Fund public schools fully and fairly

Push resources to students

If schools are like a garden, money is like water. Money alone won’t solve our problems, but good luck getting anything to grow without it.

Nationwide, 44% of school funding comes from local sources — such as property taxes or sales taxes. That means the quality of a child’s education can depend largely on the wealth of the zip code where they happen to be born.

Beyond dramatically increasing education funding overall, one of the most transformative changes we could make for students of color and low-income students would be to loosen the link between existing district lines and funding.

What states can do

1. Redefine “local revenue” to mean a larger geographic area, which might be a county, an area served by a regional education service agency, or, where relevant, a metropolitan area, instead of a single school district. 

2. Shift away from local funding, replacing those funds with state revenue for education.

3. Use some combination of these approaches, both redefining “local revenue” and shifting away from this kind of funding.

Wyoming and California both have school districts that are smaller than counties but at least some countywide taxation for schools, creating revenue pooling across multiple districts.
In Nebraska, state legislators created the Omaha Learning Community, in which a new regional governing body was to oversee a tax-sharing plan to redistribute revenue across 11 school districts located in two counties as well as an interdistrict student integration plan.
The effort was created and implemented from roughly 2006 to 2016, and despite the demise of much of the structure, including the revenue-sharing component, the legislative intent and process has potential to inform new efforts.
In Vermont, the state sets tax rates and redistributes money, functionally acting as a state property tax to fund schools.
In 1994 in Michigan, Proposal A made a meaningful shift away from local and toward state funding for schools, in part by creating a statewide property tax revenue stream designated for schools.
While it did not fully replace local property taxes with state property taxes, this is a meaningful example of a partial shift to statewide funding.
In Texas, too, the state shifts some local funds raised in property-wealthy districts into property-poor districts, treating those dollars as a source of state revenue for schools in lower-wealth districts.