Thirty-five states have funding formulas that attempt to target low-income students. To understand how well these formulas achieve that goal, we measured whether poor students tend to be enrolled in districts with higher or lower per-student funding levels than nonpoor students.

A positive difference indicates that a state spends more on educating poor students. Scroll to explore each funding source.

At the local level, funding is often regressive; on average, districts with mostly nonpoor students tend to have more money to spend than districts that have many poor students. This is to be expected because local funding levels are often a reflection of school district demographics. A district with a large population of nonpoor students, for example, will be able to raise more in property taxes because the families paying those taxes have greater property wealth. In high-poverty districts, the opposite is true.

But the disparities in local funding between districts that poor and nonpoor students attend vary widely. In Connecticut and New Jersey, nonpoor students are enrolled in districts that receive over $4,000 more in local funding than their poor counterparts. On the other end of the spectrum, Utah and Arkansas have slightly progressive distributions of local funding.

State government spending tends to correct for inequitable local spending—or at least attempts to. The states with the most regressive local government spending are, generally speaking, the ones with the most progressive state government spending. In some cases, such as in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Ohio, this is because courts have ordered the states to devise more progressive funding systems.

The addition of progressive state government funding balances regressive local funding to varying degrees across states. For example, New Jersey more than balances local funding, so that total state and local funding is progressive. All told, in nearly half of the states, students from low-income families receive less state and local funding, on average, than their nonpoor counterparts.

The third source of revenue—the federal government—shifts that balance through a set of funding streams that are largely targeted based on students' incomes. For example, Title I, the largest federal funding program, directs dollars to low-income students, and the US Department of Agriculture administers child-nutrition programs for students from low-income families.

Fourteen states that are regressive when looking only at state and local funding become progressive with the addition of federal dollars. Considering federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids, though only a few—Alaska, Ohio, and South Dakota—are highly progressive. A handful remain weakly regressive even after all funding sources are combined.