New Maps Detail District-Level Budgets for State and Federal Share
When it comes to school district budgets, the funding that
helps support the nation’s public schools comes from a combination of federal,
state and local dollars. Just as no two school districts are the same, neither
are their budgets, whether in terms of their funding priorities or—relevant to
this blog post—the proportion of the budget covered by federal and state
dollars. That is, some districts are more reliant on federal dollars than
others, while still more are disproportionately reliant on local dollars. Local
dollars are largely driven by property taxes, meaning that affluent communities
have more local dollars, making them less reliant on state dollars. Related,
because many state funding dollars are targeted to areas of need to help level
the playing field, poorer areas receive a larger share of state dollars.
Why is this relevant now? As the COVID pandemic sweeps the
nations, shuttering school districts across the nation, it is also bringing the
broader economy—and the revenue it generates at the state, local and federal
level—to a grinding halt. With most state revenues coming from income and sales
taxes—both in rapid decline with people being laid off and people spending
less—states are bracing for significant reductions in state funding levels.
Including those for education.
States have tough decisions to make in light of these budget
pressures, and there are two specific to education we want to highlight: they
have to decide how much to cut from education in general (HINT: education
should not be cut disproportionately; that is, when the cuts are in place,
education should still represent at least the same share of the overall budget
that it did before the cuts) and they have to decide which education programs
to cut (that is, the age-old question of whether they should cut equity-centric
programs or start with streams that are primarily in place to help level the
playing field). How states answer these questions will 100% impact schools, and
the intricacies were part of an article in
Chalkbeat last week:
- The major cause of the
looming school budget crisis: state tax revenue is cratering.
- Since high-poverty
districts are more reliant on state funds, they’re at risk of deeper
budget cuts.
- Because state dollars
are more at risk, the economic downturn could hit low-income students and
their schools the hardest.
The decisions made by policymakers will have real impacts on
communities, a reality that is true for both federal and state policy. Specific
to funding, it is both the overall amount of what is cut as well as the
specifics of which program are cut that will ultimately reveal the full impact
to individual communities.
In 2013, as the federal government acted to implement the
blunt budget cuts of sequestration, AASA shared a map detailing the hugely
inequitable impact of a cut that prioritized so-called ‘fairness’ by virtue of
being ‘equal’ by being one flat rate for all programs. The reality of the
‘across the board’ cuts was that some states and districts felt the cuts much
more acutely than others. Sure, the idea of ‘everyone take a 5% cut’ seems
fair, but the reality is far different: a 5% cut to federal funding when
federal dollars are just 10% of your budget is very different than a 5% cut to
federal funding when federal dollars are 50% of your budget. As I wrote
in 2013: “…it must be noted that the so‐called ‘across‐the‐board’ nature
of sequestration is anything but in schools. Each district has its own
operating budget which includes a share of federal education dollars. Through a
combination of factors including poverty, local/state budget capacity, and
state/local investment in education, the federal dollars represent a varying
‘share’ of the overall budget1 such that some districts will feel to allegedly
‘flat’ cut of 5.2 percent much more aggressively than other districts. That is,
relatively robust districts—where federal dollars represent less than 8 percent
of the overall budget—will be applying the sequester cuts to a smaller portion
of the overall budget than their higher‐ poverty districts, where federal
dollars can represent upwards of 50, 60 or 70 percent of the operating budget.
Five percent of 8 percent, while damaging, is much less harmful than 5 percent
of 60 percent. Low‐ wealth (higher‐poverty) districts generally have a larger
share of their funding coming from the federal level. The sequester cuts will
disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable students in the most vulnerable
districts, anything but ‘across‐the‐board.” Check out the map in that
report; it shows, at the district level, the share of each district’s budget
that came from federal dollars; it is a clear illustration of how cuts will
disproportionately impact different communities.
Which brings us to today’s post: We’ve updated the maps to
reflect each school district’s budget in terms of its reliance on state
dollars, as well as on federal dollars. Why? Well, we’ve already seen a
significant investment in schools via the CARES Act and can reasonably expect
additional investment via subsequent emergency funding packages. While the
statutes are very clear that large portions of the education funds are intended
for the local level—and we know that states will pass those dollars through to
the local level—we are very concerned that ultimately, states will make cuts to
state education funding, rendering the federal emergency dollars as back-stops
to state cuts, leaving school districts to feel no discernable difference from
the federal dollars. This shell game is not a case of crying wolf; it was a
well-documented reality under ARRA that state cuts to budgets in response to
the economic downturn resulted in local school districts feeling little to no
relief from the federal dollars intended to provide help.
Any federal emergency funding for school districts must both
include and enforce policy related to state maintenance of effort and state
‘supplement, not supplant’. This is NOT to say that states should be prohibited
from making budget cuts. To the contrary: unlike the federal government, state
and local budgets are often required to ‘balance’, meaning that in light of
precipitously declining revenues, they need to reduce expenditures (ie, make
cuts). What MUST happen, though, is that states must ensure that they do not
cut education disproportionately. That is, after the cuts are in place,
education funding must represent at least the same overall share of the state
budget that it did before the cuts were in place. The idea that states should
‘get a pass’ on investing in education because of significant funding pressures
is naïve, and a slap in the face to local schools: the same fiscal pressures
slowing state economies will also slow local economies. Giving states cart
blanche when it comes to education cuts leaves local school districts holding
the purse: states use the federal dollars to keep their budgets closer to
‘whole’ while locals are left grappling with both state and local cuts.
In addition to including and enforcing maintenance of effort and
supplement/supplant provisions, there are other
considerations the federal government could include (Scroll to the last
section).
These maps highlight—and allow
us to predict with some accuracy—which districts will be most impacted by state
cuts, especially if Congress fails to protect its COVID emergency response
dollars for education by holding states accountable for not disproportionately
cutting education within their budgets. Landing Page: School District Revenue &
Expenditure Patterns, FY 2017
About the map maker: Warren Glimpse/ProximityOne (wglimpse@proximityone.com) has
developed several national scope map views showing patterns of school district
FY 2017 (latest available on a national scale) revenues by source (federal,
state, local). These maps show the percent of state and federal revenue for FY
2017 by school district. The Web page http://proximityone.com/sdfa17.htm
features the map views with more detail. That page also includes an
interactive table where sources and uses of funds may be viewed/analyzed by
individual district, groups of districts or all districts. Data
are based on an annual survey of public elementary and secondary education
systems, mostly school districts, conducted by the Census Bureau under
sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Education. The survey covers all U.S.
school districts. These data are reported by school districts. They are not
estimates subject to estimation error. However, financial data reporting and
categorization differs from state to state. As a result, some data cells show
as zero while in fact the data for that cell is included in another category,
such as "Other." Data shown in these table were developed by merging
the Census-sourced "F-33" data with the Census-sourced 2017-18 school
year school district geographic reference/boundary file using the Federal
school district code. There is not a 1-to-1 match between these codes. Where
total revenue shows as 0 (228 districts) the F-33 financial data are not
available.