NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE P erhaps the biggest lie in American education is that schools serving rich kids spend more than those serving the poor. Where suburban districts bask in shiny textbooks and Astroturf, urban districts suffer crumbling foundations and teacher-bought school supplies. That’s the consensus among “progressives” in statehouses and think tanks alike. But with a handful of exceptions, they’re simply wrong.
They weren’t always wrong. Before Brown v. Board of Education, schools were unequal in dollar terms as well as segregated. Because public-school financing relied mostly on property taxes, rich neighborhoods had more money to spend on kids’ education than poor ones. Over the past 70 years, however, a combination of court challenges, state budget shifts, and federal-spending programs have reversed the balance in most places.
My colleague Adam Tyner has recently shown not only that education funding in America has largely equalized but also that “school funding within states is now generally progressive, meaning that students from poor families generally attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families.”
That doesn’t mean that poor kids are learning more — or enough. But it does suggest that unequal school budgets can no longer be singled out as the main reason.
According to Tyner, this gradual equalization began in 1971, when the California supreme court ruled in Serrano v. Priest that the state’s “funding scheme invidiously discriminates against the poor because it makes the quality of a child’s education a function of the wealth of his parents and neighbors.”
Since then, the top courts in 26 more states have forced finance reforms, and dozens of legislatures have passed financing laws that allocate monies according to a child’s socioeconomic status and learning needs. Pair that with ever-increasing federal funding and a glut of Covid-relief money, and the state of American education financing resembles something far different from what liberal social critic Jonathan Kozol famously termed “savage inequalities.”
America’s funding gaps ended years ago. A team of Berkeley economists crunched the numbers in 2018. Their analysis found that “average real spending per pupil in K-12 schools rose by nearly forty percent” in the preceding decades, and that these increases were “concentrated in low income districts.” By 2005, gaps disappeared. Another study from the Brookings Institution estimates that funding structures flipped from regressive to progressive as early as the mid 1990s.
I’ve taught in both poor and rich neighborhoods. At an affluent school, I faced broken-down desks, a dented whiteboard, and drafty windows. In a poor school, we cracked the spines of brand-new textbooks, and each teacher had a SMART Board.
This funding reversal hasn’t yet reached the ears of advocates. Education historian Diane Ravitch declares still that “school funding is not fair.” Vox repeated the lie that “schools in wealthier areas get better funding.” California state school-board chair Linda Darling-Hammond needs a fact check when she claims that “there is at least a three-to-one ratio between per-pupil spending in the richest and poorest districts.”
How much difference does money alone play in school performance? This argument has raged for 80 years and continues today. Tyner believes that “school funding does indeed make a difference to school performance” and cites multiple studies supporting that view. Yet another body of respectable research finds diminishing returns on every dollar invested in schools.
In fact, both are probably true. No money, no school. Without basic supplies and core staff, nobody can operate one. Up to a point, dollars added to the budget make possible additions and improvements that benefit kids. But dollars don’t cause learning to happen, and after a certain point, what would another dollar buy? Michelin-quality lunches? A second computer for every kid?
The University of Melbourne’s John Hattie synthesized over 800 meta-studies in his seminal work Visible Learning. He points out that “almost every intervention has some positive effect on student learning,” but which ones have the most positive effect? “It is not the amount of money spent that is important but how it is spent.”
Consider that there’s little evidence that Title I funding, the largest federal program for education monies, accomplishes much. Too many schools spend this money on ineffective interventions such as needless edtech or tedious professional development for teachers.
Tyner agrees that schools must also focus on “more efficient” use of funds. He also underscores the inability of schools to solve all of society’s problems. Local governments might be better served by allocating more funds to adequate policing or housing before dropping additional dollars into the school-system budget.
Ultimately, however, this story is a success story. America has righted what was a genuine historical wrong. When we look at student achievement in America today, savage inequalities persist but public-school apologists will need a new excuse for the terrible results of many American schools.