Welcome to EdBuild

EdBuild is a nonprofit organization focused on bringing common sense and fairness to the way America funds public schools, and we want to tell you why.

School finance is complicated. It’s arcane. Some might even call it boring. But it’s important — a little-discussed factor in issues like socioeconomic segregation and the achievement gap. And EdBuild is taking it on.

EdBuild is focused on bringing fairness and common sense to the way we fund public schools. Why? Because we’re not going to be able to move forward in education without overhauling education finance. Our funding system is illogical, it’s outdated, and it’s holding our children back.

Problem #1: The amount of funding students receive is arbitrary.

School funding formulas are set at the state level, which means there are 51 different notions of how much money is the right amount to educate a child. Even after numbers are adjusted for cost of living, the amount of money school districts have to spend on each student varies radically from state to state — from less than $8,000 per student at the bottom of the scale to more than $20,000 per student at the top. Clearly, children in Tennessee don’t deserve less than half the educational resources that kids in Wyoming do, but that’s what they’re getting.

And these arbitrary differences don’t only exist between states. Within states, districts can have very different per-pupil budgets, even when they serve similar groups of students. Take Canton and Toledo, two largely urban districts in Ohio. These two districts serve the same general student population, yet the state’s convoluted funding system affords over $3,700 more per student enrolled in Toledo public schools than it does for each student in Canton.

Problem #2: Outdated funding systems hold back innovation.

It’s politically challenging to overhaul a school funding system. It’s a tough task to make everyone happy, so it’s tempting just to let the status quo stand. That’s probably why so many states are using decades-old education funding formulas: Georgia’s dates back to 1985, Arizona’s was put in place in 1980, and Iowa’s has been basically unchanged since the mid-1970s. We’ve learned a lot about education in the last 40 years, and across the country, funding systems haven’t kept up with the times. This keeps schools and districts from trying new and innovative approaches. For example, some states allocate school funding in accordance with set student-to-teacher ratios, based on the idea that all education still takes place in classrooms with one teacher and between 20 and 30 kids. They provide that funding in the form of “teacher units” that can only be spent to hire individual staff members. This can tie up the lion’s share of funding and prevent schools from experimenting with creative arrangements regarding class time, team teaching and teacher-leadership, and interdisciplinary coursework.

Problem #3: Our funding system creates impermeable borders and contributes to socioeconomic segregation.

Nationally, about half of education funding comes from local revenues, mostly drawn from property taxes. That money almost always stays in the school district where it is raised, and because of that, each district’s funding is strongly related to the value of its local property tax base. This means that affluent communities have a powerful incentive to draw school district boundaries that divide them from lower-wealth neighborhoods: they can keep their property tax revenue in their own children’s schools and avoid having to contribute to the education of needier students who require more — and more expensive — supports.

Consider Piedmont, California, where the median household income is over $212,000. It is surrounded on all sides by Oakland, where the median household makes less than $53,000. Rather than join Oakland Unified School District, Piedmont has chosen to remain its own school system, an island in the middle of the city. This has had two important results. First, the districts are a clear example of socioeconomic segregation: a quarter of Oakland students live below the poverty line, while only 2% of Piedmont students do. Second, by fencing in its property wealth, Piedmont has been able to raise over $15,000 per pupil in education revenue, while Oakland has $5,000 less.

EdBuild is taking these challenges on.

EdBuild is working to research school funding issues, raise awareness of inequity and illogic in the education finance system, and improve education funding policies in states by sharing our expertise. Here, on Medium, EdBuild will be sharing what we know, what we learn, and what we think is important about education funding systems. Please join us.

These ideas have been discussed in previous blog posts and features on the EdBuild website, including and especially one entitled “Meet EdBuild,” published on June 24, 2015.