Or: how one of the richest states in the country managed to fund its whitest school districts at twice what they need and its Black and Hispanic districts at less than three-quarters.

Connecticut likes to think of itself as an education state. High test score averages, leafy suburbs, famous prep schools, Yale. And on average, sure. But I’ve spent a lot of years on this blog pointing out that averages are where inequality goes to hide.

In CCJEF v. Rell, a trial judge found in 2016 that Connecticut’s school funding system was irrational. In January 2018, a divided 4–3 Connecticut Supreme Court reversed that ruling, holding that the state had met its minimal constitutional obligation. Read charitably, the decision handed school funding back to the legislature. Read the way Connecticut lawmakers apparently read it, it was a dare: how unequal can we make this before anybody stops us?

Challenge accepted.

To be fair to the legislature, it had a head start. By the measures I use below, Connecticut already had the largest racial school funding gap in the country in 2009, and it has held that title every year I can measure. But once the court took itself off the field, lawmakers didn’t just defend the title. They ran up the score. From 2018 to 2024, funding adequacy in the districts serving Connecticut’s most Black and Hispanic fifth of students fell from 78% to 73% of what it would cost to reach national-average outcomes, and from 52% to 49% of what it would cost to reach Massachusetts-average outcomes. The share of Black students attending districts that spend less than it would cost to reach Massachusetts-average outcomes rose from 75% to 82%; for Latino students, from 71% to 77%. And the state funding system went from the 11th most regressive in the nation to the 4th.

In 2021, Robert Cotto, Preston Green and I wrote in the CT Mirror that it was time to fix Connecticut school finance (I laid out the case here too: Fixing Connecticut School Finance: The Time is Now), in three steps: study what it would actually cost to give every child an equal shot at robust outcomes, recalibrate the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula to hit those cost targets, and fund it. Five years later, the state has taken none of those steps. In our most recent national report, The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, Connecticut ranked 46th of 47 states on equal educational opportunity. In April, Governor Lamont created a commission to reevaluate education funding. Consider this a contribution to its homework. Here, using the same cost model and indicators from my recent red state, blue state posts, is how Connecticut lawmakers took the court’s pass and built the most racially unequal school funding system in the country.

Round 1: Funding by race

Start with the National Education Cost Model. For every district, it estimates what it would cost to get that district’s kids to national average outcomes, given who they are and where they live. Divide what the district actually spends by that cost, and you get percent of adequate. At 100%, the money covers the cost of average outcomes. Not elite outcomes. Average.

National average is a low bar for a state that likes to compare itself to Massachusetts. So the model also estimates what it would cost each district to reach Massachusetts-average outcomes, about one and a half times the national-average cost. I report both throughout: the national standard first, and the Massachusetts standard (“MA”) alongside it. Spoiler: raising the bar doesn’t change the rankings. It just makes the hole a lot deeper.

Now sort Connecticut’s students into five equal groups, from those attending the districts with the smallest shares of Black and Hispanic students to those attending districts with the largest.

In 2024, the fifth of Connecticut students in the whitest districts (about 10% Black and Hispanic) attended schools funded at 201% of adequate (134% of the MA standard), about $13,500 per pupil more than the cost of national average outcomes. The fifth in the most Black and Hispanic districts (83% Black and Hispanic) attended schools funded at 73% (49% of the MA standard), about $8,900 per pupil short. That’s a gap of 128 percentage points (86 points against the MA standard). Against the Massachusetts standard, the whitest fifth is still about $6,900 per pupil ahead, while the most Black and Hispanic fifth is about $25,000 per pupil short. Put differently, the whitest districts sit about $22,400 per pupil further ahead of where they need to be than the most Black and Hispanic districts against the national standard, and about $31,900 further ahead against the Massachusetts standard.

How does that compare? I ran the same calculation for every state with enough districts to do it.

Connecticut is first under either standard, and it isn’t close. New York is a distant second at 92 points (62 against the MA standard, vs. Connecticut’s 86). Notice who else is up there: New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. These are mostly wealthy northeastern states with small, fragmented districts drawn along lines of race and class, where the affluent towns spend like private schools. But Connecticut takes it to a level of its own.

Look at it from the student’s side. Just over half of Connecticut’s Black and Hispanic students, about 99,000 kids, attend districts funded below national adequacy. For all other students, it’s 9%. Against the Massachusetts standard, it’s 78% of Black and Hispanic students (about 153,000 kids) vs. 26% of everyone else. The typical Black or Hispanic student in Connecticut attends a district funded at 99% of adequate (66% of the MA standard). The typical student who isn’t Black or Hispanic attends one funded at 158% (105% of the MA standard). That 59-point difference in exposure is also the largest in the country.

Round 2: Names, not quintiles

Quintiles are abstractions. Here’s what it looks like district by district.

Westport spends about $8,900 more per pupil than Bridgeport. Bridgeport’s kids, by the cost model’s estimate, need nearly three times as much to reach the same modest goal. So Westport spends more, needs less, and ends up funded at 235% of adequate while Bridgeport sits at 61%. They are about 20 minutes apart on I-95. Bridgeport, by itself, is about $13,200 per pupil short of adequate. So is Hartford. Against the Massachusetts standard, Westport is at 157% and Bridgeport at 41%, about $30,200 per pupil short. Hartford is about $32,900 short.

Thirteen Connecticut districts were funded below adequate in 2024. Together they serve about 124,000 students and fall about $931 million a year short. Twelve of the thirteen are majority Black and Hispanic. (The thirteenth is tiny Sprague, with fewer than 300 students.) Four of Connecticut’s five largest cities are on the list. (Stamford, at 122% of adequate, is the exception.) Raise the bar to Massachusetts and 39 districts fall short, serving about 226,000 students, nearly half the state, by about $3.4 billion a year. That includes all eight of Connecticut’s largest districts, Stamford (82%) among them. Twenty-two of the 39 are majority Black and Hispanic.

Round 3: It didn’t have to be this way

Here’s the part that should bother Connecticut most. In 2009, by this same measure, no Connecticut district was funded below adequate. Hartford was at 133%. Bridgeport was at 104%. The most Black and Hispanic fifth of students was at 115%. Unequal, yes, but everyone was above the line. Even against the Massachusetts standard, Hartford was at 89%, Bridgeport at 70%, and 16 districts fell short.

Fifteen years later, Hartford is at 67%, Bridgeport at 61%, and 13 districts serving a quarter of the state’s students are below adequate. Against the Massachusetts standard, Hartford is at 45%, Bridgeport at 41%, and the count of districts falling short went from 16 to 39. Meanwhile the dollar gap between the whitest and most Black and Hispanic fifths of students more than doubled in real terms, from about $9,600 per pupil in 2009 (in 2024 dollars) to about $22,400 in 2024 against the national standard, and from about $15,200 to about $31,900 against the Massachusetts standard.

How? Look at how state and local revenue lines up with poverty.

Connecticut wasn’t always like this. Through the 1990s and 2000s its state and local revenue actually tilted toward higher-poverty districts. At the peak, in 2000, a district with 30% child poverty received about 21% more per pupil than a district with none, and Connecticut stayed on the progressive side, give or take a year, until about 2013. Since then it has slid almost every year. By 2024 that same high-poverty district received about 18% less, making Connecticut the fourth most regressive school funding system in the country. The median state moved the other way. (I walked through this slide in more detail back in May: The collapse of fairness in Connecticut school funding.)

For context, I’ve spent years using Illinois and Pennsylvania as my go-to examples of regressive school finance. Both were below 1.0 for nearly this entire period. Both have since improved: Illinois adopted its Evidence-Based Funding formula in 2017, and a Pennsylvania court struck down that state’s system in 2023. In 2024 Illinois sat at 0.92 and Pennsylvania at 0.86. Connecticut, at 0.82, is now more regressive than both.

This is what happens when a state leans on local property wealth and lets its aid formula drift. The rich towns raise more locally, as rich towns always will. The state aid that is supposed to offset that doesn’t keep up. The slide started before the court ruled. The ruling just removed the last referee who might have stopped it. Everyone tells themselves the formula is being phased in.

A caveat before anyone holds up Illinois as the model for Connecticut. Illinois’s Evidence-Based Funding formula is better than the system it replaced, and the trend lines here show it. But as I explained in When Evidence Based Isn’t, it is not what it claims to be. Its “adequacy targets” come from consultant-built prototype schools, not from any measured relationship between spending and outcomes. They differ by only about 22% between the state’s lowest- and highest-poverty districts, when getting high-poverty districts to common outcomes typically takes two to three times as much. They overstate what the most affluent suburbs need and understate what Chicago and other high-poverty districts need. That is a political compromise dressed up as evidence: modest increases spread across lots of constituents, rather than what kids in high-need districts actually need. It shows in the numbers above. Eight years into EBF, Illinois’s highest-poverty fifth of students is still funded at only 79% of the cost of national-average outcomes and 53% of the Massachusetts standard. So the lesson for Connecticut’s commission isn’t “copy Illinois.” It’s “don’t let consultants pre-compromise the cost targets.” Do an actual cost study, calibrated to an actual outcome goal.

Same story by poverty

Sort Connecticut’s students by child poverty instead of race and you get nearly the same picture, because in Connecticut those are nearly the same districts. The lowest-poverty fifth is funded at 195% of adequate (130% of the MA standard); the highest-poverty fifth at 73% (49%). That 122-point gap (82 points against the MA standard) is the second largest in the country under either standard, behind only New York.

Connecticut vs. Illinois and Pennsylvania

So how does Connecticut compare with my usual suspects over time? First, the gap between each state’s lowest- and highest-poverty fifths of students.

Connecticut’s poverty gap narrowed a bit, from 136 points to 122, but only because both ends fell, and the bottom fell through the floor: its highest-poverty districts went from 114% of adequate to 73%. Pennsylvania’s gap was actually larger than Connecticut’s in 2009 (139 points) and has narrowed to 103, though its poorest districts were underfunded then and still are (62%). Illinois narrowed its gap the most, from 99 points to 74, with its highest-poverty districts rising from 70% to 79%. Connecticut now has the widest poverty gap of the three. Against the Massachusetts standard (the purple labels), the gaps run 81 points in Connecticut, 69 in Pennsylvania and 50 in Illinois, and the highest-poverty fifth falls far short everywhere: 49% in Connecticut, 41% in Pennsylvania and 53% in Illinois. The difference is that Connecticut’s lowest-poverty fifth is at 130% of the MA standard, while Illinois’s is at 102%.

Now by race.

Not close. Connecticut’s gap between its least and most Black and Latino fifths of students was 131 points in 2009 and 128 in 2024. Pennsylvania’s is 67 points. Illinois’s is 43, down from 61. In Illinois and Pennsylvania the whitest districts are funded at 122% to 131% of adequate. In Connecticut, 201%. Against the Massachusetts standard, the gaps are 86 points in Connecticut, 45 in Pennsylvania and 29 in Illinois. The whitest districts in Illinois and Pennsylvania don’t even reach the Massachusetts standard (82% and 87%). Connecticut’s are at 134%.

Raise the bar to Massachusetts

I’ve been reporting both standards. Here’s the one that matters most for Connecticut. As I explained in my recent brief on Connecticut’s equal educational opportunity problem, the state’s real peers are Massachusetts and New Jersey, and Connecticut has been losing ground to both since the early 2010s. So who attends a district that spends less than it would cost to reach Massachusetts-average outcomes? (The dashed lines and inner bars in the chart below show the national standard.)

In 2024, 82% of Connecticut’s Black students and 77% of its Latino students attended districts spending less than it would cost to reach Massachusetts-average outcomes. For white students, 23%. In 2009 those figures were 62%, 64% and 9%. Against the national standard, it’s 54% of Black students, 49% of Latino students and 7% of white students, up from essentially zero for all three in 2009.

In one sense Illinois and Pennsylvania look worse: most of their white students fall short too (81% and 75%), because those states spend less overall. Connecticut’s distinction is the gap. Its white students mostly attend districts that can reach the Massachusetts bar; its Black and Latino students mostly do not. That’s a 53- to 59-point racial gap in who gets a real shot at the Massachusetts standard, compared with 16 to 19 points in Pennsylvania and 12 to 16 in Illinois. Against the national standard the racial gap is 42 to 47 points in Connecticut, 39 to 56 in Pennsylvania and 31 to 48 in Illinois. Connecticut’s white students are the least likely in the three states to fall short of either standard (7% national, 23% MA), compared with 15% and 75% in Pennsylvania and 34% and 81% in Illinois.

And the outcomes?

As I’m fond of saying, money isn’t everything, but you can’t do much of anything without it. Connecticut’s 8th-grade NAEP math gap between low-income and other students was 37 points in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, the third largest in the nation. Connecticut posts nice statewide averages because it has a lot of very well-off kids in very well-funded schools. The averages are doing exactly what averages do.

Courts, formulas and good intentions

None of this is a secret in Connecticut. In Sheff v. O’Neill (1996), the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the racial and ethnic isolation of Hartford’s schoolchildren violated the state constitution. Three decades of magnet schools and interdistrict choice followed, which helped some kids and left the underlying finance system intact. Then came CCJEF, where the same court decided that “minimal” was good enough. By that standard, I suppose Bridgeport at 61% of adequate (41% of the Massachusetts standard) is just fine. Good to know. Lawmakers certainly seem to think so.

To its credit, the legislature in 2023 accelerated the phase-in of its Education Cost Sharing formula, with underfunded towns reaching full formula funding in FY2026, after the 2024 data shown here. That’s worth watching. But “full funding” of a formula is only as good as the formula’s targets, and nearly a billion dollars a year (about $3.4 billion against the Massachusetts standard) is a big hole to fill with a phase-in. I’ll update when the 2026 data come in.

Governor Lamont’s commission should start where we started in 2021. Commission a rigorous, independent study of what it costs for every Connecticut child to reach a robust common standard, in 2027. Use it to overhaul or replace ECS in the 2028 session. Begin phasing in the new formula by fall 2028. Then fund it. It has now been 12 years since I first laid out the plight of Connecticut’s majority-Hispanic districts in a report for the Center for American Progress. A whole cohort of kids has gone from first grade to graduation since then.

There’s also a deeper problem that more state aid alone doesn’t fix. As I’ve written elsewhere (Baker, 2025), racial isolation itself raises the cost of providing equal educational opportunity. Connecticut has sorted its students sharply by race along the lines of its 169 towns. Then it funded the isolated districts least.

The bottom line

• Connecticut has the largest racial school funding gap in the nation. Its whitest fifth of students attend districts funded at 201% of adequate; its most Black and Hispanic fifth at 73%. Against the Massachusetts standard: 134% vs. 49%. First in the nation either way.
• Half of Connecticut’s Black and Hispanic students attend underfunded districts. For other students, it’s 9%. Against the Massachusetts standard: 78% vs. 26%.
• Thirteen districts, 124,000 students, about $931 million a year short, and 12 of the 13 are majority Black and Hispanic. Against the Massachusetts standard: 39 districts, 226,000 students, about $3.4 billion short.
• It got worse. In 2009 no Connecticut district was below national adequacy and 16 were below the Massachusetts standard. In 2024: 13 and 39. The real dollar gap between the whitest and most Black and Hispanic districts has roughly doubled under either standard.
• The system went regressive. From one of the more progressive states in the early 2000s to the fourth most regressive in 2024, now worse than Illinois and Pennsylvania.
• Against a Massachusetts bar, 82% of Black and 77% of Latino students attend districts that fall short, against 23% of white students. (National standard: 54%, 49% and 7%.)
• Challenge accepted. The state Supreme Court let Connecticut lawmakers off the hook in 2018. They used the freedom to make things worse for the kids the case was about. If you want one state to show what educational inequality looks like when a wealthy state chooses not to fix it, it’s Connecticut.

Data notes

All finance and adequacy measures come from the School Finance Indicators Database. Adequacy is district current spending per pupil divided by the National Education Cost Model’s estimated cost of national average outcomes (2024 release), aggregated as total spending over total cost (enrollment-weighted). The Massachusetts standard uses the NECM’s cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes, which in this release is a constant 1.4965 times the cost of national-average outcomes in every district. So rankings and ratios between groups are the same under both standards, but percentage-point gaps, counts of districts falling short and dollar shortfalls differ. Race groups divide each state’s students into five equal-sized groups by the combined Black and Hispanic share of their district’s enrollment (NCES Common Core of Data); poverty groups do the same by Census SAIPE child poverty. “Exposure” figures weight each district by its number of Black and Hispanic students, or other students. State rankings include 49 states with enough districts to form groups. Real-dollar comparisons use the CPI-U. Funding progressiveness is the SFID ratio of predicted state and local revenue per pupil at 30% vs. 0% child poverty. NAEP gaps compare students eligible and not eligible for subsidized meals. Shares of white, Black and Latino students below each standard use district enrollment by race (white, Black, Hispanic/Latino) from the NCES Common Core of Data via the Urban Institute Education Data Portal.

Sources

• School Finance Indicators Database: state panel and NECM district file (data behind all figures)
• Baker, B. D. (2025). How and why racial isolation affects education costs and the provision of equal educational opportunity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(55).
• Baker, B. D., Weber, M., & Srikanth, A. (2021). Informing federal school finance policy with empirical evidence. Journal of Education Finance, 47(1), 1–25.
• Baker, B. D. (2026). Connecticut’s Equal Educational Opportunity Problem. School Finance 101 policy brief.
• Baker, B. D., Cotto, R., & Green, P. (2021). Now is the time to fix Connecticut school finance. CT Mirror.
• Urban Institute, Education Data Portal (NCES Common Core of Data, district enrollment by race).
• Sheff v. O’Neill, 238 Conn. 1 (1996).
• Connecticut Supreme Court deals severe blow to education justice, Education Law Center, January 2018 (on CCJEF v. Rell).
• Connecticut State Department of Education, Education Cost Sharing and Choice Grant Legislative Update, FY2024 and FY2025.
• The Red State Miracle That Wasn’t and Red State, Blue State, Round Two, schoolfinance101.

Or: two states that pay for public schools, two states that would rather pay for Cave Creek’s private school tuition, and a modest proposal for anyone trying to decide where to raise a kid.

In my last round of this, I lined up the two biggest blue states against the two biggest red states. This time let’s give the voucher crowd the matchup they’ve been begging for. In one corner, New Jersey and Massachusetts, the bloated, overtaxed, union-captured, “throwing money at the problem” hellscapes of the Northeast. You’ve read the op-eds. In the other corner, Arizona and Florida, the shining cities on the hill of “education freedom,” the two states that have gone furthest in turning public school money into private school coupons. Arizona went universal in 2022. Florida followed in 2023. Surely this is where the free market finally delivers.

Same yardstick as always: the National Education Cost Model for adequacy, the Education Comparable Wage Index for spending, state and local school spending relative to the economy for effort, and NAEP for outcomes, 2009 through 2024. Then a look at where the voucher money is going, and where it might have done more good.

Round 1: Adequacy

This isn’t close. It isn’t even in the same zip code (and as we’ll see, zip codes matter a lot in Arizona). Even the highest-poverty districts in New Jersey and Massachusetts are funded above the cost of national average outcomes, at 110% and 109%. In Arizona and Florida, the highest-poverty districts sit at 64% and 63%. Ninety-eight percent of students in both red states attend districts funded below adequate levels. In New Jersey and Massachusetts it’s 11% and 12%. But sure, tell me again about the Northeast’s efficiency problem.

Now, to be fair, New Jersey and Massachusetts slipped too. Both started the period well above adequate everywhere and have drifted down toward the line. But the floor in the blue states is above the ceiling in the red ones.

Round 2: Spending and effort

Adjusted for labor costs, New Jersey and Massachusetts each spent about $22,500 per pupil in 2024, up 12% and 16% since 2009. Arizona spent $12,445 (up 3%) and Florida $13,489 (down 3%). The U.S. figure was $17,122. That’s a gap of roughly $9,000 to $10,000 per child, every year, in teacher time the blue states can buy and the red states can’t. Turns out you can’t freedom your way into a chemistry teacher.

Here’s where nobody looks great. Effort fell in all four states. New Jersey went from 5.3% of GDP to 4.8%, still by far the highest of the four. Massachusetts fell from 3.6% to 2.8%, which should worry folks in Boston more than it seems to. But Arizona (3.2% to 2.0%) and Florida (3.2% to 2.2%) fell furthest and landed lowest. By 2024 Arizona ranked second-lowest in the country on this measure, and Florida third-lowest. And that’s before most of the voucher bills came due.

Round 3: Outcomes

Now, unlike the people who write those op-eds, I’m going to show you the inconvenient numbers too. This round is not a blowout on trends. Massachusetts lost 15 points in 8th-grade math, more than any of the other three. Arizona lost the least in both subjects. Credit where it’s due? Not so fast.

As I’ve been pointing out since at least the great Mis-NAEP-ery of 2013, NAEP gains and losses are highly correlated with where you start. It’s harder to gain, and easier to lose, when you’re already scoring high. It’s easier to gain, and harder to lose, when you’re scoring low. Across the 50 states and D.C., a state’s 2009 8th-grade math score correlates at −0.63 with its change through 2024 (−0.68 in reading). Start 10 points higher and you can expect to lose about 4 more points in math and 5 more in reading. So the fair comparison is against what each state’s starting point predicts. Massachusetts lost 15 points in math, but a state starting at 299 would be expected to lose about 17. New Jersey beat its expected change by about 3 points in math and 4.5 in reading; Massachusetts by about 1 in math and 6 in reading. Arizona landed right about where its low starting point predicted, within half a point in both subjects. Florida did worse than its starting point predicted, by about 3.5 points in math and 4.5 in reading. So Arizona’s “smallest loss” is mostly the luck of starting low. And Florida, which also started low, couldn’t even manage that.

But levels matter. In 2024 New Jersey and Massachusetts still scored 12 to 16 points higher in 8th-grade math than Arizona and Florida, and 12 to 15 points higher in reading. Florida’s 8th-grade reading average fell 12 points, from 264 to 253, landing below Arizona. The Florida Reading Miracle™ appears to have been recalled by the manufacturer.

And a caution I’ll repeat until I’m blue in the face: NAEP 2024 came only a year or two after these states went universal. Nothing here tells you what vouchers did to test scores. For that, we have other research. Lots of it.

Where the voucher money goes

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program had about 97,000 students by late 2025, and the governor’s office projected ESA spending would hit about $1 billion in the fiscal year that began July 2025. Florida’s voucher programs cost about $3.9 billion in state funds in 2024–25, about 23% of the state’s public education funding, up from 12% three years earlier.

So who’s getting it?

• Mostly kids who were already in private school. In Florida, 69% of the roughly 123,000 new voucher students in fall 2023 were already enrolled in private school, per Step Up for Students’ own numbers. Only 13% came from public schools. In Arizona, the state’s own superintendent says 80% of new recipients were already in private school or homeschooling when the program expanded. Josh Cowen’s review of nine states finds about 70% of voucher users had never attended public school. That’s not expanding choice. That’s a coupon for a purchase families had already made. Imagine a “school choice” program where the main choice being subsidized is the one people made before the program existed.
• Disproportionately higher-income families. An Associated Press analysis of Arizona ZIP code data found about 11% of school-age children in high-income ZIP codes use ESAs, against about 4% in low-income ZIP codes. Jennifer Jennings’ analysis of Arizona’s second year found the highest take-up in some of the state’s wealthiest districts, about 13% in Cave Creek, 12% in Scottsdale and 10% in Catalina Foothills, places with plenty of highly rated public schools. She calls it a Matthew effect: to those who have, more shall be given. Cave Creek thanks you, Arizona taxpayers. In Florida, once the 2023 law lifted income limits, 56% of new private-school voucher recipients came from households above 185% of the poverty line or didn’t report income, including 27% above 400% of poverty or unreported.
• Higher tuition. When you hand families a few thousand dollars earmarked for private school, private schools notice. The Hechinger Report found that of 55 Arizona private schools that posted rates, nearly all raised prices after 2022, about half by 10% or more in at least some grades, against inflation of about 6%. Nationally, Douglas Harris and Gabriel Olivier find private school tuition rose 5% to 10% more in states that expanded vouchers than in states that didn’t, with the largest increases at lower-priced, non-religious schools. Some share of every voucher dollar simply evaporates into higher sticker prices. The free market works! Just not for you.

And the kids who do switch?

This is where I’d point you to Josh Cowen’s work, including his recent book The Privateers (Harvard Education Press, 2024). Cowen spent two decades evaluating voucher programs, including as part of the official evaluation team for Milwaukee’s voucher program, and he’s now firmly opposed. The reason is the evidence. The large statewide programs studied in the last decade, in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., have produced academic losses for students who used vouchers to leave public schools. In Louisiana, Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak and Walters found math scores fell by about 0.4 standard deviations after one year. Cowen notes these losses rival or exceed what we saw after Hurricane Katrina and during COVID. Add high attrition among the most disadvantaged voucher users and frequent private school closures (41% of participating schools in Milwaukee eventually closed), and you have a policy that’s costly, regressive and, on the evidence, educationally harmful for the kids it claims to rescue. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

What that money could have done

Here’s the question I actually care about. What if Arizona and Florida had put that money into the high-poverty public districts the cost model says are most underfunded?

Take the districts serving the higher-poverty half of each state’s public school students. In 2024 those districts in Arizona were about $2.8 billion short of what the cost model says it would take to reach national average outcomes. Arizona’s ESA program now costs about a billion dollars a year, or roughly 36% of that gap. In Florida the shortfall in the higher-poverty half was about $8.3 billion, and voucher spending of $3.9 billion would cover nearly half of it. Statewide, Florida’s total adequacy shortfall was about $15.7 billion; Arizona’s about $4.2 billion. Annually.

Would that money have done more good in those districts? The best recent evidence says yes, and by a lot. Emily Rauscher and Yifan Shen find that the returns to school spending are highest in places with low prior investment and high child poverty, and essentially null elsewhere. Their title says it plainly: progressive spending is efficient. In other words, targeting money to underfunded, high-poverty districts isn’t just the fair thing to do, it’s the efficient thing to do. In follow-up work with Greer Mellon, Susanna Loeb and Carolyn Abott, Rauscher and colleagues find returns to spending are significantly larger in low-resource districts, including for Black, Latinx and low-income students, with teacher salaries and counselors standing out as especially productive uses.

So compare the two bets. Bet one: send money to the districts with the lowest prior investment and highest need, where the research says each dollar has the highest return. Bet two: send money mostly to families already paying private tuition, disproportionately in affluent places, a chunk of which is absorbed by tuition increases, and for the kids who do switch, accept the risk of the large negative effects found in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and D.C. That’s not a close call. It’s not even a call. It’s a dial tone. As I’ve argued before, Arizona and Florida are very good at being efficiently mediocre. Vouchers are a way of spending more to be less efficient, which takes a special kind of talent.

So where would you rather raise a kid?

Let’s zoom out. Schools aren’t the only thing a state does for kids and families, and families with options don’t pick a state by NAEP alone. So here’s a broader scorecard. Some of these measures come from other folks’ rankings, and you can quibble with any one of them. Good luck quibbling with all of them.

A few things jump out. Arizona has the worst rate of uninsured children of the four, second-worst in the nation behind only Texas, and serves 2% of four-year-olds in state pre-K. Two percent. Florida, to its credit, reaches a lot of four-year-olds with its pre-K program, then spends about $2,946 per child on it, which buys roughly what you’d expect $2,946 to buy. Florida also never expanded Medicaid, bans abortion after six weeks, a point at which many people don’t yet know they’re pregnant, and ranks 39th in women’s health. Arizona voters, to their credit, restored abortion rights to viability in 2024, which is a big part of why I wouldn’t lump the two red states together on every line. Neither offers paid family leave. Both New Jersey and Massachusetts do. (And before anyone in Boston gets smug: Massachusetts spends about $3,046 per child on state pre-K, 43rd in the nation, right down there with Florida. New Jersey spends $18,848, second only to D.C. Not all blue states are created equal.)

And then there’s arts and culture. Massachusetts and New Jersey fund their state arts agencies at about $3.75 per resident. Arizona manages 26 cents. Florida was at least in the middle of the pack, until Governor DeSantis vetoed roughly $32 million in arts and culture grants in 2024, later explaining that a fringe theater festival was “an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” Nothing says “family-friendly” like zeroing out the state’s arts grants because of a festival you didn’t want to attend. (Private school tuition at Cave Creek’s finest, on the other hand, is apparently an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars.)

Then there’s the matter of whether your kid makes it home. Arizona’s firearm death rate is nearly five times Massachusetts’; Florida’s is more than three times. Arizona also has the highest violent crime rate of the four. In fairness (I keep doing that, it’s a character flaw), Massachusetts’ violent crime rate runs higher than Florida’s, and New Jersey’s is the lowest of the bunch. But on guns, it’s not close.

And then measles, a disease the United States declared eliminated in 2000. So far in 2026, Florida has logged 67 cases and Arizona 36. New Jersey has 3. Massachusetts has 2. Arizona now exempts 10.6% of its kindergartners from school vaccine requirements. Florida’s surgeon general has been campaigning to end school vaccine mandates altogether. The legislature hasn’t gone along, yet, but the state’s kindergarten vaccination completion rate has already slid to 88.9%. Nothing says “family values” like a measles outbreak in the kindergarten wing.

a) Where to raise a child

If you’re picking a place to raise a kid, this isn’t a hard call. Massachusetts and New Jersey offer adequately funded public schools even in their poorest districts, near-universal children’s health coverage, paid leave when the baby arrives, protected reproductive health care for the mother, longer life expectancies, and a public sector that thinks the arts are worth a few bucks per resident. Arizona and Florida offer lower taxes, sunshine, schools funded at about two-thirds of adequate if you’re poor, roughly a 1-in-11 chance your kid is uninsured, three to five times the firearm death rate, a front-row seat to the measles comeback, and a voucher if you were already paying private school tuition. Pick your poison. Actually, don’t. Pick Massachusetts or New Jersey.

b) Where to recruit young, educated families

Now put on your HR hat. You’re trying to recruit a 32-year-old engineer with a spouse, a toddler and another on the way. Housing will cost them more in Boston or northern New Jersey than in Phoenix or Tampa, and their tax bill will be higher. That’s real, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But here’s what that money buys: a public school they don’t have to flee, twelve weeks of paid leave, pediatric coverage that isn’t a coin flip, classmates who are vaccinated, an OB-GYN who doesn’t have to consult a lawyer before treating a miscarriage, and a cultural life that isn’t subject to gubernatorial veto. Families who can choose, choose that. The ones you’re trying to recruit can choose.

But wait, says the Florida recruiter, our engineer doesn’t need the public schools. He can use the voucher! Let’s do the math. Say our family makes $200,000 a year and has two kids, and they want the full Florida elite-private experience. Ransom Everglades in Miami runs $57,300 a year. Times two, that’s $114,600. Florida’s now-universal scholarship averages roughly $8,000 per student, so knock off about $16,000. That leaves about $98,600 a year, out of pocket, in after-tax dollars.

Now, what does Florida save that family by not having an income tax? In New Jersey, $200,000 of joint income with two kids runs about $8,400 in state income tax. In Massachusetts, it’s about $9,500 at the flat 5% rate (a bit less after the state’s child credit). And that’s before the federal SALT deduction gives some of it back. So the family “saves” about $9,000 a year in Florida, plus $16,000 in vouchers. Call it $25,000 in Florida perks to put toward a $114,600 tuition bill. In New Jersey or Massachusetts, the same family sends both kids to a public school funded at better than 130% of adequate (and still above 100% even in the highest-poverty districts), and pays $0 in tuition. Even if you go modest, at a $30,000-a-year private school, the Florida family is out about $44,000 a year after the voucher, five times the income tax it “saved.” Yes, New Jersey property taxes are steep. Part of what they buy is a school you don’t have to pay $57,300 to escape. The low-tax Florida deal works beautifully for one family: the one that was already going to pay private tuition anyway, and now gets $16,000 back from the state for doing it.

Arizona and Florida are betting that young professionals will trade all of that for lower taxes and a voucher. Some will. But the rest are going to look at those uninsured-kid numbers, those gun death rates, those adequacy numbers in the districts they can afford to live in, and that six-week ban, and quietly accept the offer from the firm in Cambridge.

The bottom line

• The blue states fund adequacy. The red states don’t. Highest-poverty districts: about 110% of adequate in NJ and MA, about 63–64% in AZ and FL. 98% of AZ and FL students attend underfunded districts.
• About $9,000–10,000 more per pupil in the blue states, adjusted for labor costs. Arizona and Florida rank 2nd- and 3rd-lowest in the nation on effort.
• Outcomes: everyone lost ground after 2019. Raw losses were largest in Massachusetts math and smallest in Arizona, but NAEP changes track starting levels. Measured against what their 2009 scores predicted, New Jersey and Massachusetts did better than expected, Arizona did about as expected, and Florida did worse. The blue states still lead by 12–16 points. Florida’s reading miracle is over.
• Vouchers: billions a year, mostly to families already in private school, disproportionately affluent, partly eaten by tuition hikes, with large negative effects in the best studies of statewide programs.
• Opportunity cost: the same money in underfunded high-poverty districts would likely have bought far more, per Rauscher’s work on progressive spending.
• Beyond schools: on children’s health, women’s health, paid leave, life expectancy, gun deaths, measles, and arts and culture, Massachusetts and New Jersey come out ahead. (Violent crime is the one place Florida edges Massachusetts.) Arizona is the clear laggard on kids’ coverage and pre-K; Florida on reproductive health and Medicaid.

Arizona and Florida chose to spend billions on private tuition while leaving their highest-poverty public districts at two-thirds of adequate, their kids under-insured and their arts councils on a diet. That’s a choice. It’s not an efficient one, it’s not a family-friendly one, and it’s certainly not a miracle.

Data notes

Finance measures are from the School Finance Indicators Database. Adequacy uses the National Education Cost Model (2024 release): current spending per pupil divided by the modeled cost of national average outcomes, aggregated to states as total spending over total cost (enrollment-weighted). Highest- and lowest-poverty districts are the top and bottom fifths of each state’s districts by Census child poverty. Adequacy shortfalls sum enrollment times the gap between cost and spending across underfunded districts; the “higher-poverty half” is the set of districts serving the half of public school students in the highest-poverty districts. Labor-cost adjusted spending divides by the Education Comparable Wage Index, rescaled to 2024 national-average wage levels. Effort is state and local K-12 spending as a share of gross state product. NAEP figures are 8th-grade state averages for all students in test years. Expected NAEP changes come from a simple cross-state regression (50 states and DC) of each state’s 2009–2024 change on its 2009 level; “better or worse than expected” is the residual from that regression. Voucher cost and enrollment figures come from the sources linked in the text, and reported figures differ somewhat by source and year.

Sources

• School Finance Indicators Database: state panel and NECM district file
• Baker, B. D., Weber, M., & Srikanth, A. (2021). Informing federal school finance policy with empirical evidence. Journal of Education Finance, 47(1), 1–25.
• Baker, B. D. (2025). How and why racial isolation affects education costs and the provision of equal educational opportunity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(55).
• A few quick thoughts and graphs on Mis-NAEP-ery (2013), schoolfinance101
• Rauscher, E., & Shen, Y. (2022). Variation in the Relationship between School Spending and Achievement: Progressive Spending Is Efficient. EdWorkingPaper 22-593.
• Rauscher, E., Mellon, G., Loeb, S., & Abott, C. (2024). When Money Matters Most: Unpacking the Effectiveness of School Spending. EdWorkingPaper 24-1016.
• Cowen, J. (2024). The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Harvard Education Press. See also Quick Hits of Voucher Research and “After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them” (Hechinger Report).
• Abdulkadiroğlu, A., Pathak, P., & Walters, C. (2018). Free to Choose: Can School Choice Reduce Student Achievement? American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10(1).
• Jennings, J. Arizona’s school vouchers are helping the wealthy and are widening educational opportunity gaps. Arizona Mirror, January 2024.
• Harris, D., & Olivier, G. (2025). The Effects of Universal School Vouchers on Private School Tuition and Enrollment: A National Analysis.
• Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition. Hechinger Report, November 2023.
• AP analysis of Arizona ESA use by ZIP code income, KTAR, June 2026; ESA program cost dispute, KTAR, November 2025.
• Arizona governor releases budget update amid ‘dramatic spike’ in ESA spending, KOLD, March 2025.
• Florida private education vouchers cost $4 billion this school year, Education Law Center, January 2025; Florida’s growing school voucher program has a high price tag, WUSF, January 2025.
• New report shows nearly 123,000 new students received Florida school vouchers in 2023, NBC Miami / News Service of Florida, September 2023.
• NIEER, State of Preschool 2025: Florida, Arizona, New Jersey and Massachusetts releases.
• Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book: Arizona, Florida, national coverage.
• America’s Health Rankings, uninsured children (ACS 2024).
• Commonwealth Fund, 2024 State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care.
• Arizona Proposition 139 (2024); Florida Amendment 4 (2024).
• AARP, state paid family leave laws.
• CDC/NCHS, U.S. State Life Tables, 2022.
• NASAA, FY2026 State Arts Agency Revenues; BEA, Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, 2023.
• The Art Newspaper and Fox 4 on Florida’s 2024 arts veto.
• Tuition: Ransom Everglades School, 2026–27. Florida FTC/FES-EO average award: Step Up For Students, 2025–26. State income tax at $200,000 joint income with two dependents: author’s calculation from 2025 New Jersey brackets and the 5% Massachusetts rate with Massachusetts exemptions.
• America’s Health Rankings (CDC WONDER), firearm deaths, 2023.
• FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2024, as compiled in violent crime rates by state.
• CDC, measles cases and outbreaks, and Johns Hopkins state measles tracking, as of October 8, 2026.
• KFF, vaccination exemption rates among kindergartners; Jax Today on Florida’s mandate push.

Every few months the red-state-miracle story makes the rounds again. Florida’s reading “renaissance.” Texas’s math scores. Low taxes, lean budgets, school choice for all, and results to show for it. Meanwhile California and Illinois are cast as the cautionary tales: high-tax, high-spending, union-run fiscal basket cases pouring money into failing schools. Cue the op-ed. Cue the legislative testimony.

So let’s do the head-to-head the narrative invites. The two largest blue states, California and Illinois, against the two largest red states, Texas and Florida. Same cost model, same adjustments, same NAEP tests, 2009 through 2024.

Here’s the short version. The blue states raised their real investment in schools by more than a third and, on NAEP, held up better than the average state. The red states let their effort slide by roughly 30%, fell further and further behind what it would cost to get their kids to even national average outcomes, and gave back the 8th-grade NAEP advantage they once held. Then, because I can’t help myself, a word of caution for my blue-state friends: you’re not done. Not even close.

Round 1: Is the money enough?

I’ve explained the National Education Cost Model enough times on this blog that some of you could recite it back to me. But briefly: for every district in the country, the model estimates what it would cost to reach national average outcomes given the kids it serves, the wages it has to pay to compete for teachers, its size and its population density. Divide actual current spending by that cost and you get percent of adequate. At 100%, spending covers the cost. As I’ve noted recently, national average is a low bar. It asks only that kids score like the typical American kid.

Statewide, here’s where things stood:

In 2009 these four states were bunched together, between 80% and 101%. By 2024 they had split cleanly in two. Texas districts, on average, spend 59 cents for every dollar it would take to get their kids to national average outcomes. Florida spends 70 cents.

But statewide averages always hide the part that matters most. So let’s look at each state’s highest-poverty fifth of districts, the kids for whom adequate funding matters most.

Florida’s highest-poverty districts actually started out as the best funded of the four, at 83% of adequate. They ended at 63%. Texas’s went from 61% to just under 50%. Let that sink in. The highest-poverty districts in Texas are spending about half of what it would take to get their kids to national average outcomes. California’s climbed from 65% to 79%, most of that after the Local Control Funding Formula began phasing in after 2013. Illinois inched up from 72% to 80%.

Or put another way: by 2024, 98% of students in Texas and 98% of students in Florida attended districts funded below adequate levels. Not a typo. Ninety-eight percent. In 2009 it was 73% and 70%. In California it’s now 67%, down from 74%. In Illinois, 51%.

Here’s the same measure across all fifty states. Watch the South.

Round 2: Spending and effort

Now, I can already hear it. “But spending went up everywhere!” In nominal dollars, sure. So did the wages schools have to pay to hire and keep college-educated people. That’s why I adjust spending by the Education Comparable Wage Index, which asks a simple question: can a state buy more teacher time per kid today than it could in 2009?

California: up 47%. Illinois: up 36%. Florida: down 3%. Texas: down 2%. In 2024 dollars at national average wage levels, that’s $18,438 in California and $20,027 in Illinois, against $13,489 in Florida and $12,515 in Texas. The U.S. figure was $17,122. Fifteen years, and Texas and Florida are buying less than they were in 2009.

Why? Because they chose to. Here’s fiscal effort, state and local K-12 spending as a share of state GDP:

Texas went from 3.66% to 2.61%. Florida from 3.22% to 2.19%. Both cut the share of their economies going to schools by roughly 30%. Measured against personal income, it’s the same story: Texas from 4.7% to 3.3%, Florida from 3.5% to 2.2%. By 2024, Florida put a smaller share of its residents’ income into public schools than any other state, and ranked third-lowest as a share of GDP. Illinois, the supposed poster child for fiscal dysfunction, actually raised its effort a bit, from 3.66% to 3.82% of GDP. California’s dipped slightly, but its economy grew fast enough, and its formula targeted enough of that growth toward high-need districts, that real spending still soared.

This isn’t a story about states that ran out of money. It’s a story about states that decided not to spend it on schools.

Round 3: So what happened to the kids?

This is where the red-state narrative is supposed to save itself. Lean budgets, better results, right? In 2009, Texas really did have the highest 8th-grade NAEP math average of the four, at 287, and Florida wasn’t far behind Illinois. That was the story. Here’s what happened next.

Yes, everyone took a hit after the pandemic. The average state lost about 10 points in math and 7 in reading. Against that baseline, Texas and Florida fell further. California and Illinois held up better, and California was the only one of the four to gain in reading. By 2024, the four states sat within about ten points of each other in math, and Texas and Florida had dropped below California in reading.

And no, you can’t blame it all on COVID. Texas’s math average fell 7 points between 2009 and 2019, from 287 to 280, while the average state dipped by about 1. Florida’s reading slide, on the other hand, is mostly post-2019: 263 in 2019, 253 in 2024. So much for the renaissance.

Now, the usual response here is that Texas simply had farther to fall, and California had nowhere to go but up. Fair enough, and it’s a point I’ve been making since at least the great Mis-NAEP-ery of 2013: NAEP gains and losses are highly correlated with where you start. It’s harder to gain, and easier to lose, when you’re already scoring high. It’s easier to gain, and harder to lose, when you’re scoring low. Across the 50 states and D.C., a state’s 2009 8th-grade math score correlates at −0.63 with its change through 2024 (−0.68 in reading). So let’s give everyone credit for their starting point. Texas, starting at 287, would be expected to lose about 12 points in math. It lost 17, about 5.5 points worse than expected, and it came in about 3 points worse than expected in reading. Florida came in about 3.5 points worse than expected in math and 4.5 in reading. California beat its expected change by about 3 points in both subjects. And Illinois, which started right at the national average, beat its expected change by about 5 points in math and 4 in reading. Account for where they started, and the blue states did better than expected while the red states did worse. The lines crossed.

Here’s money and math together. Each dot is a state at each NAEP administration, with the four highlighted states leaving trails behind them.

Texas slides down and to the left. Florida slides down and to the left. California moves right. Illinois moves right. You don’t need a regression to see which direction you’d rather be headed.

Unfinished business in the blue states

Before my friends in Sacramento and Springfield start taking victory laps, let’s be clear. Improved is not the same as fixed. Neither state comes close to providing equal educational opportunity. In both, the lowest-poverty districts are funded well above adequate levels, while the highest-poverty districts remain well below.

Illinois has the widest gap of the four. Its lowest-poverty districts spend about 151% of what the cost model says they need, roughly $7,100 per pupil above adequate, while its highest-poverty districts sit at 80%, about $5,800 per pupil short. That gap was 96 points in 2009 and is 71 points now. Progress, yes. Equal opportunity, no. Even after the 2017 Evidence-Based Funding reform, state and local revenue per pupil in Illinois is still slightly lower in high-poverty districts than in low-poverty ones (a progressiveness ratio of 0.92). EBF was the right idea. It just hasn’t been funded at anything like the pace needed to finish the job.

California has done more. LCFF cut the gap between its lowest- and highest-poverty districts from 55 points to 36. But California’s highest-poverty districts still fall about $5,600 per pupil short of adequate. In both states, about 95% of students in the highest-poverty districts still attend districts funded below adequate levels.

And no, the smaller gaps in Texas and Florida are not a sign of fairness. They narrowed because the lowest-poverty districts fell below adequacy too. Texas’s lowest-poverty districts went from 113% of adequate to 70%. That’s not equal opportunity. That’s equal inadequacy. Everyone’s screwed, just to varying degrees.

What this does and doesn’t show

Let me be careful here, since I spend a fair amount of time on this blog yelling at people who aren’t. Four states, plotted side by side over time, do not prove that money caused the NAEP divergence. These states differ in demographics, immigration patterns, testing exclusions, policy histories and how hard the pandemic hit. Credible causal answers come from the kind of panel studies the school finance literature has spent two decades building, and that research consistently finds that money matters, especially for kids from low-income families.

What these data do show is that the red-state model of low effort and lean budgets didn’t buy better results over this period. As I argued a couple weeks back, Florida and Texas are very efficient at producing relatively low outcomes. Efficient isn’t the same as good. They held school spending flat in real terms while their highest-poverty districts slid to between half and two-thirds of adequate. Their 8th-grade scores fell further than the average state’s, and further than their starting points would predict.

California and Illinois, the supposed cautionary tales, did the opposite. They raised real spending by more than a third, pushed a good share of it toward higher-need districts, and held up better on NAEP than the average state.

The bottom line

• The red states disinvested. Texas and Florida cut school effort by roughly 30% and let real spending per pupil stall for fifteen years.
• Their poorest districts paid the price. High-poverty districts in Texas now spend about half of what national average outcomes would cost. Florida’s spend under two-thirds. 98% of students in both states attend underfunded districts.
• The NAEP advantage is gone. Texas lost 17 points in 8th-grade math and Florida 12, against 10 for the average state. Even accounting for where each state started, Texas and Florida fell further than expected, while California and Illinois did better than expected.
• The blue states moved in the right direction. Real spending up 36–47%, high-poverty adequacy up, and better NAEP trajectories.
• But they’re not done. Illinois’s rich districts are funded at 151% of adequate while its poor ones sit at 80%. California’s gap is 36 points. Finish the job.

So the next time someone holds up Texas or Florida as proof that you can do more with less, ask them a simple question: more what? Fifteen years of data here, and the answer looks a lot more like “less with less.”

Data notes

All finance measures come from the School Finance Indicators Database. Adequacy uses the National Education Cost Model (2024 release): district current spending per pupil divided by the modeled cost of national average outcomes, aggregated to states as total spending over total cost (enrollment-weighted). Highest- and lowest-poverty districts are the top and bottom fifths of each state’s districts by Census child poverty rate. Labor-cost adjusted spending divides current spending per pupil by the Education Comparable Wage Index, rescaled to 2024 national-average wage levels. Fiscal effort is state and local K-12 spending as a share of gross state product and state and local school revenue as a share of personal income. NAEP figures are 8th-grade state averages for all students, test years only (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2024). Expected NAEP changes come from a simple cross-state regression (50 states and DC) of each state’s 2009–2024 change on its 2009 level; “better or worse than expected” is the residual from that regression.

Sources

• School Finance Indicators Database: state panel and NECM/SEDA district file (data behind all figures)
• Baker, B. D., Weber, M., & Srikanth, A. (2021). Informing federal school finance policy with empirical evidence. Journal of Education Finance, 47(1), 1–25.
• Baker, B. D. (2025). How and why racial isolation affects education costs and the provision of equal educational opportunity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(55).
• Efficiently Mediocre: Why Measuring School Efficiency Requires Measuring Cost (2026), schoolfinance101
• A Philadelphia Story of Underfunding (2026), schoolfinance101
• A few quick thoughts and graphs on Mis-NAEP-ery (2013), schoolfinance101
• National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), state results, grade 8 reading and mathematics

Back in January 2013, I wrote about three Kansas judges who saw right through the state’s claim that deep funding cuts would cause no harm. The Shawnee County District Court panel in Gannon v. State of Kansas (decision, p. 188) put it this way:

Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes, then for most, it is most likely gone. We all know that the struggle for an income very often – too often – overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.

The Kansas experiment was a legislature cutting school budgets and betting that nobody would be hurt. That was bad enough. But at least in Kansas, the children were still in schools. There were still teachers, curricula, and test results that a court could look at.

A decade later, Arizona and Florida are running a different experiment. They hand public money to parents, place few limits on how it is spent, and ask almost nothing about whether the child learned anything. If that experiment fails for a particular child, who answers for it? Who does the 18-year-old sue?

The new experiment: money out, no questions asked

Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, expanded to all students in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 children and is expected to cost over $1 billion a year. Florida followed in 2023 with universal eligibility and a homeschool ESA, the Personalized Education Program (PEP), worth roughly $8,000 per child.

Consider what the statutes actually require of the parent. Under A.R.S. § 15-2402, the Arizona parent signs an agreement to use “a portion” of the money to provide instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science. That is the whole of the academic obligation. Then comes the remarkable part, subsection I: a signed agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of the state’s compulsory attendance law. The contract is the education, as far as the state is concerned.

There is no testing requirement for ESA students in Arizona, no curriculum approval, no portfolio, and no evaluator. Even homeschool guides that are friendly to the program say so plainly. The state checks receipts, not learning.

Florida asks slightly more. PEP families must submit a student learning plan and have the child take a nationally norm-referenced test each year, with results sent to the scholarship funding organization (FLDOE PEP FAQ; Step Up PEP Family Handbook). But what triggers loss of funding is failing to take and submit the test, not the score. A child can test at a first-grade level in tenth grade and the money keeps flowing.

That is the experiment. The state funds the choice, defines the choice as compliance, and measures nothing that would tell anyone whether the child is learning.

What the money has bought

Reporters in both states have spent three years documenting what this money buys. Some of it was approved under the rules. Some was flagged as improper only after the fact. All of it was spent from accounts that exist, by law, to educate a child.

In fairness to the programs’ defenders, Arizona’s education department maintains that most purchases are valid and that misspending is a small share of the total. Florida’s administrator, Step Up For Students, requires a statement of educational benefit for theme park tickets and caps them at $500 a year (WFTV). When Florida legislators tried to tighten the list in 2024, families lobbied against it and the restrictions failed.

But “small share” is the wrong frame. Arizona auto-approved purchases under $2,000 — over a million requests and $124 million — to clear a backlog, with plans to audit later. Of 18,000 parents flagged for $10.3 million in banned purchases, only six were referred for prosecution. And every audit is an audit of purchases. None asks the only question that matters to the child: was anyone teaching me to read?

The legal question: who does the 18-year-old sue?

Imagine a young woman turning 18 in Phoenix or Orlando. For a decade, her ESA paid for theme park passes, a television, a trampoline and a lot of LEGO. Nobody ever taught her to read beyond a primer. She has no transcript and no diploma. The state that funded all of it called her “in attendance” the entire time. What are her options?

I’m not a lawyer, and what follows is a policy researcher’s tour of the doctrinal terrain, not legal advice. But the terrain is not encouraging.

1. Sue the parent. Arizona abolished parental immunity in Broadbent v. Broadbent (1995), replacing it with a “reasonable and prudent parent” standard. Florida has never gone that far. So in Arizona, at least, a negligence claim against a parent is not barred at the door. But she would then run into the doctrine of educational malpractice. Since Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976), courts have refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. They cite the lack of a workable standard of care, uncertain causation, and the burden on schools. If courts won’t hold trained, licensed educators to a duty to teach a child to read, a court is unlikely to impose one on a parent the legislature expressly freed from any measurable standard.

A narrower theory may be stronger: misappropriation. The Arizona statute says ESA money may be used “only” for the expenses of the qualified student. A diamond necklace or a family Disneyland trip is not that. A custodial-account or constructive-trust theory, treating the parent as having diverted money held for the child’s benefit, at least fits the facts. But that recovers the misspent dollars, not the lost education. And a judgment against a parent with no assets is worth little.

2. Sue the vendor. The private school, the online program, the tutoring center or the “ESA-approved” camp are private actors. A contract or consumer-fraud claim might reach a vendor that took money and delivered nothing. But a vendor that delivered exactly what was purchased (a ski pass, a paddleboard) did nothing wrong. And educational malpractice bars claims that the instruction itself was inadequate.

3. Sue the state, under the federal Constitution. This is where the Kansas panel’s warning bites hardest. San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) held there is no fundamental federal right to education. DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) held the Due Process Clause generally imposes no duty on the state to protect a child from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. The one federal appellate ruling to recognize a right to a basic minimum education, Gary B. v. Whitmer (6th Cir. 2020), was vacated when the full court took it up after the case settled. She might argue that the state created the danger by funding the deprivation and deeming it lawful attendance. That theory is untested in this setting.

4. Sue the state, under the state constitution. Both states have education clauses. Florida’s is among the strongest in the country, declaring education a “paramount duty” and requiring a “high quality system of free public schools.” In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for diverting public funds to private schools outside that uniform system. But in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education (2019), a divided court held that “high quality” offered no judicially manageable standard. More fundamentally, state adequacy litigation produces prospective, system-wide remedies. It is not a damages action for an individual who already aged out.

5. Ask the state to step in. Ordinarily, a child receiving no education might trigger truancy enforcement or an educational neglect inquiry. In Arizona, that door is closed by statute: the signed ESA agreement constitutes school attendance under § 15-2402(I). When the state does catch misspending, its remedy is to suspend the account or send it to collections. Any money recovered goes back to the state, not to the child whose education it was meant to buy.

So the honest answer to the legal question is: almost none. The 18-year-old is, in the Kansas panel’s words, a subject of an experiment with no recourse from its failure. The difference is that in Kansas, the state was cutting the budget of institutions still obligated to teach her. In Arizona and Florida, the state has written itself out of that obligation and handed the obligation, and the money, to someone the law does not hold to any measurable standard.

Tallying the damages

If she could get into court, what would she claim? The Kansas panel named the core harm: the opportunity does not repeat itself, and for most people, once it passes, it is gone. The U.S. Supreme Court said much the same in Plyler v. Doe (1982): the inability to read and write “will handicap the individual deprived of a basic education each and every day of his life.”

Start with what can be counted. Using 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics data on earnings by educational attainment (full-time workers, age 25+):

These figures understate her loss. The “less than high school” group includes people with ten or eleven years of real schooling who can read, write and do arithmetic. She has none of that. And the earnings figures cover only those working full time. Her higher odds of unemployment, part-time work and no work at all are not in the table.

Then add what is harder to price:

• No credential. Without a recognized diploma or transcript, she must first earn an equivalency credential before she can enroll in most colleges or apprenticeships. That means years of remedial work as an adult, while also trying to earn a living, exactly the trap the Kansas panel described.
• Foreclosed paths. Military enlistment, many licensed trades, and most postsecondary programs screen on a diploma or basic skills she does not have.
• Lost literacy and numeracy. Learning to read as an adult is possible but far harder, and adult literacy services are thinly funded.
• Civic and personal costs. Reading a lease, a ballot, a prescription label or a court notice.
• The money itself. At roughly $7,000–$10,000 a year in Arizona and about $8,000 in Florida, a K–12 career in the program represents on the order of $100,000 in public funds spent in her name. Whatever went to theme parks and televisions was money the state set aside for her education and allowed someone else to spend.

And under the current statutes, the state has no obligation to notice any of this until she shows up, at 18 or 25, needing an adult education program that the same legislatures have every incentive to underfund.

Closing: whose choice?

Voucher advocates frame all of this as parental choice, and most parents in these programs surely are trying to educate their kids. But a choice program that funds a parent’s decision, defines that decision as legal attendance, and never checks whether the child learned anything has made a choice of its own. It has chosen not to know.

The Kansas judges understood that the burden of a failed policy experiment falls on the children, who did not consent to it and cannot undo it. Arizona and Florida have built that lesson into statute in reverse. If the experiment fails a particular child, the law offers her almost nothing: no duty anyone owed, no standard anyone missed, no defendant she can realistically sue.

At a minimum, a state that funds a child’s education should be able to tell that child, at 18, what it bought. Right now, Arizona can tell her how much it spent at Disneyland.

Policy brief

The full policy brief, No Recourse: Universal Education Savings Accounts, Public Money, and the Students They Leave Uneducated, includes a side-by-side comparison of the Arizona and Florida program requirements and six recommendations for legislators.

Or: how to be highly efficient at producing mediocre outcomes, and why your scatterplot of spending and test scores is lying to you.

Every few months someone rediscovers the same chart. Per-pupil spending on one axis, test scores on the other, a shapeless cloud of dots, and a headline that writes itself: We spend more than ever and get nothing for it. Money doesn’t matter. Schools have an efficiency problem. Cue the think-tank panel, the op-ed and the legislator who wants to “hold the line” on school funding.

That chart is not just lazy. It is wrong in a way that points policy in exactly the wrong direction. And the reason is a word the people who make it rarely bother to define: cost.

First, some definitions (yes, again)

I’ve been through this before, but since the lesson apparently hasn’t landed, here are the four terms that get mashed together in nearly every “school efficiency” argument:

• Productivity is what the system produces: the level of student outcomes. More learning, higher outcomes, more productive.
• Spending is what districts actually spend, whatever it buys and whatever the result.
• Cost is the minimum amount that would have to be spent to achieve a given level of outcomes, given the students a district serves and the conditions it operates in (labor markets, scale, poverty, disability, language needs).
• Efficiency is the gap between the two. Spending minus inefficiency equals cost. An efficient district gets the most outcome it can out of what it has, or spends no more than it needs to for the outcomes it gets.

Notice what that last definition requires. You cannot say a district is wasting money unless you know what its outcomes should cost. Efficiency is a statement about spending relative to cost. No cost estimate, no efficiency claim. Full stop.

Back in 2012 I used a car-buying analogy for this: you want an Escalade and you’ve budgeted $25,000. Nobody would call the dealer “inefficient” for failing to sell it to you at that price. The Escalade costs what it costs. Educating a district full of kids in deep poverty, many still learning English, in a high-wage labor market, costs what it costs too. Pretending it costs the same as educating kids in a wealthy suburb is not rigor. It’s just wrong.

Efficiency is not productivity

Here’s the part that tends to get lost. Efficiency and productivity are different things, and they can point in opposite directions:

• You can be highly efficient at producing low outcomes. Spend next to nothing, get outcomes about as good as next to nothing buys, and congratulations: you’re efficient. Your kids are still behind.
• You can be highly productive without being especially efficient. Spend a lot, get well above-average outcomes, fall somewhat short of the best that level of spending could buy. Less efficient. Much better outcomes.

If your policy goal is “kids learn more,” the second is the better place to be. An efficiency ranking alone won’t tell you that. An efficiency ranking with no cost adjustment won’t tell you anything at all.

Why the spending-and-scores chart is garbage

Here’s the chart the money-doesn’t-matter crowd loves, built from real data: 8,000+ districts in 38 states, 2022–2024, with outcomes from nationally normed grade 6–8 reading and math assessments. On the left, per-pupil spending against outcomes. Flat. Slightly negative, even (r = −0.08). Money doesn’t matter!

On the right, the exact same districts and the exact same test scores, but spending is expressed relative to what it would cost each district to reach national-average outcomes, given its students and circumstances (from the National Education Cost Model). Now the correlation is about +0.6. Districts with more resources relative to need get substantially better outcomes. Same data. Opposite conclusion.

What happened? The districts that spend more are, on average, the ones serving higher-need kids in higher-cost settings. They do spend more, just nowhere near enough more. The highest-cost fifth of districts spends about $16,700 per pupil against $13,900 in the lowest-cost fifth. But reaching average outcomes would take about $25,200 per pupil in the former and $11,100 in the latter. The high-spending, low-scoring districts aren’t squandering riches. They’re underfunded relative to what their kids need, and it shows.

Now think about what the sloppy chart tells a legislator: those high-spending districts with low scores are the “inefficient” ones, so cut them, or at least stop adding money. That is precisely backwards. It takes the districts that are furthest behind their cost targets and labels them wasteful. That’s not an analytical quirk. It’s a policy recommendation to take money away from the kids who need it most, dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

So what does it look like when you do it right?

In a new brief (full PDF here), I estimate a stochastic frontier model of district efficiency using the National Education Cost Model: roughly 129,000 district-years for about 8,100 districts in 38 states, 2009–2024. The frontier is the best outcome achievable at a given level of spending relative to cost. Each district’s efficiency is its distance from that frontier, expressed as the share of its current resources a fully efficient district would need to reach the same outcomes. I estimate it with and without state fixed effects, because (more on this below) comparing test scores across states is its own can of worms.

The headline findings:

• Money matters, with diminishing returns. A 10 percent increase in resources relative to cost raises frontier outcomes by about 0.07 SD nationally, and about 0.09 SD when comparing districts within the same state. That’s not nothing. It’s a lot.
• Most districts are about equally efficient. The median district operates at about 86 percent efficiency, and nearly three-quarters of district-years fall between 80 and 90 percent. There is a long lower tail, but there’s no evidence here of a system drowning in waste.
• The tail has been growing, and it’s growing within states. The share of districts below 80 percent efficiency doubled, from 11 percent in 2011 to 22 percent in 2024, and the pattern is the same when districts are compared only with others in their own state.
• The “bloated administration” story is tiny. Within their own states, the least efficient districts are more heavily staffed across the board, with more teachers, more aides and more administrators, and they are also smaller and higher-cost. The general administration gap between the most and least efficient districts works out to something like $80–100 per pupil. Anyone promising to close achievement gaps by trimming the central office is selling something.

Florida is efficient. New Jersey is better.

Rank states by average efficiency and you get Idaho, North Carolina, Utah, Florida and Georgia at the top, with Rhode Island, West Virginia, Connecticut, Wyoming and New Jersey at the bottom. Cue the triumphant op-ed about Florida.

Except that across states, average efficiency has essentially zero correlation with average outcomes (r = 0.00). What it does correlate with, strongly, is spending little relative to cost (r = −0.70). The state efficiency ranking is mostly a ranking of how little states spend.

• Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas spend 67–78 percent of what national-average outcomes would cost them, sit close to the frontier, and produce below-average outcomes. They are efficient at producing relatively low outcomes.
• Mississippi is the reductio ad absurdum: it spends 58 percent of cost, ranks 37th of 38 on outcomes, and ranks 7th on efficiency. Very efficient. Very behind.
• Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut spend 50–70 percent above cost and rank 1st, 4th and 7th on outcomes, but 28th, 34th and 36th on efficiency.

New Jersey spends about twice what Florida does per pupil ($19,124 against $9,636 on average over the period), and its students score about 0.20 SD higher. Less efficient? By this measure, sure. But that extra money buys substantially better outcomes. Which would you rather have: Florida’s efficiency or New Jersey’s results?

Is New Jersey’s “inefficiency” just a functional-form artifact? Fair question. Diminishing returns, right? If the frontier flattens out at high spending faster than my log curve allows, it would overstate what New Jersey’s money could buy and make New Jersey look worse than it is. So I checked. The log frontier fits fine all the way up the spending range, including where the data are mostly New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts districts. Quadratic, cubic and spline frontiers trace nearly the same curve, and if anything bend slightly up at the high end. And within states, the payoff to spending relative to cost is steeper, not flatter, in the high spenders: about 1.2 in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, against 0.44 in Florida and 0.70 in Texas. New Jersey’s districts simply sit about 0.3 SD below the national frontier across the board. That’s a level shift, not a bend, and it’s exactly what state fixed effects soak up. Once they do, New Jersey (0.905) and Florida (0.917) are about equally efficient. Which brings us to the next problem.

A necessary caveat about test scores across states

The outcome measure here comes from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which takes each state’s own reading and math tests and puts them on a common, nationally normed scale. SEDA covers grades 3 through 8, but I use only grades 6 through 8, and on purpose. Middle-grades scores better capture the cumulative effects of state and local education systems: what kids actually know after years in those schools. Some states have particularly inflated early-grade scores, for a variety of reasons, and those scores drop dramatically by grade 8. Lean on grades 3–5 and you reward states for looking good early rather than for what their systems deliver over time. Even so, SEDA can only do so much. Many states have adopted common assessments, but the tests still differ across states and are reported on different scales, and states report spending under different accounting rules. It’s impossible to fully equate these measures across states. So a sizable share of the differences between states, on both the outcome side and the spending side, may be measurement error.

That’s why the brief also estimates everything within states. Once you do, state effects soak up nearly all of the state rankings: the share of variance in efficiency between states drops from about 20 percent to 1 percent. The frontier gets steeper, not flatter, which is what you’d expect if cross-state measurement noise was hiding the payoff to money. And the within-state picture is the one I’d trust for judging districts.

Which is, by the way, one more reason to be skeptical of anyone who throws all fifty states onto one spending-and-scores chart and calls it a finding. They’re stacking measurement error on top of the missing cost adjustment.

The bottom line

• No cost, no efficiency. Any claim about school “efficiency” that doesn’t account for what outcomes cost for the kids actually being served isn’t an efficiency claim. It’s a spending claim with an agenda attached.
• Efficient isn’t the same as good. Being efficient at producing low outcomes is still producing low outcomes.
• Sloppy analysis isn’t harmless. A spending-versus-scores chart systematically labels the most underfunded, highest-need districts as wasteful. Policy built on it takes money from the kids who need it most.
• Money matters. Measured properly, more resources relative to cost buy better outcomes, and the states that spend more get more, even when they don’t spend it perfectly.

The full brief, with methods, state tables and the staffing and spending comparisons, is here: Technical Efficiency in Producing Educational Outcomes: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis Using the National Education Cost Model (PDF).

A decade after I last published these lists, 47 districts with at least 2,000 students still have more than 1.5 times the child poverty rate of their labor market and spend less than 90% of what their neighbors spend. Half of them were on my lists 10 to 13 years ago.

Where this started

For years I produced lists of what I called America’s “most screwed” school districts. The idea is simple: a district is financially disadvantaged when it serves far needier children than the districts around it, with less money.

• 2013 blog update (2009–2011 data). I flagged city and suburban districts with more than 1.5 times their labor market’s poverty rate and less than 95% of its average state and local revenue per pupil. The list included Chicago, Philadelphia, Reading, Allentown, Bridgeport, Waukegan, Utica and dozens of others.
• 2014 Center for American Progress report. America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got That Way used a somewhat looser screen: poverty above 125% and revenue below 90% of the labor-market average. It grouped the causes into five types: savage inequalities in property wealth (Illinois, Pennsylvania); “stealth” inequalities in illogical state aid formulas (Michigan, Arizona); local budgeting that undercuts state aid (Bridgeport); tiny segregated enclaves (south suburban Cook County and Phoenix elementary districts); and demographic shifts in smaller, increasingly Hispanic cities (Waukegan, Reading, Allentown). It also found that the odds of being fiscally disadvantaged rose with a district’s Black and Hispanic enrollment shares, even among districts equally dependent on state aid.
• 2015 blog update (2011–2013 data). Same logic, tighter screen: poverty above 150% and state and local revenue below 90% of the labor-market average, limited to K–12 unified districts of 2,000 or more in non-rural labor markets.

The core point hasn’t changed. The value of a school dollar is relative. Schools compete for teachers against the districts next door, and graduates compete for college seats and jobs in the same regional pool. A district that spends $15,000 per pupil can still be badly shortchanged if its neighbors spend $18,000 on far less needy kids.

Data and methods

This update uses a district-by-year panel built from the Census Fiscal Survey of school district finances (F-33), Census Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), and the NCES Common Core of Data. The panel runs through fiscal year 2024.

• Relative poverty. Each district’s SAIPE poverty rate for children ages 5–17, divided by the average for all districts in its labor market.
• Relative spending. Each district’s current operating spending per pupil, divided by its labor-market average.
• Labor markets. Core-based statistical areas, following the NCES Education Comparable Wage Index, as in the earlier lists.
• Screen. Relative poverty above 1.5 and relative spending below 0.9, using 2022–2024 averages of both ratios. Districts must average at least 2,000 students.
• Ranking. Within each state, districts are ordered by the gap between relative poverty and relative spending, the same “gap” measure used in the CAP report.
• Race and ethnicity. 2024 Black and Hispanic enrollment shares from the Common Core, compared with each state’s share of all students.

Two differences from the earlier lists matter. First, this screen uses current spending rather than state and local revenue. Current spending includes federal money, and 2022–2024 were the peak years of federal pandemic relief (ESSER), which flowed disproportionately to high-poverty districts. That temporarily lifted spending in many of the districts that have always topped these lists. Second, this version includes elementary-only districts, which the 2015 list excluded, so several south suburban Chicago elementary districts appear.

The 2022–2024 list

Forty-seven districts in 16 states make the cut. Illinois leads with 8, followed by Missouri and New York with 5 each. Missouri’s Riverview Gardens and Jennings are the most extreme in the country: each has nearly three times its labor market’s child poverty rate and spends 81–85% of the regional average.

These are overwhelmingly districts that serve Black and Hispanic children. In 38 of the 47, the combined Black and Hispanic share of enrollment is higher than the state’s. The exceptions are mostly small, largely white towns and small cities: Potosi, MO; Rochester, NH; Macon County, TN; Jamestown and Watertown, NY. Union County, TN reports a 14.9% Black share, which looks implausible for that county and may be a data error.

Relative poverty and spending are 2022–2024 averages of each district’s ratio to its labor-market average. Gap = relative poverty minus relative spending. Racial shares are 2024; state figures are the share of all students statewide.

Then and now

Twenty-four of the 47 districts appeared on at least one of the earlier lists, and 12 appeared on all three. These are the chronic cases: districts that have served far needier children with less money for well over a decade.

The 23 newcomers fall into three groups:

• South suburban Cook County elementary districts. Prairie-Hills, Lansing, Indian Springs, Ridgeland, Burbank, North Palos and Matteson. The CAP report flagged this area’s fragmented elementary districts (Posen-Robbins, Lincoln) as the “not-so-blurred lines” problem. They show up in force now partly because this version includes elementary districts.
• Older inner-ring suburbs. Upper Darby and Southeast Delco outside Philadelphia, Malden outside Boston, River Rouge outside Detroit, and Riverhead on Long Island. Most serve predominantly Black or Hispanic students.
• Smaller cities and towns. Chickasaw, AL; Barstow, Hollister and San Rafael, CA; Nogales, AZ; Steubenville, OH; Wilkes-Barre, PA; Watertown, NY; and Union and Macon Counties, TN.

Who dropped off, and why that isn’t good news

The biggest names from the old lists are gone: Chicago, Philadelphia, Allentown, Waukegan, Lowell, New Britain, Hamtramck, Eastpointe (formerly East Detroit), Woonsocket and Manchester. Each still has between 1.6 and 2.7 times its labor market’s child poverty rate. They drop off because their current spending ratios now sit at or above 0.9.

For most of them, that reflects federal money, not a fix. On state and local revenue, the measure used in the earlier lists, most remain well below their neighbors:

Swap in the revenue screen (relative revenue below 0.9) and the national count jumps from 47 to 139 districts. As pandemic relief runs out, many of these districts will likely fall back below the spending line. Philadelphia is the notable exception. Its state and local revenue is now above its labor-market average, but its poverty rate is still more than double that of its neighbors, so equal funding is still far from adequate funding.

The bottom line is the one I wrote in 2015. There is no excuse for public school districts with twice the poverty of their surroundings to have less to spend on those children. Ten years later, many of the same districts are still in that position, and many more have joined them.

Sources

• Baker, B.D. (2013, May 24). Most Screwed Local Public School Districts Update 2009–2011. School Finance 101.
• Baker, B.D. (2014, July). America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts and How They Got That Way. Center for American Progress.
• Baker, B.D. (2015, June 24). America’s Most “Financially Disadvantaged” (e.g. Screwed) School Districts 2013 and Table 1. School Finance 101.
• Current data: U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates; NCES Common Core of Data; fiscal years 2022–2024.