School district borders in America serve two roles. They define not only school systems, but also the local taxing districts that sustain them. Because of growing wealth inequality, funding gaps between affluent school districts and their needier neighbors are widening. States try to close these divides, but state funding, which is often drawn from unstable sources like sales, income, and energy taxes, just isn’t enough. We need a solution that goes beyond trying to patch the hole. We need to eliminate it.

By rethinking the role of school district borders—allowing local dollars to transcend these lines to support kids throughout the county or state—we can bolster funding for nearly 7 in 10 public school students.

Every state uses a funding formula to distribute education dollars. State lawmakers and advocates frequently target these formulas for policy debate and legislative improvements. In support of these efforts, EdBuild offers its policy recommendations for each of the core areas of state funding formulas. These recommendations draw on, and build upon, existing state policies, showing how states can strengthen their formulas in line with the principles of adequacy, equity, responsibility, and transparency.

This is a practical guide for those seeking to reform state funding formulas. Use EdBuilder, an interactive tool, to construct your formula from the range of policy options recommended, and read EdBuild’s full recommendations to explore these policies in depth.

Because so much of school funding is drawn from the property taxes raised within each district’s borders, those borders do much to determine students’ access to resources. District borders could be drawn to bring about fairer funding. Instead, our district map is the product of specific communities seeking to advance their own interests—affluent areas seceding; financially healthy districts refusing to join with struggling neighbors; and small districts resisting statewide consolidation attempts that would increase efficiency and inclusion.

Divisive borders are incentivized by the school funding system, but they are made possible by the laws that govern school district borders. Those working for educational equity should engage with these laws directly. This report supports that work with a fifty-state survey of school district border law.

The inherent links between race and class in our country haven’t been remedied by school-funding lawsuits nor the passage of time. They remain ever present, and while we have made some progress on the issue of economic inequality in our schools, we still have a terribly inequitable system. For students of color, the problem is even worse. The concentration of low-wealth communities into partitioned communities is even more pronounced for communities of color due to the history of racial segregation in our country, both formal and informal. The ability of local districts to raise revenue for their schools is thus undermined. And political power in the state capitol is diffused and diminished, because there are six times more white districts representing their interests in state capitols than nonwhite districts.

The end result is fewer local resources and less state aid to compensate for it. And so, fifty years after Serrano v Priest, and despite decades of lawsuits throughout the country, there remains a $23 billion gap between white and nonwhite school districts, even though they serve the same number of children.

The United States is dotted with left-behind places. Many mid-sized cities, especially in the former industrial regions spanning the northeast and Midwest, have struggled in a changing economy; they have seen employers leave and populations decline, leading to higher poverty rates and lower property values. When school district borders are drawn around these communities, poverty is concentrated in their classrooms, and school funding can become scarce. Sometimes, these borders also serve as walls between communities of very different means. On one side, needy students are isolated in a high-poverty school district; on the other, the children of an affluent community learn in a school system supported by a healthy local economy. This report identifies the borders that create the greatest degree of economic segregation between neighboring school districts.

Thirty states have explicit policies in place detailing how a community can secede from its current district, and most of those processes have no consideration for the needs of the students left behind. These laws, paired with school finance systems heighten the importance of local wealth, pave the way for gerrymandering that advantages the wealthy and deprives our neediest students of educational opportunities.

There are almost 1000 school district borders in the United States that create steep divides: racial differences of 25 percentage points or more and revenue gaps of at least 10%. These borders cut illogically across communities and counties and serve to divide students from resources—and from each other. Along 132 of these borders, the divides are especially great, with racial disparities upwards of 50 percentage points and revenue gaps of 20% or more. And while it is true that predominately nonwhite communities are nationally disadvantaged when it comes to school funding, these divisive borders reveal that much of the reason for this is local, not national. Around the country, many school district borders both segregate students by race and define unequal tax bases that yield different levels of school funding.

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 to see at-a-glance national maps, detailed state comparisons, and downloadable reports.

Use this tool to explore EdBuild’s school district master datasets and download data, maps and charts. Users can explore every school district in the country, the largest 100 school districts, or each school district in a state. Explore equity. Create scatterplots, maps and tables and download them.

This interactive map provides a district-level visualization of financial and demographic data for most US school districts in years 2013–2018. The data include poverty rates, per-pupil finances (adjusted for cost of living), income, property value, and racial composition. Taken together, the data in this tool help describe the wide gulfs in wealth and privilege that exist both across our nation and between our communities.

Download all of EdBuild’s school district master datasets and geographic files and read the methodologies used to create them.

FundEd: Charters is a web tool that aggregates and standardizes information regarding each state’s charter school funding laws. The intent of this site is to enable better state-to-state comparisons and provide easy access to detailed information related to state charter school funding policies and reporting practices.

FundEd: Charters provides information about how funding for charter schools is calculated and distributed, as well as how charter funding is reported. Explore the tool to see at-a-glance national maps, detailed state comparisons, and downloadable reports.

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.

School district borders define both which students will be served by a district and where those schools get their dollars. When states rely on local taxes to support schools, borders can be drawn to provide a deep well of resources for all of the community's children—or they can segregate those children along lines of opportunity and wealth.

When shifting conditions leave a school district without enough local resources to get by, it may seek to improve its financial health by consolidating with a better-off neighbor district. But in most states, that's all but impossible. In thirty-nine states, consolidation is purely voluntary, and struggling districts are likely to be turned away by their wealthier neighbor districts. In twenty-five states, there are financial incentives meant to encourage mergers, but they are rarely successful at bringing about consolidations for the districts that truly need them. In fact, only nine states have mechanisms that allow the state to mandate a merger, even in the direst of circumstances.

When school funding is raised from property taxes, property-rich districts have an advantage: They can afford to pay lower tax rates without sacrificing school funding. But do they? In this report, EdBuild examines the relationship between local property tax rates and district affluence in 18 states. The report also explores the state policies that can promote equity in local tax effort for education.

Every policy that increases funding equity, though it improves the overall picture, leaves some voters worse off. This report explores the stories of three states that beat the odds.

When property tax revenues are kept for the districts in which they are raised, wealthier neighborhoods can amply fund their schools at lower tax rates. When the state moves to equalize funding for districts of different wealth levels, it must either raise more state money or order the sharing of local revenues. Either course inevitably increases tax bills in those more affluent areas.

The increases create a challenge for policymakers and place political and economic constraints on the process of increasing the equity of the school finance system. In each instance, the state took on a larger role in school funding and decreased the amount of interdistrict variation permitted in the system.

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.

Students in poverty require extra support—and more resources—to succeed. Federal funding for disadvantaged students, coupled with federal regulation of state education-funding systems, should aim to increase the amount of money going toward high-poverty school districts relative to their more affluent peers. However, federal oversight has fallen short, and states continue to allow children in high-poverty communities to go without the extra support they need. In a majority of states, the highest-poverty districts receive less state and local funding per pupil than the lowest-poverty districts. Whether through state law or federal regulation, there must be a greater emphasis placed on policies that ensure equitable funding for our nation’s children.

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.

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 ongoing teacher protest in Detroit has drawn public attention to the horrific physical conditions in many of the city's public schools. Photos have circulated of toxic mold, mushrooms growing out of walls, evidence of infestation, and gym floors too warped to stand, much less run, on. Each one is a window into a complex tragedy of multilayered government neglect and a funding system that traps children in under-resourced schools. These conditions call out not just for emergency aid, but systemic reform.

The Los Angeles Times recently covered an EdBuild report about the California State Lottery, which is presented to the public as a means of generating funding for public education. What the program actually amounts to, however, after all the costs and winnings are siphoned away, is a transfer of $449 million out of the state's poorest communities and into schools in better-off areas.

We often hear this phrase in public education: “How much money we spend on education doesn’t matter; it’s how we’re spending it that’s important.”

While it’s true that our national average funding per student has increased significantly, what matters much more is the picture when we zoom in: who’s making the investment, who receives the funding, and which students need it most?

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.

Pennsylvania is currently experiencing an implosion of its education system as schools across the state struggle to keep their doors open. For the third straight month since the initial June 30th deadline, the state house has failed to pass a budget.

Hardest hit by this crisis are schools and students in low-income communities, which rely on state funding far more than their wealthier counterparts.

There’s a new blog post floating around attacking EdBuild that blatantly (and bizarrely) mischaracterizes what we’re up to. It touches on some important policy areas, so it’s worth correcting the facts.

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.

A number of state courts have ruled that it is the responsibility of their state governments to address the disparities in what communities of varying property wealth can raise. But many states aren’t doing the job, leaving in place a regressive school funding system in which higher-poverty districts receiving less funding than low-poverty districts.

When a school or district wants to try something new, it needs to find the money to do so. Many state education finance systems, though, weren’t designed with 21^st-century innovations in mind. State funds are often tied up in inflexible spending categories or are allocated in ways that disincentivize changes to the status quo.

The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others. It is a struggle to give people a chance. It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities, as we have been allowed to develop and use ours, so that they can share, as others share, in the promise of this nation.

Recently, EdBuild launched an interactive map that highlights student poverty in every school district across the United States. After receiving a number of inquiries about our methods, we created this guide to help answer common questions.

An introduction to EdBuild.