Running head: SCHOOL FUNDING AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT 1

How are Public Schools Funded?

How Does this Effect Student Achievement?

Janaye A. Davis

California State University Dominguez Hills

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Abstract

This paper seeks to find the correlation between school funding and student achievement. Public

schools are funded by the federal government, their respected state governments, and their

respected local governments. The Obama Administration has substantially raised the bar for how

much the central government can spend on education, yet schools still claim they do not have

enough money. Not only are they greatly funded by Washington, but states make education their

duty to prioritize education. The local level of contribution to education presents a dilemma due

to property taxes authority, which widens the gap of funding to wealthy school districts and poor

school districts. My conclusions are that finances do effect a student’s ability to succeed. A

student’s ecology is determined by their community in which they reside. Implications for future

educators includes knowing when you can help a student and when his/her home life is overly

grueling that it stands in the way.

Keywords: federal, state, local, property taxes authority, student achievement, student

ecology
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Public Schools’ Funding and its Impact on Student Achievement

Equity in public education continues to be a controversial issue in the United States. The

school system is a labyrinth of inequality that many unfortunate individuals do not make it out of

for various reasons. People become trapped in the system because it was established unjust, but it

is evolving. Education is a crucial element in one’s life and effects everyone for the rest of

his/her life. A “high-quality” education can give a person the confidence to use as a stepping

stone in the real world and/or give the privileged individual the possible connections to get

him/her that respected career everyone strives for (Carter, 2016, p. 225). The long-term goal for

most people in this game called life is a “good” career, and it all starts with a person’s primary

and secondary education. This paper seeks to answer the question: How are public schools

funded and how does this effect student achievement?

Funding Paradigms

There exists no litigation specifically mentioning education “in the U.S. Constitution. [I]t

is a power reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment’s Reserved Powers clause” (Egalite

et. al., 2017, p. 760). In other words, the state, county, and district have more power regarding

educational standpoint of a school in certain aspects.

Federal Funding

However, school systems do get help from Washington, (Egalite et. al., 2017, p. 757) but

first here is some background on our government’s role in public education:

On December 10, 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA;

P.L. 114-95), replacing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as the most recent

reauthorization of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of

1965, which provided federal funds to state and local education officials to improve
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educational opportunities for children from low-income families. (Egalite et. al., 2017, p.

758)

Politicians played a “more active role in shaping education policy at the local level

throughout the latter half of the twentieth century” (Egalite et. al., 2017, p. 761). Still, nothing

can get improved or reformed without funds. The ESEA of 1965 distributed money to “students

in poverty through Title I and direct[ed] grants to state education agencies to build capacity,

resulting in a steady growth in federal involvement in education” (Egalite et. al., 2017, p. 761).

According to the U.S. Department of Education (2005), Washington annually provides $14

billion to “disadvantaged” school systems across the country so they can obtain “a high-quality

education (U.S. Department of Education, 2005).

The Phony Funding Crisis. A common misbelief is that public school districts do not

have the excess money to spend on the necessary resources for their schools (Guthrie & Peng,

2010). Each year, the media and newspapers make it seem as of America’s schools are “on the

brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue

operating” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Each year, this brings the following shortcomings in school

districts:

Budgetary shortfalls, school district bankruptcies, teacher and administrator layoffs,

hiring and salary freezes, pension system defaults, shorter school years, ever-larger

classes, faculty furloughs, fewer course electives, reduced field trips, foregone or

curtailed athletics, outdated textbooks, teachers having to make do with fewer supplies,

cuts in school maintenance, and other tales of fiscal woe inevitably captivate the news

media, particularly during the late-spring and summer budget and appropriations seasons.

(Guthrie & Peng, 2010)

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This data was pulled before President Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Aact, but The

Obama Administration had already put an “unprecedented injection of billions in federal funding

for schools [that] likely ensure[d]” public education’s cushion to be than comfortable with more

than enough wiggle room for finances (Guthrie & Peng, 2010).

Public schools are well protected during times of recessions (Guthrie & Peng, 2010).

Guthrie and Peng’s (2010) Figure 3 depicts a graph of nine different sectors: manufacturing,

finance, professional and business services, construction, retail trade, information, transportation,

warehousing, and government (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Government is the only line on the graph

that showed a steady increase of employees (in the thousands), from the years of 1972 to 2008.

The other eight private sectors either greatly fluctuated, slowly grew, steadily declined, or

remained at a low constant (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Their Figure 2: Now (and Always) Hiring

illustrates the number of public education employees increasing from approximately 230,000 to

850,000 from the same time span of 1972 to 2008 (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Education

employment has risen far faster than student enrollment as the fall enrollment started at about

770,000 in ’72, dropped below 700,000 in the ‘80s and barely increased back up to

approximately 830,000 by 2008 (Guthrie & Peng, 2010).

The above data correlates to Washington’s help in schools in that the number of

employees should have declined in the times of recession when schools claimed they had

insufficient funds and laid off thousands of teachers. This begs the question: Where is the money

going? Surely there are thousands of school districts in the country, over 13,000, but Obama’s

administration accounted for distributing $44 billion to primary and secondary education, as of

2009 (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Before this, the highest historical rate of federal “contribution to

education had been 10 percent” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Forty-four billion dollars is a slew of
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money. So, for schools to say don’t have enough to make it through the year is a difficult claim

to wrap my head around. (Note, federal funding is not the only method schools are funded.)

However, if every school district received approximately $3.2 million from Washington and

eighty percent of all funds is absorbed in personnel costs, (Guthrie & Peng, 2010), this leaves

each school district with approximately $600,000, just from the federal government.

State Funding

Education is privileged in most state constitutions. States can reduce or eradicate finances

for “prisons, highways, parks, and colleges, or welfare payments,” but it cannot abandon its K-12

school system (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Plenty of states, however, lower their educational

funding in their constitutions, but only due to having excess in the year prior (Guthrie & Peng,

2010). The United States is the most “decentralized” nation when it comes to education (Guthrie

& Peng, 2010). This sounds like a positive aspect; however, this puts states in competition

(Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Figure 4: Creeping Centralization illustrates how the the annual

amount of funds Washington dictates for schools has steadily increased from 0% to 10% over the

course of nearly ninety years, 1920 to 2008; the percentage of states’ contribution inflated from

approximately 20% to 50% (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). States are able to fund their schools during

times of recession because they can “raise taxes to cover deficits,” then keep the new rates even

when money starts flowing again (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). This paradigm may seem as if states

are fooling their residents, but they must do so to comply with their state constitutions which

says they will either make education “thorough and efficient… general and uniform… or the

legislature’s paramount duty” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010).

Local Funding
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Public primary and secondary schools are also funded by their communities. This amount

greatly varies between local school districts due to property taxes. The majority of the country’s

school districts have “property taxing authority” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). In other words, the

wealthier the homes are in the community, the more money the district can tax off their houses.

There is a very grave difference in Lynwood Unified School District’s property taxes and

Beverly Hills Unified School District’s property taxes. However, other school districts that do

not have the authority to tax property rely on “county or municipal governments to generate their

share of local revenue” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010).

The Local Dilemma. The good aspect about local funding is that it contributes 30% less

than it did one hundred years ago (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). This closes the gap for funding, but

the gap is still there. The wealthier communities are able to make charitable donations to their

local schools. The truly poor communities are covered by Title I. Where does that leave the

middle-class communities, the parents who make enough to support themselves, but not give

frivolously to their school? School district politics is run by “employee-parent coalitions… who

dominate the school-board elections” (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Guthrie and Peng (2010) say, “It

takes a great deal of personal time to become informed regarding such issues as racial

desegregation, charter schools, curriculum content, testing…” etc. (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). Most

working parents do not have the time to be committed on a school-board. Posey-Maddox (2013)

redefines what it means to be an “active parent” in their child’s life as they should be able to

“activate their capital… to support or improve the school” (Posey-Maddox, 2013, p. 247). She is

not implying supporting the school just through the parent’s property taxes, but surplus capital to

donate.

Correlation with Student Achievement

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On average, people of the same socioeconomic status reside in the same community, due

to housing. As stated earlier, local school districts give about 50% to their community schools.

Even though schools in communities of poverty are covered by Title I, Carter (2010) says that

the correlation between “students’ family socioeconomic status and their test scores… is roughly

[40%]. The strong correlations of both district and student SES with test scores strongly point to

the effect of non-school factors” (Carter, 2016, p. 225). Carter (2010) refers to socioeconomic

status as, “[A] composite of district median household income, the proportion of parents with a

bachelor’s degree or higher, and rates of child poverty, free lunch eligibility, SNAP (food

assistance), teen births, and unemployment” (Carter, 2016, p. 225). She brings up the issue of

equity as “our society expects all groups of students to make it to the same floor,” the floor being

test scores, high school or graduation rates, when students start out on different levels (Carter,

2016, p. 225). Not only do students start out on different floors, some students are “flying by in

elevators,” others are “on escalators,” and some are “walking up flights of stairways with

missing handrails and broken steps” (Carter, 2016, p. 225). The opportunity is real and effects

thousands of school districts each year. “High-quality” schools can aid their students materially,

culturally, and socially (Carter, 2016, p. 225). In other words, these schools can provide their

students with the abilities needed to succeed in a post-high school world.

Since some districts do not have ample means of payment from the local level from their

schools, they fall short of providing their students with the resources needed to succeed.

America’s multi-tiered system of education was sought to attack the dilemma of equality, but

years after Brown v. Board, we are still fighting for equity.

Problems with Funding

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Greene (2007) speaks of how “resources are activated toward positive student outcomes”

(Greene, 2007, p. 50). He makes a clear distinction between financial resources and real

resources, financial resources being the dollar amount to purchase the real, physical resource

(Greene, 2007, p. 51). Greene (2007) sees the direct link between the physical resource, not the

financial one (Greene, 2007, p. 51). The real resources were “classified as relating to quality or

quantity, whereas environmental factors were classified as either endogenous or exogenous”

(Greene, 2007, p. 51). The number of resources a school had access to all trickled down from the

unequal, multi-tiered system. Greene (2007) discovered that the schools, in New Jersey, that

scored below the national average for testing, three years in a row, were the schools stationed in

low-income communities (Greene, 2007, p. 59).

In addition, although resources are a great factor in student success, the quality of an

educator is also questioned, “[I]t may be the case that higher-achieving students have access to

higher-quality teachers than lower-achieving students” (Greene, 2007, p. 54). This just means

that the “high-quality teachers” are the instructors who went to colleges and universities with

better preparation in teaching.

Opportunities. This research is not solely about low-income schools not being able to

get appropriately financed by their community, but that the students going to those schools are

not receiving the same opportunities. Carter (2016) suggests that “school equity… refers to a

greater infusion of resources to school communities that need them (Carter, 2016, p. 225).

Gabriel Alejandro Cortez (2010) argues from a similar standpoint; he believes it is “marginalized

communities” that get overlooked for their educational resources (Cortez, 2010, p. 7). According

to Cortez’s (2010) article, “Occupy Public Education: A Community’s Struggle for Educational

Resources in the Era of Privatization,” a local public school in Chicago was advocating to use a
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field house as an “expansion of space and resources,” but after not coming to an agreement after

seven years, lead to the district passing to demolish the field house “to construct an athletic field

for a private high school” (Cortez, 2010, p. 7). Surely, if the field house wanted to be used by a

wealthy public school, the district would have approved (Cortez, 2010, p. 9).

Conclusion

Schools may get funded by three different forms of government, federal, state, and local,

but its local funds affect the school’s funds the most, since eighty percent of its budget goes to

personnel costs and other aspects keeping schools afloat (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). The direct

correlation between student outcome lies within a school’s ability to access the physical

resources with its financial resources (Green, 2007).

The annual scare that schools are going bankrupt is indeed false; public K-12 education is

protected by Washington; the Obama Administration, in 2009, greatly increased the amount of

funds distributed to primary and secondary education (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). The local

dilemma will continue to make a grave impact on educational resources due to the difference in

neighborhoods’ property taxes (Guthrie & Peng, 2010). America’s multi-tiered system of

education sought to keep education decentralized (Guthrie & Peng, 2010), but decentralized

means unequal and inequitable (Cortez, 2010). Inequitable means students in low-income

communities not being able to receive the same resources as their wealthier counterparts, thus

not being able to reach the same opportunities, although they are expected to (Carter, 2016, p.

225). Students in marginalized communities are just looking for a chance, but due to their

ecology, home life (Carter, 2016, p. 226), they don’t even get a chance to look for the golden

ticket.

Implications for Future Educators

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An instructor can only do so much with what she is given. Teachers are expected to use

what they have to go above and beyond to change students’ lives completely. It’s up to teachers

in the poor communities to make those children achieve the same tests scores in wealthier

communities with more resources, physical and financial. There are plenty of factors that tie into

student achievement, but teachers must not forget a student’s life when he/she gets home from

school because many “non-school factors are indeed school factors” (Carter, 2016, p. 226). How

can a child focus when they could be thinking about the next time he’s going to eat or where

she’s going to sleep that night? (Carter, 2016, p. 226). Educators can work wonders for a student

to achieve academically, but educators can do little about the ecology of a student’s life (Carter,

2016, p. 226). When instructors encounter this obstacle, he/she must seek help from an outside

source, but must not be discouraged little to nothing helps. Teachers can only do so much.
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References

Carter, P. p. (2016). Carter Comment on Downey and Condron. Sociology Of Education, 89(3),

225-226. doi:10.1177/0038040716651678

Cortez, G. G. (2013). Occupy Public Education: A Community's Struggle for Educational

Resources in the Era of Privatization. Equity & Excellence In Education, 46(1), 7-19.

doi:10.1080/10665684.2013.750994

Egalite, A. J., Fusarelli, L. D., & Fusarelli, B. C. (2017). Will Decentralization Affect

Educational Inequity? The Every Student Succeeds Act. Educational Administration

Quarterly, 53(5), 757-781.

Greene, G. K., Huerta, L. A., & Richards, C. (2007). Getting Real: A Different Perspective on

the Relationship Between School Resources and Student Outcomes. Journal Of

Education Finance, 33(1), 49-68..

Guthrie, J. W., & Peng, A. (2010). The Phony Funding Crisis. Education Next, 10(1), 12-19.

Posey-Maddox, L. (2013). Professionalizing the PTO: Race, Class, and Shifting Norms of

Parental Engagement in a City Public School. American Journal Of Education, 119(2),

235-260

Title I - Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged. (2005, December 19).

Retrieved December 10, 2017, from

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html