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About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how Americans view the K-12 public education system. We surveyed 5,029 U.S. adults from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, 2023.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos for Pew Research Center on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel Omnibus. The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey is weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income and other categories.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

These findings come amid debates about what is taught in schools , as well as concerns about school budget cuts and students falling behind academically.

Related: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. About two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say this, compared with 40% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In turn, 23% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans say it’s headed in the right direction.

Among Republicans, conservatives are the most likely to say public education is headed in the wrong direction: 75% say this, compared with 52% of moderate or liberal Republicans. There are no significant differences among Democrats by ideology.

Similar shares of K-12 parents and adults who don’t have a child in K-12 schools say the system is going in the wrong direction.

A separate Center survey of public K-12 teachers found that 82% think the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years. And many teachers are pessimistic about the future.

Related: What’s It Like To Be A Teacher in America Today?

Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?

We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
• Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.

How views vary by party

Americans in each party point to different reasons why public education is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say major reasons are:

• A lack of focus on core academic subjects (79% vs. 55%)
• Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%)

In turn, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to point to:

• Insufficient school funding and resources (78% vs. 33%)
• Parents having too much say in what schools are teaching (46% vs. 13%)

Views also vary within each party by ideology.

Among Republicans, conservatives are particularly likely to cite a lack of focus on core academic subjects and teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom.

Among Democrats, liberals are especially likely to cite schools lacking resources and parents having too much say in the curriculum.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

• Partisanship & Issues
• Political Issues

Rachel Minkin is a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake.

The current debate over public education underestimates its value—and forgets its purpose.

Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

Explore the October 2017 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

President Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools, describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers “care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they care about individual students.”

Few people care more about individual students than public-school teachers do, but what’s really missing in this dystopian narrative is a hearty helping of reality: 21st-century public schools, with their record numbers of graduates and expanded missions, are nothing close to the cesspools portrayed by political hyperbole. This hyperbole was not invented by Trump or DeVos, but their words and proposals have brought to a boil something that’s been simmering for a while—the denigration of our public schools, and a growing neglect of their role as an incubator of citizens.

Americans have in recent decades come to talk about education less as a public good, like a strong military or a noncorrupt judiciary, than as a private consumable. In an address to the Brookings Institution, DeVos described school choice as “a fundamental right.” That sounds appealing. Who wouldn’t want to deploy their tax dollars with greater specificity? Imagine purchasing a gym membership with funds normally allocated to the upkeep of a park.

My point here is not to debate the effect of school choice on individual outcomes: The evidence is mixed, and subject to cherry-picking on all sides. I am more concerned with how the current discussion has ignored public schools’ victories, while also detracting from their civic role. Our public-education system is about much more than personal achievement; it is about preparing people to work together to advance not just themselves but society. Unfortunately, the current debate’s focus on individual rights and choices has distracted many politicians and policy makers from a key stakeholder: our nation as a whole. As a result, a cynicism has taken root that suggests there is no hope for public education. This is demonstrably false. It’s also dangerous.

The idea that popular education might best be achieved privately is nothing new, of course. The Puritans, who saw education as necessary to Christian practice, experimented with the idea, and their experience is telling. In 1642, they passed a law—the first of its kind in North America—requiring that all children in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts receive an education. Puritan legislators assumed, naively, that parents would teach children in their homes; however, many of them proved unable or unwilling to rise to the task. Five years later, the legislators issued a corrective in the form of the Old Deluder Satan Law: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures,” the law intoned, “it is therefore ordered … that everie Township [of 100 households or more] in this Jurisdiction” be required to provide a trained teacher and a grammar school, at taxpayer expense.

Almost 400 years later, contempt for our public schools is commonplace. Americans, and especially Republicans, report that they have lost faith in the system, but notably, nearly three-quarters of parents rate their own child’s school highly; it’s other people’s schools they worry about. Meanwhile, Americans tend to exaggerate our system’s former glory. Even in the 1960s, when international science and math tests were first administered, the U.S. was never at the top of the rankings and was often near the bottom.

Not only is the idea that American test scores were once higher a fiction, but in some cases they have actually improved over time, especially among African American students. Since the early 1970s, when the Department of Education began collecting long-term data, average reading and math scores for 9- and 13-year-olds have risen significantly.

These gains have come even as the student body of American public schools has expanded to include students with ever greater challenges. For the first time in recent memory, a majority of U.S. public-school students come from low-income households. The student body includes a larger proportion than ever of students who are still learning to speak English. And it includes many students with disabilities who would have been shut out of public school before passage of the 1975 law now known as the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which guaranteed all children a “free appropriate public education.”

The fantasy that in some bygone era U.S. test scores were higher has prevented us from acknowledging other possible explanations for America’s technological, scientific, and cultural preeminence. In her 2013 book, Reign of Error , Diane Ravitch—an education historian and former federal education official who originally supported but later became a critic of reforms like No Child Left Behind—cites surprising evidence that a nation’s higher position on an international ranking of test scores actually predicted lower per capita GDP decades later, compared with countries whose test scores ranked worse. Other findings complicate the picture, but at a minimum we can say that there is no clear connection between test scores and a nation’s economic success. Surely it’s reasonable to ask whether some of America’s success might derive not from factors measured by standardized tests, but from other attributes of our educational system. U.S. public schools, at their best, have encouraged a unique mixing of diverse people, and produced an exceptionally innovative and industrious citizenry.

Our lost faith in public education has led us to other false conclusions, including the conviction that teachers unions protect “bad apples.” Thanks to articles and documentaries such as Waiting for “Superman , ” most of us have an image seared into our brain of a slew of know-nothing teachers, removed from the classroom after years of sleeping through class, sitting in state-funded “rubber rooms” while continuing to draw hefty salaries. If it weren’t for those damned unions, or so the logic goes, we could drain the dregs and hire real teachers. I am a public-school-certified teacher whose own children attended public schools, and I’ve occasionally entertained these thoughts myself.

But unions are not the bogeyman we’re looking for. According to “The Myth of Unions’ Overprotection of Bad Teachers,” a well-designed study by Eunice S. Han, an economist at the University of Utah, school districts with strong unions actually do a better job of weeding out bad teachers and retaining good ones than do those with weak unions. This makes sense. If you have to pay more for something, you are more likely to care about its quality; when districts pay higher wages, they have more incentive to employ good teachers (and dispense with bad ones). And indeed, many of the states with the best schools have reached that position in the company of strong unions. We can’t say for sure that unions have a positive impact on student outcomes—the evidence is inconclusive. But findings like Han’s certainly undermine reformers’ claims.

In defending our public schools, I do not mean to say they can’t be improved. But if we are serious about advancing them, we need to stop scapegoating unions and take steps to increase and improve the teaching pool. Teacher shortages are leaving many states in dire straits: The national shortfall is projected to exceed 100,000 teachers by next year.

That many top college graduates hesitate to join a profession with low wages is no great surprise. For many years, talented women had few career alternatives to nursing and teaching; this kept teacher quality artificially high. Now that women have more options, if we want to attract strong teachers, we need to pay competitive salaries. As one observer put it, if you cannot find someone to sell you a Lexus for a few dollars, that doesn’t mean there is a car shortage.

Oddly, the idea of addressing our supply-and-demand problem the old-fashioned American way, with a market-based approach, has been largely unappealing to otherwise free-market thinkers. And yet raising salaries would have cascading benefits beyond easing the teacher shortage. Because salaries are associated with teacher quality, raising pay would likely improve student outcomes. Massachusetts and Connecticut have attracted capable people to the field with competitive pay, and neither has an overall teacher shortage.

Apart from raising teacher pay, we should expand the use of other strategies to attract talent, such as forgivable tuition loans, service fellowships, hardship pay for the most-challenging settings (an approach that works well in the military and the foreign service), and housing and child-care subsidies for teachers, many of whom can’t afford to live in the communities in which they teach. We can also get more serious about de-larding a bureaucracy that critics are right to denounce: American public schools are bloated at the top of the organizational pyramid, with too many administrators and not enough high-quality teachers in the classroom.

Where schools are struggling today, collectively speaking, is less in their transmission of mathematical principles or writing skills, and more in their inculcation of what it means to be an American. The Founding Fathers understood the educational prerequisites on which our democracy was based (having themselves designed it), and they had far grander plans than, say, beating the Soviets to the moon, or ensuring a literate workforce.

Thomas Jefferson, among other historical titans, understood that a functioning democracy required an educated citizenry, and crucially, he saw education as a public good to be included in the “articles of public care,” despite his preference for the private sector in most matters. John Adams, another proponent of public schooling, urged, “There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”

In the centuries since, the courts have regularly affirmed the special status of public schools as a cornerstone of the American democratic project. In its vigorous defenses of students’ civil liberties—to protest the Vietnam War, for example, or not to salute the flag—the Supreme Court has repeatedly held public schools to an especially high standard precisely because they play a unique role in fostering citizens.

This role isn’t limited to civics instruction; public schools also provide students with crucial exposure to people of different backgrounds and perspectives. Americans have a closer relationship with the public-school system than with any other shared institution. (Those on the right who disparagingly refer to public schools as “government schools” have obviously never been to a school-board meeting, one of the clearest examples anywhere of direct democracy in action.) Ravitch writes that “one of the greatest glories of the public school was its success in Americanizing immigrants.” At their best, public schools did even more than that, integrating both immigrants and American-born students from a range of backgrounds into one citizenry.

At a moment when our media preferences, political affiliations, and cultural tastes seem wider apart than ever, abandoning this amalgamating function is a bona fide threat to our future. And yet we seem to be headed in just that direction. The story of American public education has generally been one of continuing progress, as girls, children of color, and children with disabilities (among others) have redeemed their constitutional right to push through the schoolhouse gate. But in the past few decades, we have allowed schools to grow more segregated, racially and socioeconomically. (Charter schools, far from a solution to this problem, are even more racially segregated than traditional public schools.)

Simultaneously, we have neglected instruction on democracy. Until the 1960s, U.S. high schools commonly offered three classes to prepare students for their roles as citizens: Government, Civics (which concerned the rights and responsibilities of citizens), and Problems of Democracy (which included discussions of policy issues and current events). Today, schools are more likely to offer a single course. Civics education has fallen out of favor partly as a result of changing political sentiment. Some liberals have come to see instruction in American values—such as freedom of speech and religion, and the idea of a “melting pot”—as reactionary. Some conservatives, meanwhile, have complained of a progressive bias in civics education.

Especially since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the class time devoted to social studies has declined steeply. Most state assessments don’t cover civics material, and in too many cases, if it isn’t tested, it isn’t taught. At the elementary-school level, less than 40 percent of fourth-grade teachers say they regularly emphasize topics related to civics education.

So what happens when we neglect the public purpose of our publicly funded schools? The discussion of vouchers and charter schools, in its focus on individual rights, has failed to take into account American society at large. The costs of abandoning an institution designed to bind, not divide, our citizenry are high.

Already, some experts have noted a conspicuous link between the decline of civics education and young adults’ dismal voting rates. Civics knowledge is in an alarming state: Three-quarters of Americans can’t identify the three branches of government. Public-opinion polls, meanwhile, show a new tolerance for authoritarianism, and rising levels of antidemocratic and illiberal thinking. These views are found all over the ideological map, from President Trump, who recently urged the nation’s police officers to rough up criminal suspects, to, ironically, the protesters who tried to block DeVos from entering a Washington, D.C., public school in February.

We ignore public schools’ civic and integrative functions at our peril. To revive them will require good faith across the political spectrum. Those who are suspicious of public displays of national unity may need to rethink their aversion. When we neglect schools’ nation-binding role, it grows hard to explain why we need public schools at all. Liberals must also work to better understand the appeal of school choice, especially for families in poor areas where teacher quality and attrition are serious problems. Conservatives and libertarians, for their part, need to muster more generosity toward the institutions that have educated our workforce and fueled our success for centuries.

The political theorist Benjamin Barber warned in 2004 that “America as a commercial society of individual consumers may survive the destruction of public schooling. America as a democratic republic cannot.” In this era of growing fragmentation, we urgently need a renewed commitment to the idea that public education is a worthy investment, one that pays dividends not only to individual families but to our society as a whole.

How much does the government spend on education? What percentage of people are college educated? How are kids doing in reading and math?

Table of Contents

What is the current state of education in the us.

How much does the US spend per student?

Public school spending per student

Average teacher salary.

How educated are Americans?

People with a bachelor's degree

Educational attainment by race and ethnicity.

How are kids doing in reading and math?

Proficiency in math and reading

What is the role of the government in education?

Spending on the education system

Agencies and elected officials.

The education system in America is made up of different public and private programs that cover preschool, all the way up to colleges and universities. These programs cater to many students in both urban and rural areas. Get data on how students are faring by grade and subject, college graduation rates, and what federal, state, and local governments spending per student. The information comes from various government agencies including the National Center for Education Statistics and Census Bureau.

During the 2019-2020 school year, there was $15,810 spent on K-12 public education for every student in the US.

Education spending per k-12 public school students has nearly doubled since the 1970s..

This estimate of spending on education is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics. Instruction accounts for most of the spending, though about a third includes support services including administration, maintenance, and transportation. Spending per student varies across states and school districts. During the 2019-2020 school year, New York spends the most per student ($29,597) and Idaho spends the least ($9,690).

During the 2021-2022 school year , the average public school teacher salary in the US was $66,397 .

Instruction is the largest category of public school spending, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Adjusting for inflation, average teacher pay is down since 2010.

In 2021 , 35% of people 25 and over had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Over the last decade women have become more educated than men..

Educational attainment is defined as the highest level of formal education a person has completed. The concept can be applied to a person, a demographic group, or a geographic area. Data on educational attainment is produced by the Census Bureau in multiple surveys, which may produce different data. Data from the American Community Survey is shown here to allow for geographic comparisons.

In 2021 , 61% of the Asian 25+ population had completed at least four years of college.

Educational attainment data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey allows for demographic comparisons across the US.

In 2022, proficiency in math for eighth graders was 26.5% .

Proficiency in reading in 8th grade was 30.8% ., based on a nationwide assessment, reading and math scores declined during the pandemic..

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative data that measures student achievement. NAEP is Congressionally mandated. Tests are given in a sample of schools based on student demographics in a given school district, state, or the US overall. Testing covers a variety of subjects, most frequently math, reading, science, and writing.

In fiscal year 2020, governments spent a combined total of $1.3 trillion on education.

That comes out to $4,010 per person..

USAFacts categorizes government budget data to allocate spending appropriately and to arrive at the estimate presented here. Most government spending on education occurs at the state and local levels rather than the federal.

Government revenue and expenditures are based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Each is published annually, although due to collection times, state and local government data are not as current as federal data. Thus, when combining federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the most recent year for a combined number may be delayed.

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Policy Dialogue: The Meaning and Purpose of Public Education

From the History of Education quarterly (Volume 64, Issue 1), published by Cambridge University Press , a thoughtful, in-depth conversation about public education between Carol Burris and Johann Neem. 

Carol Burris : If you ask one hundred Americans, “What is the purpose of public education?” you’re probably going to get at least ten different answers. There’ll be some similarities, but some answers will be quite different. In the beginning, the purpose was to create a literate American citizenry to be able to participate in democracy. Our founders realized that if they were going to give citizens the ability to actually shape government through elections, they had to have some knowledge base on which to make decisions. Academic achievement has also always been a big part of the purpose of public education. There have been other purposes as well, such as job training, which is once again becoming very popular. And there has even been the custodial function of schools, which we saw very clearly during COVID-19. When schools closed, education did not stop, but lots of parents were quite upset because they were dependent on the public education system to take care of their kids while they worked.

How has public schooling changed over the years? At its beginning, formal education was reserved for the elite. In 1892, the Committee of Ten decreed that education was for college preparation, mostly for white, male Protestant citizens. When the influx of European immigrants began, schools started to take on different functions: training in language, training in Americanism—learning what it is to be an American—and job training, from which emerged systems of tracking and ability grouping. Around the 1950s, the comprehensive high school predominated and we tried to create schools that were all things for all people. Then, in the early 2000s, there was a serious move to make schools more rigorous, focusing on college for all. And now the pendulum is swinging back to job training. So, there’s never been one purpose. And I don’t think there ever will be.

Johann Neem : I think you’re right about a lot of that. I think the question, then, is: What is it, at a moment like this, that justifies the common school model, the public school model? And I think, going back, as you said, to the founding, the preparation of citizens was one of the primary arguments to justify the expansion of public schooling. And the other public one, which is worth talking about, is socialization, or as you put it, learning to be an American. And I think that was also one of schools’ public functions in a diverse society. How do you bring people together in common institutions so they see themselves as members of the same people? After all, it wasn’t just in the United States that the expansion of public schooling and the formation of nation-states went hand in hand. And so those are two fundamental public purposes. I think you’re right. The civic purposes are threatened by the focus on work preparation and things like that. But I think even the socialization function is something we’re fighting over today. A lot of people in the education world are a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that part of their job is to take a diverse society and forge a common nation. So, both public purposes are threatened from different places. And I think we need those public purposes, they’re really important. I agree with you.

One of the things I found interesting about the nineteenth century is that, from the very beginning, the public schools took off, not because  everybody  wanted to create educated citizens, or  everybody  wanted to create a common American nation, but because there was a kind of overlapping consensus among a diverse set of stakeholders. There was an overlapping consensus that everybody benefits from these schools in different ways. Parents may have one set of goals. Students may have another. Teachers and educators may have a set of goals. Policymakers may have a set of goals. But there was enough overlap to sustain new institutions and build a very large number of stakeholders. And I think that’s the secret to why public schools have been so successful. The overlapping consensus between all these different stakeholders is that schools really matter to helping us get what we want. We’re all invested in them.

Carol Burris : I agree. And that’s what’s being threatened. That’s what upsets me the most. And it’s by design. Take Neal McCluskey, the education freedom director of the libertarian Cato Institute—the argument he makes for school choice is that we need it because we are so diverse. He argues that we will have wars within our schools if we don’t allow people to choose schools that reflect their values and their values alone. And I find that incredibly frightening because what it creates is Balkanization. Look at all of the major conflicts that we see now in Israel and Palestine, Iraq, and in the past in Northern Ireland. They happen when one faction or religion declares, “Here is my group; this is my set of beliefs, and I want nothing to do with that group and their set of beliefs.”

I led a high school for years that I loved. It was a very special place because it was diverse. It was diverse in terms of race. It was also diverse in terms of religion and socioeconomic status, and it was well funded. And in that school, kids got to know each other well, and when we eliminated tracking in the school, so that every classroom was a microcosm of the school, amazing things started to happen socially and intellectually for the children. What worries me so much about the school choice movement is that sense of shared community, of getting to know “the other” well, is exactly what we’re losing when school becomes a preferred commodity. You’re shopping for a school that aligns with your beliefs and aligns with your preferences and culture. You lose it all.

Johann Neem : That’s exactly right. One of the arguments that advocates of privatization make is just that: we’re too diverse to be a nation so we should be able to choose schools based on parents’ values. And one of the things I truly believe is that in a democracy as diverse as ours, common institutions that have an integrative function are essential. People must see each other as fellow citizens and empathize with each other.

This is the great danger of school choice, but the same danger also comes from progressive channels within the public schools, where I think a lot of educators are uncomfortable talking about the “we” in Americans. So, you’ll find statements like, “This holiday belongs to these people,” or “This is a white thing,” or “This is a Latino thing,” and so on. I have two concerns about that. One is that it threatens our capacity to tolerate, respect, and celebrate our diversity while also seeing ourselves as one people with shared traditions and rituals—and even books. The other thing I worry about is that it weakens the argument you just made when it’s coming from within the schools. In a sense, this discourse within the public schools creates the same outcomes that the parents’ rights advocates and privatizers are seeking to create in the school choice movement. Instead, I really think that we need to revive language about the commonness of the common schools, not at the expense of respecting diversity, but with the goal of becoming comfortable again with the fact that the schools are also important in forging a common Americanness. We are a diverse society, but we also need to share some things to be a people.

Carol Burris : I 100 percent agree. And it’s interesting that you said that. My granddaughter is in New York City, where she attends New York City public schools. They presently have school choice at the high school level within the public school system. And it’s a nightmare to navigate. You can’t just go to your neighborhood school anymore. So, now you’re talking about children as young as thirteen traveling. Most are schools based on interest. A school that’s for kids who want to be airplane pilots. A school for kids who want to be ferry captains and scuba divers. And the schools have different themes, or philosophies, much as you described. One school in the city has very progressive values on the website, talking more about social-emotional learning than about academics, stating that they’re against profit. My granddaughter wants a typical comprehensive high school not too far away, and in the world of choice, that is hard to find. Then you have to contend with admission preferences and lotteries in order to get in.

At the end of the day, the real outcome of “school choice” is that the parents really don’t have all that much choice. There are lotteries. There are themes. There are admission preferences. There’s screening and testing. It’s not as though they say, “Okay, this is your choice. And this is the choice of three hundred families who didn’t get the school. We’re going to open up three hundred new seats.” They don’t do that. The market system, whether it is public, charter, portfolio, voucher, just pushes kids around. The idea of a neighborhood high school where all kids of all interests, of all political backgrounds, of all religious backgrounds are welcome—it’s starting to disappear.

Johann Neem : I think that’s right. I find it interesting how you framed it, because, even as you were talking, I was thinking about how fortunate I feel to live in a town small enough that you just send your children to your neighborhood school, and you don’t have the agony of choice. The choice regime in New York, as you’ve described it, forces parents to start thinking about schooling as a private good for their child. The choice process privatizes education internally, because if I had to choose the school my child attended, I’d be doing things to game the system. I’d be doing all sorts of things to figure out the best way to move my child ahead. And as a parent, that’s totally natural. In fact, one of the things we parents ought to do is be our children’s advocates. But with losing the sense of the common school comes a loss of balance. I worry that the moment we liberate ourselves from that common framework, we will see new forms of inequality, as well as the kind of segregation you’re talking about. Not just by race, but class, party, ideology, religion, and more. I find my neighborhood school wonderful in certain ways and imperfect in other ways. But as a parent I’m invested in that neighborhood school, and through my investment, I’m invested in the other people who live around me. And this is what makes it a public good.

Carol Burris : For sure. And it also has an effect on the schools themselves. I was a high school principal for many years, and what I concentrated on was the improvement of the school and taking care of the kids. But in the world of school choice, you also have to be a marketer, right? Because now, as anybody who’s ever run a school knows, the quality markers of the school—whether they be test scores, college acceptance rates, or suspension rates—all of those different quality markers are also a reflection of who is attending your school and how many high-needs kids you have. So now, as a principal, you’re also trying to come up with ways to kind of game the system. How am I going to be more attractive to more involved families? To families that are maybe a little bit more affluent and can donate money to my underfunded school? To the parents of higher-achieving children that will raise overall test scores? And to many parents, it feels like  The Hunger Games . They’re trying their best to get their child into a good school, whether it be a charter school, or a private school, or a public school.  What are the admissions criteria? What can I do to get my child to go to the school that I think is the best fit?  And what that does to the system over time is that parents become less invested in local school improvement and more invested in school choice.

Our kids grew up on Long Island, and the particular school district we lived in was not the best by far. But it was okay. So I became invested in that school district and its improvement. I got involved in the PTA. I ran for the school board. I served as school board president, and along with other parents, we did everything we could to make the school better. Now, looking back, if somebody had come to me back then and said, “Hey, listen, here’s school choice. You don’t have to work so hard to improve your local school. You can send your child to this district or that district or this private school, and we’ll pay for it.” As a young mom and a busy mom, I might have taken the chance. But what are the long-term effects of choice systems? Now, we’ve created this system where people think of public schools as a large, leaky boat, and pundits are shouting, “Oh, the boat is sinking!” So we start throwing out these life rafts, be they online schools, charter schools, voucher schools, and the emphasis is no longer on trying to right the ship, but to escape it.

Johann Neem : Yes, yes! And you’ve hit on two key points that are really important to me. When I was writing  Democracy’s Schools , I came across a quote from Horace Mann, who basically said, if you allow parents to start to opt out, particularly parents of means, then you’re going to end up with pauper schools. You’re going to end up with schools where the public option becomes a charity model. And if you look around at certain parts of the world, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll find that families that are middle-class or above basically opt out of the public system. As a result, the public system cannot rival these private schools. And it seems weird to me that people want to import that model to the US, where we have such a robust public system.

The thing you said about stakeholders is really important, because I don’t think public schools took off in the nineteenth century because people heard Thomas Jefferson, or Horace Mann, or Catharine Beecher and said, “Ah! I want to do what they said!” I think they wanted to send their own kids to the public schools because they saw benefits accruing to their neighbors’ kids. And as more children went to the public schools, people became more supportive of paying taxes. People became stakeholders because they went through the schools alongside their neighbors, and their children and grandchildren followed them. So, they wanted to reinvest in those schools.

One of the things I’ve realized is we think commitment to public education is a given, but our commitment to public education in America is as fragile as our commitment to almost any other public good. And what the privatizers are slowly doing in places like Arizona is they’re offering people those life rafts you’ve described and are trying to create stakeholders in the alternative system. The moment enough people have vouchers, or access to schools outside the public system, the common schools will start to wither. We’ll all be in life rafts, and the ship will go down. Supporters of privatization know that as long as the majority of Americans are invested in the public school system, they can’t shake it. But if they attract enough potential stakeholders who are interested in an alternative system, a different kind of regime, those stakeholders will begin investing in the school choice system. And then they can start to finally take down the public schools, which had been too popular to challenge for generations.

Carol Burris : You’re absolutely right! That is the intent, and they’re not hiding it. And as all of these different groups, like Moms for Liberty, create all of these storms, dustups, and crises that really don’t exist, the intent is to undermine public schools. Arizona is a prime example, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to sustain the public school system there. A few years ago, I went down to Arizona. This was even before the real expansion of the voucher system, but they had a huge charter school sector, a lot of it run by for-profit schools. I met with a superintendent who was doing everything he could to keep the integrity of his public schools. He told me about a conversation that he had had with a local politician, a member of the legislature. He wouldn’t give me the name, but I have absolutely no reason to doubt the quote that he shared with me. He asked the legislator, “Do you even see a purpose for public schools?” And the legislator looked at him and said with a straight face, “Well, somebody has to take out the garbage.” Now, that is a chilling quote that I’ve never forgotten. I think about that quote. Was he saying that the public schools take out the garbage? In other words, that their purpose is to deal with kids that no one wants? Or did he see the role of the public schools as raising the children who will take out the garbage? Perhaps he meant both. It shows the incredible cynicism and the disdain of some school choice advocates, the absolute disdain for the public school system.

Johann Neem : When I think about privatizers, they’re not all one group. There are capitalists trying to make money by getting access to public funds. There are honest pluralists, even if I disagree with them, who in some ways are echoing the arguments of pluralists on the political left. They’re echoing advocates of multiculturalism, but they’re using radical pluralism to push school choice rather than trying to achieve diverse communities within the public system. And then there are those who don’t think well of public institutions, as your quote suggests. They think we only need public institutions to deal with the so-called remainders. And they believe anybody, any family worth their salt, should be able to buy all other goods on the market. The idea that education is such a fundamental public good that no matter who you are in terms of wealth or color, or religion, or anything, you belong in these institutions with other people—that idea doesn’t even compute. And if you don’t believe that public goods are things everyone should share, and they’re just for those who can’t afford to buy them on the market, that’s a really scary proposition. It really flies in the face of the postrevolutionary ideals with which we started our conversation—that public schools offer public goods and everybody should be participating and contributing and benefiting from them.

Carol Burris : Yeah. You kind of wonder what the endgame is, too. When I try to figure it out, I often look back to the writings of Milton Friedman, who, in many ways, started this movement along with the segregationists. He didn’t believe that the public should even be paying for public education. When you listen carefully to Betsy DeVos and the libertarians who have been pushing this school choice system, they’re also pushing what they call “backpack funding,” or “money follows the child.” The concept works like this: here’s a figurative backpack, and we’re going to put money in it to educate your child. Now, parent, you go and shop. Think about some of the people that are pushing this idea. They are not people who are fond of paying taxes—just the opposite. So, one of my greatest fears is that over time, we will begin to view the real endgame: when we move to a fully school-choice system, then politicians who are very tax adverse, as many on the right are, will vote to reduce the funding that is in that backpack until we have a K-12 system that will be similar to college. Some will be able to afford it; some won’t. And I worry for the poorest kids, for the kids that nobody wants, for the kids with behavior issues, the kids with special needs; they will be left in a broken public school system. And that public school system will look like a very large room with kids staring at computers and somebody standing by the door with their arms crossed, preventing them from getting out.

Johann Neem : Yeah—rather than this American institution where everybody goes. In fact, for many Americans, one of the few things we still share is the experience of going to public school. And for those who don’t have the resources or the support, it offers civic inclusion rather than charity. No, I’m with you. I do wonder: what do we do at this moment? Your work, which advocates public schools and criticizes false claims about the success of alternative models, is one of the answers to that question. And I’m so grateful for that. But I also worry that we’re in a moment when trust in almost all American institutions has been declining for decades. So, one thing to be careful about is saying this is all about public schools, when it’s also about corporations. It’s also about universities. It’s also about government. It’s also about any institution that has seen declining trust across the board. How do you build that trust?

One of my fears is that the public schools themselves are not the best at doing that these days, and one of the reasons, I think, is that they have become more partisan. I worry about the public schools being identified with a party—the Democratic Party—rather than being viewed as common institutions that Democrats and Republicans generally agree on, even when they disagree on many other things. Both parties used to rally people around local public institutions: “Let’s support our public schools. Let’s support our public school teachers. Let’s support the local team. Let’s support the local club. Let’s support these things.” Now there’s a wedge. And I don’t think it’s just caused by Republicans. I think we have seen a kind of leftward turn among education schools and public school teachers that in some ways provides evidence that the schools are becoming more tied to a party. That is very dangerous, because one of the things I think that sustained schools was that they were not partisan institutions—they were these institutions in which everyone had an investment. So, what do we do about that? That’s an honest question.

Carol Burris : It’s something that troubles me as well. I do think that some of it, though, is regional. For example, if you go into rural areas, Republican rural areas, there’s still strong support for public schools. And I tend to think that, if anything, the politics of the schools probably are more conservative than progressive. But I also agree. I cited that example before about a New York City public high school whose values align with those of the political left. And it may be the only high school in the city that has those values, but eventually, that school will show up in the  New York Post . Then it’s going to show up on Fox News. And then suddenly, here’s what will wind up happening: it will be taken up by people like Corey DeAngelis, or Betsy DeVos, and then all public schools will be painted in that way. And it’s interesting, I remember sharing this particular school’s website with a friend who is quite committed to public schools, and her remark was, “We are so good at handing people the rocks to throw at us.”

Maybe it’s a reflection of my age, or reflection of my experience, but I do think that every public school should be a place that welcomes every child. That means that it welcomes all children, not only based on ability, race, and ethnicity, but also on values. And there should be a place, in the social studies classes of a public school, to debate, right? To debate capitalism versus socialism, progressivism versus conservatism. But when a school’s website only shows one sliver of that, that becomes problematic. I do think that it would be helpful for public schools to sometimes take a deep breath and reflect on the fact that their parents come from all different places, that their faculty may hold various political opinions, and work hard to make sure that everyone, no matter their belief system, can comfortably send their child to the school, and not feel as though anybody is trying to push them one way or the other. That’s what we want for learners: to be critical thinkers, to be exposed to different ideas, and then to come up with their own conclusions.

Johann Neem : Where do we go next? We’ve covered a lot of ground.

Carol Burris : Well, there’s one thing we haven’t really touched upon, and that is the voucher system in the United States. I find it fascinating that it is so incredibly irresponsible. There are other countries that do have public funding for private schools. I’m going make a contrast now with Ireland. I have relatives who live there, as well as friends, and the Irish system is a very unusual system. It emerged as religious schooling, and most Irish schools today are run by religious organizations. You could think of it almost like a massive voucher system where the government is giving money, but education is being delivered by religious institutions. But here’s one of the critical pieces that is so lacking in the new voucher systems that we’re seeing popping up everywhere in the US: in Ireland, the government’s Department of Education controls the curriculum. They determine what the curriculum is; they determine the standards. They determine the testing. There are laws that protect students’ rights to enroll in these schools. They’re not allowed to discriminate. Even if it’s a Catholic school, you can’t just discriminate based on race, on wealth, on learning ability, on religion, or LGBTQ status.

And in other countries, where they do have a voucher system and they’re giving money to private schools, the schools themselves are more public. The strings that are attached are designed to not exclude students. The schools themselves are inspected. They’re regulated. The teachers are certified. And as for the financing of homeschooling, I don’t know of any other country that is even beginning to entertain that. So, when the voucher proponents in the US implement these systems, and then point to other places in the world where there are vouchers, what they’re not saying is how regulated those systems are, and how many guardrails are in place.

In contrast, when you take a look at the systems that are being pushed in the US now, the ESA systems—the Education Savings Account and the Education Scholarship Account—they are systems without guardrails. They are systems with no real comparative testing and evaluation measures. Not that I’m a big fan of standardized testing, but if you are going to require it of public and charter schools, why not voucher schools? There are now systems where parents receive the money and the parents are buying trampolines or going to theme parks. Now micro-schools are popping up—schools in people’s homes—it is just this incredibly loose, unregulated system that has no comparison anyplace in the world. To me, it is absolutely frightening, because I think we are going to find a sizable proportion of children presumably being educated who are not actually being educated at all. And as money flows into some of these micro-schools and homeschools, it’s going to be more and more difficult to even ascertain whether these children are being properly cared for. Because I can tell you, as a former principal, one of the functions of a public educator is that of a mandated reporter. Child abuse exists, and when you start to create systems where parents can grab money and then keep their kids home, you’re inviting all kinds of possible problems, in some cases not only educational neglect, but also physical and psychological abuse and neglect.

Once the system starts loose, it becomes very difficult to tighten and regulate. Look at charter schools. There is a difference between the original intent of the charter school movement, and what the movement became. And as people fight for regulations for charter schools, they encounter stiff resistance. You cannot just put in these ESA Programs willy-nilly, and then go back later and try to put in guardrails, especially given the vested interests that we talked about before. You’re not going to be able to do it, and I think it’s incredibly frightening.

Johann Neem : Oh, I agree. This is the irony. There are some advocates of school choice and voucher programs who recognize what you are saying about the importance of putting in guardrails, but that is certainly not happening in parts of the country where the presumption is that you need government out of the way.

As a citizen in a democracy, I have a right to have a role in shaping a curriculum through local representation in my school board or through my state representative, and I want to know that the public part of public schooling is happening in all of these schools that receive funding from tax monies. I want to know, not just about the quality of learning, but also that students are learning certain subjects, that we’re graduating people who understand science, who understand history. I want to know that about all schools, and I wouldn’t want to know any less about schools funded by a voucher system. But knowing these things would require, in a sense, more centralization than exists in the system we’ve built, from the local neighborhood school on up. It’s an interesting question about whether that kind of system could produce a more centralized bureaucracy than we have now. But you’re right, we have an obligation as a public to ensure that all children in the United States are getting a good quality education, an education that prepares them to participate in our common life regardless of where they go to school. And that’s a real challenge given American diversity, and given the inequalities. It’s going to become an even bigger challenge in a system where you have rampant school choice.

Carol Burris : Yes. Take the original ESA program in Arizona. I looked at it a few years back—I was absolutely appalled. Parents did not have to provide any evidence of learning, no evidence at all. All they had to do to get the money for the next year was to spend the money that they had received the year before. Parents are issuing high school diplomas in these systems. Are they competent to do it? Some of them probably are, but others probably not.

Think about the libertarians who were advocating for school choice years ago. They were romanticizing what education looked like at the very beginning of our country, when there were charity church schools, when kids were educated at home or weren’t being educated at all. They saw that as the model. And it’s amazing to me that rather than moving our society forward, we’re trying to return to seventeenth-century structures when it comes to schooling.

You start to wonder sometimes, because so many of the people who are so in favor of this unregulated, willy-nilly school choice system are also people who didn’t respect the last election. Although you and I might say that we want a well-educated citizenry for a well-functioning democracy, these systems are being pushed by people who perhaps don’t want people to be well-educated at all. You remember Trump’s famous quote: “I love the undereducated.”

Johann Neem : But I think we have to remember that trust in a democracy has to be earned. This is where, to the extent that I am critical of the education establishment, I’m critical because I think, like you said, that educators too often give their opponents the rocks to throw. I think we, and that includes professors, have to earn the trust of citizens. I think Trump wasn’t so much saying to voters, “I love the poorly educated,” as “I know that you don’t trust the educated to take care of your values, to take care of your economic interests, to take care of your country.” And for public schools to make it, we who are advocates of public schools and think they’re fundamental institutions, need to show that we do deserve that trust.

We can show that public schools are effective. There are lots of studies to show they’re more effective than private schools when you correct for socioeconomic status. But we also have to show that they’re not going to be places that, as we talked about earlier, are overly partisan or unwelcoming to certain groups; we have to show that everybody belongs and that these are mainstream institutions. And I think political partisanship is intentional in some of the ways teachers are professionalized today in schools of education, where they are learning to see their schools, and themselves, as remaking America along progressive lines. So I think we must be aware that there is a tension there. Mainstream Americanism doesn’t mean racism. But it also may not mean always being “anti-racist.” It means embracing a world where there are complex issues and the school doesn’t have one position on everything, as you said earlier. Because I worry that the schools are generating distrust in a world that’s already distrustful and polarized. And the public schools are so important that anything that starts to tip the scales towards privatization frightens me.

Carol Burris : I don’t disagree with you. But how do you do that? I was once on a group call that was discussing the reopening of schools near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The group was making the argument that we shouldn’t reopen schools until an extensive list of other social issues were addressed, and as a former principal, I was thinking, “I’ve got to get off this call, because we need to reopen schools and get children back in.” So, how do you convince people who are committed to all of those causes to say, “Hey, public education is in trouble.” We’re going to lose it. We need to all keep our eye on the prize, which is keeping the American public invested in public schools. How do we do that?

Johann Neem : Well, first, we say what you just said. I mean it. I agree that it’s a real challenge. It’s a challenge when educators don’t see the distinction between partisan values and the political values of a democracy, including the broadly political purposes of public education, the preparation of citizens for critical thinking, the cultivation of a shared national identity, the promotion of equality, respect for diversity. And I think that what has happened on the left and the right is eerily similar, where if you don’t agree with my left-leaning partisan values, you must be opposed to social justice. Or you must be a racist. And the right has its own version with its reaction to libraries, where if you don’t agree with my list of books to ban, you must not care about religion or family values. It’s not just a one-sided problem.

We need to find a way to promote the broad political purposes of public education. That is what holds us together. And there’s no reason why you can’t have a conservative history teacher or a liberal history teacher. Those are not the criteria. There is a lot of shared ground among Americans of all backgrounds. When you poll Americans on questions of history and politics, they are not really that far apart.

We need a sense of moderation and balance. I do find that when you look at education school curricula, or the admissions criteria, student teachers almost have to agree with a set of partisan ideas to be considered a good teacher. We need to pull back on that and say that the work of public schools is broadly political, so we have to be careful about the difference between broadly political ideas and partisanship on both sides. To have a common school, we don’t want education coming from the right any more than from the left. And it is hard, because we’ve created a dynamic where sometimes we don’t see the right’s responses as reflecting anything that’s real. I think we have to be honest that sometimes they are. Even if their responses may not seem appropriate in the light of our own values, it’s not because they have no facts on their side—they do observe things that make them lose trust. They’re not reacting to nothing—the reactions are coming from something. And if our goal is the protection of public schools, we have to start by acknowledging that not all criticism is in bad faith, that people are often responding to deeply felt concerns. There are a lot of bad-faith actors out there. So why not respond to those who are responding to something with some good faith?

Carol Burris : Yes, I think you’re right, and I think it’s an incredibly sensible response. Unfortunately, sensible solutions don’t seem to be winning the day. What I would say to people who believe that the school should be the place to teach very progressive ideals is if in doing that, you wind up losing many families who are politically conservative, you’re never going to achieve your goal. You want them in the tent. You want their children to hear this. It’s part of the reason you see these Christian nationalist academies popping up—and they are, along with charter schools. It’s like the old song, “How Ya Gonna Keep’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)” You have groups of parents that don’t want their kids to see “Paree.” They only want them exposed to one set of values—their values. Young people, they’re so open. They are just naturally liberal. They are naturally progressive. And if all of the kids in your community who come from conservative homes are now in religious schools or in homeschools or in right-wing charter schools, they’re never going to be exposed to more progressive ideals that you might have in your public school.

You need to keep that tent open so that kids have an opportunity to become tolerant of others and their point of view.. Our middle daughter attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was appalled by the anti-Semitic attitudes that she encountered there from kids whom she considered to be friends. And when she would talk to them about it, what she found was that they were never exposed to Jewish families. So they believed all of these stereotypes that they had heard. If we make our public schools places that conservative parents and parents on the right feel they need to avoid, their children will never be exposed to different cultures, to different religions and races, and they’ll not have that opportunity to grow as accepting and tolerant Americans.

Johann Neem : I think that’s right. So, it brings us full circle. The only thing I would add is that it goes both ways. As a professor, and someone who works in education circles, I’ve often been around progressives who have stereotypical images of conservatives in general, and they don’t interact with conservatives often. And their stereotypes of what people are like don’t always hold true. So I have two worries. One is that the public school system will come to an end if conservative families feel they need to withdraw, because their departure would represent a significant loss of stakeholders. The other worry is that if the schools truly do become bastions of progressivism, it’s not just the conservatives who won’t be exposed to progressive ideas—we’ll all become more Balkanized, as you put it earlier. Both progressives and conservatives will end up in echo chambers of their own. And that is not preparation for living in a diverse democracy, where it is important to respect people who come from all walks of life. We’d lose the capacity to teach that respect, which I think is a shared value between progressives and conservatives alike. So it affects everyone.

Carol Burris : It does cut both ways. I don’t disagree at all.

Johann Neem : I didn’t think you would.

Carol Burris : You know, we’re at this Humpty Dumpty moment for public schools, and if we don’t recognize it, and keep Humpty up on the wall, we’re not going to be able to put the pieces back together again—just like the system in Chile and some other places that have followed this model and seen dramatic declines in public school enrollments, stagnant test scores in literacy and mathematics, and widening achievement gaps between children from higher- and lower-income families. And we’re getting very, very close to that tipping point. So, I think a lot of honest conversations have to be had.

Johann Neem : That’s also a great name for a book:  Keep Humpty on the Wall.

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Report | Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment

Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul : How a larger federal role would boost equity and shield children from disinvestment during downturns

Report • By Sylvia Allegretto , Emma García , and Elaine Weiss • July 12, 2022

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Summary 

Education funding in the United States relies primarily on state and local resources, with just a tiny share of total revenues allotted by the federal government. Most analyses of the primary school finance metrics—equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency—raise serious questions about whether the existing system is living up to the ideal of providing a sound education equitably to all children at all times. Districts in high-poverty areas, which serve larger shares of students of color, get less funding per student than districts in low-poverty areas, which predominantly serve white students, highlighting the system’s inequity. School districts in general—but especially those in high-poverty areas—are not spending enough to achieve national average test scores, which is an established benchmark for assessing adequacy. Efforts states make to invest in education vary significantly. And the system is ill-prepared to adapt to unexpected emergencies.

These challenges are magnified during and after recessions. Following the Great Recession that began in December 2007, per-student education revenues plummeted and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years. The recovery in per-student revenues was even slower in high-poverty districts. This report combines new data on funding for states and for districts by school district poverty level, and over time, with evidence documenting the positive impacts of increasing investment in education to make a case for overhauling the school finance system. It calls for reforms that would ensure a larger role for the federal government to establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that channels sufficient additional resources to less affluent students in good times and bad. Furthermore, spending on public education should be retooled as an economic stabilizer, with increases automatically kicking in during recessions. Such a program would greatly mitigate cuts to public education as budgets are depleted, and also spur aggregate demand to give the economy a needed boost.

Following are key findings from the report:

Our current system for funding public schools shortchanges students, particularly low-income students. Education funding generally is inadequate and inequitable; It relies too heavily on state and local resources (particularly property tax revenues); the federal government plays a small and an insufficient role; funding levels vary widely across states; and high-poverty districts get less funding per student than low-poverty districts.

Those problems are magnified during and after recessions. Funding inadequacies and inequities tend to be aggravated when there is an economic downturn, which typically translates into problems that persist well after recovery is underway. After the 2007 onset of the Great Recession, for example, funding fell, and it took until 2015–2016, on average, to return to their pre-recession per-student revenue and spending levels. For high-poverty school districts, it took even longer—until 2016–2017—to rebound to their pre-recession revenue levels. And even after catching up with pre-recession levels, revenue levels in high-poverty districts lag behind the per-student funding in low-poverty districts. The general, long-standing funding inadequacies and inequities combined with the worsening of these problems during and in the aftermath of recessions have both short- and long-term repercussions that are costly for the students as well as for the country.

Increased federal spending on education after recessions helps mitigate funding shortfalls and inequities. Without increased federal education spending after recessions, school districts would suffer from an even greater decline in funding and even wider gaps between funding flowing to low-poverty and high-poverty districts.

Increased spending on education could help boost economic recovery. While Congress has enacted one-time education spending increases in difficult economic times, spending on public education should be considered one of the automatic stabilizers in our economic policy toolkit, designed to automatically increase and thus spur aggregate demand when private spending falls. Deployed this way, education spending becomes part of a set of large, broadly distributed programs that are countercyclical, i.e., designed to kick in when the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Along with other automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance, education spending thus would provide a stimulus to boost economic recovery.

We need an overhaul of the school finance system, with reforms ensuring a larger role for the federal government. In light of the concerns outlined in this report, policymakers must think differently both about school funding overall and about school funding during recessions. Public education is a public good, and as noted in this report, one that helps to stabilize the entire economy at critical points. Therefore, public spending on education should be treated as the public investment it is. While we leave it to policymakers to design specific reforms, we recommend an increased role for the federal government grounded in substantial, well targeted, consistent investment in the children who are our future, the professionals who help these children attain that future, and the environments in which they work. To establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that supports all children, investments need to be proportional to the size of the problems and to the societal and economic importance of the sector.

Introduction

The hope for the public education system in the United States is to provide a sound education equitably to all children regardless of where they live or into which families they are born. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed four interrelated, long-standing realities of U.S. public education funding that have long made that excellent, equitable education system impossible to achieve. First, inadequate levels of funding leave too many students unable to reach established performance benchmarks. Second, school funding is inequitable, with low-income students often and communities of color consistently lacking resources they need to meet their needs. Third, the level of funding reflects an overall underinvestment in education—that is, the U.S. is not spending as much as it could afford to spend in normal times. Fourth, given that educational investments are not sufficient across many districts even during normal times, schools are unable to make preparations to cope with emergencies or other unexpected circumstances. An added, less known feature is that economic downturns make all four of these problems worse. Downturns exacerbate funding inadequacies, inequities, underinvestment, and unpreparedness, causing cumulative harm to students, communities, and the public education system, and clawing back any prior progress. The severity of these problems varies widely across states and districts, as do the strength of states’ and localities’ economic and social protection systems, which may either compensate for or compound the problems.

The pandemic-led recession made these four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system more visible, leading to serious questions about the U.S. education-funding model, which relies heavily on local and state revenues and draws only a small share of funding from the federal government. While public education is one of our greatest ideals and achievements—a free, quality education for every child regardless of means and background—the U.S. educational system is in need of significant improvements.

As the report will show, the core barriers to delivering universally excellent U.S. public education for all children—funding inadequacies and inequities that are exacerbated during tough economic times—were present in the system from the very start. They are the outcomes of a funding system that is shaped by many layers of policies and legal decisions at the local, state, and federal levels, creating widespread disparities in school finance realities across the thousands of districts across the country in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This complex funding puzzle speaks to the need for a funding overhaul to attain meaningful and widely shared improvements.

In this report, we first provide an overview of the characteristics of the U.S. education funding system. We present data analyses on school finance indicators, such as equity, adequacy, and effort, that expose the shortcomings of funding policies and decisions across the country. We also discuss factors behind some of these shortcomings, such as the heavy reliance on local and state sources of funding.

Second, we illustrate that recessions exacerbate the funding challenges schools face. We parse a multitude of data to present trends in school finance indicators both during and after the Great Recession, demonstrating that the immediate effects of federally targeted funds helped schools navigate recession-induced budget cuts. We also look at the shortfalls and inequitable nature of those investments. We explore how increased federal investments—in good economic times and bad—could help address these long-standing problems. We argue that public education funding is not only an investment in our societal present and future, but also is a ready-made mechanism for countering economic downturns. Economic theory and evidence both demonstrate that large, broadly distributed programs providing public support serve as cushions during economic downturns: they spur overall spending and thus aggregate demand when private spending falls. As we note, there are strong arguments for placing public education spending within the broader category of effective fiscal responses to recessions that are countercyclical—designed to increase spending when spending in the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Increases in public education spending during downturns work as automatic stabilizers for schools and provide stimulus to boost economic recovery. We review existing research on the consequences of funding in general and of funding changes—evidence that supports a larger role for the federal government.

Third, we discuss the benefits of rethinking public education funding, along with the societal and economic advantages of a robust, stable, and consistent U.S. school funding plan, both generally and as a countercyclical policy. We show that federal investment that sustains school funding throughout recessions and recoveries would provide three major advantages: It would help boost educational instruction and standards, it would provide continued high-quality instruction for students and employment to the public education workforce, and it would stimulate economic recovery. Education funding, in particular, would blanket the country while also targeting areas with the most need, making the recovery more equitable.

We conclude the report with final thoughts and next steps.

This paper uses several terms to refer to investments in education and to define the U.S. school finance system. Below, we explain how these terms are used in the report:

Revenue indicates the dollar amounts that have been raised through various sources (at the local, state, and federal levels) to support elementary and secondary education. We distinguish between federal, state, and local revenue. Local revenue, in some of our charts, is further divided into local revenue from property taxes and from other sources.

Spending or expenditures indicates the dollar amount devoted to elementary and secondary education. Expenditures are typically divided by function and object (instruction, support services , and noninstructional education activities). We rely on data on current expenditures (instead of total expenditures; see footnotes 2 and 30).

Funding generically refers in this report to the educational investments or educational resources. Mostly, when we use funding we refer to revenue, i.e., to resources available or raised, but funding is also used to refer to the school finance system more broadly, and in that case it could be either referring to revenue or expenditures, depending on the context.

For more information on the list of components under each term, see the glossary in the  Documentation for the NCES Common Core of Data School District Finance Survey (F-33), School Year 2017–18 (Fiscal Year 2018) (NCES CCD 2020).

A funding primer

The American education system relies heavily on state and local resources to fund public schools. In the U.S. education has long been a local- and state-level responsibility, with states typically concerned with administration and standards, and local districts charged with raising the bulk of the funds to carry those duties and standards out.

The Education Law Center notes that “states, under their respective constitutions, have the legal obligation to support and maintain systems of free public schools for all resident children. This means that the state is the unit of government in the U.S. legally responsible for operating our nation’s public school systems, which includes providing the funding to support and maintain those systems” (Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Bradbury (2021) explains that state constitutions assign responsibility for “adequate” (“sound,” “basic”) and/or “equitable” public education to the state government. Most state governments delegate responsibility for managing and (partially) funding public pre-K–12 education to local governments, but courts mandate that states remain responsible.

States meet this responsibility by funding their schools “through a statewide method or formula enacted by the state legislature. These school funding formulas or school finance systems determine the amount of revenue school districts are permitted to raise from local property and other taxes and the amount of funding or aid the state is expected to contribute from state taxes. In annual or biannual state budgets, legislatures also determine the actual amount of funding districts will receive to operate their schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

A quick note on data sources

Some of our analyses rely on district-level data, i.e., the revenues and expenditures use the district as the unit of analysis. We rely on metrics of per-student revenue or per-student spending, i.e., taking into consideration the number of students in the districts. Other analyses use data either by state or for the country, which are typically readily available from the Digest of Education Statistics online. Sometimes the variables of interest are total revenue or expenditures, whereas on other occasions we rely on per-student values. All data sources are explained under each figure and table, and some are also briefly explained in the Methodology.

The federal government seeks to use its limited but targeted funding to promote student achievement, foster educational excellence, and ensure equal access. The major federal agency channeling funding to school districts (sometimes through the states) is the U.S. Department of Education. 1

Figure A shows the percentage distribution of total revenue for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools for the 2017–2018 school year, on average. As illustrated, revenues collected from state and local sources are roughly equal (46.8% and 45.3%, respectively). Two other factors also stand out. First, revenue from property taxes accounts for more than one-third of total revenue (36.6 %). Second, federal funding plays a minimal role, providing less than 8% of total revenue (7.8%). As discussed later in the report, this heavy reliance on local funding is a major driver in the funding challenges districts face.

More than 90% of school funding comes from state and local sources : Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools by source of funds, 2017–2018

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The data underlying the figure.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

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Key metrics reveal the four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system 

Fully comprehending how school funding works and how it contributes to systemic problems requires drawing on key metrics and characteristics that define the education investments or education funding. Understanding these metrics is the first step toward designing a comprehensive solution.

The adequacy metric tells us that funding is inadequate

Adequacy, one of the most widely used school finance indicators, measures whether the amount raised and spent per student is sufficient to achieve a certain level of output (typically a benchmark of student performance or an educational outcome).

We use the adequacy data provided by Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber (2020). These authors, who use the School Finance Indicators Database, compare current education spending by poverty quintile with spending levels required for students to achieve national average test scores—typically accepted as an educationally meaningful benchmark. The authors’ estimates account for factors that could affect the cost of providing education, including student characteristics, labor-market costs (differences in costs given the regional cost of living), and district characteristics (larger districts for example may enjoy economics of scale).

Figure B reveals that spending is not nearly enough, on average, to provide students with an adequate education. As this figure illustrates, relative to the wealthiest districts, the highest-poverty districts need more than twice as much spending per student to provide an adequate education. As the figure also shows, the gaps between what is spent on each student and what would be required for those students to achieve at the national level widen as the level of poverty increases. Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)

U.S. education spending is inadequate : Per-pupil spending compared with estimated spending required to achieve national average test scores, by poverty quintile of school district, 2017

Notes: District poverty is measured as the percentage of children (ages 5–17) living in the school district with family incomes below the federal poverty line, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The figure shows how much is spent in each of the five types of districts and how much they would need to spend for students to achieve national average test scores.

Source: Adapted from The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems , Second Edition (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020).

The equity metric tells us that funding is inequitable 

An equitable funding system ensures that, all else being equal, schools serving students with greater needs—whether for extra academic, socioemotional, health, or other supports—receive more resources and spend more to meet those needs than schools with a lower concentration of disadvantaged students. Across districts, states, and the country as a whole, this means allocating relatively more funding to districts serving larger shares of high-poverty communities than to wealthier ones. While our funding system does allocate additional funds based on need (e.g., to students officially designated as eligible for “special education” services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and to children from low-income families through the federal Title I program), in practice, more funding overall goes to lower-needs districts than to those with high levels of student needs.

Figure C compares districts’ per-student revenues and expenditures by poverty level, and shows gaps relative to low-poverty districts. The figure is based on data from what was, when this research was conducted, the most recent version of the Local Education Agency Finance Survey (known as the F-33) (NCES-LEAFS, various years). As shown in the figure, on average, per-student revenue and spending in school districts serving wealthier households exceed revenue and spending in all other districts. In low-poverty districts (i.e., districts with a poverty rate in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues averaged $19,280 in the 2017–2018 school year, and per-student expenditures averaged $15,910. In the high-poverty districts (i.e., in the top fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues were just $16,570, and per-student expenditures were $14,030. High-poverty districts raise $2,710 less in per-student revenue than the lowest–poverty school districts, reflecting a 14.1% revenue gap—meaning high-poverty districts receive 14.1% less in revenue. Per-student spending in high-poverty districts is $1,880 less than in low-poverty districts, an 11.8% gap. 2 In other words, rather than funding districts to address student needs, we are channeling fewer resources—about 14% less, per student—into districts with greater needs based on their student population.

Districts serving poorer students have less to spend on education than those serving wealthier students

: total per-student revenues by district poverty level, and revenue gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018.

: Total per-student expenditures by district poverty level, and spending gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 and adjusted for each state’s cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the second fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the third fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: Authors’ analysis of 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Adequacy and equity are closely intertwined

In recent decades, researchers have explored challenges to both adequacy and equity in U.S. public education. For example, Baker and Corcoran (2012) analyzed the various policies that drive inequitable funding. Likewise, lawsuits that have challenged state funding systems have tended to focus on either the inadequacy or inequity of those schemes. 3

But in reality, especially given extensive variation across states and districts, the two are closely linked and interact with one another. At the state level, for example, apparently adequate levels of funding can mask disparities across districts that innately mean inadequate funding for many, or even most, districts within that state (Farrie and Schiarra 2021). 4

In addition, disparate levels of public investments in education are often made in a context that correlates positively with disparate levels of parents’ private investments in their children’s education and related support (Caucutt et al. 2020; Duncan and Murnane 2016; Kornrich 2016; Schneider, Hastings, and LaBriola 2018). Substantial research on income-based gaps in achievement demonstrates that large and growing wealth inequality plays a role. Parents at the top of the income or wealth ladders, who can and do pour extensive resources into their children’s human capital, constantly set a baseline of performance that can be hard for children and schools without such investment to attain (Reardon 2011; García and Weiss 2017). 5

The “effort” metric tells us that many states are underinvesting in education relative to their capacity

 “Effort” describes how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so. Researchers measuring effort determine capacity to spend based on state gross domestic product (GDP), which can vary widely (just as wealthier neighborhoods can raise more revenues even with lower tax rates, states with higher GDP and thus greater revenue-raising capacity can attain higher revenue with a lower effort, i.e., generate more resources at a lower cost). The map ( Figure D ), reproduced from Farrie and Sciarra 2021, shows state funding effort from the 2017–2018 school year.

School funding ‘effort’ varies widely across states : Pre-K through 12th grade education revenues as a percentage of state GDP, 2017–2018

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Note: “Effort is measured as total state and local [education] revenue (including [revenue for] capital outlay and debt service, excluding all federal funds) divided by the state’s gross domestic product. GDP is the value of all goods and services produced by each state’s economy and is used here to represent the state’s economic capacity to raise funds for schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

Source: Adapted from Making the Grade 2020: How Fair is School Funding in Your State? (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

As Farrie and Sciarra (2021) note, states fall naturally into four groups:

• High-effort, high-capacity: States such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming are high- capacity states with high per-capita GDP, and they are also high-effort states: They use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education, which generates high funding levels.
• High-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia have lower-than-average capacity, with low GDP per-capita, but they are high-effort states. Even with above- average efforts, they yield only average or below-average funding levels.
• Low-effort, high-capacity : States such as California, Delaware, and Washington are high-capacity states that exert low effort toward funding schools. If these states increased their effort even to the national average, they could significantly increase funding levels.
• Low-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arizona, Florida, and Idaho are low-capacity states that also make lower-than-average efforts to fund schools, generating very low funding levels.

Evidence shows that districts and schools lack the resources to cope with emergencies

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, our subpar level of preparation to cope with emergencies or other unexpected needs reflects another aspect of underinvestment. As García and Weiss (2020) not about the COVID-19 pandemic, “Our public education system was not built, nor prepared, to cope with a situation like this—we lack the structures to sustain effective teaching and learning during the shutdown and to provide the safety net supports that many children receive in school.”

Whether due to lack of resources, planning, or other factors, districts, schools, and educators struggled to adapt to the pandemic’s requirements for teaching. Schools were unprepared not only to support learning but also to deliver the supports and services they were accustomed to providing, which go far beyond instruction (García and Weiss 2020). This lack of preparation was the result of both a lack of contingency planning as well as a failure to build up resources to be ready “to adequately address emergency needs and to compensate for the resources drained during the emergencies, as well as to afford the provision of flexible learning approaches to continue education” (García and Weiss 2021).

A lack of established contingency plans to ensure the provision of education in emergency and post-emergency situations, whether caused by pandemics, other natural disasters, or conflicts and wars (as examined by the education-in-emergencies research), prevents countries from being able to mitigate the negative consequences of these emergencies on children’s development and learning. The lack of contingency plans also leaves systems unprepared to help children handle the trauma and stress that come from the most serious events. This body of literature has also shown that access to education and services—and an equitable and compensatory allocation of them—helps reduce the damage that students experience during the crisis and beyond, since such emergencies carry long-term consequences (Anderson 2020; Özek 2020).

Public education’s over-reliance on local funding is a key factor behind the troubling funding metrics

The heavy reliance on local funding described above is at the core of the school finance problems. Extensive research has exposed the challenges associated with this unique American system for funding public schools. 6 The myriad factors that drive school funding—politics and political affiliation, state legislative and judicial decisions, property values, tax rates, and effort, among others—vary substantially from one community to another. Thus, it is not surprising that this system has contributed to institutionalizing inequities, especially in the absence of a strong federal effort to counter them.

It is well understood that the local sources of revenues on which school districts heavily rely are often distributed in a highly inequitable way. Revenues from property taxes, which make up a hefty share of local education revenues, innately favor wealthier communities, as these areas have a much larger capacity to raise funds based on higher property values despite their lower tax rates. 7 These higher property-tax revenues in wealthier areas lead to greater revenues for their districts’ schools, since property-tax revenues account for such a significant share of the total.

State and federal funding are insufficient to compensate for these locally driven inequities

State funding of public education is the largest budget line item for most states. 8 Along with federal funding, state funding is expected to make up for local funding disparities and gaps. 9 Federal funding, in particular through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is specifically designed to compensate low-income schools and districts for their lack of sufficient revenues to meet their students’ needs. 10 Similarly, state funding is intended to offset some of the disparities caused by the dependence on local revenues. However, in reality, state and federal sources do not provide enough to less-wealthy school districts to make up for the gap in funding at the local level, as shown in Figure E .

As the figure   shows, the U.S. systematically funds schools in wealthier areas at higher levels than those with higher rates of poverty, even after accounting for funding meant to remedy these gaps. On average, local property-tax funding per student is $5,260 lower in the poorest districts than in the wealthiest districts.

Federal and state revenues fail to offset the funding disparities caused by relying on local property tax revenues : How much more or less school districts of different poverty levels receive in revenues than low-poverty school districts receive, all and by revenue source, 2017–2018

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution for that group; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the second fourth (25th–50th percentile); medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the third fourth (50th–75th percentile); in high-poverty districts, the rate is in the top fourth. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

While state revenues are a significant portion of funding, they only modestly counter the large locally based inequities. And while federal funding, by far the smallest source of revenue, is being deployed as intended (to reduce inequities), it inevitably falls short of compensating for a system grounded in highly inequitable local revenues as its principal source of funding. As such, although states provide their highest-poverty districts with $1,550 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, and federal sources provide their highest-poverty districts with $2,080 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, states and the federal government jointly compensate for only about half of the revenue gap for high-poverty districts (which receive a per-student average of $6,330 less in property tax and other local revenues). That large gap in local funding leaves the highest-poverty districts still $2,710 short per student relative to the lowest-poverty districts, reflecting the 14.1% revenue gap shown in Figure C. Even though high-poverty districts get more in federal and state dollars, they get so much less in property taxes that it still puts them in the negative category overall.

Disparities shortchange states’ (and districts’) ability to access and allocate the resources needed for effective education

Given the heavy reliance on highly varied local funding, it is no surprise that there is similarly significant variation across states with respect to almost every aspect of funding discussed here. Table 1 reports federal, state, and local funding for each state and for the District of Columbia, with local funding broken down into three categories.

Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by source of funds and by state : Share of each source in total revenue, 2017–2018 

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b). 

Nationally, in 2017–2018, local and state sources accounted for 45.3% and 46.8% of total revenue, respectively; just 7.8% comes from the federal government. However, these averages mask substantial variation in the shares of revenue apportioned by each source across states. Local revenue, for example, ranges from just 3.7% of total public-school revenue in Vermont and 18.2% in New Mexico, on the lower end, to a high of 63.4% in New Hampshire. The same is true with respect to state revenue. The state that contributes the smallest share to its education budget is New Hampshire at 31.3%, with Vermont contributing the largest share (89.9%). There is also quite a bit of variation in the share represented by federal funds—from just 4.1% in New Jersey to 15.9% in Alaska. (The cited values are highlighted in the table. We omit the District of Columbia and Hawaii from these rankings because of the unusual composition of their funding streams, but we provide their values in the table.)

As shown earlier in the discussion of the map in Figure E, there are also large disparities in funding effort—how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so, based on state GDP. High-effort, high-capacity s tates such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education and they generate high funding levels.

As a result of funding and effort variability across states, the levels of inequity and inadequacy across states also vary substantially (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020; Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Notably, funding variability translates into significant disparities in overall per-student revenue and per-student spending levels, as shown in Figures F and G . In Wyoming, for example, where effort is relatively high (4.36%; see Figure E) and there is a higher-than-average contribution of state funds to total revenue and a lower-than-average contribution of local funds to total revenue (56.8% and 36.8%, respectively, versus 46.8% and 45.3% averages across the U.S.), per-student revenue is among the highest of any state, nearly $21,000. In contrast, Arizona and North Carolina—which are among the lowest in effort in the country (2.23% and 2.28%, respectively), but where state funds account for 47.1% and 62.1% of the state’s total public education revenues, respectively, and local funds account for 40.4% and only 27.0%, respectively—collect about half of what Wyoming collects per student. (Data accounts for differences in states’ cost of living; see the appendix for more details on our methodology.)

Public education revenues vary widely across states : Per-student revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b).

Public education expenditures vary widely across states : Per-student expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020c).

These substantial disparities in all the school finance indicators, and in per-pupil spending and revenue across states, are mirrored in capacity and investment patterns across districts and, within them, individual schools.

As such, these systemic and persistent inequities play a decisive role in shaping children’s real school experiences. As Raikes and Darling-Hammond (2019) note, “As a country, we inadvertently instituted a school finance system similar to red-lining in its negative impact. Grow up in a rich neighborhood with a large property tax base? You get well-funded public schools. Grow up in a poor neighborhood? The opposite is true. The highest-spending districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times as much as the lowest-spending, with large differentials both across and within states (Raikes and Darling-Hammond 2019). In most states, children who live in low-income neighborhoods attend the most under-resourced schools” (see also Turner et al. 2016 for the underlying data). 11

These gaps in spending capacity touch every aspect of school functioning, including the capacity of teachers and staff to deliver effective instruction, and pose a huge barrier to the excellent school experience that each student should receive. In Pennsylvania, for example, where districts tend to rely heavily on local revenues to finance schools, per-pupil spending ranges dramatically. Indeed, in 2015, the U.S. Department of Education flagged the state as having the biggest school-spending gap of any state in the country (Behrman 2019). One illustrative example is in Allegheny County, on the western side of the state, where the suburban Wilkinsburg school district outside of Pittsburgh spent over $27,000 per student in the 2017–2018 school year, while the more rural South Allegheny school district spent just over $15,000, roughly 45% less.

With salaries being the largest line item in school budgets, these disparities substantially affect schools’ ability to hire the educators and other school personnel needed to provide effective instruction, the school leaders to guide instructional staff, and the staff needed to support administrative needs and to offer other services and extracurricular activities. As a result, these resources vary tremendously not only among states, but within them from one district, and even school, to another. 12 Overwhelming research exposes large disparities in access to counselors, librarians, and nurses, and in access to up-to-date technology and facilities. Facilities are literally crumbling in lower-resourced states and districts, painting a clear picture of the dire straits many schools face. (See, for example, Filardo, Vincent, and Sullivan 2019 regarding added consequences for low-income students and their teachers in schools that are too cold, full of dust or lead paint, and have broken windows or crumbling ceilings.)

Baker, Farrie, and Sciarra (2016) note that “increasing investments in schools is associated with greater access to resources as measured by staffing ratios, class sizes, and the competitiveness of teacher wages.” The findings presented here are backed by the extensive body of literature on the positive relationship between substantive and sustained state school finance reforms and improved student outcomes. Together, they make a strong case that state and federal policymakers can help boost outcomes and close achievement gaps by improving state finance systems to ensure equitable funding and improved access to resources for children from low-income families.

Economic downturns exacerbate the problems with our school finance system and, over time, cause cumulative damage to students and to the system

Recessions lead to depleted state and local budgets and, in turn, to cuts in education funding. Trends since the Great Recession demonstrate that it can take a long time to restore education budgets and that our practice of balancing budgets on the backs of schoolchildren is an unwise and, ultimately, costly one in terms of educational and societal outcomes. As we show in Figure H , reductions in revenue for public education often outlast the official length of the recession, lasting much longer than the point when state and local budgets have returned to pre-recession trajectories in other areas of spending. In addition, a poor allocation of resources across high- and low-poverty districts disproportionately harms students in the highest-poverty districts relative to their peers in better-off districts, compounding the existing challenges described above and impeding their recovery.

It took the United States nearly a decade to restore the national per-student revenue to its pre-recession (2007–2008) school-year levels. Figure H shows national trends in revenue per student, by source (federal, state, and local), from the onset of the Great Recession through 2017–2018. 13

Education revenues fell sharply after 2008 (and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years) : Change in per-student revenue relative to 2007–2008, by source (inflation adjusted)

Note: The chart shows change in revenue per student for public elementary and secondary schools compared with 2007–2008. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021). The Local line is all local sources, including property tax revenues.

Per-student state revenue fell precipitously between 2007–2008 and 2012–2013—it was down nearly $900 at the low point. While revenue from property taxes did not decrease, on average, other local revenues fell by $160 by 2011–20121, only recovering to 2007–2008 levels in 2014–2015. Federal funding for schools, together with the additional recovery funds targeted to education through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided an initial and critical counterbalance to these reductions; in 2009–2010 and 2010–2011, districts were receiving slightly over $600 more per student from the federal government than they were before the recession.

The peak in federal revenue is also visible in Figure I , which depicts the distribution of funding by sources by year . Total federal funds accounted for 12.7% of total revenue in 2009–2010, compared with just 8.2% in 2007–2008, an increase of over 50%. (Note that this increase was made larger by the reduced total amounts of revenues, i.e., it constituted a greater share of a smaller whole).

Importance of federal funding for education increased in the aftermath of the Great Recession : Share of total education revenue by source, 2007–2008 to 2017–2018

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

While these federal investments provided a critical boost by temporarily upholding education funding, our analyses suggest an opportunity to shorten the slow recovery to pre-recession levels was lost. Just as they effectively operated during the recession, it is likely that larger and more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession. We come back to this idea in sections below.

In keeping with the discussion on broad funding disparities by state, the road to recovery from the Great Recession also varies across states and districts, with some still lagging from the Great Recession as they struggled with the COVID-19 crisis.

Research demonstrates that well after the end of the Great Recession, a significant number of states were still funding their public schools at lower levels than before the recession. As late as 2016, for example, per-student funding in 24 states—including half of the states with over a million enrolled students—was still below pre-recession levels (Leachman and Figueroa 2019). For some of these states, the failure to return to prior funding levels was driven by the lack of recovery of the per-student state revenue (for example, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). In some of the “deepest-cutting states — including Arizona, North Carolina, and Oklahoma,” note Leachman and Figueroa, the state governments made significant cuts to income tax rates, “making it much more difficult for their school funding to recover from cuts they imposed after the last recession hit.” In other states, lack of local revenue was the culprit (as in Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, and Vermont, for example). Finally, in some of these states, this shortfall fell on top of a rapidly growing student population (i.e., even had their total revenues recovered to pre-recession levels, they would still fall far behind on a per-student basis). Exploring the various drivers of these trends and their variation across states is beyond the scope of this report but would undoubtedly be fruitful. 14

Putting aside state trends and underlying causes, a focus on school districts reveals a strong correlation between poverty rates and education funding recovery. The following figures show the trends over time in total per-student revenue and spending by school district poverty levels. As we see, high-poverty districts and their students experienced both the biggest shortfalls and the most sluggish recoveries.

Figure J shows that, as discussed above, districts with relatively small shares of low-income students (low-poverty districts) never saw revenues per student fall below pre–Great Recession levels, adjusted for inflation and state cost of living. By contrast, the one-fourth of districts with the largest share of students from poor families (high-poverty districts) stayed below their pre–Great Recession level of per-student revenues long after recovery was in full swing, through 2015–2016. In keeping with that spectrum, the medium-high poverty districts did recover to their pre-recession per-student revenue levels, but not until 2014–2015.

The drop in education revenues after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student revenue compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty level (adjusted for inflation and state cost of living)

Sources: 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Figure K tells a similar story regarding trends in per-student expenditure across school districts. As such, it took until 2017–2018, a decade after the Great Recession had first hit, for high-poverty school districts to surpass their pre-recession levels, though they still lagged far behind their wealthier counterpart districts. Moreover, though not shown in this graph, for high-poverty districts, getting back to pre-recession status means catching up to revenue and spending levels that were lower than in the wealthier districts to begin with. (Figure C earlier in the report illustrates the gaps between high- and low-poverty districts in 2017–2018.)

The drop in education expenditures after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student expenditures compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty (adjusted for inflation and state cost-of living)

Notes:  Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates (for children ages 5 through 17) are in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates are in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Balancing budgets on the backs of children during a recession has serious consequences

Inadequate, inequitable funding relegates poor children to attend under-resourced schools even in good economic times, and to suffer disproportionately during and in the aftermath of economic downturns. We have for far too long been balancing recession-depleted budgets on the backs of schoolchildren, in particular low-income children and children of color. This not only hurts these children immediately, but severely limits their prospects as adults. As such, this practice has broader implications for the future of the country, both economically and regarding the strength of our societal fabric, given that the students of today are the workers and the citizens of tomorrow.

Indeed, these negative patterns are just the first indications of a cascade of consequences that result from funding cuts. This section describes those consequences and their flip side, which is more frequently the focus of education researchers—the positive effects of increased investment. First, we review the literature demonstrating the impacts of various levels of funding on student outcomes. Next, we point to analyses that have shown some other associated school problems (education employment, class size, and student performance, among others) that were contemporaneous with the declines in spending and revenue. Thought it is difficult to quantify the exact and independent impact of the funding cuts on these factors, the strong correlations suggest that they are related.

Substantial evidence points to the positive effects of higher spending on both short- and long- term student outcomes, as well as on schools overall and on adult outcomes (Jackson and Mackevicius 2021; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016; Gibbons, McNally, and Viarengo 2018; Hyman 2017; Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson 2018; Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Baker 2018). This body of research also provides evidence that the impact of school spending differs by students’ family income (Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). And, though less has been studied in this specific area, the evidence also shows that a misallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending has a negative influence on student outcomes, as well as on some teacher outcomes (Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Greaves and Sibieta 2019). 15

A recent summary of the literature provides compelling evidence of the effects of school spending on test scores and educational attainment. Based on 31 studies that provide reliable causal estimates, Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) find that, on average, a $1,000 increase in per-pupil public school spending for four years increases test scores by 0.044 percentage points, high school graduation by 2.1 percentage points, and college-going by 3.9 percentage points. Interestingly, the authors explain that “when benchmarked against other interventions, test score impacts are much smaller than those on educational attainment—suggesting that test-score impacts understate the value of school spending.” Consistent with a cumulative effect, the educational attainment impacts are larger after more years of exposure to the spending increase, and average impacts are similar across a wide range of baseline spending levels, indicating little evidence of diminishing marginal returns at current spending levels.

Other research suggests that the effect of spending is greater on disadvantaged students. Bradbury (2021) investigates “how specific state and local funding sources and allocation methods (redistributive extent, formula types) relate to students’ test scores and, especially, to test-score gaps across races and between students who are not economically disadvantaged and those who are.” Her findings suggest that statewide per-student school aid has no relationship with test-score gaps in school districts, but that the progressivity of the state’s school-aid distribution is associated with smaller test-score gaps in high-poverty districts. 16

Other studies further affirm the implications of equity-specific funding decisions. Jackson, Johnson, and Persico’s (2016) study assesses the impacts on a range of student and adult outcomes of a series of court-mandated school finance reforms that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Linking information on the reforms to administrative data about the children who attended the schools, the authors found that the increase in school funding was associated with slight increases in years of educational attainment, and with higher adult wages and reduced odds of adult poverty, as well as with improvements to schools themselves—increased teacher salaries, reduced student-to-teacher ratios, higher school quality, and even longer school years (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). Specifically, a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public schooling leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25% higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty. As with the other studies, the benefits from increased funding are much greater for children from low-income families: 0.44 years of educational attainment and wages that are 9.5% higher.

In another study drawing on data from post-1990 school finance reforms that increased public-school funding in some states, Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018) estimate the impact of both absolute and relative spending on achievement in low-income school districts, as measured by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data. 17 They find that the reforms increase the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the increase in spending/adequacy. While the measures employed to estimate the impact tend to be technical, the authors emphasize that this “implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.” 18 Similar adequacy-related reforms that resulted from court mandates, rather than state legislative decisions, prompted significant increases in graduation rates (Candelaria and Shores 2019).

Conversely, research shows that both the reallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending have a negative influence on both teacher and student outcomes. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2020) find that the cuts to per-pupil spending that occurred during the Great Recession reduced test scores and college enrollment, particularly for children in poor neighborhoods. Shores and Steinberg (2017) reaffirm these findings, noting that the Great Recession negatively affected math and English language arts (ELA) achievement of all students in grades 3–8, but that this “recessionary effect” was concentrated among school districts serving both more economically disadvantaged students and students of color. Greaves and Sibieta (2019) find that changes that required districts to pay teachers following higher salary scales, but that provided no additional funding to implement the requirements, did lead to increased pay for teachers as intended, but at the expense of cuts to other noninstructional spending of about 4%, with no net effects on student attainment. That is, reallocating resources across functions, without increasing the overall levels, did not improve outcomes.

Other studies explore disappointing trends across multiple education parameters during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, including teacher employment, class size, aggregate student performance, and performance gaps by socioeconomic status and/or racial/ethnic background. Several analyses show that recession-led school funding cuts were contemporaneous with significant reductions of teacher employment. The number of teachers in the United States public-school system reached its highest point in 2008, and then dropped significantly between 2008 and 2010 because of the recession (Gould 2017; Gould 2019; Berry and Shields 2017). Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019) estimated a decrease in total employment in public schools of 294,700 from the start of the recession until January 2013. Gould (2019) estimated that, in the fall of 2019, there were still 60,000 fewer public education jobs than there had been before the recession began in 2007 and that, if the number of teachers had kept up proportionately with growing student enrollment over that period, the shortfall in public education jobs would be greater than 300,000.

Related to these challenges, in the aftermath of the Great Recession through the 2015–2016 school year, schools’ struggles to staff themselves increased sharply. García and Weiss (2019) showed that the share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but could not do so tripled from the 2011–2012 to the 2015–2016 school year (increasing from 3.1% to 9.4% of schools in that situation), and the share of schools that reported finding it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7% to 36.2%). 19

Although class size, and the closely related metric of student-to-teacher ratios, have declined over the long term, they are higher, on average, in 2020 than they were in 2005 (the closest data point prior to the Great Recession) in 29 out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia (NCES 2020d; Hussar and Bailey 2020). (See Mishel and Rothstein 2003 and Schanzenbach 2020 for a recent review of the influence of class size on achievement.)

Understanding overall trends in student performance over this period helps to put the impacts of trends in these other metrics in context. We have cited research that links school finance trends and educational outcomes in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but it is worth describing what the trends in student performance looked like across the country. It should not be surprising that scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable indicator over time of how much students are learning, show stagnant performance in math and reading for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2009 and 2019 (NAGB 2019). As Sandy Kress, who served as President George W. Bush’s education advisor, commented, “The nation has gone nowhere in the last ten years. It’s truly been a lost decade [and] [t]he only group to experience more than marginal gains in recent years has been students in the top 10th percentile” (Chingos et al. 2019).

Gains (both absolute and relative) vary by students’ background, with multiple trends visible. Carnoy and García’s 2017 research on achievement gaps between racial/ethnic groups shows that Black–white and Hispanic–white student achievement gaps have continued to narrow over the last two decades, and also that Asian students were widening the gap ahead of white students in both math and reading achievement. At the same time, Hispanic and Asian students who are English language learners (ELLs) are falling further behind white students in mathematics and reading achievement, and gaps between higher- and lower-income students persist, with some changes that vary by subject and grade. During the decade of stagnation, however, in keeping with trends in per-pupil investments over this period, these trends widened existing inequities. As National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr soberly notes, “Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains” (Danilova 2018).

Finally, we have also seen marked changes in the student body composition that have implications for these trends going forward. The proportion of low-income students in U.S. schools has increased rapidly in recent decades, as has the share of students of color (NCES 2020e; Carnoy and García 2017). A student’s race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status also affects the student’s odds of ending up in a high-poverty school or a school with a high share of students of color. For example, Black and Hispanic students who are not poor are much more likely than white or Asian students who are low income to be enrolled in high-poverty schools (Carnoy and García 2017).

All of these changes point to the need for increased resources across the board, and especially in schools serving the highest-needs students. As we revisit education funding in the aftermath of the pandemic-induced recession, the new structure must make greater investments to ensure the equitable provision of education and associated supports not only in stable times but also in the context of substantial disruptions and crises (García and Weiss 2021). As the analysis above makes clear, neither equity not adequacy—and, thus, excellence in public education—will ever be possible as long as local revenues play such a central role, and as long as states are the primary vehicle to address those disparities. While we leave it to policymakers to design the specifics of this public-good investment, we emphasize that the benchmarks we should reach to determine that those investments are stable, sufficient, and equitable should reflect meaningful, consistent advances for the highest-poverty schools and schools serving students of color. In other words, when the impacts of recessions no longer fall on the backs of our most vulnerable children, we will know that we are moving in the right direction.

Public education funding could also be deployed quickly to boost the economy and serve as an automatic stabilizer

The practice of cutting school funding during recessions is not only bad for students and teachers but also hurts the economy overall. The education sector has the potential to help stabilize the economy during downturns, but historically, our policy responses have failed to provide the necessary investment, as discussed in this report.

Up to this point, we have shown the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the existing education funding system. We have emphasized that fixing the system’s problems and achieving an excellent, equitable, robust, and stable public education system requires more funding —not just a reshuffling of existing funding. We have presented evidence indicating the need for a significantly larger contribution to the system from the federal government on a permanent basis. We have also demonstrated that targeting additional funds to schools during the Great Recession—via ARRA funds in particular— helped offset the large cuts schools experienced due to state and local shortfalls. As stated by Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019), “[…] the federal government’s efforts to shield education from some of the worst effects of the recession achieved their major goal.” Based on the observed trends, we considered whether even more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession.

There is another reason for both larger investments and a more robust federal role when state and local budgets experience shortfalls due to economic downturns: School funding can be part of the countercyclical public-spending programs that help the economy recover. While policymakers and economists have long recognized the need for, and the effectiveness of, such automatic stabilizers (programs that pump public spending into the economy just when overall spending is declining), they have not traditionally placed public education spending in this category—yet it belongs there. 20 Federal funding directed toward schools during and in the aftermath of economic downturns can further boost the economy, thereby jump-starting economic recoveries.

Stable, sufficient, and equitable education funding would give schools and districts the resources and flexibility to adapt to challenges that they need but have not had during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, automatic stabilization of public education protects students and school systems against depleted school budgets during recessions and volatile business cycles (Evans, Schwab, and Wagner 2019; Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2021). In addition to averting the harms to students and teachers described above, countercyclical investments would keep the public education workforce employed. The teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and others who work in public schools made up 53.2% of all state and local public-sector workers in 2019—accounting for nearly 7.0% of total U.S. employment. 21 School staff are also family and community members whose spending ripples through their local economies (known as the multiplier effect). Cuts to education revenues and employment thus also affect local communities more broadly, and retrenchment of spending acts as a type of reverse multiplier, resulting in a vicious downward cycle.

Federally provided countercyclical fiscal spending on public education set up to kick in based on defined triggers—akin to an expansion of unemployment benefits that kicks in when certain unemployment targets are reached—would have significant “bang-for-your-buck” multiplier effects. Such automatic spending constitutes smart investment that upholds public education while giving the overall economy a significant boost. Analyzing then President-elect Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which included public education spending, Zandi and Yaros (2021) reported a 1.34 fiscal multiplier for state and local government spending (the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was signed into law in March 2021).

Because the federal government already provides substantial support to state and local governments in such times, bolstering and further targeting that support in a defined and concerted manner would entail a relatively light lift. Despite some challenges, several programs of this nature have been shown to meet their goals in their given policy areas. For example, the federal unemployment insurance (UI) and food stamps (SNAP) 22 programs are often cited as having demonstrably positive outcomes when the federal government increases their funding. Both have been heavily criticized for their structural flaws and lack of sufficient resource (Bivens et al. 2021). However, through prior recessions and the pandemic, data illustrate that UI and SNAP nonetheless prevented millions of people from falling into, or deeper into, poverty, as well as averted hunger and evictions. The CARES Act’s first allotment of the Economic Impact Payments and expanded UI benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic kept 13.2 million people out of poverty (Zipperer 2020). 23 The Bureau of Economic Analysis broke out the effects of selected pandemic response programs on personal income, illustrating just how heavily Americans leaned on these benefits through the pandemic. In June 2020, UI payments accounted for 15.6% of all wages and salaries in the U.S (BEA 2020). By contrast, just prior to the pandemic UI benefits were negligible in comparison—just 0.27% of wages and salaries overall in February 2020.

We propose that policymakers create a program for funding education during downturns that is of adequate magnitude and provides immediate, sufficiently large, and sustained relief as needed.

In order to provide an immediate response, the system must have the capacity to adapt to emergencies; a key way to ensure that is to specify ahead of time the automatic triggers that prompt launching the contingency plans. 24 To clarify, we are not suggesting that public education spending be treated exactly like food stamps or unemployment insurance benefits—i.e., that states amass reserves for a “rainy day” or that reserves be built up during nonrecessionary periods. Rather, we are pointing to the economic benefits of an education system that is robustly, stably, and consistently funded throughout economic ups and downs, ensuring that it also has the resources to withstand the downturns and the flexibility to adapt. And we are recommending that Congress establish a program that kicks in when needed, rather than waiting until a crisis and coming together to pass a large, responsive bill, which requires political negotiation and can thus take a lot of time.

Sufficiently large investments imply that the spending numbers are adequate to the size of the problem. As we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the various public programs—even with all their flaws—have been critical to preventing a much worse disaster than the one we have experienced. 25

Finally, regarding sustained assistance, it was clear that relief and recovery spending fell far short in response to the Great Recession and was cut off too soon; it took 6.2 years to recoup the jobs lost and nearly eight years for the unemployment rate to get back to its pre-recession rate of 5%. And unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic workers took much longer to return to pre-recession levels (Allegretto 2016). In education, as shown before, it was not until the 2014–2015 school year that districts’ per-student revenue, on average, recovered to 2007–2008 levels nationally—and recovery took even longer for high-poverty districts.

In sum, while the purpose of this study is not to offer guidance on how to best design a public education automatic-stabilization program, we do argue that such a program would help public education during downturns, and provide a boost to the overall economy. At later stages, proof-of-concept designs such as Medicaid and transportation grants, and some of the existing large-scale public programs already mentioned, could be a useful place to continue the discussion. Identifying best practices—in program design, financing, and implementation in the United States and elsewhere—would help to conceive a strategy.

Conclusions and next steps

For too long in this country, we have normalized the practice of underinvesting in education while expecting that schools would still function well (or at least moderately well). We have also accepted the disproportionate burden that economic recessions place on public schools and students. These norms are very costly—to individuals and to society—and they shortchange our country’s potential.

As the data and research show, this approach is backward. If we are to have a chance of providing all students in the United States with an excellent education we must  build a strong foundation—one with sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools in practice, not just in theory. Ensuring broad adequacy and equity will require increased federal investment (to more fully complement a system that relies heavily on nonfederal sources). Moreover, federal provisions that provide for automatic boosts to education spending during downturns is critical. Our education system can and should include a countercyclical designed to help stabilize the economy when it is contracting—benefiting schools and communities.

Were we to truly acknowledge the benefits, it would be hard to argue politically against making these investments a reality. Here again the data are edifying: Extensive research indicates that a stable and consistent funding system with a much higher level of investment would generate large economic and social returns. 26

An increased federal investment to ensure sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools has an additional benefit: It could serve as another tool in our toolbox for faster, broader, and more equitable recoveries from recessions. Boosting school funding during downturns could boost the wider economy—and disproportionately benefit the low-income communities that tend to be hit hardest in hard economic times.

This proposal requires jettisoning the tendency to pit public policy areas against one another for resources, and to glamorize the purportedly efficient notion of “doing more with less.” The latter, often used to justify education budget cuts, actually entails a misguided denial of the need for resources and of the inevitable damage that ensues when those resources fall short—or fail to exist at all.

We are not arguing that increased access to federal resources alone will address all the issues outlined above. Simply throwing money at the goal of providing an excellent education equitably to all children won’t achieve it; we need to make the right investments. 27

In addition, it is also important to distinguish funding from decision-making. While the federal government is best positioned to ensure broadly adequate and equitable education funding nationwide, it is not necessarily well suited to make decisions about policy, practice, and implementation. Evidence should guide how decision-making is allocated across the federal, state, and local levels. 28

Advancing this proposal also requires that we dislodge the conversation from where it has been stuck for at least the past half-century—namely on whether the resources exist. They do. What we need to ask now is how to make those resources available, and how to deploy them to ensure that all students have the opportunities to learn, develop, and achieve their full potential—and that these opportunities are available during both ordinary and recessionary times.

About the authors

Sylvia Allegretto is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute. She worked for 15 years at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-founded the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED). She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Emma García is an economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy. She developed this study while she was at the Economic Policy Institute (2013-2021). She is now a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. García received her Ph.D. in economics and education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Elaine Weiss is the Policy Director at the National Academy of Social Insurance, and former National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education at the Economic Policy Institute (2011-2018). She received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to EPI Publications Director Lora Engdahl for having edited this report and for her help shepherding it to its release. The authors benefited from Ajay Srikanth’s guidance on school finance data sources at the beginning of the project. The authors appreciate EPI’s support of this project, EPI Research Assistant Daniel Perez for his assistance with the tables and figures, EPI Editor Krista Faries for her usual thoughtful insights, and EPI’s communications staff for their assistance with the production and dissemination of this study.

Appendix: Notes on the data sources and the analyses

We construct our own district-level longitudinal data set using information from three different sources:

• the National Center for Education Statistics’s School District Finance Survey (F-33, Local Education Agency Finance Survey microdata from NCES 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 (NCES-LEAFS 2021)
• the United States’ Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program (for districts 2007–2018, from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a) 29
• Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) Version 4.0 covariates file (Reardon et al. 2021).

The School District Finance Survey (F-33) is the source for revenues and expenditures for public elementary and secondary school districts in the country. The F-33 is a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD) and consists of local education agencies (LEA)-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The entire universe of LEAs in each school year and in each state plus D.C. are included. The F-33 report includes the following types of school district finance data: revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; revenues by source; current expenditures by function and object; and revenues and current expenditures per pupil.

We use the annual data from 12 school years from 2006–2007 until 2017–2018 (the most recent available data at the time of development of this research was the data for 2017-2018, last accessed in March 2021 (NCES-LEAFS 2021) , see https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp#Fiscal:1,LevelId:5,Page:1 for updates).

We use the following variables from NCES CCD 2020:

• Total Revenue (TOTALREV)
• Total Federal Revenue (TFEDREV)
• Total State Revenue (TSTREV)
• Local Rev – Property Taxes (T06)
• Fall Membership (V33 and MEMBERSCH if V33 is missing)
• Total Current Expenditures for Elementary/Secondary Education (TCURELSC) 30

We calculate revenues (total and by source) and current expenditures in per-student terms.

For findings expressed “in constant 2019 – 2020 dollars,” all spending and revenue data are expressed in dollars corresponding with the 2019–2020 school year (average July–June as explained by NCES 2019), using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021).

For findings involving states’ cost-of-living-adjusted (RPPs), we account for differences in the cost-of-living across states by using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s (BEA’s) Regional Price Parities (BEA 2021). 31

For analyzing metrics and outcomes by school poverty level, we link the school finance information with the poverty information.

Our preferred poverty data source is the United States Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program for districts for school years spanning 2007–2018, which we collect from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a). Census SAIPE district poverty data are available for the period 2007–2008 through 2017–2018 (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The variable of interest is the poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the district (ratio between poor children and total children in that age group). They are originally available as yearly data. To proxy for the school year (July–June) data, for a given school year, we take the average between the fall year-1 and the spring year.

We also use two other poverty data sources, which are linked to the F-33 data in sequential steps, for the following two purposes: (a) to offer sensitivity analyses of the results using alternative sources of data; and (b) to use the maximum number of observations possible, in cases in which some information is missing in one source but available in others.

Our second-preferred poverty data are SEDA’s shares of free and reduced price lunch eligible students in grades 3–8 in the districts (Reardon et al. 2021). This information is available in the covariates’ file, and it is available starting in school year 2008–2009 (which is least preferred because it is after the beginning of the Great Recession). 32

As an additional source checked in our sensitivity analyses, we use the county-level information from the Census, available (by year) at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe/data/datasets.html (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The information is equivalent to the district-level information, but at the county level. For this study, we use the data in the same manner (turning the year estimates into school-year equivalent estimates, etc.).

We perform the analyses using the different sources independently, plus one more in which we combine the three sources, when one is missing but the other is not (i.e., we define a poverty-all variable that “combines” sources: If Census’s SAIPE’s district poverty data are missing, SEDA’s district poverty data are used; for districts missing on both, Census’s SAIPE’s county poverty data are used).

In each case, we calculate the poverty quartiles each year by dividing the poverty variable(s) into four quartiles. 33 Low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the first quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the second quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-high-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the third quartile of the poverty distribution. High-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the fourth (top) quartile of the poverty distribution.

A note about analytic samples and weights: As the school finance variables of interest are in per-student terms, districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students are kept in our sample. In our preferred sample, we also restrict the analyses to observations from districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both, 34 and to districts with charter information nonmissing. Results using the full number of observations (unrestricted sample) are available upon request.

A note about the final sensitivity analysis: Following the nature of F33 and the weights available in the surveys, our unit of analysis is the district, and we present unweighted averages across districts. Sensitivity analyses are also available using the student population in the district to compute weighted averages across the districts, upon request.

A note about methods: The analyses presented in this report are descriptive in nature. We are interested in providing a description of the trends in revenues and expenditures over time, by state, and by district poverty level. We produce updated estimates for the main school finance indicators and we look at trends in the main variables (per-student revenue and spending) during recessions to see the potential of a solid response from the system to respond, counter, and recover from economic recessions.

We conducted multiple sensitivity analyses in our attempt to verify that the data that we provide are not sensitive to data sources or data procedures, as well as to understand possible ways to further expand this research. Each data source offers significant advantages, but there is no source that can be used for all the purposes intended. Additionally, the evidence improves if we use multiple sources. We are confident the main findings hold and are not driven by extraneous factors. We do not use regression analyses in this version of the report.

1. In addition to the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds the Head Start program for young children, and the Department of Agriculture, which funds the School Lunch (meals) Program are also part of the agencies that support programs or functions in education.

2. We use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

3. See the New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights backgrounder (NYSER n.d.) on Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. (CFE) v. State of New York , 8 N.Y.3d 14 (2006) and Srikanth et al. 2020. Michael A. Rebell, one of the most prominent school funding litigators in the country, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in CFE v. New Yor k , a school funding “adequacy” lawsuit that claimed that the State of New York violated the constitutional rights of New York City students by failing to adequately fund the city’s public schools (NYSER n.d.). See also Sciarra and Dingerson 2021.

4. Since 2010, the Education Law Center (ELC), housed at Rutgers University, produces report cards that ask Is School Funding Fair? (using the data collected annually, some of which we use in our analyses below). To paraphrase their response, “Generally, no.” As the authors emphasize, “The hallmark of a fair school funding system is that it delivers more funding to educate students in high-poverty districts [since] states providing equal or less funding to high-poverty districts are shortchanging the students most in need and at risk of academic failure” (Farrie and Schiarra 2021).

5. Moreover, these wealth-based disparities are mirrored in and compounded by race/ethnicity-based gaps. The Education Trust uses data to report on disparities by both income/poverty level and race/ethnicity. As the Education Trust’s report on funding gaps in 2018 reveals, “School districts serving the largest populations of Black, Latino, or American Indian students receive roughly $1,800, or 13 percent, less per student in state and local funding than those serving the fewest students of color. This may seem like an insignificant amount, but it adds up. For a school district with 5,000 students, a gap of $1,800 per student means a shortage of $9 million per year ” (Morgan and Amerikaner 2018, emphasis added).

6. Our peer Western nations view public schools as more of a national responsibility and provide resources accordingly. For example, Germany has a heavily state-based school system, France has a hybrid local–federal system in which the central government pays teachers’ salaries, and Finland’s national government takes virtually full responsibility for public education.

7. As a large study by Berry (2021) reveals, higher-income areas are taxed, on average, at just half the rate of their lower-income counterparts. Not only does this lead to structurally inequitable funding for schools, it exacts a harder toll on the residents who are least able to afford it—who pay double the taxes of their wealthier peers on much lower incomes. And, as Srikanth (2021) notes, “The study reveals structural racism at work.”

8. Funding for K–12 (21.5%) and higher education (9.4%) combined make up the largest segment of most state budgets. Spending on K–12 education alone is barely second in public budgets to public welfare spending (22.4%) (Urban Institute 2021b).

9. Bradbury (2021) explains that “the largest portion of state aid to local school districts is typically provided on a per-student basis through a ‘foundation,’ ‘power-equalizing,’ ‘flat grant,’ or ‘tiered’ program.…In addition, some states include cost adjustments in their formulas. Key attributes on which states base such cost adjustments are student poverty, English language facility, and special education or disability status.”

10. As part of his War on Poverty, which recognized the impacts of poverty on children’s well-being and the nation’s future, President Lyndon Johnson advanced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This flagship federal legislation, which has since been reauthorized multiple times and whose current iteration is the Every Student Succeeds Act, is designed principally to channel resources to schools serving low-income students. However, Title I, the largest section of ESEA, was never enough to make up for the inequities created by the local–state funding system (see Gamson, McDermott, and Reed 2015).

11. This pattern isn’t at all “inadvertent,” but is a built-in feature that is part of a pattern of systemic racism and related classism that merits attention in itself. See, for example Sosina and Weathers 2019.

12. For example, in 2018–2019, average teacher salaries ranged from less than $46,000 in Mississippi to roughly $86,000 in New York (NEA 2020). However, within New York (according to 2017 data), they ranged from as low as $55,976 in the low-income Finger Lakes region in the northern part of the state to nearly twice as high, $110,000, in the wealthiest Long Island districts (Malatras and Simons 2019).

13. We note that the Great Recession started as the 2007–2008 school year was underway, so we are using the term “pre-recession level” flexibly and assuming school budgets do not immediately respond to the economic recession.

14. See Leachman, Masterson, and Figueroa 2017; Leachman and Figueroa 2019; Baker 2018; and Allegretto 2020 for some more examples.

15. Note that we are not distinguishing here between the source of increased or decreased funding but focusing on total revenues and expenditures. Roy (2011) examined a redistributive school finance reform initiated by the state legislature in Michigan in the mid-’90s, called Proposal A. This reform, which eliminated local discretion over school spending by increasing state aid to the lowest-spending districts and limiting it in the highest-spending districts, reduced spending disparities between districts, and increased student performance (state test scores) in the lowest-spending districts, though it also had a negative effect on student performance in the highest-spending districts. For an analysis of state school finance reforms affecting Kansas (“block grant funding” that froze district revenue regardless of enrollment and reduced funding in districts where enrollment increased), see Rauscher 2020. See Biasi 2019 for an examination of the effect of equalizing revenues across public school districts on students’ intergenerational mobility; Biasi finds that equalization has a large effect on mobility of low-income students, with no significant changes for high-income students.

16. Note that these analyses are based on cross-sectional data.

17. This post-1990 period, often referred to as the “adequacy era,” represented a time in which state-court decisions in multiple states resulted in increased public-school funding, offering an opportunity for researchers to study the overall impacts of these substantial increases and to compare them to student outcomes in states that did not experience them.

18. Their preferred estimates, based on the gradient of student achievement with respect to district income, indicate that a school funding reform raises achievement in a district with log average income one point below the state mean, relative to a district at the mean, by 0.1 standard deviations after 10 years.

19. High-poverty schools found it more difficult to fill vacancies than did low-poverty schools and schools overall, and high-poverty schools experienced higher turnover and attrition rates than did low-poverty schools (García and Weiss 2019).

20. Note that in this report, our main goal is to document the need and concept for such a program, not to discuss how best to design a public education automatic-stabilization program. These considerations, including specifically raising federal supports to education, have been discussed before (Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019; Partelow, Yin and Sargrad 2020; Ogletree et al. 2017; Sahm 2019; Schott Foundation 2022; U.S. Department of Education 2013; Washington Center for Equitable Growth 2021; etc.).

21. Author Sylvia Allegretto’s analysis based on Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics data for 2019 (BLS-CES 2021). Education is one of the largest single components of government spending, amassing 7.3% of GDP across federal, state, and local expenditures (OECD 2013).

22. SNAP is the abbreviation for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as “food stamps.”

23. Data Household Pulse Survey (HHPS) from the U.S. Census Bureau found that 29.3% of respondents with children were food insecure in the week of April 23–July 21, 2020 (Schanzenbach and Tomeh 2020). Bauer (2020) estimates that there were almost 14 million children living in a household characterized by child food insecurity during the week of June 19–23, 2020, “5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many as during [the] peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million).” Typically, these programs disproportionately benefit low-income communities, which are often hit the hardest, thus preventing even more damage and the exacerbation of the large existing inequities.

24. The term “contingency plans” comes from the education-in-emergencies field and is mostly applicable to international contexts, but it has also been used in the U.S. to give broader responses to crises such as Hurricane Katrina (The White House 2006). See García and Weiss 2020, 2021 for more details. The term “automatic trigger” is used to indicate what activates benefits or programs. See Mitchell and Husak 2021 and Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019.

25. For flaws around one of those programs—unemployment insurance—see Bivens et al. 2021. Bitler, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach 2020 provide evidence for three reasons why the policy response left needs unmet: “(1) timing—relief came with a substantial delay (due to overwhelmed UI systems/need to implement new programs); (2) magnitude—payments outside UI are modest; and (3) coverage gaps—access is lower for some groups and other groups are statutorily excluded.”

26. See section summarizing the literature on the impacts of spending on education above.

27. We have discussed this point extensively in our other research on early childhood education, socio-emotional learning, and integrated student support, among others. See García 2015; García and Weiss 2017; García and Weiss 2016; Weiss and Reville 2019, among others, for guidance on smart education investments. See also Bryk et al. 2010 for a discussion on the role of context and how even after receiving funding, schools did not improve, and offering suggestions for school reform efforts.

28. California, which revamped the state’s education funding and accountability systems in the wake of the 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, offers a valuable model. See Furger, Hernández, and Darling-Hammond 2019 and Johnson and Tanner 2018.

29. For counties 2007–2019, see U.S. Census Bureau 2021.

30. As explained earlier in the report, we use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

31. For 2018: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/real-personal-income-state-and-metropolitan-area-2018 , and For Time Series: https://apps.bea.gov/regional/histdata/releases/0920rpi/SARPP.zip

32. Note that we obtain the minority concentration from this source. Not used in this report.

33. Variables with the poverty quartiles are called POV_CDIST (our preferred Census SAIPE district) and povall (the one combining all sources).

34. Excluded are districts of vocational or special education system; nonoperating school system that exists for administrative purposes only and does not operate its own schools; LEAs that closed shortly before the start of the fiscal year or are scheduled to open in a future fiscal year but still reported revenue or expenditure information for the current fiscal year; and education service agency (ESA) (variable labeled schlev).

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Sahm, Claudia. 2019. “Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals.” In Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stimulate the American Economy , edited by Heather Boushey, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh. Washington, D.C., The Hamilton Project, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Brookings Institution.

Schanzenbach, Diane Whitmore. 2020. “The Economics of Class Size.” In  The Economics of Education (Second Edition), A Comprehensive Overview , edited by Steve Bradley and Colin Green, 321–331. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815391-8.00023-9 .

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public education

Learn about this topic in these articles:, assorted references.

…services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities. Civil rights are an essential component of democracy; when individuals are being denied opportunities to participate in political society, they are being denied their civil rights. In contrast to civil liberties, which are freedoms that are…

…Mann, a pioneer of American public schools in the 19th century, famously called education the “great equalizer of the conditions of men.” But the inverse is also true. Students who receive a poor education, or who drop out of school before graduating, can end up on the wrong side of…

…dramatic expansion and extension of public (i.e., government-sponsored) education systems around the world—the number of schools grew, as did the number of children attending them. Similarly, the subjects taught in schools broadened from the basics of mathematics and language to include sciences and the arts. Various explanations have been given…

development in

United states.

…belief in the necessity of public education, but only Thomas Jefferson undertook to translate his conviction into actuality. Convinced that democracy could be effective only in the hands of an enlightened people, he offered Virginia’s lawgivers a plan in 1779 to educate schoolchildren at public cost for three years and…

…send their children to a public school. Parents with sectarian persuasions could send their offspring to religious schools. In principle, there was to be equal educational opportunity.

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• Grant on separation of church and school

…to offer an alternative to public education. Neither system ever achieved universal attendance during the 19th century, however, for not until 1874 was a compulsory attendance law for the primary grades enacted; new immigration subsequently overloaded all city schools. After consolidation, Greater New York launched a massive public building program…

• promotion by Garfield

…citizens with regard to nonsectarian public education was universal: as citizens, they were financially obligated for the public schools; as Roman Catholics, they were committed to education in schools of their own faith.

…also introduced a system of public education. The motivation for this reform came from concern both that the Roman Catholic Church in Austria was no longer maintaining public morality properly and that certain changes in the 18th-century economy required that Austria provide a better-educated work force. It is often assumed…

…which lasted until about 1870, public systems of education emerged, accommodating religious interests in a state framework. Public support was won for the common school, leading toward universal elementary education. Secondary and higher education began to assume a public character. The principle of local responsibility under central provincial authority was…

The administration of public education was the exclusive responsibility of the provinces, which had worked out schemes of local authority under provincial oversight. Although the specific structure of the departments of education varied among the provinces, they conformed to a basic structure. Each was headed by a politically…

…braved the first steps in education, then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did not trail far behind. In 1642 it ordered parents and masters of apprentices to see to it that their charges were instructed in reading, religion, and the colony’s principal laws. Five years later, the General Court reinforced this…

…systems existed: that of the public elementary schools and higher primary schools and that of the selective, overwhelmingly intellectual secondary lycées and their preparatory schools. The lycées emphasized Classical studies through the study of Greek and Latin. It was not until 1902 that this exclusive emphasis was challenged by a…

The Volksschule was universal, free, and compulsory. The fundamental subjects were taught along with gymnastics and religion, which held important places in the curriculum. Girls and boys were taught in separate schools except when it was uneconomical to do so. Boys usually received training in manual work, and…

…independence the task of overseeing public instruction fell to the state and local authorities. Fiscal poverty and a lack of trained personnel soon proved them unequal to the task. Furthermore, since most existing schools were confessional and private, the need for intervention by the central authorities to enforce unity became…

…both types being eligible for public funds. The resultant decentralization was unique. Roughly two-thirds of the Dutch school-age children attended private schools. In return for public funds, the private school—which might be Protestant, Roman Catholic, or secular—had to provide a curriculum equivalent to that offered by the public schools.

…years toward the establishment of public school systems. By 1876, when the provincial governments were abolished, the people of New Zealand, through varying regional decisions, had accepted governmental responsibility for education, had opted for nonsectarian schools, and had started on the path to free, compulsory common schooling.

…to begin the establishment of public educational systems early in the 19th century. Others, such as Great Britain and the United States, under the spell of laissez-faire, hesitated longer before allowing the government to intervene in educational affairs. The school reformers in these countries had to combat the prevailing notion…

…three schools open to the public, supported by estates from the dissolved monasteries. It was more difficult to set up the city schools, for which there was no tradition. In towns and villages of northern Germany, Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558) set up the earliest schools to teach religion and reading and…

…in 1618 decreed that free public schools should be set up in all villages. In Scotland in 1560, John Knox, a disciple of Calvin and the leader of the Scottish Presbyterians, aimed at setting up schools in every community, but the nobility prevented this from actually being carried out. The…

…expressed by progressive education influenced public school systems everywhere. Some of the movement’s lasting effects were seen in activity programs, imaginative writing and reading classes, projects linked to the community, flexible classroom space, dramatics and informal activities, discovery methods of learning, self-assessment systems, and programs for the development of citizenship…

…of a “national system of public education available for all persons capable of profiting thereby.” Local authorities were called upon to prepare plans for the orderly and progressive development of education. The age of departure from formal education was raised to 14, and power was given to local authorities to…

theories of

…proposed a comprehensive plan of educational reform designed to assure access at the lowest level for all citizens and state support at the higher levels for the most talented; third, he advocated a law prohibiting any religious establishment and requiring complete separation of church and state. The last two proposals…

…first great American advocate of public education who believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers.

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South carolina budget to ban cellphones in k-12 schools, new curriculum sparks texas-sized controversy over christianity in the classroom, study: kids receive up to two years more school depending on where they live, hundreds of high schools wrongfully refused entry to older, immigrant student, rethinking the definition of high-quality instructional materials for math.

I n 1993, Paul T. Hill founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research center based out of the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance that from the outset was focused on issues of the next century and the broader question of how America’s schools can better prepare their graduates for a rapidly changing society.

This past winter, CRPE, now led by Robin J. Lake and based at UW Bothell, hosted a gathering of education experts and observers to commemorate its first quarter-century of work, toasting 25 years of research, analysis, field studies and white papers created in hopes of aiding school leaders, elected officials and families in reimagining our education system. And not just the function of our schools — but the ways in which the larger system is structured, governed and evaluated.

Across its first 25 years, CRPE’s pursuits were focused primarily on developing more highly effective public schools in every community, especially for low-income or otherwise disadvantaged students. One prominent strategy at the core of the center’s work has been the portfolio strategy, in which public schools operate with high levels of flexibility and family choice, paired with strong government oversight. But beyond the portfolio model, the center has also focused on key issues of funding formulas, governmental oversight, innovative practice and the charter school sector.

In a series of new essays and analyses published in coordination with its anniversary celebration, CRPE took the longer view, considering how these systems and structures must adapt over the next 25 years as education becomes more nimble and personalized, and as it becomes a priority for learning to extend beyond the traditional classroom structure.

It was an eye-opening and horizon-expanding thought experiment. And we’ve assembled a handful of these new essays — and their bold theses — below, in a bid to answer the underlying question: What does success look like in 2050 America, and how must our schools evolve to set graduates up for that success?

In honor of CRPE’s 25th anniversary, here are eight of the center’s biggest thoughts about the next era of public education — some not-so-modest proposals worth thinking about:

Reconfiguring the P-16 Pipeline — How do we redraw the high school–college career continuum? American public education assumes one common pathway for all: four years of high school and, for the lucky, another four years of higher education, the required credential for the vast majority of middle- and high-paying jobs. Even as careers grow ever more diverse, and students fall into a clear and concerning skill gap that will only get worse with continued automation, we remain almost singularly devoted to the “4+4” preparation model. Instead, the billions of dollars we devote each year to education would be better spent breaking down the traditional barriers among high school, college and career and reimagining the 9-16 continuum of learning so we can develop the talented workforce and democratic citizenry needed for our nation to thrive in the 21st century. Read the full proposal .

Redefining Equity — Beyond the classroom, how are we going to grapple with out-of-school enrichment, postsecondary preparation and beyond?: Expanding access to educational opportunity has defined debates over school reform for nearly a century, including desegregation efforts, finance equalization cases and proposals to expand school choice. But despite notable progress in some areas, opportunity is more stratified than ever along the lines of race and class. While the issues of racial and income-based segregation, inadequate spending and gaps in achievement continue to define educational inequality, they fail to capture broader societal shifts that are changing the ways we think about youth development. These include increased household spending on out-of-school learning experiences, particularly among wealthy families; the growing complexity of postsecondary educational opportunities; and the importance of non-achievement-based educational outcomes. These shifts highlight sources of educational inequality that, to date, policy has largely failed to address — and at times actively undermined — and suggest a new framework for our evolving conversation surrounding improving opportunity for America’s most vulnerable children. Read the full proposal .

Rejecting ‘Average’ — How we can redesign the school system for the tails, not the mean. The public education system must prepare all students to solve the problems of the future. But the current system is not rising to the challenge. While high school graduation rates are at an all-time high, completion and dropout statistics for students with disabilities remain dismal. (The latest federal education statistics show that fewer than two-thirds finished high school with a standard diploma.) Beyond students with disabilities, other student populations have unique needs that existing public school systems remain ill-equipped to meet. The struggles of these students, along with those of countless other “square pegs” — independent thinkers, nonconformists, students who are exceptionally creative — cry out for approaches that can better match talent with opportunity. Here’s a renewed call to design an education system for the tails, not the mean. Read the full analysis .

Rethinking the Classroom — Instead of a portfolio of schools, envisioning a portfolio of student opportunities: Conversations about the next generation of education reforms often get bogged down in either-or disputes. Should districts focus on improving their own schools or contracting with autonomous schools of choice? Can students gain access to job-related learning opportunities without having to sacrifice high school college prep coursework? Should states invest in expanding universal pre-K and other programs built to help lay students’ academic foundations, or should they focus on building K-12 schools capable of helping them achieve faster rates of academic growth? An agile public education system, Lake argues in this new essay tied to the 25th anniversary of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, would avoid pat answers to these questions and concentrate instead on providing effective, flexible and individual pathways toward common goals. It would find ways to enable every student to achieve gateway competencies. It would give students the support necessary to achieve their full potential and allow them to pursue personal objectives such as job and language skills, social-emotional development and achievements in science or the arts. Most importantly, if something was not working, or a student’s needs were not being met, an agile education system would be equipped to change. Looking beyond merely a portfolio of schools, a broader student-centered system would be animated by a drive to do whatever is necessary to prepare every student to solve the problems and capitalize on the opportunities that await the next generation. Read the full proposal .

Retraining Teachers — How personalization, specialization, soft skills and a talent shortage will reshape the profession: A rapidly changing future has implications not just for learners but also for educators. What might it mean for who teaches what — and how? In a new analysis, we consider the broader future of the teaching profession, from how instructors will be required to expand their expertise to how schools and districts will be forced to rethink issues of recruitment, development and collaboration. In particular, the paper identifies two areas of teacher expertise beyond academics that will become increasingly important and spotlights emerging ideas about how to challenge the one-teacher, one-classroom model while making the job more manageable. The authors also underscore the need to cast a wider net in engaging a broader community in the conversation about what quality teaching looks like for the next generation. “The future of teaching may be less about knowing the answer,” the authors write, “and more about rethinking who asks the questions and works to solve emerging problems.” Read the full thinkpiece .

Redistributing Funding — How routing dollars to students instead of schools could fund a more nimble system: In a more nimble public education system, all students would have equitable access to learning opportunities during the summer, outside the normal school day and beyond the school walls. Students would also continue to have access to these learning opportunities, supplemental support and postsecondary education opportunities later in life. And students from special populations — those who are gifted and low-income, those with disabilities, those who are not native English speakers or who lack stable home environments — would have access to educational programs tailored to their circumstances. One policy could help enable all of them: personalized education funding. Rather than states and local governments allocating funding to specific public schools, students themselves would receive funding based on their needs and circumstances, and could then plan with their parents to direct this money toward their educational needs: basic school attendance, tutoring, therapy or supplemental learning experiences. Read the full analysis .

Restructuring Education Systems — How can an innovative approach to school governance balance a need for experimentation with a parent’s right to make informed choices?: A local public education system built for personalization and rapid adjustment to workforce demands must be open to innovation and make full use of learning opportunities outside of conventional schools. But that system cannot be so atomized, chaotic or dominated by irresponsible providers that families are ultimately unable to make informed choices for their children. Families need a comprehensible set of options and information about likely results for students, and communities need options that prepare young people for jobs that are likely to exist. Still, this need for some degree of order and process must not drive out innovation and responsiveness to change. Students must be free to pursue — and providers free to offer — learning experiences that community leaders might not understand or prefer. Paul Hill takes the long view on how to balance these essential, conflicting needs. Read the full commentary .

Empowering Change — Why America’s educators are ready to innovate (but their education systems are not): Designed more than 100 years ago, America’s public education system is not preparing students for today’s realities of civic and global competitiveness — much less tomorrow’s. Consider the facts: U.S. students are scoring poorly in math and science compared with students in other industrialized countries, and they’re not graduating with the necessary skills or knowledge to succeed in college. Think about social mobility, and the situation grows even starker: Children from high-income families are 10 times as likely as other children to become inventors; NAEP fourth-grade achievements show that only 8.6 percent of students with disabilities scored proficient in reading; and rural students have less access to high-speed internet, AP coursework and extracurricular opportunities, leaving them more likely to “undermatch” themselves when applying to colleges. There is no single answer, but for every solution tried, there is one common theme: Educators, students and families who want something better are thwarted by an outdated delivery model. Robin Lake pens an in-depth analysis of the current educational system — and why she says it will not deliver in preparing students to solve the problems of an unpredictable future society. Read the full analysis .

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Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools?

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

• Feb. 21, 2017

In the days leading up to and after Betsy DeVos’s confirmation as secretary of education, a hashtag spread across Twitter: #publicschoolproud. Parents and teachers tweeted photos of their kids studying, performing, eating lunch together. People of all races tweeted about how public schools changed them, saved them, helped them succeed. The hashtag and storytelling was a rebuttal to DeVos, who called traditional public schools a “dead end” and who bankrolled efforts to pass reforms in Michigan, her home state, that would funnel public funds in the form of vouchers into religious and privately operated schools and encouraged the proliferation of for-profit charter schools. The tweets railed against DeVos’s labeling of public schools as an industry that needed to adopt the free-market principles of competition and choice. #Publicschoolproud was seen as an effort to show that public schools still mattered.

But the enthusiastic defense obscured a larger truth: We began moving away from the “public” in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places. Parents have pushed for school-choice policies that encourage shopping for public schools that they hope will give their children an advantage and for the expansion of charter schools that are run by private organizations with public funds. Large numbers of public schools have selective admissions policies that keep most kids out. And parents pay top dollar to buy into neighborhoods zoned to “good” public schools that can be as exclusive as private ones. The glaring reality is, whether we are talking about schools or other institutions, it seems as if we have forgotten what “public” really means.

The word derives from the Latin word publicus , meaning “of the people.” This concept — that the government belongs to the people and the government should provide for the good of the people — was foundational to the world’s nascent democracies. Where once citizens paid taxes to the monarchy in the hope that it would serve the public too, in democracies they paid taxes directly for infrastructure and institutions that benefited society as a whole. The tax dollars of ancient Athenians and Romans built roads and aqueducts, but they also provided free meals to widows whose husbands died in war. “Public” stood not just for how something was financed — with the tax dollars of citizens — but for a communal ownership of institutions and for a society that privileged the common good over individual advancement.

Early on, it was this investment in public institutions that set America apart from other countries. Public hospitals ensured that even the indigent received good medical care — health problems for some could turn into epidemics for us all. Public parks gave access to the great outdoors not just to the wealthy who could retreat to their country estates but to the masses in the nation’s cities. Every state invested in public universities. Public schools became widespread in the 1800s, not to provide an advantage for particular individuals but with the understanding that shuffling the wealthy and working class together (though not black Americans and other racial minorities) would create a common sense of citizenship and national identity, that it would tie together the fates of the haves and the have-nots and that doing so benefited the nation. A sense of the public good was a unifying force because it meant that the rich and the poor, the powerful and the meek, shared the spoils — as well as the burdens — of this messy democracy.

Achieving this has never been an easy feat. The tension between individual striving and the common good, between the beliefs that strong government protects and provides for its citizens and that big government leads to tyranny, has always existed in this country. As a result, support for public institutions and expansive government has ebbed and flowed. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in response to the Great Depression, ushered through the biggest expansion of federal programs in our nation’s history, he did so because he thought that government regulation was necessary to empower common people against corporations and banks but also that government should provide certain protections for its citizens. Under the New Deal, we got Social Security and unemployment insurance. Federal housing projects — public housing — meant quality dwellings for the nation’s working people. Federal works projects employed millions of out-of-work Americans and brought infrastructure to communities that had not been able to pay for it on their own.

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How Home Schooling Will Change Public Education

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, paul t. hill paul t. hill founder - the center on reinventing public education, research professor - the university of washington bothell, former nonresident senior fellow - the brookings institution.

June 1, 2000

• 14 min read

More than 1.2 million students are now being taught at home, more students than are enrolled in the entire New York City public school system. Paul T. Hill reports on the pros and cons of learning at home—and the effects home schooling will have on public schools.

Home schooling, not a present threat to public education, is nonetheless one of the forces that will change it. If the high estimates of the number of children in home schools (1.2 million) is correct, then the home-schooling universe is larger than the New York City public school system and roughly the size of the Los Angeles and Chicago public school systems combined. Even if the real number of home schoolers is more like 500,000, less than the lowest current estimate, there are more children home schooling than in charter schools and public voucher programs combined.

Home schooling is not a new phenomenon. In colonial days families, including wealthy ones, educated their children at home, combining the efforts of parents, tutors, and older children. The rural one-room schoolhouse was created by families that banded together to hire a teacher who could substitute for parents but who would use the same mixture of direct instruction, tutoring, and mentoring by older students.

There is nothing un-American about home schooling. Home-schooling families are, however, breaking a pattern established since colonial times—education has been becoming increasingly institutionalized, formal, and removed from the family. How important is the contemporary home-schooling movement and what does it portend for American public education? No one can say for sure. It is difficult even to estimate the numbers of children being schooled at home, and evidence about student learning and other outcomes is mostly anecdotal.

It is, however, possible to draw three conclusions about where home schooling is likely to go and how it will affect the broad public education enterprise—which for the purpose of this article includes charter schools and publicly funded voucher programs as well as conventional district-run public schools.

• Home schooling is part of a broad movement in which private groups and individuals are learning how to provide services that were once left to public bureaucracies.
• As home-schooling families learn to rely on one another, many are likely to create new institutions that look something like schools.
• Although many home-schooling families are willing to accept help from public school systems, the families and the schools they create are far more likely to join the charter and voucher movements than to assimilate back into the conventional public school system.

Developing New Teachers

Parents who decide to school their children at home commit time and energy to an activity that was once left to specialized professionals. Even in the states with the most permissive home-schooling laws, parents must learn what is normally taught to children of a given age, find materials and projects that teach specific skills, and learn how to use their own time and that of their children productively. The vast majority of home-school parents hope their children will attend college and so must also learn how to assess their children’s progress against higher education admission standards.

Even a casual perusal of the home-schooling literature reveals the scale and intensity of home-schooling parents’ search for ideas, materials, and relevant standards of performance. Home-schooling web sites continually post new ideas and materials for teaching subjects from math to drama. Parents can find advice about what kinds of programs are likely to work for their own children and can enter chat rooms with other parents struggling with the same issues.

Without making a quality judgment about these resources, it is clear that many serious people are putting in a great deal of effort. The materials available are not amateurish: They come from universities, research institutes, mutual assistance networks, school districts, and state education departments. People who contribute to home-schooling web sites and association meetings are also conducting serious research and development. Home schooling is a very large teacher training program, and many tens of thousands of people are learning how to teach, assess results, and continuously improve instruction. It also must be one of the biggest parent-training programs in the country.

Like charter schooling, home schooling depends on the creation of new human capital. People have to learn how, in new contexts and under new rules, to teach and motivate students, take advantage of complementary adult skills, find resources, and make effective use of scarce time and money.

Critics charge that much of this effort is wasted and that at best all the new human capital developed at such cost can only duplicate what already exists in conventional public and private schools. Unlikely. Although the new people will undoubtedly reinvent some wheels and some may go down blind alleys, these initiatives bring new blood and new ideas into a stagnant education sector that was previously dominated by civil service cartels and was thus rule-bound and risk-averse.

Collaboration and Evolution

Home schoolers are not all recluses living in log cabins. Growing numbers of home-schooling families live in or near cities, are well educated, and hold down normal jobs. They are not all afraid of the modern world; many are inveterate users of the Internet, and large numbers of West Coast home-school parents work in the computer and software industries.

Although large numbers of home schoolers are Christian fundamentalists and Mormons, many other religions are represented as well. There are active home-schooling organizations for Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews. In Washington, Oregon, and California, many of the new urban home schoolers are not active members of any church.

Home schoolers’ fierce independence rarely leads to isolationism. Increasingly, parents are bartering services—the mother who was a math major tutors children from several families in return for music or history lessons. Families come together to create basketball or soccer teams, hold social events, or put on plays and recitals. Growing numbers of home schoolers value the expertise of professional educators and are readily accepting help, advice, and testing assistance offered by school districts.

In such an atmosphere, it is highly likely that parents will come together to collaborate, specialize, and exploit comparative advantages. It is too soon to say whether many such collaborations will ever become elaborate enough to include cash payments for services or the hiring of coordinators to schedule, integrate services, and exercise quality control. But some home-schooling collaboratives have already advanced to the point that groups of parents find themselves running organizations that look much like schools. In Colorado, Arizona, and Michigan, several such groups have won charters and are operating as new public schools. Some home-schooling groups have also created management firms offering to create new schools that coordinate parent efforts and incorporate many of the values and processes of home schooling.

The advantages are obvious: Parents can limit their time commitments and get for their children the benefits of others’ expertise. They can also get public funds to pay for materials, facilities, management time, Internet hookups, and testing. Those that have mastered a subject or learned a great deal about instructional methods can even decide to become paid teachers.

However, home-schooling parents would be skittish and demanding clients. Many have learned exactly what they want for their children and are unlikely to stick with an arrangement that does not deliver. But all the preconditions exist for the emergence of new schools based on what home-schooling families have learned.

Although growing numbers of home schoolers are receiving valuable assistance from local public school systems, mass returns to conventional public schools are unlikely. Most home-schooling parents fled something they did not like about the public education system—variously perceived as lax discipline, bad manners, low standards, unsafe conditions, or hostility to religious practice.

In general, their web sites make it clear that home schoolers dread bureaucracy, unions, and liberals. Parents complain about teachers who would not adjust to individual children’s needs and about principals who insist that district rules prevent using better methods, changing children’s placements, accelerating instruction, or replacing bad teachers. Web sites also complain about liberal social agendas, particularly those associated with homosexuality and perceived attacks on the family.

Although home-school web sites are full of ideas about learning projects and what conventional educators would call “authentic” performance measures, parents are openly suspicious about forms of student-directed “progressive” education used in public schools. They strongly favor reading, writing, and debating. Web sites are full of resources for teaching classic liberal arts subjects (including rhetoric) and suggestions for study of primary sources.

Complaints about state standards and performance-based education are far less prominent in home-schooling materials than in religious-right political agendas. Educated home schoolers are concerned about preparing their children for the real world and are open to state standards and testing programs that guide action and give measures of progress.

These concerns, and the fact that many families began home schooling after what they perceived as “takeovers” of their local public school systems by “progressive” academics and left-of-center parents, make it unlikely that large numbers of home-schooling parents can readily return to public schools. Some home schoolers will get by with the help available from public school systems, and others will seek to create charter schools. Some—the numbers depend on costs and the availability of private subsidies—will also be attracted to specially constructed private schools such as those now being created by the conservative Christian Heritage Schools.

Given American families’ reliance on dual incomes, it is unlikely that home schooling will continue to grow indefinitely. But it will almost certainly continue to attract families that cannot find comfortable places in conventional public schools, and it will continue to be a channel through which parents become attached to private and charter alternatives.

What’s the Harm?

What could be wrong with a movement that leads tens of thousands of people to spend vast amounts of time and money learning to teach, working closely with children, developing new instructional materials, and subjecting them to real-world tests? Critics charge that three things are wrong with home schooling: harm to students academically; harm to society by producing students who are ill-prepared to function as democratic citizens and participants in a modern economy; and harm to public education, making it more difficult for other parents to educate their children.

• Student Learning. The very nature of home schooling makes it difficult to quantify student performance. But the best available evidence is strongly positive about home-school student learning. Consider these results from the Bob Jones University testing service for home schoolers:
• Almost 25 percent of home-school students are enrolled one or more grades above their age level peers in public and private schools.

Home-school student achievement test scores are exceptionally high. The median scores for every subtest at every grade (typically in the 70th to 80th percentile) are well above those of public and private school students.

Students who have been home schooled their entire academic life have higher scholastic achievement test scores than students who have attended other educational programs.

However, these results are drawn from a small, self-selected group of home schoolers who sought a university’s help in assessing student progress. Although there is no known profile of home schoolers against which to compare the sample, it is almost certainly a better-educated, higher-income, and better-supported (e.g., by church membership) group than home schoolers as a whole.

Thus, it is still impossible to say whether, on the whole, home-schooling students are doing much better than their public and private school counterparts. However, it is also totally unwarranted to argue that home schoolers are doing badly. The available evidence certainly seems to indicate otherwise.

Preparation for Adult Life. Nobody knows whether home schooling produces any different mixture of geniuses, socially adept individuals, academic failures, or misfits than do conventional public schools. For that matter, nobody has a good grasp on what the distribution of those outcomes is—or ought to be—in the population as a whole.

Some educators worry about the agendas of conservative religious leaders and parents, assuming they want children to become intolerant, insular, hypercompetitive, or convinced of religious or racial superiority. There is little basis for these fears, other than the long-standing tensions between religious groups (both conservative and mainstream) and the academic left.

Others avoid the trap of assessing schools in terms of current pedagogical orthodoxies but worry that home schooling (along with private schooling, charters, and vouchers) pulls children away from the socially centripetal experience of the common school, in which people of all races and backgrounds are educated together to common standards. This concern too has little empirical basis. Home schoolers certainly do not experience “common schools,” but neither, apparently, does anyone else. Whether they attend private or public schools, the vast majority of students are likely to attend classes and associate with others very like themselves.

Moreover, contemporary public schools do not meet the aspirations of those who expect them to be incubators of young democrats. Graduates of private (including conservative Christian) schools are more likely than demographically similar public school graduates to express tolerant attitudes, volunteer time and money for social causes, and participate in civic debates.

None of this proves that home schooling meets every aspiration Americans have for their children. But it does place the worries about home schooling in perspective, and it suggests the basis on which home schooling should be evaluated: It needs to be compared to the real performance of conventional public schools, not to some idealized aspiration.

Harm to Public Education. Home schooling limits public school enrollments and therefore reduces the amounts of money state governments provide to local school districts. It also reduces the numbers of parents who expect to enhance their own children’s education by voting for taxes and bond issues. On the other hand, home schooling reduces the burdens on public school systems and, in areas with growing populations, decreases pressure for new buildings and staffs. Unlike charters and public vouchers, home schooling does not force an overt transfer of public funds from an incumbent bureaucracy to a new rival organization.

Like charters and vouchers, home schooling is also criticized for weakening the common civic enterprise represented by the public school system. To some, deliberation about education is a necessary means of making one society out of many groups. They think that people who demand freedom from regulations, educate children themselves, or pay for private schools weaken critical public forums. A contrary view is that intellectual and values diversity are so important to a democratic society that questions about education should never be settled authoritatively. People who hold that view point to legislatures’ susceptibility to capture by interest groups and their inability to settle deeply controversial issues. They have reason to think that state standard-setting processes have degenerated into logrolling sessions among advocates for different subjects and that states have pretended false clarity about what skills young people must have in our boisterous, competitive, fast-moving, technology-driven, and unpredictable society.

Again, in a situation where so little is understood, the potential harms of home schooling seem far smaller than the harms of trying to prevent or thwart it. Every issue raised here is amenable to evidence, but abstract arguments and fears do not stand up against home-school parents’ First Amendment rights and their evident willingness to back up conviction with money, time, and effort.

The issues raised above are far from resolved. Scholarly and political discussions about home schooling are burdened by an unrecognized ambiguity in our use of the term public education, which in some instances refers to a commitment to use any means necessary to ensure that every child learns enough to participate fully as a citizen, earner, and parent and in other instances refers to a specific set of political bargains, rules, programs, job rights, and bureaucratic oversight mechanisms. The difference between these two definitions of public education is evident everywhere but most painfully in the big cities. There, aspirations for student learning, racial justice, and introduction of disadvantaged students into the mainstream of society are high. Political and educational leaders talk endlessly about the importance of high standards. But students fall farther behind the longer they are in school, and more than half of them drop out before gaining a regular high school diploma.

Our dialogue about home schooling, charters, and public vouchers, then, is frozen by confusion over means and ends. The people who run and staff conventional public schools are convinced that the current arrangements are public education. The question—put into play by home schooling and related reforms—is whether that definition is too narrow. It is time to ask whether home schooling, charters, and vouchers should be considered parts of a broad repertoire of methods that we as a society use to educate our children.

A longer version of this essay will appear in a future issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

Paul T. Hill is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution; a member of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education; and a research professor, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington.

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Police escort Black students to South Boston High School on the first day of court-ordered busing in 1974.

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Boston busing in 1974 was about race. Now the issue is class.

School-reform specialist examines mixed legacy of landmark decision, changes in demography, hurdles to equity in opportunity

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Nearly 50 years ago, a landmark federal court decision found the Boston School Committee had illegally perpetuated segregation and allocated lower funding in predominantly Black neighborhoods. It ordered racial rebalancing of white and Black students through busing.

The ruling by Judge W. Arthur Garrity on June 21, 1974, ignited racial violence and bitter protests from mostly working-class whites who resisted complying and sparked fears in both white and Black neighborhoods over the safety of their children. The tumultuous era tore apart Boston and left an indelible stain on the city’s reputation.

There is widespread agreement that the results of this attempt to achieve more equal educational opportunity were mixed at best. And a new report by a state education oversight panel finds that a majority of public schools in Massachusetts remain segregated.

The Gazette spoke with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Paul Reville about Boston’s busing crisis and what has improved — and what hasn’t — over the past half-century. An expert on school reform, Reville was secretary of education in Massachusetts from 2008-2013 and is now the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at HGSE. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

While well-intentioned, busing didn’t yield the kind of student gains Judge Garrity and others likely thought it would. Was this experiment doomed to fail from the start, or an idea with potential that was derailed by racial and class politics?

The decision Judge Garrity made to bus students in Boston was his answer to the blatant discrimination against racial minorities promulgated by the Boston School Committee. When that school board failed to come up with an acceptable plan for integration, Garrity imposed a court-designed plan on the school system.

People in Boston, then as now, felt like they were entitled to have good, safe, nearby schools in their neighborhoods. For many parents, Black and white, the idea of busing their children to a far-away, possibly unsafe school was outrageous.

The court order was seen by many as not only a misguided technical solution to a much larger problem, but also as an imposition by affluent, white liberals on vulnerable urban neighborhoods. Many Black parents in Boston had painfully endured decades of discrimination by the school system, and they wanted a remedy. At the same time, they feared for the safety of their children who were being bused into sometimes hostile neighborhoods.

The plaintiffs had sought a ruling that would prevent the discrimination against and isolation of racial minorities. The court concluded that the only way to accomplish this was to force the integration of each school so that no particular school could be identified for discrimination. If there were Black and white children in every school, then the system would be forced to treat them all equally in terms of policy and budget.

That was a logical and well-intentioned strategy, but the court did not anticipate the degree of resistance forced busing would generate, nor the degree to which forced busing would trigger white and middle-class flight from Boston’s public schools.

What has changed for the better and what hasn’t since 1974?

The demographics in the U.S. and in public education, in particular, have changed dramatically. Students left the Boston Public Schools in droves. While initial enrollment declines were attributable to the court decision, larger demographic and societal changes compounded the effect.

85% Of those attending Boston Public Schools today are students of color

Current enrollment is now roughly half of what it was in the early 1970s. Students of color are now more racially isolated in Boston public schools than ever before. Currently, BPS has roughly 85 percent students of color, whereas white students were in the majority [57 percent] when busing began. To have an integrated student body in every school, given current demographics, is virtually impossible. On the other hand, we now have a more equitable distribution of budget and resources between schools.

Many factors at play during this era have changed: People of color are now the majority population in Boston; the school committee is not as politically powerful as it once was; and the last two mayors and the current Massachusetts secretary of education are people of color. And yet, Boston’s public schools are about average compared to other large U.S. cities. Should we be seeing better results?

Boston has strong leadership now, an effective mayor and an experienced superintendent presiding over a challenged school system. The challenges are huge: You’ve got declining enrollment, increased absenteeism, and spiraling mental health and behavioral problems.

Although student attendance appears to be increasing somewhat, you still have something like a quarter of students chronically absent. No amount of school improvement is going to raise your scores if high percentages of young people are absent from school on a regular basis.

It’s much more a matter of socioeconomics than race. Educational achievement and attainment are closely associated with class. Boston is now a much less socio-economically diverse school district than it was before.

Socioeconomic flight from the district to private, parochial, and suburban schools, even to charter schools, has drawn down enrollment and left the system with much more concentrated poverty.

The cost of housing has driven a lot of middle-class people out of the city. The hollowing out of that middle means that the school system is now serving many more children with profound special needs, more multilingual learners, and students from low-income backgrounds. These factors make it much more complicated and difficult to educate all children to higher levels.

Boston, like a lot of cities, has got major challenges in dealing with the circumstances in children’s lives outside of school. Children are in school for only 20 percent of their waking hours between kindergarten and grade 12. So, school is a fairly weak intervention in terms of changing the prospects and opportunities available to young people.

“The school-choice system sometimes seems to amount to little more than an expensive game of musical chairs. Somebody always loses out.”

Whenever you have concentrated poverty, irrespective of race, it diminishes the chances for young people moving forward. Folks like Harvard economist Raj Chetty have done a lot of research on the importance of social class and social class interaction for social and economic mobility. That matters a lot.

What still needs to be done?

The school-choice system has not worked very effectively. It sometimes seems to amount to little more than an expensive game of musical chairs with a limited number of high-quality educational opportunities. Somebody always loses out in that kind of a game.

I think we should move back to neighborhood schools. Until recently, you could barely mention the idea of having a “neighborhood school” because that term became so fraught during the busing days. But the concept is worth reviving.

We desperately need high school reform. There must be school-to-career pathways and early college options in all those high schools. There’s some good work going on in Boston on “hub schools” — full-service community schools — which I applaud. This movement addresses some of the out-of-school factors that become impediments for many children. We need a “children’s cabinet” to oversee and expand this work.

We desperately need, and are now beginning to see, improvements in Boston’s school buildings. This administration has committed significant capital funding and is moving ahead in spite of some predictable setbacks and controversies.

We are stuck with a framework where school lines are drawn along municipal lines. Increasingly, in the U.S., people are segregating on the basis of income. That sort of segregation is as difficult to overcome as racial segregation has been in the past. Students in schools with high concentrations of poverty have a much more difficult time achieving and moving up than students in more integrated schools. To the degree that we can get affordable, mixed-income housing, Boston will have a more integrated school system. But that takes time.

What did school administrators, policymakers, and scholars learn from this period? Has anything positive come from it?

Yes, I think a couple of things. On the one hand, it was obviously right for the court to demand that the Boston School Committee treat all of its students equitably. That had to happen. On the other hand, we learned that you can’t have a successful, externally imposed remedy if people who are on the receiving end had no role in designing the remedy.

“Ultimately, we should be striving to have a quality school in every neighborhood.”

Those who bear the full brunt of the strategy are going to demand changes when the remedy threatens their children’s safety. If those changes are not forthcoming, those who can will leave. In the end, busing was not a successful remedy for racial segregation even if it did fix some aspects of a biased system.

We still have a long way to go. The school-choice program we have now is another well-intentioned attempt to achieve integration on a voluntary basis. That is a step in the right direction, but one with serious problems. We should be worrying less about achieving the perfect balance in all schools based on racial or ethnic demographics and be more concerned about socioeconomic integration.

Ultimately, we should be striving to have a quality school in every neighborhood, a school tailored to meet the needs of those particular children, giving them what they require to be successful both inside and outside of school. This should be part of a much larger city-wide social contract which guarantees every neighborhood the preconditions which will allow residents to flourish.

This is no simple matter given demographic trends, the history and politics of achieving equity, and the cost of housing in Boston, but it’s the best way forward.

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Louisiana becomes first state to require that Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms

Updated on: June 19, 2024 / 9:18 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in "large, easily readable font" in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Opponents questioned the law's constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are "foundational documents of our state and national government."

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph "context statement" describing how the Ten Commandments "were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries," must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also "authorizes" but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America's "First Constitution"; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory - in the present day Midwest - and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

"The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional," the groups said in a joint statement. "The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools. "

In April, State Senator Royce Duplessis told  CBS affiliate WWL-TV  that he opposed the legislation. 

"That's why we have a separation of church and state," said Duplessis, who is a Democrat. "We learned the 10 Commandments when we went to Sunday school. As I said on the Senate floor, if you want your kids to learn the Ten Commandments, you can take them to church."

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

State House Representative Dodie Horton is the author of the bill. In April, she defended it before the House, saying the Ten Commandments are the basis of all laws in Louisiana, WWL-TV reported.

"I hope and I pray that Louisiana is the first state to allow moral code to be placed back in the classrooms," Horton said. "Since I was in kindergarten [at a private school], it was always on the wall. I learned there was a God, and I knew to honor him and his laws."

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can "make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

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New law requires all Louisiana public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. (AP produced by Javier Arciga)

FILE - Workers repaint a Ten Commandments billboard off of Interstate 71 on Election Day near Chenoweth, Ohio, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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FILE - Workers remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments outside West Union High School, Monday, June 9, 2003, in West Union, Ohio. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Al Behrman, File)

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said.

Opponents questioned the law’s constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious , but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also “authorizes” but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America’s “First Constitution"; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory — in the present day Midwest — and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate,” the groups said.

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas , Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed.

The story has been corrected to clarify that the time for gubernatorial action did not lapse. The governor signed the bill Wednesday.