Source: Hechinger Report
The 25 percent of school districts with the highest amounts of student poverty received 3.4 percent fewer funds per child than the 25 percent wealthiest districts during the 2014-15 school year. That’s a national funding gap of $449 per student. “It’s a temporary step backward,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, explaining that states ran out of money after the 2008 recession, allowing rich communities to spend more and curbing extra funds to poor districts. But with the economic recovery, many states are moving back toward funding schools more equitably, Roza said. “We’ve generally seen an enormous effort by states to raise the base for the poorest students,” Roza said. “Thirty to 40 years ago, in the poorest districts, you’d have 30 to 40 kids in a class and no extracurriculars. You don’t see that anymore.”