Tell me all about school funding

[mommyoffive]

Can you tell me how school funding works? 

Is it all federal or is it state?  Or both? 

Honestly what got me thinking this is seeing some online schools give x amount of money in funds to kids and in other states they give y.    

But also schools in the same state give different amounts. 

Does each state get the same amount of money per kid?  Some of it must be local too because we pay for schools. 

I am wondering how it all works.  

[Janeway]

Every state does it different. Some states, local authorities tax. Then sometimes, when the local authority has too much money, they have to give back to a Robin Hood fund. In other states, the state taxes and then distributes the money.

[mommyoffive]

5 minutes ago, Janeway said:

Every state does it different. Some states, local authorities tax. Then sometimes, when the local authority has too much money, they have to give back to a Robin Hood fund. In other states, the state taxes and then distributes the money.

 

So none of it is Federal? 

[Xahm]

6 minutes ago, mommyoffive said:

 

So none of it is Federal? 

Very, very little is federal. That's one of the reasons educational quality varies so much from state to state, and even town to town.

[mommyoffive]

4 minutes ago, xahm said:

Very, very little is federal. That's one of the reasons educational quality varies so much from state to state, and even town to town.

 

Got it.    My thought was a certain part was federal and then anything on top was local.  But I thought a larger part was federal.  

[JenneinCA]

As I remember the federal government pays for some of the school lunch/breakfast programs but very little of anything else. 

[Arcadia]

11 minutes ago, mommyoffive said:

 

So none of it is Federal? 

 

Title 1 funding (https://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/index.html) and Free/Reduced School lunch program (https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/fr-071918) is Federal. 

My school district is funded by property tax almost 100% when the state gives a token amount and 100% when the state claim to be broke/over budgeted like during the Great Recession years. It’s the Basic Aid model (https://edsource.org/local-control-funding-formula-database/basic_aid.html). There is a cutoff limit so a school district funding status may change if property tax collection drop severely.

[GoodGrief]

edit:(wrote all that out then realized you were not asking about homeschool funding by school districts, lol)

In Alaska, school districts around the state offer homeschool programs to students. Our schools are state-funded for the most part. School districts get a reduced amount of the per-student allotment for each homeschool student; I believe it is currently about 80%. They use a portion of the funds for the students, and use the rest for their building-based programs. The amount they offer the student varies from program to program, because it is an individual decision by the district. They want to offer enough to attract homeschool students and be competitive with other programs, but they also want to maximize what they keep.

Edited October 18, 2018 by GoodGrief

[Farrar]

Adding to the above... while it can vary dramatically from place to place, the most common model is for schools to be funded by local property taxes. That's part of why American education is so dramatically unequal. Wealthy people = bigger tax base = better schools.

Lots of states are aware of this issue and some have tried to fix it by pooling money in various ways between different districts within their states or regulating spending. One of the ways this went wrong in some places is that in a few states, they did away with the property tax model and local districts are prevented from raising money for anything core. However, they'll be allowed to raise money for building projects. So you'll see wealthy districts in some states that have incredible facilities but the teachers are still paid next to nothing, the classes are overcrowded, and they don't even have textbooks. Another way that wealthy districts sometimes get around these limitations or efforts by states to even out the wealth is through PTA funding - PTA funding can pay for things like library books, technology, field trips, and even teacher aides in every class in some wealthy districts.

The federal government does pay for some programs, like the free lunch programs mentioned above. But they mandate a lot more stuff than they pay for. For example, special education is mandated and there are a lot of laws about how it works and what schools must do to cover students with special needs of all kinds. They do sometimes use things like grant money given to the states for this, but mostly, states are on their own to pay for it. Which some states really resent. That's how you end up with things like how in Texas a few years ago, the state informally was telling districts not to allow there to be more than a certain, randomly chosen percentage of kids with IEP's so they were denying testing and coverage to qualified students.

There's clear court cases that students cannot be charged for a public education. However, in reality, this is another funding stream for public education. Most classrooms are now stocked by parents, not schools. Schools get away with textbook fees and field trip fees and other such things. It can be hard to challenge them.

Not only are schools funded differently in different states and districts, but the allotment of school funds to the actual schools can vary a great deal as well. In some states, it's strictly per pupil. In others, it's based partially on attendance or even on how well the school is performing according to various measures set by the district. In some places, charter students get the same amount as regular public schools, but not in others. In some places, some schools get more funding and others get less. In practice, it costs a lot more to educate special needs students, which is one of the reasons that public schools need as many students as possible so they have enough to educate the kids who cost the most. If each student gets 10k but a new charter school pulls a quarter of the students away and they were all the ones who didn't have IEP's and they leave just the students who have the most challenges, then the schools now has only 75% of their previous budget, but now must use that to still educate the kids who are the hardest to teach - including all the ones who need one on one aides and so forth.

Anyway, it's a right mess.

Edited October 18, 2018 by Farrar

[Carrie12345]

I just googled my district's funding, and it's ridiculously complicated.  A little federal, some local (I pay $2,800,) and then a bunch of state and miscellaneous (though some very large) grants from here and there.

 

[SamanthaCarter]

The best way to find out for your district is to read thier CAFR (comprehensive annual financial report). It’ll be in thier website somewhere. Buried in that report will be a table that lays out all the sources of revenue. 

Edited October 18, 2018 by SamanthaCarter

[madteaparty]

I don’t know, but I have a big age difference between my kids and I’m pretty sure my youngest kid’s class is a huge percentage special needs. Those kids get a massive amount of resources because they’re by federal law entitled to them. This is supposed to be a good district and yes it’s all property tax, which is a massive amount and up 4% every year I’ve lived here. 

Needless to say, DD will go to private school next year and I am really down on public education at the moment. 

[TravelingChris]

It is hard to believe what is happening in my state.  It is something like 90% of income tax by constitution to the schools, plus a large chunk of property tax, and also of the high sales tax too.  And then what do they do?  I have never seen another state before with such a building campaign for new school buildings or new additions.  And not just because of more people, since most of the new buildings are in areas where there hasn't been much growth in school population.

But we have lots of weird funding and constitutional problems.  I believe we have the certified longest constitution in the world and every election year, we have to add more to it.  And of course, our gov, thinks that no one is interested in having a normal, reasonably written constitution and I suspect that a large part of the state doesn't care, doesn't know or is just resigned to the mess..

[SamanthaCarter]

Ive never encountered a bond initiative on my ballot that I felt was financing a legitimate need, though I know it happens. 

I caught wind recently that the district HS is asking the council for $25M capital improvements.  Yeah, no. It’s fine, 60s, but updated, and adequate space and sports facilities. 

What doesn’t have adequate space and updates is the library, but alas, it doesn’t house the alter of Sports. 

Edited October 18, 2018 by SamanthaCarter

[Farrar]

2 hours ago, texasmom33 said:

This is where I've gotten extra confused as far as the State of Texas. I had always heard that a special needs Dx (I can't remember if that's the 504 or SLP or whatever so forgive me) got the schools extra funding, and had, in fact, heard several times that that had to do with why so many schools seemed to push testing and Dx of LD's and whatnot. They actually liked kids with those Dx, because of the funding it brought. But then, as Farrar and maybe others mention upthread, it turned out in TX that wasn't the case and they were, in fact, trying to cap the schools doing anything of the sort. The discouraged it and were doing huge disservices to kids with legit special needs. The Houston Chronicle did a great expose on it, but then it sort of fizzled and I haven't heard much since. Meanwhile, our state legislators have decided to expend their recent efforts to change the school grading systems from Exemplary, etc. to letter grades. Yeah. Because that's what we need to spend money on...........more signage on school buildings that mean squat. 

It  kills me that they are allowed to be so non-transparent and can make things so confusing that the average citizen doesn't have a shot in hell of understanding it. 

Sometimes there are special funds coming from grants from the state or even the federal government. But generally, the "extra money" for special needs kids is coming out of a pool of money that's for "everything." The more special needs kids, the more the district has to spend because they have rules about what resources they need to devote to a student with  a particular need. That's everything from special buses to special computers. Since the money for the schools isn't typically given to the district in a big lump sum, but rather approved based on what they need, it can mean they get a funding boost. But the money isn't coming out of nowhere. If there's not enough, then the things that are allowed to "give" end up losing out. Typically things that don't have specific mandates attached like music or field trips or technology for average kids or classroom size... stuff like that is the first to suffer.

That's why districts need a good balance between "normal" kids and kids who need special services and why a bigger district can do a better job sometimes - if you're serving dozens of kids with the same issues, you can be much more efficient with training, staffing, resources, etc.

 

[Farrar]

6 minutes ago, texasmom33 said:

You know what I would absolutely love to see?

What percentage of each state's educational funds that go to predatory, corrupt, monopolostic testing mills who create problems just so they can charge to solve them  services provided by the most profitable "non-profit" College Board, and the world's biggest educational company, Pearson etc. and their red herring subsidiaries and offshoots. I bet it's massive. Non-profit my ass. 

Oh heck yes. I generally dislike when people bemoan that schools are wasteful. On the ground, most schools don't have enough money to be wasteful in a meaningful way. And teachers are underpaid. And students don't have the right resources. But the cash spent in service of cruddy materials in the education-industrial complex is obscene. And it's not totally the districts' faults. They get shaken down to get the "right" test prep materials by the people the states have hired to write the tests (yet another expense). So gross.

[Crimson Wife]

If you're asking why different virtual charter schools give different sized stipends, that has to do with how the administration of each school chooses to spend the per-student funding allotment from the state. So in my area, charter A might give $1600 per student per semester for the stipend while charter B spends more on overhead and only gives $1400 per student per semester. The school that has a larger stipend might have other trade-offs, however, such as requiring all materials to be Common Core-aligned. We went with a slightly less generous stipend charter because it offered greater academic flexibility.

[kiwik]

Thanks for this thread I had always wondered.  In NZ - everyone pays income tax and GST (15% on sales) plus taxes on stuff like petrol and alcohol that goes to the government and is used to fund school's, hospitals, police, armed forces, main roads, government etc.  Locally you pay rates (property tax) which is used to fund local amenities (from sports fields to sewage), some local roads and local council costs.  

We don't have school districts - each school has a board who employ the teachers and principal directly but they are paid via the ministry of education and trained by approved national programmes.

Until I was an adult I assumed every country had one school system, one police force etc and it still seems a fairer system though maybe a bit unwieldy in big countries.