in their homes for a long time because it’s their forever home. That older population in Manchester will definitely result in declining school populations.”

Families ‘feeling the crunch’

It would be one thing if decreasing birth cohorts simply meant smaller class sizes. But it’s not that simple: Every student lost to districts like Manchester also translates into fewer education dollars sent from legislators in Concord.

A major outlier in the northeast, New Hampshire has always been characterized by skepticism toward government. With no state taxes on wages or sales, it raises less revenue than its neighbors and ranks for per-pupil education aid dispensed by the state. According to from the New England Public Policy Center (a think tank affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), an average of 47 percent of K-12 education revenue in the 2015-16 school year came from state governments. In Vermont, the figure was much higher, 89 percent. In New Hampshire, just 33 percent of funding came from the state, with 61 percent coming from local taxpayers.

Bruce Mallory, a professor emeritus of education at UNH’s Carsey School and observer of New Hampshire schools for decades, has recently worked with studying education finance in the state. He said that the intense reliance on local revenues can make communities particularly sensitive to fluctuations in population size.

“A new housing development goes up in a small community, 50 new kids, and that puts huge strains on the school budget,” Mallory observed. “The reverse of that is, school populations decline, taxpayers ask, ‘How come our local education costs are staying flat or going up when the enrollment is down? We’re not going to pay for that!’’

In an attempt to gain relief, Manchester voters on both property tax revenues and expenditures in 2009. That restriction can be overridden, and periodically has been to secure more money for schools. But between the smaller pot of funding and the relatively higher needs of local students — the district enrolls far more English learners and low-income pupils than is typical in New Hampshire, one of the highest-income states in the country — budgets are stretched thin. One , commissioned last year from the American Institutes for Research by the state panel studying education finance, estimated that Manchester schools were underfunded by “almost $10,000 per student.”

Nicole Leapley was elected to the local school board in 2019. This May, petitioning for reforms to the state’s funding policies, and in an interview, described the status quo as “anti-young-people.”

“The whole playing field is set up in a way that really doesn’t support families,” she said. “If our population is growing, it’s mostly people saying, ‘Oh, I’d like to retire to the seacoast.’ But I think families are feeling the crunch and probably are being driven away.”

One of the most significant signs of strain is the state of the district’s building stock. According to the capacity review released last year, Manchester schools currently face $158 million in deferred maintenance and capital improvement costs — the result of buildings like Hallsville, which have been in use long after their typical lifecycle was spent. Superintendent Goldhardt said that the price tag for renovation could be much greater than the cost of building new schools.

“Some may say, ‘I’m okay with this old, shabby building that we’re paying a lot of money for, and that we’re going to have to pour millions into,’” he said. “But eventually, it’s like the old car: You can only replace the radiator so many times before the bottom falls out, and you can’t drive it anymore because the floor’s rusted out. The same thing happens to school buildings.”

That realization is part of what’s driving the push to combine the district’s three traditional high schools into one newly built structure (a fourth, a career and vocational school, would be moved to one of the vacated buildings). The proposal is also a concession to numbers: Not only are the existing high schools aging, they also collectively enroll 1,500 fewer students than they have capacity for. Board members the plan — which also includes converting all middle schools into magnet programs and introducing a French language immersion system at one of the city’s remaining elementary schools — at a public Zoom meeting convened in May. But if enacted, it would be the biggest shakeup Manchester schools have seen in decades.

In an email, Mallory said the steps being considered were “indications of the stress that all [New Hampshire] districts are under.” If the status quo is maintained, he added, other areas “will also be closing or consolidating buildings in addition to cutting back staff and reducing supports for students most in need. That is, the budget and education program situation for such schools will only get worse.”

In the meantime, Hallsville elementary will end operations fairly quickly. Kym Prive, a parent who has sent three children to the school, said that even families without students currently enrolled have been saddened by the move to close a neighborhood institution. More poignant still is the fact that students lost most of the school’s last year to remote classes necessitated by COVID.

“We want to make it memorable for them, which is hard. Even looking at the yearbook, there aren’t as many pictures from this year of them in school. We’re hoping to be able to still do a good end-of-year send-off for everyone, since it’ll be the end of Hallsville altogether.”

Lead art by The 74’s Meghan Gallagher (Getty Images)