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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.

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.

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In 39 states, consolidation is purely voluntary. Twenty-four of these states also provide financial incentives to encourage mergers between wealthier and less affluent neighbors, but such mergers rarely happen. In fact, only nine states have mechanisms that allow the state to force a merger, but very few can do so in response to financial problems. And no consolidation policy can overcome the problem of insolvent districts surrounded by other property-poor school systems. Widening the tax base cannot help students who live and learn in regions experiencing broad economic struggles.

So long as states depend on local property taxes to fund their schools, there will inevitably be students stranded in districts ill-equipped to provide for their educations. Read about examples when children were left behind by these policies in our Case Studies, and then continue on to the Solutions section to see how states can do better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.