Unequal education spending: Variation between and within
school districts
The most common reason given for variation in the funding of schools is the
history of school finance systems in which public schools were supported almost
entirely by local property taxes. 21 Because of this well-known story, the majority
of efforts by advocates of equal public education spending have been aimed at
reducing spending inequities between school districts in the same states by
redistributing education spending from wealthier to poorer districts.
But in recent years, researchers have started to document a new level of maldistribution of resources at the district level. “Almost universally,” explains University of
Washington’s Center for Education researcher Marguerite Roza, “school districts
magnify those initial [between-district] inequities by directing more non-targeted
money to schools and students with less need.”22 The primary mechanism through
which this happens? Districts have teacher assignment practices that place the
least-experienced teachers in high-minority, high-poverty schools. Because novice
teachers earn so much less in salary, the total spending at these high-needs schools
is likely to be lower than spending at schools in wealthier neighborhoods that
employ veteran teachers.
The Center for American Progress published studies shining a light on these
within-district inequities in teacher salaries in California and Florida. The former
required painstakingly “pluck[ing], one by one, from online school accountability report cards,” the average teacher salaries at each school.23 Florida made the
job easier by collecting and reporting expenditure data, including actual teacher
salaries, at each school.
0 Arizona New Mexico Washington Idaho Oregon Texas New York New Hampshire North Dakota Utah Indiana Ohio Colorado Oklahoma Illinois Massachusetts Nevada Kansas Maine Minnesota Rhode Island U.S. Average Montana Kentucky Maryland DC Nebraska Missouri Virginia Loisiana Michigan Florida North Carolina Mississippi Wisconsin South Dakota West Virginia Arkansas Wyoming Georgia South Carolina Source: Author’s analysis of newly released U.S. Department of Education expenditure data, part of a reporting requirement under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, adjusted for regional cost differences.
The latest data highlights both within- and betweendistrict inequities Figure 2 exploits this new data to show the percentage of variation in per-pupil spending occurring within and between districts in each state. The percentage of variation that is within districts—
the part of the story that no one really talks about and that is likely driven by teacher salary differences—ranges from 9 percent in Arizona to 77 percent in South Carolina.26 On average,27 41 percent of the variation in spending between schools happens within districts; the remaining 59 percent falls between districts in a state. This is a major finding. Contrary to popular belief,28 individual districts themselves are responsible for a sizable amount of the variation in per-pupil spending. The common perception that discrepancies in wealth between districts are responsible for most of the variation in per-pupil spending within a state is simply not the whole story. In some states there is more between-district variation, and in those areas the focus should continue to be on addressing those funding discrepancies. But in the states at the top of Figure 2,
the bigger problem appears to be within-district variation in spending. Advocates of equitable education funding should target their strategies to individual states; the information in Figure 2 should help to contextualize reform efforts in each state. But Figure 2 also shows that within-district discrepancies in spending are a nationwide problem. The remainder of this paper presents a proposed solution to that problem.
