Afton Partners

“The federal government must take bold action to address inequitable funding in our nation’s public schools.” So begins a list of recommendations released Thursday by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress in 1957 to investigate civil rights complaints. Thursday’s report comes after a lengthy investigation into how America’s schools are funded and why so many that serve poor and minority students aren’t getting the resources they say they need.

Some districts are addressing this problem in creative ways. Portland Public Schools in Oregon, for example, redistributes a portion of parent donations through an equity fund. Other districts, like Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, limit how parent donations can be spent. In theory, this puts the responsibility on the district to provide schools with equitable core resources, particularly around staffing. Neither policy appears to significantly affect the level of parent contributions. But they have not always gone over well, with some more affluent communities advocating to keep donations in their own schools.

In all, 28.5 percent of America’s schools are rural, and 48 percent of those rural students are from low-income families, the report said. Those are significant numbers, and so are these — we don’t spend nearly as much money on rural schools as we do in other areas. Only 17 percent of education funding goes to rural schools. On average, $6,067 is spent per year on each student in rural schools. Compare that to the national average of $11,841 spent per student each year.