School funding battles, litigation go hand in hand

Across US, states are constantly tweaking formulas in response to lawsuits, court rulings

Pennsylvania’s school funding has been ruled unconstitutional — both for depriving children in poorer communities of the education to which they’re entitled and for shortchanging them compared with peers in wealthier districts.

A fix could take years and cost the state billions of dollars, depending on how lawmakers respond to the Commonwealth Court decision.

But if you look at other states’ funding formulas and the systems supporting them, it’s clear the solutions — shaped by a patchwork of court rulings and the political dynamics at play — run the gamut.

Even efforts once lauded as successful may still fail, as states don’t always follow through on what their formulas — or their courts — say is required.

In some states, that’s led to more striking interventions: The North Carolina Supreme Court, for instance, last year ordered the transfer of $1.75 billion from the state’s treasury to implement a school funding plan. Washington’s high court in 2015 fined the state’s legislature $100,000 a day for failing to make progress on a plan.

States have been repeatedly dragged back to court: In Kansas, plaintiffs’ lawyers made 13 trips to the state Supreme Court.

Battles over school funding have led to improvements, advocates say. But experts say no state has a perfect system, and some remain deeply flawed.

While Pennsylvania — where state officials could still appeal the recent ruling — faces what could be a long road to reform, here’s a look at other states’ approaches and what’s working (or not) and why.

Texas: ‘Politicking behind the scenes’

Texas was at the forefront of school funding challenges in the 1970s, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund schools — disadvantaging children in poorer districts — didn’t violate the U.S. Constitution. That ruling pushed the parents who had brought the case — and advocates in other states — to take their claims to state courts.

The Texas parents ultimately

won. But while the litigation led to changes — including a so-called “Robin Hood” program that takes some property tax revenue from wealthy school districts and gives it to poorer ones — rich districts on average still spend more than poorer ones.

“The whole politicking behind the scenes that goes on is what ends up damaging the promise of these really important decisions,” said David Hinojosa, a civil rights lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the Edgewood v. Kirby case, filed in 1984.

Like most states, Texas has a formula that calculates how to distribute funding based on enrollment. Each district gets a base amount per pupil that goes up depending on different factors — if a student lives in poverty, for instance, or is an English learner. Those weights increase a district’s enrollment count and, in turn, its funding allotment.

The state then determines how much of the total the district can afford to raise on its own in property taxes — with the state filling in whatever gap is left. If a district raises more than it needs to meet the budget, the money goes into the Robin Hood program.

There are carveouts, however, that have preserved inequity, Hinojosa said. Property tax revenue that wealthy districts raise for school facilities, for instance, doesn’t have to be shared.

And Texas — which doesn’t have an income tax — hasn’t put enough state funding into schools, Hinojosa said: “They throw in a little more money, and hope the courts will forgive them.”

As a result, the costs largely fall on property taxpayers. That’s fueled complaints about the Robin Hood program, as districts with property wealth but large numbers of poor students — like Dallas — have given up money to the state.

Hinojosa said the “saga is not exactly your model for ensuring an equitable and adequate education for all students.”

“Is it better than what it was? Yeah,” he said. “But you’re comparing bad to the absolute worst.”

Kansas: ‘You’ve got to stick with it’

Like Texas, Kansas’s school funding system involves a formula targeting added state money to districts with poorer students — and limits what local districts can spend.

If a district wants to spend more than what the state determines its budget should be, it can go up to a cap calculated by the state, tied to its estimated needs. The state supplies funding to poorer districts that can’t raise the same money as wealthier ones.

Advocates say the cap has played an important role in reducing gaps between rich and poor communities.

“If you didn’t limit what schools spent … wealthy districts would blow the doors off,” said John Robb, who has represented plaintiffs for 33 years in a series of cases challenging the constitutionality of Kansas’s funding. “Every kid in Kansas ought to have an equal shot.”

Plaintiffs got their first win in 1992, but had to go back to court repeatedly to force changes: For years, lawmakers failed to increase the formula’s base amount per pupil. Then the state cut back on payments.

“School finance litigation, it’s a process,” Robb said. “Not just you win your case and you yell touchdown.” He noted that it took years of work to get lawmakers to make changes, and some “equity-busting” measures that allow wealthy districts to spend more have at times crept in.

Kansas stands out among states for its court rulings addressing both school funding adequacy — how much money is going into the system — and equity, or how that money is distributed, said Bruce Baker, a school finance expert and professor at the University of Miami.

Both matter: A state can have a progressive school funding system, with more money going to higher-poverty districts, but overall funding may be inadequate, Baker said.

“We have no state that combines the two anymore,” said Baker, who views New Jersey and Massachusetts in the mid-2000s — before the Great Recession led to deep cuts — as models.

Still, Baker, who wrote a book on Kansas’s school funding, said the state is among the better examples.

“You’ve got to stick with it. And Kansas has,” Robb said.

New York: ‘That’s not the way legislators think’

In response to a lawsuit initially filed in 1993, and ultimately a court decision in 2006 directing it to substantially increase funding to New York City schools, New York state adopted a funding formula that targeted money to needier districts.

But the state didn’t follow through with funding — leading to more legal battles that didn’t end until 2021, when Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a settlement in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case to add $4 billion in education funding over three years.

Critics say there are other flaws with the system. The formula itself was based on cost estimates that some experts, like Baker, criticized as too low — derived from a comparison pool of lower-spending districts. And it hasn’t been updated since its adoption in 2007.

What goes into a funding formula — including the size of the weights for students with added needs — has a dramatic impact, said John Yinger, a trustee professor emeritus in the economics department at Syracuse University. Yinger’s research has found children living in poverty may cost twice as much to educate as non-poor children.

“Frankly, that’s the hardest step. You’re a scholar, you’re very comfortable saying we should run this regression and use the results — but that’s not the way legislators think,” Yinger said.

He said New York has a better formula than most states, but “they still have a long way to go.”

Washington: ‘How the state allocates the money is just as important’

A 2007 lawsuit by two families challenging Washington state’s school funding has led to an influx of money into the education system there — though it’s actually become less equitable, experts say.

That stems from a couple factors: The McCleary lawsuit, decided by the state Supreme Court in 2012, challenged the adequacy of the school funding system, not its equity. And as lawmakers negotiated changes, school districts that stood to lose money “didn’t like what they saw coming down the pike,” said David Knight, an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington College of Education.

As a result, “regionalization” factors were added to the funding formula, Knight said, targeting more money to higher cost-of-living — generally, wealthier — areas. He said that of the additional $7 billion that went into the education funding system, most went toward increasing teacher salaries.

Unlike most states with formulas allotting a certain amount of money per student, Washington is among a handful that fund schools based on a calculation of how many staff members a given district needs. In practical terms, that doesn’t mean much, Knight said: The state isn’t funding positions, and districts aren’t beholden to specific staffing ratios.

What is instructive for Pennsylvania, he said, is that a school funding system based on state taxation — Washington supplies more than two-thirds of funding for K-12 schools, while most of Pennsylvania’s school funding comes from local taxes — isn’t necessarily more equitable.

“How the state allocates the money is just as important as how much money comes from the state,” he said.