A New Look at Inequities in School Funding: A Presentation on the Resource Variations Within Districts

May 2002
Karen Hawley Miles, Marguerite Roza

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Since the late 1960s, school finance equity has been a major focus of research and legal action. Researchers have developed data showing the disparity of spending among the school districts of a given state. Districts with weak economic bases cannot raise as much revenue as districts with valuable real estate and thriving businesses. The tax bases of central cities are also heavily burdened by infrastructure needs and demands for spending on public health, safety, and sanitation. Low-revenue and high-cost districts – usually those in poor rural areas and big city districts – simply cannot spend as much on education as districts in wealthy suburbs or prosperous towns.

Unfortunately, the districts able to spend the least are often those that serve the poorest and most disadvantaged children. Lawyers have argued that these spending discrepancies violate state constitutional provisions guaranteeing all children equal access to quality education. On these grounds, courts have ordered many states to assume some responsibility for funding K-12 education, and to send disproportionate amounts of state money to school districts that are least able to support schools from their own tax revenues.

Researchers and lawyers thought that equalizing spending between rich and poor districts would ensure that poor children would benefit from as much public spending as rich children. However, they did not take account of the fact that school districts – even those that receive large amounts of state “equalization” funds – can create their own inequitable spending patterns.

Within-district spending inequalities have passed under the radar screens of researchers and litigators whose attentions are fixed on between-district spending inequalities. As this study shows, however, school districts – particularly the large ones that serve tens of thousands of students and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on education – can spend highly unequal amounts of money on different students. More often than not, those inequalities work to the disadvantage of schools serving the lowest-income and most heavily-minority students.

This paper presents the first results of a new series of studies on within-district spending patterns. It provides an overview of some early analysis of variations in spending among schools within three districts. What we have found has been an eye-opener, especially for those involved in the leadership of these districts. Major spending inequities exist, even in places where superintendents and school boards had intended to follow equitable policies.

We present our methods and preliminary results in succinct briefing-chart form, in hopes that citizens and policymakers, as well as researchers, will be able to read and understand them. We hope these results will cause district leaders and school activists in other localities to investigate their own spending patterns, make spending more equitable, and to focus money more effectively on improvement of instruction, especially in their most challenged schools.

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