In this third installment of Power in Numbers, EdBuild finds that similar school districts across the country spend radically different amounts on their students, even when differences in local costs are taken into account, revealing systemic and unjustifiable inequities in the way we fund our schools.

Skip to: School Districts Difference from National Average Peer Groups Map Peer Groups Table

In the late 1960’s, parents from Edgewood, an urban school district within the city of San Antonio, brought suit against the state and seven school districts, claiming that the Texas system of funding schools was unconstitutional. Their main claim was that the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund schools favored more affluent communities, giving them more resources for their schools. While they recognized the state’s attempt to partially compensate for the inequalities with state funding, they argued that since low-income districts still ended up with less money, they were substantially disadvantaged, and the system should be struck down as a violation of the United States Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The case, San Antonio v. Rodriguez, made it to the Supreme Court, and in 1973, the Court ruled that Texas' education finance system did not violate the U.S. Constitution. It based its ruling on two tenets—first, that low-income communities are not a protected class, unlike racial or religious minorities, and second, that education is not a fundamental right under the United States Constitution. Without these two protections, as long as a state's funding scheme has a “legitimate” or “rational basis,” the U.S. Supreme Court could not strike it down, even if it clearly disadvantaged struggling communities^[1].

With its ruling in San Antonio, the Supreme Court forfeited any responsibility to level the playing field for poor students, and left their fates to 51 state definitions of “equity” and “opportunity”. Today, there are no federal criteria for what constitutes an education, leaving each state to set its own standards and requirements. In some states, education systems must be “thorough and efficient.” In others, they must be “uniform and general.” Still others expect schools to prepare each child to participate in democracy. These different standards create a system in which your home state and community dictate the level of education to which you are entitled.

The map below shows just what that means. It shows the amount by which school funding in every school district in America differs from $11,866, the average per-pupil revenue in all districts in the nation. These numbers are adjusted for local variations in the cost of living, so they are directly comparable across states and across the country. As you can see at a glance, there is huge variation in the resources that each district has available for their students - the poorest districts, in fact, receive 21% less funding than the wealthiest ones do.

School Districts, Difference from National Average

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As Justice Marshall predicted in his dissent to the San Antonio v Rodriguez ruling, while school funding systems might discriminate between districts rather than students, "the impact of that discrimination falls directly upon the children whose educational opportunity is dependent upon where they happen to live." To be sure, we at EdBuild believe that there should be differences in the amount of money spent on education in different communities, but this variation should be based on levels of student need, not on the happenstance of location. Education spending today is wildly inconsistent, even between districts serving similar student populations.

In the data presented below, we highlight the 200 largest districts (based on their student enrollment) to reveal large and systemic inequities in the way we fund schools across the country^[2]. We have sorted these districts into fourteen peer groups based on their demographics and budget constraints so that it’s easy to compare spending levels in similar districts. Just like the variation among state education budgets, the disparities in the budgets of comparable school districts demonstrates the arbitrariness of education funding in America. As we see again and again in districts around the country, education funding levels are determined by local wealth and state will—not by student need or any legitimate education considerations.

Peer Group 2, for instance, consists of eight school districts, all middle-income with more than 50,000 students and very high rates of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch under the National School Lunch program. They educate some of the highest-need students in the country, and yet all have revenues well below the national average of $11,886. Even at a mere $8,141 per pupil after cost-adjustment, Clayton County Schools, located just outside of Atlanta, receive the second-highest funding in this peer group^[3]. Granite School District in Salt Lake City brings up the rear with $5,652 per pupil after cost-adjustment, almost $2,500 less than Clayton County and over $6,000 less per pupil than the national average. After cost-adjustment, it's clear how arbitrary any individual district’s revenue really is. Click the SELECT A PEER GROUP button in the map below to view all of 200 largest districts or to select another group to compare. The table underneath the map shows each of the districts, their per-pupil spending, and the different student need factors that affect their costs.

School Districts, Cost-Adjusted Revenue Per Pupil

State constitutions guarantee most American children the right to an education—but not necessarily the best education. For a child in Virginia, the state must provide a “high quality” school system to satisfy its obligation, while in Georgia, a child’s educational rights are met by a merely “adequate” education. And on top of its constitutional obligations, each state faces its own economic conditions, and has a limited pot of public funds. The combination of all three of these factors produces a hodgepodge of school systems, funded at levels that are inconsistent from one to the next and that bear little relationship to student need. The San Antonio ruling means that, even though the federal government provides approximately 9% of total education revenue, it has little role in addressing the inconsistencies and inequities in education funding.

As a country, we recognize that states are different and respect certain areas of traditional state control, but we know that some issues—especially ones that relate to our health and welfare—are truly national concerns. Air and water don’t stop at the border, so we rely on the federal Environmental Protection Agency, not state legislatures, to set limits on the pollutants we can emit into the air and the contaminants we allow. Contaminated food makes Floridians just as sick as Oregonians, so we ask the Food and Drug Administration, not each state, to ensure that our food supply is safe. Even in the realm of education, the federal government sets national standards for the education of students with disabilities to ensure that each state serves those children well. But all children grow, develop, and learn in essentially the same way from state to state, and instead of setting any national expectations, we have delegated education funding policy to the states, with the result that a single student might receive radically different levels of resources and support in one state than another, and indeed, in one district than another.

These disparities exist for no other reason than that we lack any uniform notion of what it means to properly support our children. After adjusting for variations in costs and finding that large inequities remain, we are left with no choice but to conclude that our system funds students’ education by luck and by lot rather than by logic.