School funding is set in state capitols, and governors write the first draft. Over three decades of school finance data, states’ standing on how hard they try to fund schools rose and fell with the people they elected.

Public schooling is, in most states, the largest single expense and responsibility of state government. It is also the only state function with consistent constitutional standing as a positive right: every state constitution obligates the state to provide a system of public schools. So we can reasonably judge state political leaders by how well they do on public education.

This post uses the School Finance Indicators Database to rank the 48 contiguous states on spending, fairness, effort, wages, adequacy and outcomes in 2024. It then asks a narrower question: in each state, whose watch saw the steepest drop in fiscal effort for schools?

Where states stand in 2024

Democratic-leaning states average an overall rank of about 18th; Republican-leaning states average about 28th. I ranked states on seven groups of indicators: (a) wage-adjusted current spending per pupil, (b) progressiveness of spending and of state and local revenue, (c) fiscal effort, (d) teacher wage competitiveness, (e) adequacy overall and in high-poverty districts, (f) equal opportunity, and (g) NAEP outcomes adjusted for family income and for starting point.

The split is not one-sided. Blue states lead by wide margins on spending, effort, wages and adequacy, including adequacy in the highest-poverty districts. Red states rank better on the progressiveness ratios and on equal opportunity, but much of that edge comes from underfunding low-poverty districts too: median adequacy in their lowest-poverty quintile is 0.88, against 1.25 in blue states. Red states also do better on income-adjusted NAEP levels and on NAEP gains since 2003, led by Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana.

Why effort is the place to look

Effort is the indicator elected leaders control most directly. It measures how much of a state’s economy goes to its schools: state and local education spending as a share of gross state product, and state and local revenue as a share of personal income. In 2024 the 48 states ranged from 2.2% to 5.6% of personal income, with a median of 3.6%.

Effort is not destiny, but it sets the ceiling. Across states in 2024, effort as a share of income correlates at 0.66 with wage-adjusted spending per pupil and at 0.45 with overall adequacy. It correlates only 0.22 with adequacy in the highest-poverty districts, because how a state distributes its money matters as much as how much it raises. Still, a state that lets effort slide has few ways to keep spending, wages and adequacy from sliding with it.

Effort is also a choice in a way that spending levels are not. A wealthy state can spend a lot while trying little; a poor state can try hard and still spend little. Effort asks what a state chooses to do with what it has, and that choice runs through governors’ budgets and the tax policy they sign.

Whose watch saw effort fall

In 16 states, effort rank fell 13 or more places across a single governor’s budgets, and 13 of those 16 governors were Republicans. I credited each year’s change to the governor in office when that year’s budget was adopted. I used rank, not raw effort, because recessions and booms move every state’s effort at once.

Some of the falls were steep in raw terms too. Under Mitch Daniels, Indiana went from 5.56% to 4.34% of personal income. Under Mark Gordon, Wyoming went from 4.68% to 3.53%. Under Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas went from 4.05% to 3.23%.

This is not a one-party story. Tom Carper in Delaware, Tom Vilsack in Iowa and Mike Lowry in Washington all presided over double-digit drops. Across all 48 states, the steepest decline came under a Republican in 29 states, a Democrat in 17 and an independent in 2. Republicans held 136 of the 262 governorships in the period, so they are overrepresented, but many of these states had few Democratic governors to compare.

A few states held their ground. No governor in Illinois, New Jersey, Vermont, Tennessee or California saw the state lose more than two places in effort rank.

The last eight years

Recent budgets show both directions. Ranking states on effort and adequacy combined, and crediting each change to the governor whose budget it was, 2016–2023 budgets produced these falls and gains.

Nine of the ten largest falls came under Republican governors; Republicans held 57 of the 97 tenures in the window. Iowa under Kim Reynolds and Nebraska under Pete Ricketts lost the most on adequacy, with overall adequacy down 0.17 and 0.20. In Arkansas, Texas and Delaware the decline was mostly effort.

Seven of the ten largest gains came under Democratic governors, three under Republicans. New Mexico under Michelle Lujan Grisham stands out on every measure: effort rose 0.64 points of income and high-poverty adequacy went from 0.49 to 0.80. Those budgets followed the 2018 Yazzie/Martinez ruling, so the court shares the credit. In Nevada, Colorado and Vermont, adequacy rose even as effort as a share of income fell.

On the ballot Tuesday

Thirty-four of the 48 states in this analysis elect a governor on November 3. Alaska and Hawaii also vote but are outside the data. In 16 states the incumbent is running, and the record shown is theirs. In the other 18, the seat is open, and the record is the departing governor’s: the record of the party now holding the office. Rhode Island is listed as open because Gov. Dan McKee lost his primary.

Governors first elected in 2022 have only one budget in the data, too few to judge. Among incumbents with longer records, Phil Scott (R, Vermont) took his state from 6th to 1st, and JB Pritzker (D, Illinois) from 7th to 5th. Greg Abbott (R, Texas) shows the largest fall among incumbents on the ballot, from 35th to 45th. Ned Lamont (D, Connecticut) and Brad Little (R, Idaho) held their states’ rank. Kelly Ayotte (R, New Hampshire) and Larry Rhoden (R, South Dakota) took office after 2023, so their predecessors’ records are shown.

Among open seats, the largest gains came under Michelle Lujan Grisham (D, New Mexico, 34th to 10th), Kay Ivey (R, Alabama, 43rd to 34th), Gretchen Whitmer (D, Michigan) and Gavin Newsom (D, California). The largest falls came under Kim Reynolds (R, Iowa, 12th to 20th), Mike DeWine (R, Ohio), Tony Evers (D, Wisconsin), Mark Gordon (R, Wyoming) and Kevin Stitt (R, Oklahoma).

A departing governor’s budgets say something about the party that wrote them, not about the nominee who would inherit the job. Nominees who have not served as governor have no record in this data. Rhode Island’s Republican nominee is shown as Aaron Guckian, who led a close September primary.

What this does and does not show

These are associations in time, not proof that any one governor caused a decline. Four things deserve weight before anyone reads too much into a single name:

• Governors share the pen. Legislatures write and pass budgets, and in some states the legislature is the stronger hand. Courts also order or block funding changes.
• The economy moves the denominator. Effort is spending relative to income or GSP, so an energy boom (North Dakota in the 2000s, Wyoming more recently) can push effort down even when spending holds steady. Rank nets out national cycles, not state-specific ones.
• Ranks are relative. A state can lose places because others raised effort, not because it cut.
• Short and partial terms. Governors in office before 1993 are judged only on later budgets, and a few tenures cover just one or two budgets.

What the pattern does show is that effort is not fixed. It moves, sometimes sharply, within a single administration. That makes it something voters can hold leaders to.

Elections matter

When a governor’s budgets let effort slide, the state gives up the main lever it has over spending, teacher pay and adequacy. Indiana under Mitch Daniels and Wyoming under Mark Gordon each fell from 3rd to 18th in effort.

Voters can ask concrete questions of anyone running for governor or the legislature. Will they hold or raise the share of state income going to schools? Will new money go first to the districts furthest from adequate? Will tax cuts be paid for by cutting school funding effort?

Public education is the largest thing most states do and the one their constitutions promise. How leaders treat it is a fair test of how they govern.

Data and methods

• Data. School Finance Indicators Database state panel, 1993–2024, for the 48 contiguous states (Alaska, Hawaii and DC excluded). Adequacy uses the National Education Cost Model; NAEP covers grades 4 and 8 reading and math.
• 2024 ranks. Each indicator is ranked 1–48. The overall rank averages within-year percentiles across groups a–g. NAEP enters as scores adjusted for family income (non-linear where cross-validation favored it) and gains since 2003 adjusted for starting score.
• Political lean. 2025 Cook Partisan Voting Index; D-leaning means D+1 or more, R-leaning R+1 or more.
• Effort and governors. Effort rank averages within-year percentiles of state and local education spending as a share of GSP and of state and local revenue as a share of personal income. The change into data year t is credited to the governor in office on July 1 of year t−1. Governor terms come from Jacob Kaplan’s governors dataset, extended through 2023 and corrected for December inaugurations and mid-year transitions.
• Interactive version. Rank tables, state best years and every governor’s effort record are on the Red-Blue School Finance Ranks dashboard.

Yesterday I took a look at America’s bottom five states for education: Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, states that could do far better by their children and choose not to. Fair is fair. Today, the other end of the list. It also picks up where two recent posts left off: The Dependent States of America, on the states that lean on federal aid because they underinvest in their own kids, and The Education States that Will Lead the Way.

Can, and do

America’s best states for education are Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Wyoming and Connecticut. Not simply because they’re wealthy, but because they fund their schools adequately, and their students show it, on test scores and on broader measures of child well-being.

Being rich isn’t the same as being good, and good scores aren’t the same as good policy. The question here mirrors yesterday’s, flipped: which states fund their schools adequately and get strong results for kids? And it means treating effort, the share of its economy a state puts into its schools, a little differently. Yesterday, low effort was a stain because it left children in inadequately funded schools, by choice. A state that puts a smaller share of its economy into schools but still funds them well above adequate, and gets top results, isn’t making that choice. So here, low effort counts against a state only when it comes with inadequate funding.

One warning up front. None of these states provides equal educational opportunity, and only Wyoming comes close. Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts have some of the largest gaps between rich and poor districts in the country. “Best” here means best available, not good enough.

How I picked them

I used the same sources as the bottom five, with the flags flipped, and added actual student outcomes and equal educational opportunity. A state earns a star for each of the first three measures below, plus or minus half a star for equal opportunity, and loses half a star for low effort that leaves its schools underfunded (finance data are for 2022-23):

1. High statewide adequacy. Top ten on how far the typical student’s district spends above its National Education Cost Model target, the cost of reaching national average math and reading scores given local poverty, wages and scale. (Why cost, not raw spending, is the right yardstick: Illustrations: Why “Cost” Matters and Efficiently Mediocre.)
2. Child well-being. Top ten in the 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book.
3. Student outcomes. Top ten on 2024 NAEP, averaging standardized state scores across 4th and 8th grade math and reading (state scores).
4. Equal opportunity (half weight). Plus half a star for an opportunity gap smaller than the median state’s (−38 points) with high-poverty districts still funded at or above adequate, so states can’t earn it by underfunding everyone equally. Minus half a star for a gap in the worst quarter of states (−63 or worse, 11 states).
5. Low effort that leaves schools underfunded (half-star penalty). Fiscal effort, state and local K-12 revenue as a share of gross state product (SFID, 8th ed.), below the median state’s 3.22 percent, and a typical student in a below-adequate district. That’s the stain: a state that could do more choosing not to, with children paying for it. Fifteen states get this flag, including all of yesterday’s bottom five. Lower effort on its own costs nothing.

Ties are broken by NAEP.

All five land at two and a half stars. Four of them earn all three full stars and lose half a star for fairness; Wyoming misses the well-being star but earns the fairness bonus. NAEP breaks the tie: Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Connecticut. Next come Minnesota and Wisconsin at two stars each, earned on outcomes alone, then Utah and North Dakota at one and a half.

Notes: effort change, typical-student adequacy and high-poverty adequacy are my calculations from the SFID State Indicators Database (2026 release). The NAEP ranking is my calculation from published 2024 state averages for public schools. It orders states almost exactly as Business Insider’s ranking of the same tests does. Opportunity gap = adequacy of the 40 percent highest-poverty districts minus the 40 percent lowest-poverty districts, as published in the SFID report; closer to zero is more equal. Raw NAEP scores partly reflect student poverty, which is one reason funding and fairness count here too. SFID doesn’t estimate adequacy for Alaska, Hawaii or Vermont, so they can’t earn star 1 or the equal-opportunity adjustment.

The top five

1. Massachusetts

Massachusetts makes the list on results. It ranks 1st on NAEP, with the highest average in the country on all four 2024 tests (225 and 246 in 4th grade reading and math; 268 and 283 in 8th, where Wisconsin ties it in math). It ranks 2nd on KIDS COUNT, and its typical student is in a district spending about 54 percent above adequate (6th).

Its effort is 2.79 percent of GSP, 35th in the country and below the national average, and it’s one of only three states whose effort fell by a full percentage point or more since 2006 (with Indiana and West Virginia). On yesterday’s list, that would be a stain. Here it isn’t, because a large, high-income economy means even below-average effort buys a lot: its typical student is still funded well above adequate, and its kids lead the nation. Massachusetts built that lead on the 1993 Education Reform Act and extended it with the 2019 Student Opportunity Act. The risk is that, as a share of its economy, it keeps spending the lead down. Its opportunity gap (−104), the fourth-largest in the nation, costs it half a star. For how Massachusetts and New Jersey stack up against the voucher states, see Red State, Blue State, Round Two: Arizona & Florida vs. New Jersey & Massachusetts.

2. New Jersey

New Jersey has the highest fiscal effort in the nation, 4.90 percent of GSP. For scale: Arizona would have to raise its K-12 revenue by about 150 percent to match it. New Jersey’s typical student is in a district spending about 69 percent above adequate (3rd), the state ranks 6th on KIDS COUNT, and it ranks 2nd on NAEP behind only Massachusetts (222 and 240 in 4th grade; 266 and 282 in 8th).

This didn’t happen by accident. It is the product of decades of Abbott v. Burke litigation and a weighted, need-based formula in the School Funding Reform Act of 2008. Thanks to that, New Jersey’s high-poverty districts are funded nearly 50 percent above adequate, better than the typical district in all but a handful of states. But its opportunity gap (−109) is still among the largest in the country, driven mostly by how much its wealthiest districts spend, and that costs it half a star. On what New Jersey’s formula needs now, see Reforming New Jersey School Funding in 2026; on why the spending-and-scores graphs creeping into its funding debate mislead, Misinform, Not Inform. The Education Rights Project page has an animation of New Jersey districts against the Massachusetts standard, 2009–2024.

3. New Hampshire

New Hampshire’s numbers look almost too good. The typical student’s district spends about 107 percent above the NECM target, the highest in the nation. Just 0.1 percent of students attend a below-adequate district. New Hampshire ranks 1st on KIDS COUNT and 3rd on NAEP (221 and 242 in 4th grade; 264 and 280 in 8th). SFID’s state profile gives it an overall score of 90, third of 47 states rated.

But this is a low-cost, low-poverty state with a lot of local property wealth. Its effort (3.26 percent, 23rd) is only average and has dropped 0.74 points since 2006, costing schools about $2.81 billion (10.7 percent) over 2016–2023. And it has a real equal-opportunity problem. Its opportunity gap (−63) is the 11th-largest in the country, enough to cost it half a star, and SFID rates its equal opportunity “low.” The gap is driven mostly by how lavishly its wealthiest towns spend; its highest-poverty districts are still funded about 78 percent above adequate, better than the typical district in most states. New Hampshire is well funded largely because its towns are rich, not because the state makes it so, which is what the Claremont litigation has been about for three decades.

4. Wyoming

Wyoming is the surprise, and on fairness, the model. Its typical student is in a district spending about 80 percent above the NECM target, second only to New Hampshire. Its effort (3.48 percent, 14th) is above average, and it’s another of the five states that held to or exceeded its 2006 effort level every year from 2016 to 2023. Its students rank 4th on NAEP, and its 4th graders’ math average (243) is tied for second in the country.

What sets Wyoming apart is equal opportunity, the only state on this list to earn the bonus. Its opportunity gap is just −6 points, the smallest in the country: its highest-poverty districts are funded about as far above adequate (+83 percent) as its most affluent ones. That’s no accident. Since the Campbell County decisions of the 1990s, Wyoming has funded schools through a cost-based model built from what districts actually need. Wyoming ranks 12th on KIDS COUNT, just outside the top ten.

5. Connecticut

Connecticut earns all three full stars, and it gets there the hard way. It puts 3.91 percent of its economy into K-12, third in the nation, and it’s one of just five states that stayed above its own 2006 effort level in every year from 2016 to 2023 (SFID). Its typical student attends a district spending about 57 percent above the NECM adequacy target, fourth-best in the country. Connecticut ranks 7th on KIDS COUNT and 8th on NAEP, beating the national average on all four 2024 tests (219 and 239 in 4th grade reading and math; 263 and 277 in 8th grade).

Then it loses half a star. Connecticut has the second-largest opportunity gap in the country (−148 points), behind only New York. Its high-poverty districts are still funded above adequate, but its affluent suburbs are funded to achieve far more. Bridgeport and New Britain have shown up on my lists of America’s most financially disadvantaged districts for more than a decade, from the 2015 edition to the latest, for 2022–2024. Still a top-five state, with a very big asterisk.

A big asterisk. Connecticut makes this list on averages, and averages are where inequality goes to hide. On equal educational opportunity, Connecticut is a disaster, and its racial and economic segregation is a huge liability. It ranks 46th of 47 states on equal opportunity in our latest SFID report. By my measures it has the largest racial school funding gap in the nation. The fifth of students in its whitest districts attend schools funded at about 201 percent of adequate; the fifth in its most Black and Hispanic districts, about 73 percent. Its funding system has slid from one of the more progressive in the country in the early 2000s to the fourth most regressive. And 13 districts serving about 124,000 students, 12 of them majority Black and Hispanic, fall short of even national-average adequacy. The light weight this scorecard puts on fairness flatters Connecticut more than any other state on the list.

Connecticut’s high averages are the same defense the State of Kansas offered in Montoy v. State two decades ago. In closing argument, the state’s attorney told Shawnee County District Judge Terry Bullock that Kansas’s schools were “producing meaningful results for most children.” Bullock’s reply, in his December 19, 2003 order, fits Connecticut today:

“The Court will never forget Mr. Weltz’s statement in closing argument in this case when he said, in haec verba, ‘Our education system is strong and is producing meaningful results for most children.’ This case, of course, is about the rest of those children.”

Judge Terry Bullock, Memorandum Decision and Order, Montoy v. State, No. 99-C-1738, Shawnee County District Court, December 19, 2003

Connecticut is the same story. Most of its kids are doing fine, and its overall outcomes are among the best in the country. But a great many of its children, concentrated in Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury and other high-poverty, majority Black and Hispanic districts, are deeply deprived. For a state that otherwise does so well, that is a huge problem. Any honest ranking of Connecticut has to be about the rest of those children. (For where Kansas stands two decades after Montoy, see my Kansas & Missouri policy brief.)

For the full picture, see my Connecticut Equal Educational Opportunity policy brief and Reforming School Finance in Connecticut slide deck on the Education Rights Project page, and my recent posts Challenge Accepted: How Connecticut Became the Poster Child for Educational Inequality and The collapse of fairness in Connecticut school funding.

What they have in common

The common thread is adequacy plus results. All five rank in the top six on typical-student adequacy and the top eight on NAEP, and all five beat the national average on every 2024 NAEP test. How they pay for it differs. New Jersey, Connecticut and Wyoming back it with sustained, above-average effort; Wyoming and Connecticut are two of only eight states putting at least as large a share of their economies into schools as they did in 2006. New Hampshire and Massachusetts get there on average or below-average effort, because their economies are big enough that it still buys adequate schools. Compare that to the bottom five: four of them are the four lowest-effort states in the country, and all five fund their typical student below adequate.

Four of the five also have something the bottom five lack: a school funding formula forced into shape by courts. Abbott in New Jersey, Campbell County in Wyoming, Claremont in New Hampshire, McDuffy behind the 1993 reform in Massachusetts. Litigation isn’t sufficient, as Connecticut’s CCJEF case shows, but in these states it set the floor.

The caveat that matters

Educational opportunity is unequal in every state, these five included. Only Wyoming earns the equal-opportunity bonus. Connecticut (−148), New Jersey (−109), Massachusetts (−104) and New Hampshire (−63) all have gaps well beyond the median state’s (−38). In each, the gap is driven at least as much by how lavishly affluent districts spend as by shortfalls in poor ones.

That isn’t a reason to level down. Wealthy communities investing in their kids is a good thing. But it does mean the job in these states is to raise the floor: drive targeted state aid to high-poverty districts until they’re funded as far above adequate as the suburbs next door. Wyoming shows it can be done. Its gap is −6.

Note: the state with the next-smallest opportunity gap after Wyoming is Florida (−8), which gets there by underfunding nearly everyone. Equal is only good when it’s also adequate. More in Florida School Finance Update: Here’s your manageable standard, now fund it!

Honorable mentions

North Dakota is the oddity. Its effort is modest: 2.59 percent of GSP, 41st, the same as Texas. But its economy is large relative to its student population, so modest effort still buys adequate funding (typical student about 33 percent above target, 9th), spread fairly evenly (an opportunity gap of −23, earning the half-star bonus). It ranks 12th on NAEP and 14th on KIDS COUNT, just outside on both. Same effort as Texas, very different result. That’s a reason for Texas to try harder, not praise for North Dakota’s effort.

Maine tries hard. It ranks 8th on effort (3.69 percent) and 5th on adequacy, with a typical student about 56 percent above target. But it ranks only 21st on KIDS COUNT, and its 2024 NAEP scores were the lowest in three decades. Its opportunity gap (−71) also costs it half a star. Money is necessary, not sufficient.

Illinois is the most-improved story. It ranks 4th on effort (3.86 percent), and its effort is up 0.43 points since 2006, the largest increase of any state. Much of that reflects the 2017 Evidence-Based Funding formula; The Red State Miracle That Wasn’t tracks what it bought against Texas and Florida. But it is still climbing out of a deep hole: adequacy ranks only 18th, and its opportunity gap (−80) is wide. Chicago and Waukegan are fixtures on my most-disadvantaged lists. Check back in a few years.

Pennsylvania ranks 2nd in the nation on effort (3.97 percent), but its money is badly distributed. Adequacy ranks 11th, the opportunity gap is −103, and in 2023 the Commonwealth Court ruled the system unconstitutional. Reading, Allentown and Philadelphia have long topped my lists of the most financially disadvantaged districts in the country. Philadelphia spent about 55 percent of what it would cost to reach national-average outcomes in 2024, about where it was in 2009; see A Philadelphia Story of Underfunding.

New York and Rhode Island put a lot in, ranking 7th and 6th on effort, and earn the adequacy star (7th and 10th). Then they lose half a star each for opportunity gaps of −151 and −96, the largest and sixth-largest in the nation. Neither ranks in the top 25 on NAEP or KIDS COUNT. On New York, see What’s up with New York State School Finance? and my policy brief on Foundation Aid and the small city districts. SFID urges caution with New York’s adequacy estimates, which rely on imputed test data.

Notable misses

Minnesota and Wisconsin earn two stars each, both on outcomes: top-ten NAEP (9th and 10th) and top-ten KIDS COUNT (5th and 8th). Neither earns the adequacy star. Minnesota ranks 30th on effort; Wisconsin is about average (21st), with a typical student only about 8 percent above adequate. Minnesota’s averages also hide wide gaps; see Minnesota’s Equal Educational Opportunity Problem and the Minnesota funding and outcome gaps animation, national vs. Massachusetts standards on the Education Rights Project page. Utah has the same two outcome stars (5th on NAEP, 3rd on KIDS COUNT) but loses half a star. It ranks 39th on effort (2.60 percent), and its typical student is in a district spending about 6 percent below adequate. That’s exactly the stain this scorecard penalizes: low effort that leaves schools underfunded. These are states where kids do well in spite of their funding systems, helped in part by comparatively low child poverty.

Vermont ranks 4th on KIDS COUNT but can’t be scored. SFID doesn’t publish Vermont effort or adequacy estimates because of irregularities in its data since 2017.

What the bottom five could learn

Put the two lists side by side and the lesson is plain. All five of the top states fund their typical student well above what it costs to reach national-average outcomes, and all five beat those outcomes comfortably. New Jersey, Connecticut and Wyoming get there with large, sustained commitments of their own economies, and Wyoming shows that adequate and equal can go together. New Hampshire and Massachusetts get there with average or below-average effort, and that’s fine as long as the money is enough, though both have let effort slide since 2006, and that cushion isn’t permanent. The bottom five can’t say any of this. Their low effort leaves their schools underfunded, by choice, and their kids pay for it.

The gap between the lists is a choice, not a law of nature. If Arizona put New Jersey’s share of its economy into its schools, its K-12 revenue would rise by about 150 percent. If North Carolina matched even Wyoming’s effort, it would add roughly 70 percent. Nobody is asking Nevada to become Connecticut overnight. But the states at the top of this list show what sustained commitment buys. And yes, money matters, and the evidence keeps piling up, all the way through to state economic growth (Human Capital Pays, If You Count the Cost).

They also show its limits. Even the best states leave their poorest children with less than their richest. Being the best, in American school finance, still isn’t the same as being fair.

Sources and data notes

• Baker, Di Carlo & Weber (Feb. 2026), The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, 8th ed.: effort ranks, opportunity gaps, and the states above their 2006 effort, 2022-23. See also the report summary.
• SFID State Indicators Database, 2026 release: my calculations of effort change since 2006, typical-student adequacy and high-poverty adequacy (NECM funding gap as a share of estimated cost).
• SFID New Hampshire state profile, 2026.
• Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book, via Becker’s full ranking.
• 2024 NAEP state average scale scores (NCES), compiled by US School Index and cross-checked against Business Insider’s state ranking.
• Maine Morning Star, Maine students score lowest in three decades.
• Companion post: America’s Worst States for Education (2026 Edition).

Notes: adequacy is not estimated for Alaska, Hawaii or Vermont. Interpret New York’s adequacy estimates with caution. All rankings are relative across states, using SFID’s modest benchmark of national-average test scores.

Often when I speak to large national groups in the US, those in the room wish to proclaim their state as the worst on education funding. But only one state can really hold that position. Here, I take a look at the bottom five.

Can’t versus won’t

America’s worst states for education are Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona. Not because their kids are the poorest or their test scores the lowest, but because they could do far better by their children and choose not to.

Every summer brings another round of “best and worst states for schools” listicles. Most mash together spending, class size, test scores, safety and whatever else is lying around, then hand out a rank. They tend to reward states for being rich and punish them for being poor. That tells us who has the money. It doesn’t tell us who is failing to use it.

So here’s a different question. Which states pair weak outcomes for kids with a deliberate refusal to put their own economic capacity toward fixing them? Those states aren’t unlucky. They’re making a choice.

How I picked them

I counted red flags on four measures, then used NAEP as a check on outcomes. A state earns a flag for each of the following:

1. Low fiscal effort. Bottom ten on state and local K-12 revenue as a share of gross state product, 2022-23 (SFID, 8th ed.). The U.S. average is 3.13 percent.
2. Chronic underfunding. At least half of students in “chronically underfunded” districts, the 20 percent of districts nationally furthest below their National Education Cost Model (NECM) adequacy targets. Ten states meet that bar.
3. Deliberate choice. Named in the SFID report as low-adequacy and low-effort, meaning inadequate funding is at least partly a policy choice, not a capacity problem.
4. Child well-being. Bottom ten in the 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book, which scores 16 indicators across economics, education, health and family/community.

The NECM benchmark is modest: what each district would need to spend to reach national average math and reading scores in grades 3–8, given its poverty, labor costs and size.

Arizona ties several states at two flags. It takes the fifth slot because its retreat from its own pre-recession effort is the largest SFID highlights (−35 percent), which I’ll get to below. NAEP Core ranks (4th and 8th grade math and reading pooled) come from the University of Oklahoma’s Fall to 48th report; I only have them for the states it lists.

The bottom five

1. Nevada

Nevada hits every flag I can measure. It puts 2.10 percent of its economy into K-12, 47th in the country. At least half its students attend chronically underfunded districts, and SFID names it among the states where that’s a choice. Kids pay for it outside school too: Nevada ranks 46th on KIDS COUNT, ahead of only Alaska, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi. On NAEP, Nevada had the seventh-lowest 8th grade math proficiency rate in 2024, with about one in five 8th graders proficient.

This is a state with a casino-and-tourism economy and no personal income tax. It has capacity. It just doesn’t point it at kids.

2. Texas

Texas also hits all four flags, and it does so at a scale no other state on this list approaches. Effort is 2.59 percent of GSP (40th) (SFID). At least half of Texas students are in chronically underfunded districts. Texas ties Oklahoma at 44th on KIDS COUNT. Its NAEP Core rank of 36th is middling, which tells you something: Texas kids are outperforming what Texas is willing to pay for.

And because Texas enrolls so many children, its choices shape the schooling of a very large share of the nation’s underfunded students.

3. North Carolina

North Carolina has the lowest fiscal effort in the nation, 2.05 percent of GSP. It has a large, growing economy and chooses to devote less of it to public schools than any other state. Unsurprisingly, at least half of its students sit in chronically underfunded districts, and SFID lists it among the deliberate-choice states.

North Carolina’s KIDS COUNT rank (32nd) is better than the others on this list. That’s the point: this is a state with the economic and social base to do far better. Instead, it has spent roughly three decades litigating the Leandro case over whether the state is meeting its own constitutional duty to provide a sound basic education.

4. Florida

Florida devotes 2.19 percent of GSP to schools (46th). Had it held to its own 2006 effort level, its schools would have had about 29 percent more state and local revenue from 2016 to 2023, among the steepest losses in the SFID report. At least half of Florida students are in chronically underfunded districts.

Here’s the twist. Florida posts one of the smallest opportunity gaps between high- and low-poverty districts in the nation (−8 points). That isn’t equity. It’s what happens when nearly everyone is underfunded: there isn’t enough money in the system to generate much inequality. Florida ranks 35th on KIDS COUNT and 27th on NAEP Core.

Note: SFID’s opportunity gap compares adequacy in the 40 percent highest- and lowest-poverty districts in each state, in percentage points.

5. Arizona

Arizona puts 2.10 percent of its economy into K-12 (48th). Few states have walked away from their schools faster: had Arizona kept its 2006 effort level, its schools would have had about 35 percent more state and local revenue from 2016 to 2023, the largest proportional loss the SFID report highlights. To reach New Jersey’s effort level, Arizona would have to raise K-12 revenue by about 150 percent.

Arizona is on SFID’s deliberate-choice list and ranks 40th on KIDS COUNT. On NAEP, its 4th graders scored below the national average in both math and reading in 2024; only about a quarter were proficient in reading, and nearly half scored below Basic.

What they have in common

All five are low-effort states with the economic capacity to do more. Four of the five are the four lowest-effort states in the country (NC, AZ, NV, FL), and all five appear on SFID’s list of states where inadequate funding reflects, at least in part, a policy choice. That’s the common denominator: not poverty, not geography, but priorities.

The cost lands unevenly. Nationally, 75 percent of Black students attend districts funded below NECM adequacy levels, versus 37 percent of white students; for chronically underfunded districts it’s 57 percent versus 18 percent. Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely than white students to be in an underfunded district. States like Texas, Florida and Nevada, with large Black and Hispanic enrollments and chronically underfunded systems, are where those national gaps are made.

None of this is a pandemic story. U.S. average effort fell from 3.59 percent of GSP in 2006 to 3.13 percent in 2023, and 42 states now put a smaller share of their economies into schools than before the Great Recession. Had states simply held their 2006 effort levels, schools would have had about $575 billion more from 2016 to 2023. The five states here just went further down that road than almost anyone.

Note: the post-2020 dip in effort partly reflects unusually fast GSP growth, not only budget cuts; Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat also raised whether federal COVID aid let states ease off.

The children’s rights picture rhymes. Human Rights Watch’s state scorecard finds no state above a C on child marriage, corporal punishment, child labor and juvenile justice; 16 states get an F. Corporal punishment remains legal in both public and private schools in 22 states. A country that won’t ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child leaves those guarantees to the states, and the states on this list have chosen to guarantee children rather little, starting with their schools.

Dishonorable mentions

Oklahoma would make any outcomes-only list. It ranks 48th on NAEP Core, ahead of only West Virginia, Alaska and New Mexico, and 48th on the KIDS COUNT education domain. Its effort (2.85 percent, 34th) is below average but not bottom-tier, so it misses my cut. It shouldn’t take comfort in that.

Alabama has at least half its students in chronically underfunded districts and a wide gap between its high- and low-poverty districts: high-poverty districts sit about 48 percent below adequate, low-poverty districts about 7 percent below, a 41-point opportunity gap. It ranks 42nd on KIDS COUNT and 44th on NAEP Core.

Tennessee is a low-effort, deliberate-choice state (2.31 percent, 45th) whose NAEP Core rank of 17th shows what reform without money can buy, and its limits.

New Mexico and Mississippi are the hard cases. They hold the bottom two spots on KIDS COUNT, and New Mexico is last on every NAEP test (Mississippi, thanks to its literacy push, now sits 28th on NAEP Core). Mississippi has 99 percent of students in below-adequate districts and 80 percent in chronically underfunded ones. But both try: New Mexico ranks 12th on effort (3.54 percent) and Mississippi 20th (3.30 percent). These are can’t states, not won’t states. Small economies and high child poverty mean even strong effort can’t close the gap alone. That’s an argument for federal foundation aid targeted at high-effort, low-capacity states, not for putting them on a shame list.

Note: Alaska and West Virginia also sit near the bottom on NAEP and KIDS COUNT. SFID doesn’t estimate adequacy for Alaska, whose geography drives costs the national model can’t capture.

These are choices

The usual response to lists like this is that some states are just poorer, more rural, or harder to serve. For New Mexico and Mississippi, that’s partly true. For Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, it isn’t. These states have the capacity. They’ve chosen tax cuts, revenue limits and, increasingly, private school subsidies over adequately funding the public schools most of their children attend.

We know what works. Money matters, and it matters most for the kids these states shortchange. The fix starts with three things:

1. Raise effort. Getting even to the national average of 3.13 percent of GSP would mean billions in new revenue in each of these states.
2. Target it. Drive state aid to high-poverty districts based on rigorously estimated costs, and strip out flat grants and minimum-aid guarantees that send money where it isn’t needed.
3. Tie federal aid to effort. Supplemental federal foundation aid should flow to high-need districts in states that pay their fair share, which would reward New Mexico and Mississippi and give the bottom five a reason to try.

Until then, children in these five states will keep paying for their legislators’ priorities.

Sources and data notes

• Baker, Di Carlo & Weber (Feb. 2026), The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, 8th ed. — effort, NECM adequacy and opportunity gaps, 2022-23. Adequacy not estimated for Alaska, Hawaii or Vermont. See also the report summary.
• Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book, via Becker’s full ranking and Oklahoma Policy Institute (domain ranks).
• Tyner (Feb. 2026), The Fall to 48th, Oklahoma Center for Education Policy — pooled NAEP Core ranks, 2024.
• USAFacts, Nevada NAEP math proficiency; Arizona Republic on Arizona’s 2024 NAEP; Rio Grande Foundation on New Mexico’s 2024 NAEP.
• Human Rights Watch, How Do US States Measure Up on Child Rights? (last updated Sept. 2023).

Spoilers for episodes 1–3 of Carrie (Prime Video, 2026).

This month I posted a draft law review article, Not the Mere Creature of Anyone: Parental Control, Public Money, and the Case for Children’s Educational Rights. Its argument is that for a century the Supreme Court has asked one question about children’s schooling, how much control parents get, and has almost never asked the other: what is the child owed? (I walked through the argument in an earlier post.)

Then I started watching Mike Flanagan’s Carrie on Prime Video, and I couldn’t get the article out of my head. What struck me most was how Carrie’s teachers, and especially her school counselor, reached out to her and cared for her, all while working inside the very constraints the article describes.

I did not expect a Stephen King adaptation to be the clearest illustration of that argument I’ve seen. It is.

Flanagan’s Carrie White is not just a bullied teenager with a fanatical mother. She is a child who was, for roughly fifteen years, legally invisible. And the only reason she ever sees the inside of a school is a plot device that our law does not reliably supply: a death in the family that triggers a welfare check.

Fifteen years in the house: exit with no one watching

The series opens after Carrie’s father Ralph dies in a construction accident. Social workers conducting a welfare check find Margaret and her teenage daughter, a girl who has essentially never left the family home. As a condition of Margaret keeping custody, Carrie must attend the local high school. Margaret, for her part, promises Carrie it will only be for a semester, two at most.

Up to that point, Carrie had been “homeschooled,” in the loosest possible sense. She was allowed to read little beyond the Bible. What she knows of the wider world of books she owes almost entirely to a neighbor, Stella, who as a girl began slipping books into the birdhouse Carrie was permitted to tend, the one point of contact she had with the outside.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a precise picture of the regime described in Part I.D of the article. The Supreme Court has never decided a home schooling case. Home schooling’s legality rests on state statutes read against Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and those statutes range from notice and portfolio review to almost nothing at all. Carrie’s entire educational recourse, for a decade and a half, was the private generosity of a kid next door with a library card. No registry knew she existed. No assessment measured what she had learned. No teacher, nurse, or counselor (no mandated reporter) ever laid eyes on her.

Pierce itself did not contemplate this. The Court was explicit that nothing in its holding questioned “the power of the State reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils.” Pierce was a bargain: parents could leave the public schools, and the State kept the power to make sure the child was educated anyway. In Carrie’s case, the first half of the bargain was honored for fifteen years. The second half never showed up.

The welfare check: the state as guarantor, by accident

The show’s premise, that the state conditions Margaret’s custody on Carrie’s school attendance, is the closest thing in the story to the framework I call Children’s Recourse. It is the state acting as guarantor of a real education for a child whose parent has failed her.

There is doctrinal room for it. Prince v. Massachusetts remains the clearest statement that parental and religious authority yields to the state’s interest in the child’s welfare: parents “may be free to become martyrs themselves,” but they are not free “to make martyrs of their children.” Even Mirabelli v. Bonta, which this spring expanded parents’ rights to be informed about what happens at school, preserved a carve-out: the State may still “shield children from unfit parents by enforcing child-abuse laws and removing children from parental custody in appropriate cases.” A prayer closet used as a punishment cell is squarely what child-abuse laws are for.

But notice how the state got there. Not through any system designed to find a child like Carrie. It got there because her father died and someone came to the door. Under DeShaney, the state generally owes a child no duty to protect her from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. Absent the accident, Carrie stays in the house, and nothing in federal constitutional law obliges anyone to come looking.

Inside the school: what Mahmoud and Mirabelli would hand Margaret

Once Carrie is in school, the show becomes a story about a child discovering what she has been denied, and a mother trying to claw it back.

In episode two, the guidance counselor, Peter Morton, is among the first adults to treat Carrie kindly. He answers her questions and walks her into the school library, a place she has never been. The titles she pulls off the shelf, as Forbes noted, are drawn from authors whose books are among the most frequently challenged in American schools. Carrie wants to read. She wants to understand her own body, which no one has explained to her, and she gets materials and answers from the adults at school that her mother would never have provided. Margaret, true to form, wants her out of all of it.

Twenty years ago, Margaret’s objections would have gone nowhere. The baseline the lower courts drew from Barnette (Mozert in 1987, Parker v. Hurley in 2008) was that being exposed to material in school is not a constitutional injury. Parents who objected could leave. They could not veto.

That baseline is gone. Under Mahmoud v. Taylor, a parent’s free exercise rights are violated by school policies that “substantially interfere with the religious development” of the child, and a burden of the same character as Yoder triggers strict scrutiny even under a neutral, generally applicable policy. Margaret White is close to a law school hypothetical for that test: sincere, all-encompassing religious objection to the library’s novels, to sex education, to the very idea that Carrie’s body is something she is entitled to understand. Mirabelli adds a second weapon. The Court found parents likely to succeed in claiming a right to participate in “decisions regarding their children’s mental health,” which is to say, in what passes between Carrie and Mr. Morton.

What neither opinion contains is any account of Carrie’s side. As Part II.D of the article puts it, a child’s interest in learning about the world as it is, in confidential access to a school counselor, and in developing views of her own appear in these opinions only as interests the parental right overrides. They are never treated as rights the child holds.

Justice Douglas saw this coming in Yoder. The children’s own views had not been canvassed, he wrote, and “the children should be entitled to be heard.” Carrie is sixteen or seventeen. She has views. She is literally reading her way out of the house. Under current doctrine, no court would ask her.

Compare England. Its statutory guidance on sex education lets a pupil, from three terms before age sixteen, opt into sex education even over a parent’s withdrawal. Carrie, in England, would have her own say. In the U.S., after Mahmoud, the opt-out runs one way.

Follow the money: the Carrie the state would never have found

Now change one fact. Suppose Margaret White lived in Arizona, and suppose that instead of keeping Carrie home on her own dime, she had signed up for an Empowerment Scholarship Account. I took up exactly this scenario in Experimenting With Our Children, which asks who answers to the eighteen-year-old the voucher failed.

Under Arizona’s statute, a parent’s signature on the account agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of compulsory attendance law. The account requires spending on reading, math, and the other basic subjects, but imposes no testing, no curricular approval, and measures no learning. Florida’s home-education account requires a test to be taken and reported; funding turns on submitting it, not on the score.

In that world, the welfare check does not end with a custody condition. Margaret has a signed account agreement that counts as attendance and a stream of public money to prove it. Carrie’s “education” is a ledger of receipts. And after Carson v. Makin, a state that funds private options cannot exclude a family because the instruction it funds is religious. (The series, like King’s novel, is set in Chamberlain, Maine. Carson is a Maine case.) If the Court rules in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, argued November 3, that neutral conditions cannot bind religious providers, even the conditions a state might want to attach will be in doubt. Preston Green and I sketched where this sequence leads back in 2020, in The Post-Espinoza End Game.

The point is not that religious families shouldn’t get public support. The Netherlands funds private religious schools on the same footing as public ones. The point is that every peer democracy that does so exchanges that support for public accountability, and that money flowing in a child’s name ought to carry some obligation running to the child. Under the doctrine as it stands, it carries none.

What Carrie is owed: the state constitutional right that follows the child

The guidance office is where Carrie’s world opens up. Mr. Morton’s trip to the library is the first time an adult at any institution asks her what she wants to read. It’s a small scene, but it points straight at the question school finance people spend their careers on: not what a parent prefers, but what the state has actually promised each child.

Kentucky’s high court in Rose defined an adequate education in terms of capacities every child must have the opportunity to develop, including enough knowledge of economic, social, and political systems to make informed choices. New York’s Court of Appeals has said a sound basic education must prepare students to compete for jobs that support them and to function as civic participants. Several state high courts, including Kentucky, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Washington, have called the right fundamental, and have described it as one held by each child.

A right like that does not stay behind when a child leaves the public system. It follows her. On that reading, the relevant question about Carrie is not whether her absence harmed the local public school’s budget. It is whether the state secured for her, at any point in fifteen years, the capacities its constitution guarantees. The honest answer is no, and the only thing that changed it was a funeral.

Children’s Recourse, applied to Carrie White

Part VII of the article lists measures a state can adopt now, on the authority Pierce itself reserved, without overruling anything. Here is how each would have changed Carrie’s story.

None of these measures requires Margaret to renounce her faith or Carrie to profess anything. They are deliberately content-neutral. That matters, and I want to be careful here, because Margaret White is a horror-movie caricature of religious motherhood, and it would be easy, and wrong, to read this post as an argument that religious parents are the problem. Pierce protected Catholic families from a Klan-backed law; Meyer and Farrington protected German and Japanese American families. Any framework that expands state authority over schooling has to be built so it cannot be turned against minority families again. That is why Children’s Recourse locates the right in the child, not in the state’s preferences about culture or creed. The European Court of Human Rights draws the line at indoctrination, not exposure, and it has held that a child’s interest in a well-rounded education can outweigh a parent’s religious objection to particular lessons. That’s a workable model.

The only recourse in the story

Carrie is a horror story, and the genre gives its heroine one form of recourse: telekinesis. Every adult institution in her life, the family, the church, the school, the state, fails her or arrives too late, and she answers with the only power she has.

Real children don’t have that option. What they have, or ought to have, is law. Right now, the law the Court has built treats Carrie as the object of her mother’s liberty, funds her mother’s exit if her state chooses to fund exit at all, lets her mother veto what the school teaches her once she’s inside, and asks Carrie nothing.

Pierce told us that “the child is not the mere creature of the State.” True. Nor is she the mere creature of her mother, or of a neighbor’s birdhouse, or of a lucky welfare check. If we are going to let a parent hold a child’s education in her hands, and especially if we are going to pay for it, someone has to be answerable to the child.

Read the full draft: Baker, B.D. (2026, October). Not the mere creature of anyone: Parental control, public money, and the case for children’s educational rights. School Finance 101 Working Paper.

Related posts on School Finance 101

• Not the Mere Creature of Anyone: A Century of Parental Control Over Schooling, and the Case for Children’s Recourse (October 2026)
• Experimenting With Our Children: Who Answers to the 18-Year-Old the Voucher Failed? (October 2026)
• An Economically Conservative Approach to Deciding Whether to Adopt or Expand Vouchers (October 2026)
• Preserving an Educated Future for America (Short Term Plan) (May 2025)
• Charter Schooling in the Post-Espinoza & Fulton Era (July 2021)
• The Post-Espinoza End Game (with Preston Green) (July 2020)
• On Private Schools and Discrimination (Preston Green) (February 2020)
• The Efficiency Smokescreen: The 3 Kansas Judges Who Saw Right Through It (January 2013)

Sources on the series

• Carrie (miniseries), Wikipedia
• Show Snob, episode 1 recap
• Show Snob, episode 2 recap
• Plugged In, Carrie TV review
• High On Films, series recap
• Forbes, Carrie’s library scene and banned books

An update on what the causal research says about school funding, with a new policy brief attached.

In January 2025, the Albert Shanker Institute released the third edition of Does Money Matter in Education? The bottom line, which I put in all caps on purpose: MONEY MATTERS, WHETHER IT’S GOING UP OR DOWN. It matters whatever the source or cause of the change, for operating and capital spending alike, and most of all for children in high-poverty, historically underfunded districts.

That was 21 months ago. Since then, pandemic aid has run out, districts are going over fiscal cliffs, universal voucher programs are diverting public revenue, and the federal role in education is under direct attack. So it’s fair to ask: has anything in the newer research changed the picture?

It has. The picture got stronger.

What’s new

Here’s a quick tour of the rigorous, causally designed studies that have appeared, or appeared in major journals, since the third edition. The attached brief has details and full citations.

Capital spending matters, a lot, in the right places. Biasi, Lafortune and Schönholzer, now published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2025), study roughly 17,000 school bond elections using close-election comparisons. On average, $1,000 of capital spending raises test scores by about 0.05 SD. HVAC projects raise scores by more than 0.20 SD, and health, safety and building-system projects by about 0.15 SD. Athletic facilities? They raise home prices but not test scores. The gains are concentrated almost entirely in districts serving low-income students. So yes, kids learn better when they aren’t sweltering in 90-degree classrooms with bad air. Who knew?

Teacher pay keeps teachers, and that pays off. Arkansas raised its minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 under the LEARNS Act. Zamarro and colleagues (CALDER, 2026) find that the biggest raises produced the biggest retention gains: teachers who got more than $8,000 were 3.1 points more likely to stay in their districts. In New Jersey, Shakya (2024) finds that districts adopting a $50K starting salary saw gains in math proficiency and graduation rates. Rauscher, Mellon, Loeb and Abott (2024) trace part of the effect of voter-approved operating levies to teacher salaries and counselors, and they find returns roughly twice as large in low-spending, high-poverty districts.

Federal pandemic aid helped, mostly where it was targeted. Goldhaber and Falken (CALDER, 2025) use the Title I formula to isolate ESSER’s effects and find positive math gains, larger in high-poverty districts. The Education Recovery Scorecard team (Kane, Reardon and colleagues, 2026) estimates about six extra days of learning per $1,000, and finds that the highest-poverty districts would have seen almost no math recovery without the aid. Those effects are modest per dollar. That’s what you’d expect from one-time money pushed out fast in a crisis, against the largest learning loss in modern history. They’re still positive.

Cuts hurt, including cuts by another name. Chin and Chen (AERJ, 2026) study Indiana’s 2011 voucher and charter expansion. The most exposed districts lost about $433 per pupil, class sizes grew, schools closed, and achievement eventually turned significantly negative for several student groups. Money matters going down, too. It’s the same lesson as the Great Recession studies, with a new cause.

The payoffs extend into adulthood and into state economies. Baron, Hyman and Vasquez, now in the Review of Economics and Statistics (2026), show that Michigan’s school funding increases reduced adult crime. And Kirabo Jackson’s new NBER paper (2026) follows the money all the way to the macroeconomy. After state school finance reforms, earnings per worker stay flat for about 15 years while the affected kids are still in school, then climb to roughly 4.7% above the counterfactual after 30 years. GDP per capita ends up more than 5% higher.

The exception that proves the rule

One new study found no effect. Clemens, Hoxie and Veuger (NBER, 2026) look at districts just above and below an ESSER eligibility threshold and find that the extra federal money didn’t improve test scores. Why? Because those districts didn’t spend it on schools. They used it to cut local property taxes. Per-pupil spending didn’t rise, so outcomes didn’t either.

That isn’t evidence against “money matters.” It’s evidence for it. Money matters when it reaches classrooms. This is why maintenance-of-effort provisions matter.

About those scatterplots

Every so often someone posts a chart of state spending against NAEP scores, or of rising national spending against flat or falling scores, and declares the case closed. In 2025–26 we got a Brookings cross-state analysis and a Texas A&M blog post along these lines. The Brookings authors, to their credit, say plainly that their analysis is not causal.

Those charts are the 2020s version of the Coleman-era correlations that the entire modern literature was built to get past. States that spend more differ in student need, labor costs, and a hundred other ways. And a national score decline that coincides with smartphones, a pandemic and changing test-taking populations tells you nothing about what an additional dollar does in a given district. That’s exactly why researchers turned to close elections, formula kinks, court orders and policy shocks. When you do that, you get the same answer over and over.

Why the case keeps getting stronger

Look at the timeline. Through the 1980s and early ’90s, the “money doesn’t matter” argument rested on vote counts of correlational studies. Starting around 2016, quasi-experimental studies began piling up: different states, different decades, different funding sources (courts, legislatures, local voters, the federal government, even recessions and voucher programs) and different outcomes (test scores, graduation, college, earnings, poverty, crime, civic engagement, mobility, state GDP). The direction almost never changes.

Each new natural experiment is another independent test. Each one passes. That’s what a mature, robust body of evidence looks like.

So what?

• Cuts are not neutral. States staring at fiscal cliffs or voucher-driven revenue losses should expect real, measurable harm to kids, concentrated in high-need districts.
• Progressive funding is efficient funding. The highest returns are in the districts with the greatest needs and the fewest resources.
• New money has to add, not replace. Pair aid with maintenance-of-effort requirements.
• Fund people and buildings. Salaries, staffing, HVAC and safe buildings are complements, not competitors.
• Use the right time horizon. Several years for operating effects, three to eight for capital, decades for economic returns.

The question isn’t whether money matters. It’s whether we’re willing to provide it.

The full policy brief, “Money Matters — and the Evidence Keeps Growing,” with the infographic, pathways figure, evidence timeline and references, is attached below.