Get tips for overcoming challenges when reporting on complex school funding systems. Connect the dots between state laws and practices that could impact equity in funding across a state.
Photo credit: Judy O’Babatunde (pictured Rebecca Sibilia, EdFund)
What should reporters do when efforts to report on equity in school budgets are stymied by administrators who are less than forthcoming about the distribution of state and local tax dollars?
How should journalists proceed when school officials, new to the budget process, aren’t collecting data that could help the community better gauge whether a newly enacted funding plan is resolving the student achievement gaps for which it was implemented?
And, when a change in the school funding formula becomes a campaign issue, how can reporters help voters understand what’s at stake?
As more states tinker with K-12 school funding formulas, three veteran education reporters shared strategies to help journalists report on their impact during an Education Writers Association workshop. It was held at the 2024 SXSW EDU Conference in Austin, Texas last March.
The workshop also included insights and resources from Rebecca Sibilia of EdFund and Zahava Stadler of New America. They demonstrated new tools to help reporters understand and investigate school funding formulas.
A major shift from its prior four-decade formula, California 11 years ago enacted the Local Control Funding Formula to give K-12 school districts the ability to make spending decisions that proponents of the formula hoped would improve achievement gaps among districts with greater numbers of English learners and students living in low-income households and in foster care.
The goal for the LCFF was to improve equity. But has it been living up to its promise?
Fensterwald has been reporting on this topic for the past decade. But the politics behind implementing the formula in 2013, he said, have stymied efforts to find out if the funding overhaul is working.
The formula’s “structural lack of transparency,” he said, has made it challenging for the public to assess whether the LCFF funds are reaching the students who need the additional support.
When LCFF marked its 10th anniversary, his reporting, which included an interview with its architect, has documented mixed results.
“The Local Control Funding Formula is more like a dump truck that deposits money in the parking lot. It’s not a backpack that follows students,” Fensterwald said.
Even as districts are required to complete local control accountability plans, the experts Fensterwald has cultivated as sources as well as state agencies tasked with overseeing the budget, say that they still don’t know whether or not funds are going to students who most need them.
After an attempt to review three school districts, a state auditor concluded, ‘I can’t really figure out where this money was spent’,” Fensterwald said.
Nonetheless, Fensterwald has helped EdSource deliver insights by cultivating independent researchers to help readers understand LCFF’s strengths and shortcomings.
EdSource also is crunching numbers to help its audience examine taxpayers’ investment into the state’s education system.
Despite some progress in closing achievement gaps between students living in low-income households and their more affluent peers, Fensterwald’s reporting has found that in the years since the state enacted LCFF, California hasn’t observed a lessening of the achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and white and Asian students.
Whatever you are covering in education, there is going to be some budget story along with it, said Neal Morton of The Hechinger Report.
Morton is currently working on stories about migrant families enrolling kids into schools in Colorado.
“At the state level, you can look at what policy prescriptions are out there,” Morton said. “Colorado requires extra instruction for English learners, but they only provide funding based on students who are [enrolled] on a certain specific day of the fall. So anyone who comes after, there’s no extra funding. That’s a big hole to fill.”
For his reporting on Colorado and nine other states across the West, Morton likes to break down the numbers to the amount of dollars the school district spends per pupil.
“If you have multiple schools, that will give readers context – this high school in the northern side of the district gets a lot per pupil, whereas the south side school gets a lot less,” he explained.
But getting to that number can be a challenge.
“Sometimes, especially with the Every Student Succeeds Act, where districts now have to report this per pupil funding, the math is really, really fuzzy,” Morton said. “It’s really ambiguous and oftentimes incorrect. So make sure you understand what’s actually going into those dollar amounts.”
Other tips include reaching out to school district demographers to understand the enrollment trends driving a district’s budget. The number of births, housing trends and enrollment in charters or private schools can be factors. Morton also said nonprofits, “often have someone who wants to nerd out with you on these numbers.”
To get a better picture of a school district’s financial health, check out the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA): “This will give you what the districts have to report to creditors,” Morton said.
Finally, study a state’s constitutional provision on education: “If you can understand all the mechanisms of how the money gets out there, you can explain it in a much more simplified way,” Morton said.
Camille Phillips needed to explain school funding to her Texas Public Radio audience. She began by updating a previously written TPR explainer. She then stumbled across a budget in which the school district spent $30,000 per student.
“The state average in Texas is $10,000 per student. So I went, okay: One, how is this happening? And is this happening a lot?”
Phillips started comparing school districts.
“I filed a public information request, so I could actually have Excel spreadsheets with all the districts in one place,” she said She also talked to a couple of experts at think tanks.
“Think tanks, even if they have a slant, can be useful if you use them as a starting point,” Phillips said. “Both told me, look at ‘golden pennies.’”
A 1993 law required wealthy school districts to recapture and redistribute property tax revenue in Texas. But two decades later, in 2006, the state passed a provision called “golden pennies,” which allowed some school districts to retain some of their excess property tax revenues instead of sharing them with the state to support other districts. The provision gave school districts with high-property wealth a big advantage.
For example, Phillips found one school district with an average spend of $50,000 per student. It includes a campus with new buildings, such as a football stadium and state-of-the-art athletic facilities.
Phillips also talked to lawmakers and tracked down legislative archives to understand the debates during passage of the laws driving school funding policy in Texas.
“There’s so many more stories to tell, but I started out with four stories.”
Journalists should look up their state’s school finance lawsuits and examine how they impact funding today, Phillips advised.
“The reason why the Texas funding system in a lot of ways is so complicated is because we had one lawsuit; one side won. We had another lawsuit; the other side won. So they’ve kind of like, fixing it piecemeal and making it a lot more complicated,” she said. “So look at the impact of that data, and see who the winners and losers are.”
For the past five decades, research on school funding has focused on the question of whether money matters to improve student outcomes. But Rebecca Sibilia says the real issue is how schools are funded.
Despite the country’s nearly $800 billion annual investment, we lack clear best-practices for how to fund U.S. schools. Consequences of bad policy for school funding impact everyone from taxpayers to students.
“We are never going to get to better systems unless we recognize that we’re living within a constrained resource environment. The questions of for whom, on what, from where, matter a whole lot. We have very little research to tell us what works.
EdFund, where Sibilia serves as executive director, aims to fill this gap by identifying areas where additional evidence is necessary to improve how communities fund schools, and also supporting research on this topic.
Sibilia explained the basics of school funding formulas.
Sibilia also shared insights on what states are doing to implement school funding policies that reflect community needs – including greater funding for schools in neighborhoods experiencing concentrated poverty.
In the last few years, more states have been developing funding formulas that increase funding to school districts that lie in areas of concentrated poverty. Marked by food desserts, substandard housing and limited transportation, these areas can increase the burdens for students and hinder educational outcomes.
The bottom line: State funding formulas take different approaches to student poverty. Some consider individual students. Some consider concentrations of poverty. And some consider both.
Why does concentrated poverty exist? What are the consequences?
Zahava Stadler, project director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative at New America, shared insights from new research that gets at these issues.
Discrimination in residential lending is among housing policies that continue to drive inequities in school funding systems based on local property taxes, according to Stadler’s research
Stadler and her co-researcher, Jordan Abbott, shared their findings in a February 2024 report, “Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality Between America’s School Districts.”
From a dataset of more than 25,000 pairs of adjacent school districts, the report identified the 100 most segregated district borders and their impact on school funding.
“These divides are the result of intentional policy choices at every level of government,” Stadler said.
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