5 Reports, 5 Different Conclusions About Fairness in School Funding

“And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild.”

— Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, Oct. 4, 2026

“Contrary to common narratives, high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts have spent more per pupil than their lower-poverty counterparts for decades.”

— Sarah Reber, Brookings Institution, July 2026

If you’re confused about whether America’s public schools are shortchanging poor children or spending less money educating Black, Hispanic and Native American children, I was too. At least five major reports on school funding released in the past decade have reached conflicting conclusions. Some say disadvantaged students get more money than their wealthier, whiter peers. Others find substantial spending gaps in the opposite direction. 

Why the strikingly different conclusions? Some reports count federal dollars for education, while others exclude them, and some adjust the dollars for regional differences in salaries or other expenses.

The five school spending reports — from Brookings, EdBuild, the Urban Institute, EdTrust and the Education Law Center— all use slightly different methodologies. One dates back to 2017 while another was just released last month. 

“The fact is that when you ask different questions, you get different answers by design,” said Zahava Stadler, the former policy director at EdBuild (an advocacy and research group that closed in June 2020) who now directs the education funding equity initiative at the left-leaning think tank New America. “We’re not using different calculators here.”

Stadler made these comments at an August webinar held by EdFund, a nonprofit organization, after a surprising Brookings report landed in July 2026. That report pushed back against the narrative that school funding is terribly unfair to low-income children and implied that school funding inequality had been fixed. EdFund, which collects and commissions school finance research, wanted to help policymakers sort through the conflicting narratives and I attended the event. I’ll do my best to disentangle it all for you. 

Brookings economist Sarah Reber found that the poorest school districts (the dark blue quintile #5 in the chart below) receive the most money per pupil from all government sources. She found a similar pattern in districts with the highest concentrations of nonwhite students. The white inset bars show national spending without New York City, which spends unusually large sums per student.

Average per-pupil school spending, 2020-21

Meanwhile, the group that Hannah-Jones cited, EdBuild, found the opposite in its 2019 analysis. The group’s bar chart shows that per-student spending is lower in both poor and nonwhite districts.

Average Revenue Per Student

They’re all crunching real data. And no one is accusing anyone else of chicanery or bad math. So what’s going on?

1. Federal money changes the picture

The Brookings report counted all sources of school funding: local, state and federal. EdBuild, EdTrust and the Education Law Center, a legal advocacy organization, counted only local and state dollars.

That’s a big difference. The federal government provides more than $50 billion in school-related aid, including $18 billion in Title I funding for poor children, $15 billion for students with disabilities and $19 billion for school meals. When you count all that money in the per-pupil spending calculations, poor school districts come out ahead. 

The Urban Institute makes these differences visible by layering the sources of school funding, local, state and federal, one at a time. Local funding, much of it raised through property taxes, favors wealthier districts.

The addition of state funding narrows the gap, although some states contribute more to poor districts than others do.

Add federal funding, and poor districts receive more per pupil, on average, in almost every state.

So why exclude federal money? Stadler, the former EdBuild policy director, said she wanted to answer a narrow question: Are states doing their job to ensure that poor districts and districts serving children of color get the resources they need? Including federal aid, she said, “obscures” whether states are doing their part.

Federal aid is supposed to supplement state and local funding, not replace it. If states rely on Washington to close funding gaps, “they’re passing the buck,” Stadler said.

Brookings’ Reber, meanwhile, wanted to count all the money available to educate children. She worried that EdBuild’s findings were being misinterpreted to mean disadvantaged children actually receive fewer dollars.

Both are answering legitimate questions. One measures state and local responsibilities; the other measures the total resources available to students.

2. Adjusting for regional cost differences

Brookings simply counts the dollars. EdBuild, EdTrust and the Education Law Center adjust them for regional cost differences. 

Teachers are schools’ biggest expense, and salaries vary geographically. A dollar in the Bay Area of California, for example, doesn’t pay for as many teachers as a dollar in rural Alabama. 

To show how these adjustments make school funding appear more regressive, the Urban Institute lets readers compare the difference in per-pupil spending with and without adjustments for teacher labor costs.

EdBuild went further, adjusting for a broader basket of regional costs, including housing prices. That can make a dollar in an expensive metropolitan area worth even less than raw dollar spending figures indicate.

Reber also adjusted spending for teacher costs in the appendix of the Brookings’ report. Nonwhite districts spent more per pupil, but their higher teacher salaries left them with about the same purchasing power, she found.

“That changes your way of thinking about where the inequality comes from,” said Reber. “You’re thinking about high labor costs instead of local property tax wealth, which is the story that comes out of the EdBuild report.”

3. Poor children and nonwhite children aren’t interchangeable

Poverty and race overlap, but their school funding stories diverge. Many poor children attend predominantly white, rural schools. Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately poor, but they’re more concentrated in cities, where teacher labor costs are higher.

Adjusting for the high cost of urban teachers can have a bigger effect on the figures for students of color than the figures for poor students. In other words, a district can spend more dollars per pupil but not be able to pay for as many teachers or aides. 

That’s a big reason that several reports conclude that poor students are getting more money while Black and Hispanic students are getting less. EdTrust, for example, which released its latest school funding report last month, found that districts serving mostly Black, Hispanic and Native American students got $1,300 fewer state and local dollars per student than white students. But districts serving poor students actually got $200 more a year than nonpoor students.

The school finance economists and advocates I spoke with all said that the funding of poor schools has improved considerably over the decades. But they also agreed that poor children still need more resources to have the same educational opportunities as wealthier children: more counselors, school psychologists, tutors, reading coaches and experienced teachers. Bruce Baker of the University of Miami once estimated that it can cost tens of thousands more per pupil a year to catch poor children’s skills up to the national average in reading and math.

Even Reber, whose research found that poor students receive more money than wealthier students, isn’t satisfied. “Do districts serving children in poverty have what they need? The answer is not universally no, but it’s often no,” she said.

And there’s an even bigger inequity: How much we invest in a child’s education depends enormously on the state where that child is born. New York, the highest-spending state, spends $17,000 more per student than Idaho, according to the Education Law Center’s 2025 report. Regardless of poverty or race, kids in many states get far less. 

So whenever someone says poor schools get more or less money, I plan to ask three questions: Which money? Adjusted for what? And compared with whom?

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about school funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.