Author(s): EdBuild
Published: July 24, 2018
Report Intro/Brief:
“Over 21 million school-age children live within the bounds of a high-poverty school district, and many are still separated from educational resources by school district borders that segregate by socioeconomic status. In some areas, walking across a district boundary can mean a jump in the student poverty rate by as much as forty percentage points—the difference between Aspen, Colorado and Flint, Michigan.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court heard San Antonio v. Rodriguez, a challenge to Texas’s school funding policy. That policy drew heavily upon local property wealth for education dollars, disadvantaging students in poor communities. The Supreme Court ruled in Rodriguez that the system did indeed harm those students, but the federal government had no right to intervene and remedy inequitable state funding formulas. Since then, states have mostly continued to use wealth-based systems like the Texas policy that prompted the challenge. Today, 46% of school funding nationwide is drawn from local sources, where what matters most is the value of the property inside a given district boundary.3 As a consequence, communities with greater property wealth can generally provide better-resourced schools for their students, even if they tax themselves at lower rates. Meanwhile, school districts in persistently impoverished areas, or in places experiencing economic decline, are left without the resources they need to support their students. As long as states ground their school funding systems in local property taxes, they are almost sure to fall short of finding resources to level the playing field.
Within this flawed framework, one means of addressing the inequity is to help struggling districts merge with their financially heathier neighbors, widening their tax bases so that they have access to more local dollars. But many states make it nearly impossible for lower-wealth districts to consolidate with better-off neighbor districts. The vast majority of states–thirty-nine in all–have given themselves no power to trigger school district mergers. Instead, consolidation is purely voluntary, and struggling school systems must go hat in hand to wealthier neighbors, who can decide whether to take or leave the merger. Twenty-five states do offer financial incentives for mergers, but most are modest, and even the most generous often fail to spur consolidations for the districts that need it most. Only nine states have the power to force consolidations in limited circumstances, but these actions are vanishingly rare. In the vast majority of cases, the state does nothing.
Because locally rooted funding systems do so much to advantage small and wealthy school districts, the incentives of our education funding system dictate that financially distressed districts seeking consolidation will almost always be turned away by their neighbors. Unless states intervene to directly bring about consolidations, merger efforts will generally fail and students in districts underfunded by the school finance system will be left stranded, with no escape route.”
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