America’s School Funding Struggle: How We’re Robbing Our Future By Under-Investing In Our Children
August 5, 2019
By: Linda Darling-Hammond
Source: Forbes
This week, U.S. lawmakers will gather for the annual National Conference of State Legislators meeting to tackle a range of issues, including school funding, which they identified as their top priorityearlier this year. Although there has been an upsurge in school funding since 2015, it comes on the heels of years of budget cuts during the Great Recession that left nearly half the states spending less on schools in 2016 than they were spending in 2007.
Low-wealth districts, especially those serving concentrations of students from low-income families, were hardest hit by these cuts. In many cases, they experienced teacher layoffs, increased class sizes, and reduced services in areas ranging from counseling to after-school programs.
These growing inequalities are rooted in the way American schools are funded, primarily through local property taxes that produce significant disparities. Although states try to offset inequalities, they rarely succeed in eliminating these funding gaps. The top-spending states spend about three times what the lowest-spending states allocate to education and, in many states, the wealthiest districts spend two to three times what the poorest districts can spend per pupil.