A new study finds that many states fall short in the “fairness” of their school funding models, measured not just by the amount of money they provide to education, but also by whether they direct sufficient resources to the poorest schools.
The Education Law Center, a N.J.-based organization that advocates for equal opportunities and funding for public school students through research, policy development, and legal action published the report in October. The center examined pre-recession data and found about four-fifths of the states evaluated received a “C” grade or lower on the extent to which they “progressively” fund education—or channel greater resources to poorer, rather than wealthier, districts.
The authors evaluated the states’ performance on four separate categories of funding fairness. Six states scored relatively well on all of them: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wyoming. Even though Connecticut was only graded a “C,” we were 10th on the list of all states in the fairness rating.
Four states generally rated poorly across all or most of the four indicators: Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina, the authors said. In all 19 states were given a “D” or a “F.”
After adjusting revenues to make states comparable to each other and controlling for factors such as wages and population density, the authors identified broad disparities in the combined amount of state and local funding that students in different states receive.
