Fifty Different States, Fifty Different Issues

Rebecca Sibilia, then founder and CEO of EdBuild, told Dr. Rod Berger in 2017 why school funding in the United States is fifty separate state problems. A new section after the interview checks Sibilia’s points against federal figures for 2024 and explains how school funding works for families and board members.

Play video: CoffeED: Rebecca Sibilia (13 minutes 9 seconds)13:09

A CEO talks about the 50 different funding problems in US education

This interview is part of a series of discussions I conducted on the Financial Health of the U.S. Education System. The idea spawned from conversations I had with Jess Gartner, CEO, and founder of Allovue, a noted connector in the space bringing voices in financial management together. During the Future of Education Finance Summit, Gartner popularized the term #EdfinTech, and it has been gaining steam ever since.

Founder and CEO of EdBuild, Rebecca Sibilia

One of the most glaring issues, when you look at education funding for our K-12 public schools across the country, is local income disparity creating haves and have nots. With education funding mostly based on local tax revenue, it stands to reason that a student in an affluent suburb north of New York City is going to grow up with a vastly different educational experience than a student in a poor inner city district in the Bronx.

Rebecca Sibilia is Founder and CEO of EdBuild, a non-profit organization based in Washington DC that is focused on more equitable ways for states to fund local schools. As she points out, because of a couple of key supreme court decisions, we don’t have a national school funding problem to deal with; we have 50 independent problems, one in each state.

She explains the history of the legislation and politics the led us to the position we find ourselves in regarding education funding, including the notion that the education system is actually “flush with cash” but is simply mismanaged.

Finally, Rebecca says that EdBuild is trying to “better match up the accountability and the authority for the provision of education, which rests at a state level, with how schools are being funded to bring those two issues together.” Check out the interview above to hear how they are trying to accomplish this noble goal.

Interview Transcript

Dr. Berger: Rebecca, a lot of people, especially with the Trump transition in DC, are looking at what our education landscape is going to be and how it’s going to be impacting those that are in schools as practitioners, as students, as community members, and also those that are working to support the educational system at large.

We’ve been looking at the financial health of the US education system, and it seems like what you are doing with EdBuild is keenly tied to this area of focus.  Where are we in how we look at and examine the state of the financial health of the US education system?

Rebecca Sibilia: One of the things that I think doesn’t get enough attention, in terms of the education landscape as a whole, is the supreme court ruling in San Antonio V. Rodriguez. What the supreme court said in that case in the early 70s is that education is not a fundamental right that is guaranteed by the US Constitution. This, in essence, pushed almost all of the requirements down to the states, in terms of guaranteeing access to a great education for kids.

All of the funding policy related to how schools are resourced is largely driven by state by state basis. So answering the question of how the general fiscal health of our schools is doing, really requires 50 different answers.

DB: And does therein lie the problem? We’re battling with local control versus federal oversight. From your position, is there an answer that says “we can fix this if we do X?” I know, in doing research, looking at the fault lines in these different areas that you’re designating and carving out, if we’re to establish what these fault lines are, and how to shore them up, is it from a local perspective, or do we need the federal oversight?

RS: If you want a holistic fix throughout the country, then you need to revisit two really important supreme court cases, San Antonio V. Rodriguez, and a really understated one, Milliken V. Bradley. A lot of people don’t focus on Milliken, but we actually think that it had one of the broadest sweeping impacts on education to date. What Milliken basically said is that, if there is a school district order that is drawn anywhere for any reason, by the state, that the US Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to mandate desegregation across that school district order.

And so what in essence did, is give wide sweeping power to the states, to draw lines wherever they so chose. What we now see is that, in a lot of cases, those lines tend to be extremely segregating both a racial and a socioeconomic perspective.

If we want to see holistic change, we have to go back to the supreme court. But there are certainly things that states can do to smooth out the negative effects of school district orders.

States can move to a much more progressive way of funding schools – moving away from this reliance on local property taxes and toward a state-funded system. States can annually review their school orders to see whether or not there are drastic changes and differences between the socioeconomic status of kids.

We do that pretty regularly for electoral borders, why we don’t do it for school district borders is kind of beyond me.

And so there are a number of things that states can do, but again on in order to encourage states to do that, organizations like EdBuild have to go state by state to change those policies.

DB: Let’s talk a little bit about those alternative funding sources. There’s an ongoing argument about public-private partnerships in this country, and yet other countries are looking at ways to bring in private enterprise to public school communities. And, from my perspective, this is to great benefit to everybody who is involved.

Is there a reality that we need to come to grips with, that our children are marketed to on a daily basis, everywhere outside of school, in school, and with technology, and that there’s got to be a way to capitalize on that, in a thoughtful, systematic manner?

RS: One of the most of the promising areas is social impact bonds. We’ve seen a few of them come to the United States. The idea is that you have a number of product investors who will make a bet on something that will eventually bring savings to the state.

There is probably no other area where investment can yield significant long term outcomes than education. The problem is that usually states are issuing social impact bonds, but the states delegate a lot of authority for how schools are being funded at the local level. And so you have a mismatch, in some cases, between where a social impact bond could sit at the state level, versus who’s actually carrying out the provision of education, which is largely the locals.

What you’re looking at in an education system is essentially 16,000 different decision makers, that is the number of school districts that we have in the US.

DB: I don’t know if that’s troubling more as a parent or as someone who’s working in education. How should we understand it from the community member perspective? If you’re at a local community event or picnic, or after school event and someone’s willing to know about what you do at EdBuild,  how do you communicate it in a way that is not daunting?

I think for those of us in the industry, it is a bit daunting to think about thousands and thousands of decision makers, and local versus state and federal control, and all of the provisions or the hurdles that prevent innovators from wanting even to work or interact with the education sector.

RS: The first thing I try to do is to establish to folks the baseline — that the federal government actually does not have a lot of oversight as it relates to school district policies. Largely, states are making decisions on most of their education policy themselves. And that is being carried out at the local level. So the real line of accountability is with the state, but the state is allowing the locals to resource their schools however they’d like.

What EdBuild is trying to do is better match up the accountability and the authority for the provision of education, which rests at a state level, with how schools are being funded to bring those two issues together. But in terms of explaining this to a layperson, the notion is that for a long time, we have funded schools based on the local wealth of the community or the resources that were in the school — the teacher, the system, the computer, the pencil, the apple, everything else. What we’re looking to do is to move funding systems for the needs of students rather than the resources and the wealth of the community. And that doesn’t take a lot of work; it takes a lot of political capital at the state level.

DB: Yeah and that’s the part that I don’t think a lot of folks think that are in the industry, is just how political education is. When you first started in your career, was that eye-opening as to how political it is in the industry?

RS: What’s actually interesting about education is that everyone has had experienced in the education system. Therefore, everyone has an opinion on whether or not schools are working. One of the things that I found throughout the course of my time is that education is not necessarily motivating people at the ballot box.

You don’t often see a lot of local elected officials campaigning on education priorities. They’ll campaign on what I think are normal kind of political platforms. Education very rarely plays a significant role there. Where it does play a role is in funding. You’ll hear a lot of local officials talk about the level of funding in schools. That means that folks have to give up the notion that they will be locally funding their schools, which is almost impossible. Where it ends up really at the end of the day is a game of winners and losers.

You’ll see a lot of folks vote across party lines on education funding, depending on whether or not it is going to benefit their school and their constituents. So it is one of the areas where it’s overly political, but it’s political in a way that we normally don’t define our state and local politics. It is not a party-driven issue, education funding; this is a game of winners and losers.

DB: Speaking of that, President Trump talked about the education sector being flushed with cash but obviously mismanaged. Is that accurate from your perspective? I think that there’s this notion that we spend more per pupil than any other western country but that we obviously struggle in the results around achievement. Are we flushed with cash in education?

RS: No. I think if you would go to a lot of states and talk to a lot of teachers, who are incredibly underpaid, and they would absolutely tell you that their classrooms are not well resourced, that they are underpaid, and we are absolutely not a system that is flushed with cash.

So a couple of reasons why this is important. First, when we report education funding statistics, we don’t cost adjust. What happens is $12,000, $14,000, $15,000 in Connecticut is actually only worth let’s say $10,000. And so when we come up with these aggregate averages across the US, we’re not taking into consideration the fact that there are a number of northeastern states that are just completely blowing that average because we’re not cost adjusting for the costs there. What we found is that once we actually cost adjust, that number drops significantly.

The second thing that I would make a note of is that we do a lot of talking about the absolute investment in education. So two things about those OECD numbers, which are what’s normally reported. The first is that in some cases, they include both higher ed and K-12 education. You have to pull those two apart. The US spends a lot more on higher education than other countries, and so that’s something that skews the numbers in some cases.

But the other number that is important is the table that’s published in the book right after the talking point. And that table is what percent of our GDP are we actually investing in education. And when you look at that number, what you’ll find is that the US runs right about middle for all industrialized countries in terms of the amount of our wealth we are investing in our education system.

So it’s slightly misleading just to look at the numbers and absolutes. You have to cost adjust; you have to make sure that you’re taking into consideration wild variations in economies. But when you’re looking at a multi-national level, taking into consideration the ability of a country to pay, may be even more important than its absolute investment.

DB: So it’s about providing context and building that context into the conversation.

I want people to know that you can learn more about Rebecca at edbuild.org. You’re doing some really groundbreaking work there. And obviously, when you’re talking about 50 different states and systems within, we need people and professionals like yourself to go out and have those conversations that are obviously quite complex and unwieldy at best.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post

How school funding works in 2026: why it differs by state and what the latest figures show

Rebecca Sibilia’s interview above, recorded in 2017 while Sibilia led EdBuild, explains why there is no single national answer to how school funding works. Sibilia’s argument is that the United States has fifty separate funding systems, shaped by two Supreme Court decisions and by state decisions about local property taxes and district boundaries. This section checks that argument against federal data released in 2025 and 2026 and gives families and board members a way to read their own district’s budget.

The two court decisions behind the 50-state system

Sibilia names San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley. In Rodriguez, decided on March 21, 1973, the Supreme Court held that Texas’s school-financing system did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, and that education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution. In Milliken, decided on July 25, 1974, the Court held that a federal court cannot order a desegregation remedy that crosses district lines unless there has been a constitutional violation within one district that produces a significant segregative effect in another. Sibilia’s reading is that these rulings left both funding and the drawing of district lines to the states. The court texts support the narrower legal points, while Sibilia’s broader claim about their effect on segregation by district line is an interpretation, and readers can weigh it as such.

Who pays: the current split

The most recent national figures from the Census Bureau’s fiscal year 2024 school finance release show total public school revenue of $994.9 billion. States supplied 45.2 percent, local sources 43.2 percent and the federal government 11.6 percent, which fell 4.4 percent from the year before. Property taxes made up 63.3 percent of local revenue in that release. These shares support Sibilia’s point that the federal government plays a limited role in paying for schools, and that states and localities carry most of the cost.

The share each state pays differs a great deal. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported for 2020-21 that state governments supplied 88 percent of public school revenue in Hawaii and Vermont but only 30 percent in Missouri and 31 percent in New Hampshire and Nebraska. In New Hampshire, 62 percent of revenue was local and 61 percent of total revenue came from property taxes, compared with essentially none in Hawaii. Sibilia’s argument is that where the local share is large, local wealth sets what a district can raise, which is the source of the gaps in school funding that Sibilia describes.

Per-pupil spending and the cost adjustment

The Census Bureau reports that national current spending per pupil was $17,619 in fiscal year 2024, up 6.6 percent from $16,526 in 2023. By state, it ranged from $31,918 in New York and $31,529 in the District of Columbia down to $11,060 in Idaho and $11,347 in Utah.

Sibilia warns that national averages mislead unless costs are adjusted, since $15,000 in Connecticut buys less than the same amount elsewhere. The Census release makes the same caution in its own words: its figures are not adjusted for inflation or for cost-of-living differences between areas. A gap of about $20,000 per pupil between New York and Idaho therefore overstates the difference in what a classroom has to work with, though by how much cannot be read from these tables. For that reason, a comparison of two states or districts should use a cost-adjusted measure where one is available.

Sibilia’s second point, that the United States ranks near the middle of industrialized countries when spending is measured against national wealth, was not rechecked here, because the sources used for this section cover only domestic data.

How to read your own district’s budget

1. Find the split between local, state and federal revenue in the district’s annual budget. Compare it with the national shares of 43, 45 and 12 percent above.
2. Ask what share of local revenue comes from property taxes, and what happens to the budget when property values or tax limits change.
3. Look at per-pupil spending alongside local costs, and ask whether the figure was adjusted. A raw dollar comparison with another state tells little.
4. Ask when the state last reviewed its funding formula and whether it accounts for students who cost more to educate, such as English learners and students with disabilities.

Further Reading

1. WMCAction News 5 – Mississippi one of six states that doesn’t provide for ELL
2. The Clarion Ledger – Senate budget officer joins EdBuild
3. Sun Herald – New formula could cut funds, increase property-tax in some Coast districts

Related reading

• Leaders to Meet Over School Finances

More on Education Policy and Government