Public School Funding With reports on the lower standardized test scores among the nation's students, policy makers are once again turning their attention to the issue of education reform. For many educators, one of the culprits behind this is not only the dearth of money spent on public education. Rather, the available funding is disbursed unequally, benefiting the already more affluent school districts.

This paper examines the inequity that exists in funding public school education.

The first part of this paper looks at examples of this unequal funding throughout the country. The next part of the paper then looks at the various reasons for these disparities, from the government level to the lack of public support.

In the conclusion, this paper argues that there remains a strong need to increase public support for education funding, and to re-work the current formula used by states to determine how school funds are disbursed. After all, whether one is wealthy or poor, it is in everyone's interests to ensure that the succeeding generation of Americans is both skilled and educated.

Background

In 2001, Congress agreed to re-write the long-standing Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This alone was a contentious step, since agreeing to the re-write opened the doors for controversial programs such as the school voucher program. Critics of the law also charge that President Bush is ignoring his campaign promise to provide sufficient funding for all school districts, to ensure that low-income students can catch up to the test scores of their more affluent peers (Swindell 2003).

In a study conducted in 2000, the Educational Trust found that across the nation, school districts that serve a higher concentration of low-income students receive far less state and local funding. This holds true in 30 out of 37 states included in the study, where districts with the fewest concentration of low-income...

Corollary to this, school districts with the fewest minority students also receive an additional $100 per student, compared to schools with higher concentrations of minorities. Nationally, these figures mean that the school districts with the fewest minority students are allotted $6,684 per student, compared to only $5,782 for school districts with a large minority population (Brooks 2002).
These disparities hold true, even in wealthy states such as New York. In New York State alone, an average elementary school with a population of 400 students receives $860,800 less if it was located in a minority neighborhood.

These disparities in funding occur even at the state level. When the E. study focused only on locally-raised revenue, the Education Trust researchers further found that New York State alone allots an additional $1,339 per student to districts with the fewest minority students. When factored into the differences in federal funding, school districts with high minority populations have $2,084 less per student (Brooks 2002).

This disparity in funding has numerous implications for the education of minority students. Already, studies such as Jencks and Phillips (1998) have shown that the widening gap between the test scores and academic achievements between black and white students. Many other analysts believe that the fiscal inequalities in education funding do not matter at this point, since poverty and family backgrounds are the overwhelming factors that cause this gap.

However, activists believe that the funding gap is a critical issue, one that keeps many minority students from reaching the state standards of education. These reformers argue that the first step towards closing the achievement gap between high poverty/high minority schools and their affluent counterparts.

Reasons for the funding disparities

These inequalities…