Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card

National report card on school funding fairness finds Illinois one of four states ranking poorly on all measures

"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card," a national study conducted by Rutgers University researchers and the Education Law Center in Newark, N.J., ranks states and the District of Columbia on how fairly they fund public schools based on four interrelated "fairness indicators"—funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort and public school coverage.

“Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card” posits that fairness depends not only on a sufficient level of funding for all students, but also the provision of additional resources to districts where there are more students with greater needs.

The results show that many states do not fairly allocate education funding to address the needs of their most disadvantaged students, and the schools serving high numbers of those students.

Among the Report Card’s key findings are:

- Six states do relatively well on all four indicators (NJ, CT, MA, VT, IA and WY);
- Four states are below average on all the indicators (IL, LA, MO and NC);
- Several states have high levels of education spending but allocate less funding to higher poverty districts (e.g., NY, ME, NH, MI);
- Most states need improvement in at least one area, and many do poorly on the indicators most influenced by policy decisions – effort and funding distribution.

The study reports these findings for Illinois:

-Illinois received a grade "F" in funding fairness, one of only three states to receive this failing grade. The most recent data indicate that Illinois now has the second highest disparity of funding between high-poverty and low-poverty schools nationally.
-Illinois is one of only four states that fall below average on all four measures evaluated, placing it among "low-effort, regressive states... and ranking below average in terms of the overall level of funding provided and coverage." Illinois shares this ranking with Louisiana, Missouri and North Carolina. A state is considered "regressive" if a 30-percent-poverty district receives at least five percent less funding than a zero-percent-poverty district. In Illinois—one of only six states with a statistically significant "regressive" funding structure—districts with 30-percent poverty can expect to receive 21 percent less than a district with zero percent poverty.
-Illinois scored a "D" in "effort"—a measure based on the ratio of state spending on education to per capita gross domestic product.