“And nationally, schools in predominantly non-white districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their predominantly white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild.”
— Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, October 4, 2026
“Contrary to popular belief, high-poverty, predominantly non-white districts have been spending about as much or more per student than their more advantaged counterparts for decades. »
— Sarah Reber, Brookings Institution, July 2026 (Updated November 9, 2026*)
If you’re not sure whether America’s public schools are neglecting poor children or spending less money to educate black, Hispanic and Native American children, I was too. At least five major reports on school funding published over the past decade have produced conflicting results. conclusions. Some argue that disadvantaged students earn more money than their wealthier, whiter peers. Others see large spending gaps in the opposite direction.
Why are these conclusions so different? Some reports count federal education dollars, while others exclude them, and some adjust dollars for regional differences in wages or other spending.
The five reports on school spending — from Brookings, EdBuildTHE 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 thing is, when you ask different questions, you automatically get different answers,” said Zahava Stadler, former policy director at EdBuild. (an advocacy and research group that closed its doors in June 2020) which now leads the Education Finance Equity Initiative at the left-leaning think tank New America. “We don’t use different calculators here.”
Stadler made the comments during an August webinars held by EdFund, a nonprofit, after a surprising report from Brookings was released in July 2026. This report countered the narrative that school funding is woefully unfair for low-income children and implied that inequities in school funding had been corrected. EdFund, which collects and commissions research on school finance, wanted to help policymakers sort through the conflicting narratives and I attended the event. I will do my best to sort it all out for you.
Sarah Reber, an economist at Brookings, found that the poorest school districts (the dark blue quintile No. 5 in the chart below) receive the most money per student from all government sources. She found a similar trend in districts with the highest concentrations of nonwhite students. The inset white bars show national spending without New York City, which spends unusually large amounts per student.
Average school spending per student, 2020-2021
Meanwhile, the group Hannah-Jones cites, EdBuild, found the opposite in its 2019 analysis. The group’s bar chart shows that spending per student is lower in poor, non-white neighborhoods.
They all analyze real data. And no one accuses anyone else of chicanery or bad calculations. So what’s going on?
3 school funding reports, 3 different methods, 3 contradictory results
1. Federal money is a game changer
The Brookings report listed all sources of school funding: local, state and federal. EdBuild, EdTrust and the Education Law Center, a legal advocacy organization, only counted local and state dollars.
That’s a big difference. The federal government provides more than $50 billion in school aid, including $18 billion under Title I for poor children, $15 billion for students with disabilities, and $19 billion for school meals. When you count all that money when calculating per-pupil spending, poor school districts come out on top.
The Urban Institute makes these differences visible by overlaying school funding sources, local, state and federal, one at a time. Local funding, largely from property taxes, favors wealthier neighborhoods.
Adding state funding narrows the gap, although some states contribute more to poor districts than others.
Add in federal funding, and poor districts receive more per student on average in almost every state.
So why exclude federal money? Stadler, the former EdBuild policy director, said she wanted to answer a specific question: Are states doing their job to ensure that poor districts and districts serving children of color get the resources they need? The inclusion of federal aid, she said, “obfuscates” the question of whether states are doing their part.
Federal aid is meant to supplement state and local funding, not replace it. If states rely on Washington to fill their funding gaps, “they’re passing the buck,” Stadler said.
For his part, Reber of Brookings wanted to count all the money available to educate children. She was concerned that EdBuild’s findings would be misinterpreted to mean that disadvantaged children actually received less money.
Both answer legitimate questions. One measures state and local responsibilities; the other measures the total resources available to students.
2. Adjustment for regional cost differences
Brookings simply counts dollars. EdBuild, EdTrust and the Education Law Center adjust them for regional cost differences.
Teachers represent the largest expense for schools and salaries vary by geographic area. A dollar in California’s Bay Area, for example, doesn’t pay as many teachers as a dollar in rural Alabama.
To show how these adjustments make school funding more regressive, the Urban Institute allows readers to 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. This can make a dollar in an expensive metro area worth even less than the raw dollar spending figures indicate.
Reber also adjusted spending to account for teacher costs in the Brookings report’s appendix. Nonwhite districts spent more per student, but their teachers’ higher salaries left them with about the same purchasing power, she found.
“It changes the way you think about where inequality comes from,” Reber said. “You’re thinking about high labor costs rather than local property tax wealth, as the EdBuild report reveals.”
3. Poor children and non-white children are not interchangeable
Poverty and race overlap, but their histories on school funding diverge. Many poor children attend predominantly white rural schools. Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately poor, but they are more concentrated in cities, where teacher labor costs are higher.
Adjusting for the high cost of urban teachers may have a greater effect on the numbers of students of color than on those of poor students. In other words, a district may spend more money per student but not be able to pay as many teachers or aides.
This is a key reason why several reports conclude that poor students receive more money while black and Hispanic students receive less. EdTrust, for example, which released its latest report on school funding last month, found that districts primarily serving Black, Hispanic and Native American students received $1,300 less per student than white students. But the districts serving poor students actually received $200 more per year than non-poor students.
The economists and school finance advocates I spoke with all said that funding for poor schools has improved significantly over the decades. But they also agreed that poor children still need more resources to receive the same educational opportunities as wealthier children: more counselors, school psychologists, tutors, reading tutors and experienced teachers. Bruce Baker of the University of Miami estimated that it could cost tens of thousands more per student per year to get poor children to meet the national average in reading and math.
Even Reber, whose research has shown that poor students receive more money than wealthier students, isn’t happy. “Do districts serving poor children have what they need? The answer is not universally no, but it’s often no,” she said.
And there is an even greater inequity: The amount we invest in a child’s education depends enormously on the state in which that child is born. New York, the top spending state, spends $17,000 more per student than Idaho, according to the Education Law Center’s 2025 report. Regardless of poverty or race, children in many states receive far less.
So, whenever someone says that poor schools get more or less money, I intend to ask three questions: How much money? Adjusted for what? And in relation to whom?
*Update: After this article was published, Sarah Reber of Brookings informed the Hechinger Report that she had revised her statement to reflect her updated calculations. Over the past two decades, it has not always been true that poorer districts spend more than poorer districts; from 2012 to 2017, the poorest districts spent about as much as the poorest districts.
Contact the editorJill Barshayat 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
This story on school funding was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Register for Proof points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
The article 5 Reports, 5 Different Findings on School Funding Fairness appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
