Income-based segregation between school districts is rising. Today, high-poverty school districts enroll half of America's schoolchildren. Often these high poverty districts neighbor wealthier school systems where children have access to greater resources. Because property taxes play such an important role in school funding, affluent communities have an incentive to establish school district borders around their neighborhoods in order to ensure that the benefit of their wealth is reserved for their children alone. When the families with means isolate themselves in wealthy districts, low-income children are left behind and income segregation between school districts increases.

This report presents the results of EdBuild’s analysis of the degree of income segregation across America's school district borders. In particular, it highlights trends among the 50 most segregating borders, and tells the stories of Detroit, MI; Birmingham, AL; Clairton, PA; Dayton, OH; and Balsz, AZ, whose borders with wealthy neighboring districts are the most segregated in the country.

Schools have the potential to serve as a corrective, a way to bring students of different socioeconomic backgrounds together and to bring resources and opportunity into the lives of needy kids. The school funding system we have, though, only draws brighter lines between the haves and have-nots.

FundED is the first interactive web tool to aggregate and standardize information regarding each state’s education funding laws. The intent of this site is to enable better state-to-state comparisons and provide easy access to detailed information related to the funding policies of all 50 states.

FundED provides information related to the most common elements of state funding formulas through national maps and state pages, organized by the general categories below. Explore the tool using the navigation bar above to see at-a-glance national maps, detailed state comparisons, and downloadable reports.

In our third installment of Power in Numbers, we use cost-adjusted revenue to explore the arbitrary nature of school funding across the country. We look at differences nationally, and compare funding across similar districts throughout the country to reveal systemic inequities in the way we fund our schools.

In our second installment of Power in Numbers, we use cost-adjusted revenue to look deeper at whether each state is meeting their responsibility to provide sufficient funding for schooling for all children. We redefine state-level funding inequity and discuss how our current funding systems maintain uneven access to education.

Our new series, Power in Numbers, focuses on the inequities brought about by our convoluted state funding systems. We focus on per-pupil funding for states and school districts across the country in order to understand and compare the data at the most granular level.

The state of California, like many others across the country, runs a lottery whose stated purpose is to increase funding for education. In practice, this government-run program results in a transfer of wealth of $449 million from lower-income to higher-income school districts. In California, poor neighborhoods pay much more into the lottery than their schools get out of it, while affluent areas contribute far less than their schools receive.

In 2013, there were 26.3 million students living in high-poverty school districts throughout the United States. This is an increase of 60% since 2007. Launch the map to see how we got here.

Schools have the potential to serve as a corrective, a way to bring students of different socioeconomic backgrounds together and to bring resources and opportunity into the lives of needy kids. The school funding system we have, though, only draws brighter lines between the haves and have-nots.