[ The Shaky Foundations of U.S. School Funding]
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50 YEARS OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT  
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Stan Karp
August 1, 2023
Rethinking Schools
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_ The Shaky Foundations of U.S. School Funding _

, Illustrator: Boris Séméniako

 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of _San Antonio Independent
School District v. Rodriguez_, the landmark 5-4 Supreme Court decision
that held that education is not a fundamental right protected by the
U.S. Constitution. The decision dashed hopes that the historic _Brown
v. Board of Education_ ruling that ended legal segregation in 1954
would be followed by a sustained federal commitment to making
education equality a reality.

Demetrio Rodriguez was a sheet metal worker and a member of the
Edgewood Concerned Parent Association when he became the lead
plaintiff in the case. He thought his three children were being
shortchanged by wide disparities in schooling across the sprawling San
Antonio school district and the state of Texas. Parents hoped the case
would clearly establish a federal right to education.

Instead, the _San Antonio_ decision closed the federal treasury to
advocates of funding equity and set the stage for decades of legal
battles over 50 state school finance systems that provide sharply
different levels of education to students from different class, race,
and community backgrounds. Those court battles, and the organizing and
advocacy they generated, made some significant gains. But today the
U.S. school funding landscape remains littered with unequal and
inadequate state funding systems and is in urgent need of
transformation. One recent national survey
[[link removed]] found
that “unequal opportunity is a universal feature of state school
finance systems.”

Still, there is reason for hope. Activists and advocates are reaping
the lessons of a half century of funding battles and planning the next
wave. In February, Pennsylvania’s system of funding schools, one of
the most unfair in the country, was declared illegal after a 10-year
court battle, opening up a debate over how to reform it (see below).
Also encouraging, researchers, organizers, and policy advocates are
developing notions of what “transformative justice in school
funding” could look like.

REPRODUCING INEQUALITY INSTEAD OF ERADICATING IT

The process of remaking school funding in the United States begins
with understanding how the current system reproduces inequality
instead of eradicating it.

In most countries the right to education is enshrined in the national
constitution and supported by a centralized, national funding system.
The patchwork U.S. system of local property taxes and 50 separate
state funding systems makes it an outlier. As with voting rights, the
lack of strong federal protections provides room for less transparent
and less equitable state and local systems. 

The absence of a federal guarantee of basic educational rights can be
traced to the country’s historic fault lines. While Horace Mann was
organizing “common schools” in Massachusetts in the 1800s, public
education didn’t exist in most parts of the country, and even
aspiring to literacy was a crime for most Black people. Arguably,
public education got its biggest boost from Reconstruction when
multiracial legislatures in the South supported the establishment of
public schools and Radical Republicans in Congress demanded that
clauses guaranteeing universal access to free public education be
added to state constitutions as a condition of re-admission to the
union. 

But the end of Reconstruction and the consolidation of Jim Crow
culminated in the “separate but equal” era of _Plessy v.
Ferguson_, and states’ rights — including “local control” of
schools — became central components of segregation in the United
States. A federal takeover of school funding never happened for the
same reasons that federal efforts to end segregation, even after
the _Brown_ decision, were weak and indecisive: The structures of
white supremacy and class privilege were stronger than society’s
democratic and egalitarian impulses.

Some retrospectives marking the anniversary of _San Antonio_ noted
how these same factors were reflected in the court’s
decision. _Chalkbeat_ reporter Matt Barnum offered evidence that
four of the justices in the 5-4 majority (all recent Nixon appointees)
were swayed by “an influential cadre of social scientists [who]
claimed it didn’t matter how much money schools spent. In fact,
maybe schools weren’t actually a key factor in what students
learned. Maybe — most insidiously — poor children of color
weren’t likely to succeed in school no matter how well funded their
schools.”

Barnum recounts how such ideas were “spreading, appearing in
academic journals and publications” like the _Atlantic_,
the _Washington_ _Post_, and the _New York Times_. He cites the
sympathetic attention given to eugenicists like Berkeley psychologist
Arthur Jensen, who argued that IQ was largely fixed at birth and to
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard academic and presidential advisor
who urged “benign neglect” toward issues of racial justice and who
emphasized the “pathology” of Black families. Even liberal
scholars like James Coleman, whose seminal “Coleman Report” was
directly authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, identified “the
home” and “the cultural influences immediately surrounding the
home” rather than schools or money as the source of education
disparities. “The racist notion that children in poverty could not
benefit from additional or even equal resources may well have
influenced the court’s decision,” Barnum writes.

He speculates further that pushback to _Brown_ led the court to back
away from asserting federal responsibility over funding policy for
every school in the nation. “Enforcing desegregation,” he writes,
“had prompted a furious backlash and a host of practical
difficulties that engulfed the court in litigation for decades to
come. Deciding for the plaintiffs in the _Rodriguez_ case, [Justice
Lewis] Powell wrote, would have led to an ‘unprecedented upheaval in
public education.’”

The abdication of federal responsibility for equalizing school funding
meant the focus returned to the states. Each state constitution
includes language establishing a system of free, universal public
education, and since 1973, there have been school funding cases in 48
of the 50 states parsing exactly what that constitutional promise
requires. About half have declared existing funding systems illegal or
inadequate and mandated a variety of corrective measures or
“remedies.” 

EQUITY AND ADEQUACY GAPS

Typically, these cases have focused on “equity gaps” in funding
across districts that can be traced to wide gaps in per-pupil spending
and to finance systems that rely heavily on unequal property tax bases
to fund schools. These gaps translate into daily injustices for
students in the form of fewer curricular resources and course
offerings, less prepared and supported staff, subpar facilities, and
fewer support services. 

Local property taxes still supply about 44 percent of all school
funds. State support varies, but on average provides about 48 percent.
The federal government’s overall share of education spending,
despite the huge impact of federal policies like No Child Left Behind,
is still only about 8 percent.

Since the distribution of property in the United States is grossly
unequal and communities are sharply segregated by race and class,
it’s inevitable that schools heavily dependent on property taxes
will be unequal. In fact, with more than 13,000 school districts, the
reliance on property taxes is a sorting mechanism for class and race
privilege and allows pockets of “elite schooling” to exist within
the public system. 

Relying on local property taxes serves the agenda of the conservative
forces that dominate state and local governments in several ways. When
communities must assume growing fiscal burdens for schools by more
heavily taxing local residential and commercial property, it creates
strong pressure for austerity. When school budget referendums are
presented like sacrificial lambs to hard-pressed local taxpayers, who
never get to vote on tax abatements for real estate developers or
whether the U.S. Department of Defense should build another aircraft
carrier, the budget process is driven not by what schools and children
need, but by how to keep the tax rate flat. The reliance on property
tax funding works at one level to protect privilege and at another as
a vise to squeeze local budgets.

At the same time, the per-pupil amounts schools receive in most states
are not based on reliable estimates of the staff, programs, and
resources needed to provide a quality education for all children.
Instead, they are political decisions made by state and local
officials based on budgetary pressures and spending priorities. 

More recently, school funding cases have focused on “adequacy
gaps” between what school funding systems provide and what state and
federal education standards demand of schools. The recent lawsuit in
Pennsylvania documented a $4.6 billion gap between what the state
funding system provided and what its own cost studies said was
necessary to allow students to meet state standards. Expert witnesses
testified that Pennsylvania’s wealthiest districts spent $4,800 more
per student than poorer ones. The court ruled there was “no rational
basis” for such disparities that violated the state constitution’s
promise of a “thorough and efficient” education for all.

But as New Jersey’s Education Law Center
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filled with wonderful paper victories that have never been
implemented.” Although glaring disparities in school funding have
persuaded judges to order reform, it’s been difficult to prevent
governors and state legislators from limiting the impact of court
orders. Restrained by separation-of-powers concerns and a conservative
political climate, courts have given states wide latitude to proceed
with half measures and evasive action — and seemingly endless delay.

There is an old joke about school funding lawsuits that “they’re
like a Russian novel, long and boring and by the end, everyone’s
dead.” The recent Pennsylvania decision came after 10 years of
litigation and may still be appealed. Newly elected Gov. Josh Shapiro
says working out a remedy could take years. Generations of Keystone
State students have spent their entire school lives in a system that
violates their rights with “no rational basis.” 

We Won, Now Keep Fighting

Still, decades of legal challenges at the state level have won
significant victories, especially when combined with strong campaigns
of advocacy and organizing. Where funding challenges have been
successful, disparities have narrowed and spending levels in poorer
districts have improved. A 2022 Economic Policy Institute report
summarized the impact of funding reforms stemming from successful
court challenges. It found improvements in test scores, graduation
rates, and “educational attainment” (i.e., years of completed
schooling), along with “higher adult wages and reduced odds of adult
poverty” for students in affected districts. It also found
“improvements to schools themselves — increased teacher salaries,
reduced student-to-teacher ratios, higher school quality.” 

The most successful funding cases can lead to dramatic improvements.
New Jersey’s _Abbott_ case produced court mandates that
established full-day public pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds, class size
limits of 15 through 3rd grade, and state responsibility for 100
percent of the cost of facilities projects in the state’s poorest
districts. In Massachusetts and New York, pressure from court
challenges compelled the legislatures to add billions to state school
budgets.  

Even in deep red Kansas, a combination of six state supreme court
decisions and a sustained grassroots campaign for funding justice
succeeded in defeating Gov. Sam Brownback’s “red state
experiment.” Brownback had turned the state’s school funding
system into a patchwork system of “block grants” and the
legislature repeatedly balked at providing needed resources. In 2013,
a lone parent and a single teacher began a 60-mile trek from the
Shawnee Mission school district to the capitol in Topeka to publicize
the need for better school funding. The walks grew into an annual
event eventually drawing hundreds of parents, teachers, and students.
One parent carried a brick from a long-closed public school attended
by his father and grandfather. “Kansas schools are kind of important
to my family,” he told a reporter. The Kansas Education Association,
the state PTA, and the grassroots citizens group Game on for Kansas
Schools built a statewide campaign that eventually changed the
composition of the legislature and drove Brownback from office. More
than a billion dollars in cuts were reversed and hundreds of millions
in new resources added to the state education budget.

To be sure, such gains are precarious, subject to erosion and
reversal. The watchword for funding battles even when victorious, says
ELC-NJ, must be “We won. Now keep fighting.”

As of 2020, 23 states spend above the national per-pupil average
($15,450) 27 spend less. In some states, equity suits have led to
“weighted student formulas” that drive more resources to districts
with greater populations of students with extra needs. Nineteen states
have “progressive” funding formulas that provide more resources to
higher poverty districts. Twelve states have flat formulas and 17 are
regressive, providing more resources to wealthier districts than
poorer ones. 

Decades of funding litigation have established that the state is
responsible for meeting the educational promises enshrined in state
constitutions and that, legally, districts are creatures of the state.
Where overreliance on local property taxes to fund schools creates
inequality, it is the legal responsibility of the state to address it.

One metric that reflects the long-term threat state budget austerity
poses to school funding justice has been a steady decline in “state
effort,” the percentage of a state’s economic activity that goes
to support K–12 programs. In 39 states, average state effort in 2020
was less than it was before the fiscal crisis of 2009. Even as state
economies recovered, education spending didn’t return to previous
levels. This amounted to an “austerity tax” in which state
legislatures refused to raise the funds necessary to support public
services like education. If states had simply maintained their
pre-recession effort levels, schools would have received nearly $750
billion in additional revenue.

And then there are the school funding formulas. These hopelessly
complicated equations are typically understood by only a few
researchers, attorneys, and bureaucrats in each state. But they
nevertheless determine the allocation of billions of dollars and are
endlessly subject to manipulation and underfunding.

For example, Pennsylvania stopped using its school funding formula to
distribute state aid in 1992. Instead, aid was based on whatever
districts had received the previous year, regardless of increases or
decreases in enrollment or other factors. “Hold harmless”
provisions protected some districts from sharp cuts while depriving
others of redistributed resources. In 2008, the state adopted a new
formula based on a legislative cost study of what it would take to
actually meet state standards. But the state never funded the new
formula at the projected levels and, again, suspended its use in 2011
after the fiscal crisis. In 2016, the legislature adopted yet another
formula that allocated funds more fairly, but only a fraction of total
state education aid is distributed according to its provisions. Now,
pending a possible appeal of the court ruling, a new remedy phase will
try to untangle the mess of overlapping systems that keep Pennsylvania
schools strapped and underfunded.

In his first budget, unveiled a month after the Pennsylvania court
ruling, Gov. Shapiro proposed a 7.8 percent increase in education
spending, but also ended the Level Up program that directed additional
funds to the poorest districts, including Philadelphia. Shapiro
promised more reform to come, but the advocates and attorneys who
brought the case said in a statement, “This year’s proposed
education budget does not do enough to meet the standard set by our
state constitution and the urgency of this moment.” 

Even where progressive funding formulas are in place, there are
multiple ways schools can be stripped of resources. Pennsylvania
districts made $2.6 billion in charter school payments for 2020–21,
with $1 billion going to dubious cyber charter schools. The same year
corporate tax abatements cost schools in New York state $1.8 billion
in lost revenue. In 27 states, voucher programs divert public funds to
support private tuition and other non-public expenses. As articles
elsewhere in this issue explain, underfunded schools and districts are
also caught in an increasing web of debt that siphons funds from
classrooms to financial institutions. Combined with austerity budgets
and the slim prospects of dramatically expanded federal investment
anytime soon, the current school funding system provides a shaky
foundation for educational equity and adequacy, let alone social
justice. 

“Education Debt” and Funding Justice 

Almost 20 years ago, educator and scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings put
the year-to-year shortfalls in school funding in context. She spoke of
an accumulated “education debt” with “historical, economic,
sociopolitical, and moral” dimensions. Rather than a one-year budget
“deficit,” she argued, the U.S. “education debt” was akin to
the “national debt” amassed cumulatively over the country’s long
and unequal history. (For comparison, the federal budget deficit for
FY2022 was $1,375 _billion_. The “national debt” was
$30.93 _trillion_.)

Ladson-Billings used this analogy to reframe the achievement gap as
the inevitable outcome of unequal treatment over centuries. The
analogy holds for funding as well. 

Today’s “education debt” includes the untold costs of Jim Crow
schooling; the social, moral, and economic costs of the exclusion and
underserving of immigrant and non-English-speaking students; and the
degradation of Native education through racist mission schools and
later boarding schools and laws that prevented the use of Native
languages in Indigenous schools.

“Taken together,” Ladson-Billings said in her famous 2006 address,
“the historic, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debt that we
amassed toward Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red children seems
insurmountable. . . . The images should remind us that the cumulative
effect of poor education, poor housing, poor health care, and poor
government services create a bifurcated society that leaves more than
its children behind.” 

As long as public education survives, there will be struggles over
funding it. To build on the efforts since _San Antonio_ and win
future victories, school funding campaigns will need to find multiple
pathways forward, including some new ones. 

Fifty years of school funding litigation have shown that state courts
and legislatures are both highly political and subject to popular
pressure. To succeed, fair funding coalitions must mobilize
ever-broader bases of parents, students, and communities. They must
also strengthen communication and coordination across the legal,
legislative, and public engagement sides of such efforts. 

One way to do that is to begin building out campaigns before the
lawsuits are even filed. Public hearings and community speak-outs
about the daily, on-the-ground effects of inadequate and unequal
school funding can help build public support and create a compelling
record that can be used in court. Similarly, sustained public
conversation facilitated by advocacy groups and coalition partners,
about how new resources should be used and the many ways public
education can be improved, can begin building grassroots awareness and
statewide networks that can support and shape future “remedies.” 

In New York, advocacy groups led by parents and organizers from
communities of color built statewide campaigns that have pursued such
strategies and endured over the long haul. The Campaign for Fiscal
Equity (CFE) and the Alliance for Quality Education
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the 1993 filing of a court challenge to a landmark agreement by state
officials to provide more than $4 billion in new education funding by
2024. “From the outset of the filing of the litigation,” wrote one
of the group’s founding members, “CFE has involved thousands of
citizens throughout the state in an extensive deliberative process to
help develop the positions that the plaintiffs presented to the court
in the trial and to prepare the ground for successful implementation
of a final court order. . . . The realization that their input might
help determine the outcome of this major constitutional issue
intrigued and excited many of the education advocates, parents,
teachers, administrators, school board members, and other community
members that CFE sought to engage in this public dialogue.”

In several successful campaigns, the state teacher unions have played
a pivotal role. The Washington Education Association funded a court
challenge with a special dues assessment approved by the membership.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association provided funding and
institutional support for legal, research, organizing, and public
engagement efforts.  

“After five decades advocating for school finance reform, [there is]
an urgent need to deepen understanding of how differing strategies —
from litigation to research to grassroots organizing to communicating
with the public — can combine to achieve successful school funding
reform in the states,” says ELC-NJ.

The fight for funding justice will also need new vision. In the face
of expanding voucher and privatization efforts, continued austerity,
and the pervasive social inequality that threatens the premises of
public education, school funding campaigns need to tie demands for
better resources to a more powerful vision of what schools can be.
Ultimately, it is not enough to demand “adequacy to meet state
standards.” 

Realizing this, some researchers and policy advocates have begun to
outline a vision of transformative school funding that builds on the
work social justice educators have done to develop “culturally
sustaining” curriculum and pedagogy. In _Our Children Can’t Wait
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Joseph Bishop, the head of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of
Schools, researchers Oscar Jiménez-Castellanos, Danielle Farrie, and
David M. Quinn outline a framework that 

means changing the focus from remedies that compensate for perceived
deficits of marginalized groups and communities and instead creating
systems that build on and sustain the linguistic and cultural
diversity in school communities. . . . The foundation of this work is
that students’ success is dependent on teaching and curriculum that
both values students’ cultural knowledge and experiences and gives
them the tools to critically assess the world around them. 

In terms of school finance, this means expanding notions of the
“additional” resources that students need to succeed. Instead of
programs and services that focus narrowly on students’ ability to
meet state benchmarks, an asset-based model would focus on programs
that build on students’ existing talents, explore and deepen their
understandings of their own culture through literacy and art and
provide them with the tools they need to critically engage with the
social and political systems surrounding them.

Not surprisingly, there are as yet few well-developed examples of
transformative justice in school finance. But such aspirational,
community-based, student-centered, anti-racist, and culturally
sustaining engagement must become a prominent feature of school
funding campaigns if the promise of transformative school finance is
to be realized.

In the final analysis, U.S. school funding mirrors — and reproduces
— the social and economic inequality we see all around us. The
details are complicated, but the heart of the matter is simple: Most
schools don’t get enough money, and the money they do get is not
distributed fairly. 

At bottom, the struggle for funding justice in education raises two
questions: Will we provide schools with the resources they need to
make democratic, social justice, anti-racist education possible; and
will we provide those resources to all children, or only some
children? The answers will go a long way toward shaping our future. 

_Stan Karp ([email protected]) is a policy advocate for New
Jersey’s Education Law Center [[link removed]]. He was a
high school teacher for 30 years in Paterson, New Jersey, and is a
Rethinking Schools editor._

* school funding
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