Public education funding does not reflect the needs of schools and students, and the distribution of funds is extremely unequal.
Schools are funded by a mix of federal, state and local municipal funding. According to the 2018 report Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, “…revenues for public elementary and secondary schools are 9% federal, 46% state and 45% local.” In my state, the state legislature provides only the amount of money deemed necessary to provide a student with the “minimum adequate education” (just what every parent wants their child to have). This is known as the foundation budget. A town or city can choose to spend whatever amount they want in local property taxes on top of that base level funding, but only communities with wealth can afford to devote extra funds, which quickly makes education funding inequitable.
That is where systemic racism comes in. Communities in the United States are segregated by design. The practice of redlining ensured that families in African-American neighborhoods were denied mortgages and loans, as well as barred from accessing the post-war boom of new housing developments. As a result of these intentional and explicit practices, housing values in this country are unevenly distributed by race. Whiter communities have more property tax revenue. As a result, they subsequently more money to spend on schools. The nonprofit organization Edbuild puts it best: “On the whole, nonwhite districts receive significantly less funding than white districts. Because our system relies so heavily on community wealth, this gap reflects both the prosperity divide in our country and the fragmented nature of school district borders, designed to exclude outside students and protect internal advantage. For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district.”
This is all, of course, perfectly legal. The 1973 court case San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez attempted to challenge the inequality in education funding as a violation of the right to equal education, and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled 5–4 “that substantial inequality in funding between two San Antonio school systems did not raise substantial issues under the U.S. Constitution.” The judges argued that education was not in fact a right guaranteed by the constitution, and that lower-income students were not being denied access to education. As recently as 2016, the Texas Supreme Court upheld this system as constitutional and lawful. The national Supreme Court refuses to revisit the issue, meaning that this system of clear educational inequality along racial lines continues, and any legal challenges to it will not be heard by the highest court in the land.
So, as a result of this reliance on local dollars, the highest-poverty communities have the least school funding. As a result of the way wealth has been intentionally and deliberately distributed throughout American history, those high poverty communities are more likely to be communities of color. The Century Foundation reports that “low-income school districts are more than twice as likely to have a funding gap as higher income districts.” At the same time, they do not have the same external funding supports that wealthier districts do. In a community where most of the families are middle class, PTA and “Friends Of…” groups can fundraise for school needs, but that isn’t possible in communities of lower socioeconomic status. Chalkbeat investigated the issue in New York City and found huge disparities, with some PTAs raising a few hundred dollars and others raising millions. A household with multiple children and only one working adult who has multiple jobs and still needs government assistance to keep their family afloat does not have the time to fundraise for a school sports team, no matter how invested in their child’s education they are. The lack of family wealth also affects the opportunities that teachers can make available for students. Take, for example, a teacher in a high-poverty district who wants to bring her class on a field trip. She can’t simply tell families to pay a fee and send in the students with their own lunches. Asking for a $20 fee for a field trip may automatically move it out of the realm of possibility for many students, and the only meals they will be eating are the breakfast, lunch, and in some cases weekend grocery bags in that the school provides. The unofficial and often invisible community wealth that buoys educational enrichment is not available, further increasing educational inequality.
Economically disadvantaged districts, though having less funding, incur more costs. Schools must provide extensive wraparound services to meet the needs of under-resourced communities. These services include connecting families with social workers, health care providers, housing assistance programs, and more, all of which take time, money, and staffing. In communities with less wealth, there are also more students deemed “high needs,” including students with disabilites (who are more likely to stay even while their peers are sent to better-funded charter schools), students with trauma, and students who are learning English. All of these students deserve specialized support services provided by trained staff, but schools often don’t have the resources to ensure access. Federal and state funding agencies drastically underestimate the costs involved in educating students. State per-pupil funding formulas are not regularly updated, in spite of the fact that the costs of personnel and materials are constantly rising with inflation, and student needs are always changing. The Education Law Center’s 2021 report states that “most states do not provide higher levels of funding to deliver the extra resources necessary to educate students from low-income families and students in high-poverty schools and districts. Importantly, many states simply refuse to make the fiscal effort required to adequately fund PK-12 education relative to their economic capacity.”
For teachers, this creates an environment where it is nearly impossible to actually provide students with a quality education, due to systemic factors outside of any individual’s control. It’s demoralizing, unsustainable, and frustrating for all involved. I discuss more of this pressure on educators in another essay, Good Teaching Can’t Solve the Problems of Poverty, but the bottom line is that the public schools with the greatest need have the least funding, and that makes teaching much, much harder.
Why do teachers leave urban public schools? Today’s answer: because they are chronically and egregiously underfunded.
