The gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade.
Growing money gap across 30 states
The growing gap between rich and poor is affecting many aspects of life in the United States, from health to work to home life. Now the one place that’s supposed to give Americans an equal chance at life — the schoolhouse — is becoming increasingly unequal as well. I’ve already documented the startling increase since 2000 in the number of extremely poor schools, where three-fourths of the students or more are poor enough to qualify for free or discounted meals (see here), and I’ve noted the general increase in poverty in all schools here.
But now there’s new evidence that poor schools are getting increasingly short-changed by the states and localities that fund them. The richest 25 percent of school districts receive 15.6 percent more funds from state and local governments per student than the poorest 25 percent of school districts, the federal Department of Education pointed out last month (March, 2015). That’s a national funding gap of $1,500 per student, on average, according to the most recent data, from 2011-12. The gap has grown 44 percent since 2001-02, when a student in a rich district had only a 10.8 percent resource advantage over a student in a poor district.
The funding gap between the poorest and richest 25% of school districts in each state during the 2011-12 school year. Red and orange states are where students in rich districts receive more funds than students in poor districts.
(Use arrows to navigate and click on any state to see student spending data. Interactive map created by Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report. Source data: School district current expenditures per pupil Table A-1 FY2012, NCES)
I keep specifying “state” and “local” funding because the picture gets more complicated when you factor in federal funding. Once you do, almost all of the funding gaps disappear. But the Department of Education says that’s a problem. “Federal dollars were never intended to act as an equalizer for an unfair playing field set by state and local dollars,” said a U.S. Department of Education official, who said she was required to speak anonymously. “They are explicitly intended to supplement.”
Dating from President Johnson’s War on Poverty, federal education dollars are meant to give needy children (along with non-native English speakers and those with special needs) extra resources to help them catch up to their wealthier peers.
But most states have never created a level playing field, and new data show that it’s getting worse at a time when we’re asking schools to raise standards and demonstrate test score gains.
Change in the funding gap between 2001-02 and 2011-12. Red and orange states are where the gap widened to the benefit of students in rich districts.
(Use arrows to navigate and click on any state to see student spending data. Interactive map created by Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report. Calculated from School district current expenditures per pupilTable A-1 FY 2012 and FY 2002, NCES)
To be sure, there’s a certain amount of quibbling over the data and how spending per student is calculated. Each state crunches the numbers differently and it’s often difficult, especially with administrators and technology that are shared across districts, to figure out exactly how to attribute dollars to each student. An advocacy group, The Education Trust, released its own report in March, 2015, calculating that the state-and-local funding gap between rich and poor districts was only 10 percent, after adjusting for cost of living differences. Yet in another, more controversial calculation, it found an 18 percent funding gap between rich and poor.
Even within states, there are methodological changes from year to year. So it’s hard to say with certainty, for example, if the funding gap between rich and poor in Nevada more than doubled from 7 percent in 2001-02 to 15 percent in 2011-12, as the National Center for Education statistics reports. But the national trend is clear, when across 30 states you see a growing money gap between rich and poor The gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade. - The Hechinger Report:
