Closing America’s Education Funding GapsClosing America’s Education Funding Gaps
Key Findings
Our cost model and interactive map identify every district in the country with a funding gap—that is, where current spending is below the amount that our model estimates is necessary to achieve average outcomes, based on that district’s unique geography and student demographics. The result is that broad swaths of the country, including much of the south, southwest, and west United States, show sizable funding gaps.
Similarly, many of the nation’s large cities, which have more diverse school districts, have significantly larger funding gaps. As the COVID-19 pandemic constrains state and local budgets further, additional cuts to public education spending may exacerbate these gaps.
District-Level Findings
- Districts with high concentrations of students living in poverty are more likely to have funding gaps, and these students experience significantly larger funding gaps, than wealthier districts.
- Low-income school districts are more than twice as likely to have a funding gap as higher income districts.
- Districts with the highest concentrations of poverty—those in the highest 20 percent of districts by Census poverty rate—are 2.6 times more likely to have a funding gap.
- The average gap in these districts is more than $6,700 per pupil.
- Districts with high concentrations of Latinx and Black students have much larger funding gaps, and are more likely to have funding gaps to begin with, than majority white districts.
- Districts that have more than 50 percent Black or Latinx enrollment are nearly twice (1.95 times) as likely to have a funding gap than districts with minority enrollment less than 50 percent.
- Nationally, districts with over 50 percent Black and/or Latinx students face a funding gap of more than $5,000 per pupil on average (see Figure 1).
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