Carrie Is Not the Mere Creature of Anyone: A Children’s Recourse Reading of Flanagan’s Carrie

Who speaks for Carrie White? Timeline from birth through fifteen years at home to the welfare check and school

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

Opt-out claims lost for decades, then won twice in 2025-26 — Figure 2. Opt-out claims, Gobitis (1940) through Mirabelli (2026).

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.

Inside the school, the claims run one way: Margaret holds recognized claims under Mahmoud and Mirabelli; Carrie holds none — Figure 3. What each party can claim once Carrie is inside the school.

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

Since 2017, funding private schools means funding religious ones too — Figure 4. The funding cases, Norwood (1973) through St. Mary (pending).

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.

Three versions of Carrie: as shown, under an Arizona-style ESA, and under Children's Recourse — Figure 5. Same child, same mother, three rule sets.

Children’s Recourse measure	What it would have meant for Carrie
Register every school-age child, in any setting	The state knows Carrie exists before age 16, not because of a death
Assess learning, not attendance or receipts; remediate, then require a change of setting after repeated failure	A Bible-only curriculum shows up in an assessment years earlier
Keep every child in periodic contact with a mandated reporter	Someone other than Stella sees Carrie, and the prayer closet, long before high school
Attach neutral accountability conditions to every public dollar	If Margaret’s home schooling were publicly funded, the money would buy measurable learning, not a signature
Give older students a statutory voice in decisions about their own schooling	Carrie’s wish to read, and to learn about her own body, counts for something against Margaret’s opt-outs
Repeal provisions that deem a funding contract to be school attendance	Margaret cannot convert an account agreement into a shield against the welfare check

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.

Sources on the series

Money Matters. And the Evidence Keeps Piling Up.

Infographic: money matters whether funding goes up or down, whatever the source, across short- and long-term outcomes; operating and capital both matter; effects largest for high-need children.

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.

Infographic: money matters whether funding goes up or down, whatever the source, across short- and long-term outcomes — Figure 1. The evidence at a glance. Sources: Jackson & Mackevicius (2024); Jackson, Wigger & Xiong (2021); Biasi, Lafortune & Schönholzer (2025); Rauscher & Shen (2022).

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.

Flow diagram: funding sources feed operating and capital spending, which reach students through teachers, adult attention, healthier buildings and engagement, raising short- and long-run outcomes — Figure 2. How school funding reaches students: from revenue source, through operating and capital spending, to short- and long-run outcomes.

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.

Timeline of studies from the 1966 Coleman Report to 2026, showing the shift from correlational doubt to consistent causal evidence — Figure 3. Sixty years of evidence. Green = funding increases improved outcomes; red = funding decreases worsened them.

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.

Money Matters — and the Evidence Keeps Growing (Policy Brief, PDF)Download

The Education States that will Lead the Way

U.S. map classifying states as Leading, Close behind, or Not there yet on school funding adequacy and NAEP performance

In my last post I described the Dependent States of America: the states, mostly red, whose schools lean most heavily on federal aid, in many cases because they have chosen to underinvest in their own children. This post looks at the other end of the spectrum. These are the states that fund their schools adequately, including the schools serving the poorest children, and that perform well. And they include the states that, after letting their school funding collapse in the Great Recession, eventually chose to reinvest.

In an earlier working paper, I called these the Education States. They are states where courts have been willing to uphold and enforce education rights, where legislators and governors have funded those rights whether a court ordered them to or not, and which are now positioned to protect their own students while the federal government retreats. I noted then that the Education States are not exclusively blue or northern. The data bear that out, though not by much.

Measuring an Education State

I use three measures. The first two come from the School Finance Indicators Database (SFID), 2026 release, which covers school years through 2023. Funding adequacy compares what districts actually spend per pupil with what our National Education Cost Model estimates they would need to spend to reach national average test scores, given their students’ needs and regional costs. A ratio of 1.00 means spending is exactly adequate; 0.75 means districts spend three-quarters of what they need. I look at adequacy statewide and in each state’s highest-poverty fifth of districts, because a state can be well funded on average while its poorest districts are left behind. The third measure is performance: each state’s 2024 NAEP scores in grade 4 and grade 8 reading and math, expressed as standard deviations above or below the national public school average.

From these, I sort states into three groups:

Leading: adequate funding statewide and in high-poverty districts (both ratios at or above 1.00), with NAEP performance at or above the national average.
Close behind: adequate statewide, high-poverty districts at 85% of adequate or better, and NAEP at or above, or within 0.10 standard deviation of, the national average.
Not there yet: everyone else.

Six states lead: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Wyoming and North Dakota. Eleven more are close behind, including New York, Maine, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Washington, Colorado, California and Illinois, along with Kansas, Nebraska and Montana. The remaining 31, including nearly the entire South, are not there yet, though several of them are moving in the right direction. (Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont aren’t rated, because the cost model can’t produce reliable estimates for them.)

Funding and performance go together, though not perfectly. Across states, the correlation between statewide adequacy and NAEP performance is about 0.45. Every leading state performs above the national average, with Massachusetts (+0.27 SD) and New Jersey (+0.18) at the top.

The Great Divergence

The Great Recession hit every state’s school budget. What separates the Education States from the rest is what happened next.

Line chart of funding adequacy in high-poverty districts, 2009 to 2023, by 2024 presidential result: Democratic-leaning states recovered to about 1.0 while Republican-leaning states stayed near 0.6

Nationally, adequacy in high-poverty districts fell from 0.79 in 2009 to 0.66 by 2013. Those districts spent, on average, about two-thirds of what they needed. In the states Harris carried by 10 points or more, high-poverty adequacy dropped from 0.95 to 0.76 at its 2013 low. Then those states climbed back steadily, reaching 0.96 by 2019, before any federal pandemic aid arrived, and about 1.00 by 2023. In the states Trump carried by 10 or more, high-poverty adequacy fell from an already low 0.63 to 0.52, crept back only to 0.56 by 2019, and stood at 0.62 in 2023, still below where it was in 2009.

In other words, the gap between blue and red states’ highest-poverty districts was wide before the recession (about 0.32) and wider after the recovery (about 0.40 in 2019). Both groups cut their effort. In 48 of the 50 states with data, state and local school revenue is a smaller share of personal income today than in 2008; only Illinois and Hawaii are exceptions. But the median solidly Democratic state’s effort fell from 4.3% to 3.8%, while the median Lean R state’s fell from 3.8% to 2.4%, a decline of more than a third.

2024 result	States	Statewide adequacy, 2023	High-poverty adequacy, 2009	Post-recession low	High-poverty adequacy, 2023	Effort, 2008 → 2023	NAEP 2024	Leading / Close behind
Solid R (R+10 or more)	24	0.82	0.63	0.52	0.62	4.3% → 3.5%	0.00	2 / 3
Lean R (R+2 to 10)	4	0.77	0.59	0.52	0.58	3.8% → 2.4%	−0.05	0 / 0
Toss-up (margin under 2)	3	1.13	0.64	0.56	0.69	4.8% → 4.1%	+0.03	0 / 0
Lean D (D+2 to 10)	6	1.31	1.05	0.88	1.05	4.5% → 3.6%	+0.01	2 / 2
Solid D (D+10 or more)	14	1.24	0.95	0.76	1.00	4.3% → 3.8%	0.00	2 / 6
United States	51	1.01	0.79	0.66	0.83	4.3% → 3.6%	0.00	6 / 11

Adequacy = actual current spending per pupil ÷ spending required to reach national average test scores (SFID National Education Cost Model); 1.00 = exactly adequate. Group values are enrollment-weighted (pooled); high-poverty = each state’s highest-poverty fifth of districts. Post-recession low is the lowest value between 2010 and 2016. Effort = state and local school revenue as a share of personal income, median state. NAEP 2024 = average of grade 4 and 8 reading and math, in national standard deviations from the national public average, simple mean across states. Leading / Close behind = number of states in each group. Adequacy not estimated for Alaska, Hawaii or Vermont. Sources: School Finance Indicators Database (2026 release); NAEP; FEC 2024 certified results.

The pattern by political leaning is stark. In states Harris carried, by any margin, high-poverty districts are funded at or near adequate levels on average. In states Trump carried by any margin, they are funded at about 60% of adequate, and that hasn’t changed in fifteen years. The three toss-up states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, look like their politics: adequately funded on average but with their poorest districts well short, at 0.69.

Average NAEP performance by group is close to the national average across the board. That is partly because group averages blend high and low performers, and partly because performance depends on much more than funding, including child poverty, which is higher in many red states. It’s not that funding doesn’t matter. The leading states all outperform. But money is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

The Education States, by name

State	Statewide adequacy	High-poverty adequacy: 2009 → low → 2023	Effort	NAEP	Reinvested	2024 margin
Leading
Wyoming	1.80	2.10 → 1.78 → 1.93	3.71%	+0.15		R+45.8
New Hampshire	2.07	1.45 → 1.31 → 1.54	3.34%	+0.16	Yes	D+2.8
New Jersey	1.69	1.38 → 1.10 → 1.26	5.16%	+0.18		D+5.9
Massachusetts	1.54	1.36 → 0.99 → 1.15	3.23%	+0.27		D+25.2
North Dakota	1.33	0.90 → 0.71 → 1.12	3.51%	+0.09	Yes	R+36.5
Connecticut	1.57	1.36 → 1.13 → 1.07	4.07%	+0.11		D+14.5
Close behind
New York	1.46	1.22 → 1.00 → 1.09	5.02%	−0.03		D+12.6
Maine	1.56	1.11 → 0.93 → 1.09	3.73%	−0.07		D+6.9
Washington	1.35	0.74 → 0.66 → 0.96	3.38%	+0.04	Yes	D+18.2
Rhode Island	1.32	1.04 → 0.82 → 0.94	3.82%	0.00		D+13.8
Colorado	1.16	0.73 → 0.56 → 0.92	3.04%	+0.14	Yes	D+11.0
Minnesota	1.18	0.78 → 0.74 → 0.92	3.47%	+0.10		D+4.2
Kansas	1.14	0.99 → 0.76 → 0.91	4.16%	0.00		R+16.1
Montana	1.07	0.75 → 0.71 → 0.91	2.76%	+0.09	Yes	R+19.9
Nebraska	1.13	0.92 → 0.87 → 0.89	3.69%	+0.03		R+20.5
California	1.09	0.59 → 0.46 → 0.89	4.03%	−0.08	Yes	D+20.1
Illinois	1.14	0.69 → 0.66 → 0.87	4.68%	+0.05	Yes	D+10.9

Adequacy and effort are for 2023; NAEP is 2024, in standard deviations from the national public average. Leading: statewide and high-poverty adequacy both at or above 1.00, and NAEP at or above the national average. Close behind: statewide adequacy at or above 1.00, high-poverty adequacy at least 0.85, and NAEP within 0.10 SD of the national average or above it. Reinvested: high-poverty adequacy gained at least 0.15 from its 2010–2016 low, had already gained at least 0.08 by 2019 (before pandemic aid), and by 2023 exceeded its 2009 level. Row shading shows 2024 presidential leaning: solid red/blue = margin of 10+ points; pale red/blue = 2 to 10 points. Sources: School Finance Indicators Database (2026 release); NAEP 2024; FEC 2024 certified results.

Scatterplot of state and local school funding effort against statewide funding adequacy in 2023, with states colored by 2024 presidential result; low-effort, low-adequacy states are mostly Republican-leaning

Effort explains a good share of the difference. Across the 47 states with estimates (excluding DC), state and local effort and statewide adequacy are correlated at about 0.40. Of the 23 states putting in less than the median effort (3.6% of personal income), 17 voted for Trump, and only 8 fund their schools adequately statewide. Of the 24 at or above the median, 18 do. Twenty-one states fall below adequacy statewide, and 19 of them voted for Trump. The exceptions run in both directions. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Washington and Colorado reach adequacy with below-median effort because they are wealthy. Georgia, South Carolina and New Mexico put in above-median effort and still fall short, because their capacity is lower and their needs are higher. But the lower-left corner of the chart, low effort and inadequate funding, belongs almost entirely to Republican-leaning states: Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Idaho, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

Of the 17 leading and close-behind states, 12 voted for Harris and five for Trump. The red Education States fall into two types. Wyoming and North Dakota are small, energy-rich states that can fund adequate schools without exceptional effort. Wyoming’s effort has actually fallen from 5.8% of personal income in 2008 to 3.7%, but its funding is built on decades of court-enforced adequacy under the Campbell County decisions. Kansas, Nebraska and Montana are more traditional Plains states with long-standing commitments to their public schools. Kansas, in particular, was pulled back by its courts. After deep cuts under Governor Brownback, the Gannon litigation forced a multi-year reinvestment that the Kansas Supreme Court finally approved in 2019. Its high-poverty adequacy, stuck at 0.75 as late as 2019, reached 0.91 by 2023.

Nor is being blue enough. Maryland (high-poverty adequacy 0.71), Virginia (0.68), New Mexico (0.67) and Delaware (0.98, but with NAEP well below average) are all “not there yet.” And several of the leading states have slipped. Connecticut’s high-poverty districts went from 1.36 in 2009 to 1.07, and New Jersey’s from 1.38 to 1.26. Both are still adequate, but the margin is narrower than it was.

The states that eventually reinvested

The most hopeful part of the story is the states that hit bottom after the recession and then chose to rebuild, mostly through new funding formulas, often prompted by litigation, and mostly well before federal pandemic aid arrived.

California adopted the Local Control Funding Formula in 2013, directing additional funding to low-income students and English learners. High-poverty adequacy rose from 0.46 in 2012 to 0.74 by 2019 and 0.89 by 2023, the largest gain of any state.
Washington, under the state supreme court’s 2012 McCleary decision, overhauled its funding in 2017 and 2018. High-poverty adequacy rose from 0.66 to 0.96.
Illinois replaced one of the nation’s most regressive systems with its Evidence-Based Funding formula in 2017, and is one of only two states whose effort is higher now than in 2008. High-poverty adequacy rose from 0.66 to 0.87.
Oregon passed the Student Success Act in 2019. High-poverty adequacy rose from 0.63 to 0.99 by 2019 and stood at 0.94 in 2023.
Colorado rose from 0.56 to 0.92 even before eliminating its “budget stabilization factor” in 2024. That change isn’t yet in these data.
Massachusetts and New Jersey, both already adequate, recommitted through the Student Opportunity Act (2019) and New Jersey’s 2018 school funding reform (S2), respectively, reversing post-recession erosion.

A second wave of reinvestment is too recent to show fully in data that end in 2023. Kansas is one example. Maryland’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, enacted in 2021, has moved high-poverty adequacy from 0.53 in 2019 to 0.71. New Mexico, responding to the 2018 Yazzie/Martinez ruling, has moved from 0.48 to 0.67. Michigan’s 2023 budgets began to fund its new Opportunity Index. Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court declared the state’s system unconstitutional in 2023, and the legislature has begun adding adequacy funding. Whether these states become Education States depends on whether they sustain the effort.

Not every state that recovered deserves the credit. Arizona, Tennessee, South Dakota and Missouri also improved high-poverty adequacy from their post-recession lows, but their effort kept falling. Arizona’s dropped from 3.7% of personal income in 2008 to 2.4%, and Tennessee’s from 3.4% to 2.7%. Their gains came from economic growth, not renewed commitment, and several are now expanding universal vouchers that will pull money away from the public districts these figures describe. Utah is the more convincing case: its high-poverty districts are now at 0.94 of adequate and its students outperform the national average by 0.15 SD.

Then there are the states that never came back. Florida’s high-poverty adequacy is lower now (0.70) than in 2009 (0.76), and its effort has fallen from 3.8% to 2.2%, the lowest in the country. North Carolina (0.61 to 0.55; effort 3.6% to 2.4%) and Texas (0.56 to 0.52) followed the same path. Iowa, whose high-poverty districts were adequately funded in 2009 (1.01), has slid to 0.82.

Leading the way

The Great Recession was a natural experiment in political will. Every state took a hit. Some states rebuilt, usually because courts insisted or because legislatures and governors decided their poorest children deserved better. Others took the opportunity to cut taxes and never looked back. Fifteen years later, the result is two countries: one where children in high-poverty districts attend schools funded at roughly the level needed to reach national average outcomes, and one where they attend schools funded at about 60% of that level.

The Education States now carry a double burden. In the short term, they must protect their own students from a federal administration that is withholding funds, dismantling the Department of Education and targeting equity itself. That means backfilling lost federal aid, building their own data capacity as NCES and IES are hollowed out, setting aside reserves (as I’ve proposed, through federally tax-exempt education endowments), and closing the door to publicly funded religious and discriminatory schooling by tightening charter oversight before the courts force it open.

In the longer term, they are the model for Project 2029. The states that reinvested after the recession show that the decline is a choice and can be reversed. They also show what reversing it takes: a cost-based formula, a commitment of state revenue, and in most cases a court willing to hold the state to its constitution. A federal foundation aid formula of the kind we’ve proposed would ask every state to do what California, Washington, Illinois and Kansas did, with federal help for states whose capacity genuinely falls short. The Education States have already shown the rest of the country the way. The question is whether the rest of the country will follow.

Data notes

Adequacy, effort and spending figures are from the School Finance Indicators Database, State Indicators Database, 2026 release (school years through 2023). Adequacy is actual current spending per pupil divided by required spending per pupil, estimated by the SFID National Education Cost Model to reach national average test scores. The model doesn’t produce estimates for Alaska, Hawaii, or Vermont after 2016, and SFID advises caution in interpreting New York’s estimates.
2020 to 2023 spending includes some federal pandemic relief (ESSER) funds, which raise adequacy in absolute terms in those years. For that reason, the reinvestment test requires that recovery was already under way by 2019. Effort is a strictly state and local measure and is unaffected.
Group adequacy figures are enrollment-weighted, pooling all states in each group. Effort and NAEP group figures are median and simple mean across states, respectively. Effort is state and local school revenue as a share of aggregate personal income.
NAEP performance is the average of 2024 grade 4 and grade 8 reading and math scale scores, each expressed as the difference from the national public school average divided by the national standard deviation (NAEP Data Service).
Political leaning is based on the statewide popular-vote margin in the 2024 presidential election (FEC certified results). Solid = 10 points or more; Lean = 2 to 10 points; Toss-up = under 2 points.
Baker, B. D., Di Carlo, M., & Weber, M. (2026). The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems (8th ed.). Albert Shanker Institute, University of Miami and Rutgers Graduate School of Education.

The Dependent States of America

U.S. map of federal revenue as a percent of total public school revenue by state, FY 2024. Highest: Mississippi 22.7%, Alaska 21.0%, New Mexico 19.7%. Lowest: New Jersey 6.3%. U.S. average 11.6%.

We like to think of our public schools as locally controlled and state funded, with Washington playing a bit part. Nationally, that’s roughly right. In fiscal year 2024, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of School System Finances, public school systems took in about $995 billion, of which about $115 billion, or 11.6%, came from federal sources.

But that national average hides a very different country. In some states, federal aid is a rounding error in school budgets. In others, more than one of every five dollars flowing to local public schools comes from Washington. Welcome to the Dependent States of America.

Mapping dependence

The measure that matters here is dependence: federal revenue as a share of each state’s total school revenue. It tells us how much a state’s schools would be exposed if federal aid were cut, frozen, or weaponized, and how much leverage Washington has (or could have) over what happens in those schools.

Mississippi tops the list, with 22.7% of school revenue coming from federal sources, followed by Alaska (21.0%), New Mexico (19.7%), South Dakota (19.4%), Louisiana (19.2%) and West Virginia (18.4%). At the other end, New Jersey’s schools draw only 6.3% of their revenue from Washington, with Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut and Massachusetts all around 8%.

The politics of dependence

It won’t surprise many readers that the Dependent States of America lean heavily red. Sorting states by the 2024 presidential result (using FEC certified state returns):

2024 presidential result	States	Federal share of total school revenue	Median state
Trump-won	31	13.5%	13.9%
Harris-won (incl. DC)	20	9.7%	9.6%
Solid R (R+10 or more)	24	13.9%	15.0%
Lean R (R+2 to 10)	4	14.8%	15.5%
Toss-up (margin under 2)	3	10.7%	10.9%
Lean D (D+2 to 10)	6	8.6%	8.3%
Solid D (D+10 or more)	14	9.9%	10.3%
United States	51	11.6%	11.8%

Group shares are pooled (group federal revenue ÷ group total revenue). Rows are shaded by 2024 presidential leaning: solid red = R+10 or more; pale red = R+2 to 10 (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina); pale purple = toss-up, margin under 2 points (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin); pale blue = D+2 to 10 (Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Virginia); solid blue = D+10 or more (including DC). Sources: Census Bureau, FY 2024 Annual Survey of School System Finances; FEC 2024 certified results.

Schools in states Trump carried draw 13.5 cents of every revenue dollar from Washington, compared with 9.7 cents in states Harris carried, about 40% more reliance. Dependence rises with the margin: across states, the correlation between Trump’s 2024 margin and the federal share of school revenue is about 0.55 (excluding DC). Nine of the ten most dependent states voted for Trump (New Mexico being the exception). Nine of the ten least dependent voted for Harris (Utah being the exception).

Dependent by circumstance, or by choice?

Here’s the important part. The Dependent States of America are not dependent because Washington is especially generous to them. Federal dollars per pupil are about the same in Trump-won states ($2,403) as in Harris-won states ($2,598). What differs is the denominator. State and local revenue averages about $15,400 per pupil in Trump-won states, compared with about $24,300 in Harris-won states. A similar federal contribution simply makes up a much larger slice of a much thinner budget.

And that thinner budget is not only a function of being poorer. As I lay out in a recent working paper, state wealth and income account for about half, or less, of the variation in how adequately states fund their schools. The rest is effort, or the lack of it. Forty-one states now devote a smaller share of their economies to K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-09 recession. Some states, like Mississippi, have so little capacity that even average effort would leave them well short. Others, like Florida and Arizona, could raise enough on their own simply by exerting average effort. They choose not to.

Both kinds of states show up among the Dependent States of America. New Mexico, West Virginia and Alaska exert above-average effort and remain highly dependent anyway; they are dependent largely by circumstance. Arizona (18.1% federal), North Carolina (17.4%), Tennessee (15.9%) and Florida (15.3%) are dependent substantially by choice: very low-effort states leaning on federal aid, several of them while cutting taxes and expanding private school vouchers. And there’s a bitter irony here. Many of the states most dependent on federal aid today are the same states that, during the civil rights era, adopted “antiregulation” acts, using state aid and local tax policy to shield districts that refused federal desegregation mandates.

Low effort, high dependence

To separate circumstance from choice, the table below lists every state that both puts in below-average effort (state and local school revenue as a share of personal income) and draws an above-average share of its school revenue from Washington.

State	State & local effort (% of personal income)	Effort	Federal share of revenue	2024 leaning (margin)
Mississippi	3.49%	Below avg.	22.7%	Solid R (R+22.9)
South Dakota	2.75%	Very low	19.4%	Solid R (R+29.2)
Louisiana	3.71%	Near avg.	19.2%	Solid R (R+22.0)
Arizona	2.41%	Very low	18.1%	Lean R (R+5.5)
Montana	2.74%	Very low	17.8%	Solid R (R+19.9)
North Carolina	2.43%	Very low	17.4%	Lean R (R+3.2)
Kentucky	3.67%	Near avg.	17.1%	Solid R (R+30.5)
Tennessee	2.81%	Very low	15.9%	Solid R (R+29.7)
Wyoming	3.69%	Near avg.	15.5%	Solid R (R+45.8)
North Dakota	3.73%	Near avg.	15.4%	Solid R (R+36.5)
Florida	2.35%	Very low	15.3%	Solid R (R+13.1)
Arkansas	3.58%	Below avg.	14.7%	Solid R (R+30.6)
Oklahoma	3.26%	Below avg.	13.9%	Solid R (R+34.3)
Nevada	3.07%	Below avg.	13.6%	Lean R (R+3.1)
Texas	3.48%	Below avg.	13.4%	Solid R (R+13.7)
Hawaii	3.69%	Near avg.	13.1%	Solid D (D+23.1)
Rhode Island	3.63%	Near avg.	12.7%	Solid D (D+13.8)
Wisconsin	3.58%	Below avg.	11.9%	Toss-up (R+0.9)
Idaho	2.86%	Very low	11.7%	Solid R (R+36.5)
United States	3.73%		11.6%

States with below-average effort and above-average federal share, sorted by federal share. Rows are shaded by 2024 presidential leaning: solid red = R+10 or more; pale red = R+2 to 10; pale purple = toss-up (margin under 2 points); pale blue = D+2 to 10; solid blue = D+10 or more. Effort tiers: very low = under 3.0%; below average = 3.0 to 3.59%; near average = 3.6% to the U.S. average of 3.73%. Effort = FY 2024 state and local school revenue ÷ 2023 personal income. DC excluded (see data notes). Sources: Census Bureau FY 2024 Annual Survey of School System Finances, Tables 1 and 19; FEC 2024 certified results.

Nineteen states meet both conditions, and 17 of them voted for Trump in 2024. The two Harris-won states on the list, Hawaii and Rhode Island, sit just below the national effort average. All seven states with very low effort voted for Trump: Florida (2.35%), Arizona (2.41%), North Carolina (2.43%), Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee and Idaho. Florida, Arizona and North Carolina devote only about two-thirds of the national average share of personal income to their schools, yet each draws more than 15% of its school revenue from federal sources. Mississippi is a different case. Its effort is modestly below average, but its capacity is so low that average effort alone would not get it close to adequacy.

Every state in this table falls below the 4%-of-personal-income effort floor in our federal formula simulation (described below). Under that design, each would have to raise its own effort before receiving gap-closing federal aid.

So what should federal policy do with the Dependent States of America? Two things: allocate aid toward adequacy, and attach meaningful strings.

Allocating federal aid toward adequacy

Federal aid today is layered on top of 50 separate state systems and targeted mainly on child poverty through programs like Title I and IDEA. It helps, but it does little to close either the gaps between adequately and inadequately funded states or the gaps between high- and low-need districts within states. Even during the period of elevated pandemic aid, the highest-poverty districts in southeastern states received the most federal money and the largest federal share, yet their total revenue remained woefully inadequate.

With my colleagues Matthew Di Carlo and Mark Weber, I’ve proposed a different approach: a new federal foundation aid formula that treats the federal government as the top layer of a national school finance system. It works much the way a good state formula works:

Set an adequacy target for every district, using a national education cost model to estimate the per-pupil spending needed to reach common outcome goals (in our simulation, a modest goal: national average reading and math outcomes), adjusted for student needs and regional costs.
Require a minimum state and local effort, in our simulation 3.5% of gross state product or 4% of aggregate personal income, roughly the national average.
Direct that state and local revenue toward the districts furthest below adequacy.
Have federal aid fill whatever gap remains, but only once a state has done its part.

In our proof-of-concept simulation, universal adequacy would require roughly $52 billion in additional federal aid per year, targeted to districts in 34 states, along with about $80 billion in additional state and local fair-share investment. Full participation would reduce the share of students in inadequately funded districts from about 55% to zero and shrink the funding gap between the highest- and lowest-poverty districts by more than 60%.

The effort requirement matters most for the Dependent States of America. Low-capacity states like Mississippi would receive substantially more help once they reach the effort floor, because their gaps genuinely exceed what they can raise. Low-effort states like Florida, Arizona, North Carolina and Tennessee would have to raise their own effort before receiving gap-closing aid. Federal dependence would stop being a subsidy for choosing not to try. And there’s no reason this logic must be limited to new money. The same framework could guide the distribution of the roughly $115 billion in federal revenue already flowing to schools.

Applying pressure where dependence is greatest

When one fifth of a state’s school revenue comes from Washington, Washington has both a stake and a lever. We’ve used that lever before. Southern states were required to adopt education articles in their constitutions as a condition for readmission to the Union after the Civil War. A century later, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 put real federal money on the table, and the threat of losing it gave teeth to desegregation enforcement. The federal government is again using that lever, but in the opposite direction, threatening to withhold aid from schools and states that pursue equity.

A future federal role should apply the lever deliberately, and most firmly where dependence is greatest. Conditions attached to federal aid should include:

Civil rights protections for all children. Full compliance with Title VI, Title IX, IDEA and Section 504, and with the obligation to educate every child regardless of immigration status. Any provider receiving public funds, including charter and voucher-receiving schools, must be bound by the same nondiscrimination requirements.
Common national goals. Shared outcome goals and measures, broader than reading and math scores and including preparation for postsecondary education, the workforce and civic life, that define what adequate funding must accomplish and drive the cost estimates behind the formula. These are national goals, not a national curriculum; achieving them would require revisiting long-standing statutory limits on federal direction of curriculum, and states would retain authority over how to meet them.
Minimum effort and no backsliding. States should not be able to eliminate the primary tax sources funding their schools, as Mississippi has proposed with its income tax and Florida with property taxes, or divert public funds to private schools, while drawing federal aid to backfill the hole.
Enforceable education rights. Every state constitution includes an education article, but enforcement by state courts has been uneven at best. Federal aid should come with pressure to make those rights real.
Transparent data. School-level spending and broader outcome reporting, supported by a rebuilt, not dismantled, National Center for Education Statistics and Institute of Education Sciences.

There are legal limits. Spending Clause conditions must be clearly stated, related to the purpose of the funds, and not so severe that they amount to coercion. That argues for attaching new conditions to new adequacy aid, phased in over time, rather than threatening to pull existing funds overnight. But the principle stands: the more a state’s schools depend on federal dollars, the stronger the federal interest in ensuring those schools serve every child, to common standards, under the protection of the law.

Whose rights? Children’s, not parental preferences

There’s another reason the Dependent States of America deserve federal attention. Several of them are where public money now follows parental preference with the fewest strings attached. Arizona, at 18.1% federal and among the lowest-effort states in the country, has made every school-age child eligible for an Empowerment Scholarship Account since 2022. Under its statute, a parent’s signature on the account agreement counts as compulsory school attendance. The law requires no testing and no curricular approval, and it measures no learning. Florida’s universal program requires a norm-referenced test, but funding turns on submitting the test, not on the score. Idaho’s high court has upheld that state’s private education tax credit, and Wyoming’s has cleared its education savings accounts to operate. All four states appear in the low-effort, high-dependence table above.

As I explain in Not the Mere Creature of Anyone (full working paper), for a century the Supreme Court has asked how much control parents may exercise over their children’s schooling, and almost never what the child is owed. Since 2017, the doctrine has converged on a single result: parental authority, underwritten by public money and increasingly insulated from public conditions. Carson v. Makin requires a state that funds any private option to fund religious ones. Mahmoud v. Taylor and Mirabelli v. Bonta make parental religious objection a powerful claim inside the public schools that remain. And on November 3, the Court hears St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which asks whether states may attach neutral conditions to the money at all.

Consider, as I did in Experimenting With Our Children, the student in Phoenix who turns 18 having been failed by her account-funded education. She can’t sue her parents; courts have long refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. She can’t sue the state under the federal Constitution; education is not a fundamental federal right, and the state generally owes no duty to protect a child from harm by a private actor, including a parent. And state courts reviewing universal voucher and account programs have increasingly asked whether the money harms the public system, not whether any individual child is being educated. She is the one party to the arrangement with no rights of her own.

Pierce v. Society of Sisters told us that the child “is not the mere creature of the State.” True. But neither is she the mere creature of her parents. And Pierce struck a bargain that is too often forgotten: parents could leave the public schools, but the state kept the power to reasonably regulate all schools, to inspect and examine them, and to require studies essential to good citizenship. Federal aid can and should reinforce the state’s side of that bargain. Any state that spends public money, its own or Washington’s, on private schooling or home education should, as a condition of federal aid, adopt what I call Children’s Recourse:

Register every school-age child, in every setting, so no child disappears from public view.
Assess learning, not attendance or receipts, paired with remediation and, after repeated failure, a required change of educational setting.
Keep every child in periodic contact with a mandated reporter, such as a teacher, nurse or counselor, and review any withdrawal from school while child-protection concerns are open.
Attach neutral accountability conditions to every public dollar: assessment participation, public reporting of outcomes and finances, nondiscrimination in admissions, including on the basis of disability, and audits. To survive Carson and Fulton, these must apply to all providers alike, without discretionary exemptions.
Give older students a voice in decisions about their own schooling, the question Justice Douglas asked in his Yoder dissent and the Court has never answered.
End the fiction that a funding contract is an education, repealing provisions like Arizona’s that deem a signed account agreement to be school attendance.

None of these measures requires any family to profess anything, and none prescribes a culture or a creed. They ask only that someone be answerable to the child whose public education dollars are being spent. And they rest on the strongest ground available: state constitutional education clauses, which courts in Kentucky, Wyoming, New Hampshire and Washington have read as conferring an individual, even fundamental, right on each child. A right held by the child doesn’t stay behind when the child leaves the public system. It follows her, and so should the state’s duty, and the federal government’s interest, in seeing that she is actually educated.

From the Dependent States of America to Project 2029

None of this will happen under the current federal administration, which is dismantling the Department of Education, clawing back appropriated funds and greenlighting states already eroding their own public schools. In the short term, the work falls to what I’ve called the Education States, which are not exclusively blue or northern (Kansas qualifies), to protect their own students: backfilling threatened federal aid with state funds, much as southern states once used state aid to resist civil rights, and building the data capacity Washington is abandoning.

But short-term resistance is not a plan for the Dependent States of America. Children in Florida, Arizona, North Carolina and Tennessee can’t wait for their legislatures to rediscover the value of public education, and children in Mississippi can’t wait for their state to grow its way to adequacy. That requires a longer game: Project 2029.

Project 2029 is a new reconstruction. Ideally, it would include a federal constitutional amendment requiring that every child be provided, by their state with federal assistance, equal educational opportunity. At a minimum, it must include:

Common national goals and standards, and measures of them, to guide what we expect our schools to accomplish and what it costs.
A national cost model to drive a federal foundation aid formula targeting dollars to where they are needed most.
A required minimum state and local effort, so that federal aid complements rather than substitutes for state responsibility.
Rebuilt federal data and research capacity to monitor progress toward equal educational opportunity.
Children as rights-holders, with federal aid reinforcing each child’s right to an adequate education wherever public money sends her, not deferring to parental preference as a proxy for the child’s interest.

What Congress would have to change

Project 2029 can’t be accomplished by executive order, nor should it be. It requires legislation, and in several places it means rewriting rules that currently get in the way. Congress would need to enact a federal foundation aid program¹; replace ESEA’s maintenance-of-effort rule with an effort floor²; fix Title I’s spending factor³; revisit the prohibitions on federal involvement in standards and curriculum⁴; strengthen civil rights enforcement⁵; write Children’s Recourse into the conditions on federal aid⁶; ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child⁷; make education rights enforceable⁸; fully fund IDEA⁹; and rebuild and protect the federal education infrastructure¹⁰. The notes below spell out each change and the statutes and cases involved.

Project 2025 was years in the making, so that an administration could act on day one. Project 2029 must be just as detailed and just as ready, but with a crucial difference. It must be built on broad congressional buy-in rather than executive shows of force, and it must uphold, not subvert, our core constitutional commitments: equal protection, due process, free speech, and the balance between the free exercise of religion and the prohibition on its establishment. Over the longer run, it means revisiting the precedents that have subordinated the child to parental preference and public money, from Carson and Espinoza back toward Pierce itself, with any replacement built so it can never again be turned against minority families.

The Dependent States of America are dependent today largely because they’ve chosen to underinvest in their own children, and federal aid has quietly covered for it. Project 2029 should turn that dependence into a partnership: real federal help, toward real adequacy, in exchange for real effort and real protections for every child, protections that belong to the child, not to the adults choosing for her. If we are going to spend public money in a child’s name, someone has to be answerable to that child. Equitable and adequate funding alone won’t get us to equal educational opportunity. But we can’t get there without it.

Enact a federal foundation aid program. A new title of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) authorizing adequacy-based aid driven by a national cost model, with a minimum state and local effort requirement (for example, 4% of personal income or 3.5% of gross state product) and a multi-year phase-in for states below the floor. Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), 20 U.S.C. § 6301 et seq. The effort benchmarks follow Baker, Di Carlo & Weber (2022). ↩︎
Replace the maintenance-of-effort rule with an effort floor. ESEA’s current maintenance-of-effort requirement asks only that a state spend at least 90% of what it spent the year before. A state can stay at very low effort forever and remain compliant. The test should be effort relative to capacity, and states should not be able to cut taxes or divert public funds to private schools below that floor while drawing federal foundation aid. ESEA § 8521, 20 U.S.C. § 7901 (maintenance of effort: combined fiscal effort or aggregate expenditures of at least 90 percent of the prior year). ↩︎
Fix Title I’s spending factor. Title I’s formulas use a state per-pupil expenditure factor that sends more aid per poor child to states that already spend more, regardless of capacity or effort. Allocations should instead reflect adequacy gaps and effort. ESEA §§ 1124–1125A, 20 U.S.C. §§ 6333–6337. Under the Basic Grant formula, the state expenditure factor is 40 percent of the state’s average per-pupil expenditure, bounded at 80 to 120 percent of the national average. ↩︎
Revisit the prohibitions on federal involvement in standards and curriculum. The General Education Provisions Act and provisions the Every Student Succeeds Act added to ESEA bar federal direction of curriculum and federal incentives for particular standards. These should be amended to permit common national outcome goals and measures, including an expanded NAEP, while leaving curriculum and instruction to states and districts. General Education Provisions Act § 103, 20 U.S.C. § 1232a; ESEA § 1111(e), 20 U.S.C. § 6311(e); ESEA § 8526A, 20 U.S.C. § 7906a. ↩︎
Strengthen civil rights enforcement. Restore private enforcement of Title VI disparate-impact protections, which the Supreme Court closed off in Alexander v. Sandoval (2001). Codify the guarantee of Plyler v. Doe that every child, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to a public education. And as a condition of federal aid, require states that fund private providers, through vouchers, education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarships or charters, to hold them to the same nondiscrimination, special education and transparency requirements as public schools. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d; Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001); Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982). ↩︎
Write Children’s Recourse into the conditions on federal aid. Require any state that spends public funds on private schooling, education savings accounts or home education to register every child, assess learning rather than receipts, keep children in contact with mandated reporters, apply neutral accountability conditions uniformly to every provider, give older students a voice, and drop any rule deeming a funding agreement to be school attendance. Drafted as neutral, generally applicable conditions, these stand the best chance of surviving whatever the Court decides in St. Mary. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 15-2402(I); Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. 767 (2022); Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021); St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, No. 25-581 (U.S., argued Nov. 3, 2026). See Baker (2026), Part VII. ↩︎
Ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It recognizes parents’ primary responsibility for their children, exercised consistent with the child’s evolving capacities, while guaranteeing the child a voice in matters affecting her and subjecting private schools to minimum standards. The United States signed it in 1995 and is the only UN member that is not a party. Convention on the Rights of the Child, arts. 5, 12, 18, 29, Nov. 20, 1989, 1577 U.N.T.S. 3 (signed by the United States Feb. 16, 1995). Ratification requires the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 2. ↩︎
Make education rights enforceable. Condition foundation aid on each state guaranteeing, in law, a judicially enforceable right to an adequate education. In the longer run, pursue a federal constitutional amendment so that this right no longer depends on the willingness of 50 state courts. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 35 (1973) (no federal fundamental right to education); Papasan v. Allain, 478 U.S. 265, 285 (1986) (leaving open whether a minimally adequate education is a fundamental right). ↩︎
Fully fund IDEA. Congress authorized federal funding of up to 40% of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities in 1975, and it has never come close. Closing that gap is among the most direct ways to relieve pressure on low-capacity states. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1411(a)(2) (maximum grant of 40 percent of the national average per-pupil expenditure times the number of children served). ↩︎
Rebuild and protect the federal education infrastructure. Reauthorize the Education Sciences Reform Act with statutory independence and stable funding for NCES and IES. Codify the Census school finance survey and school-level spending reporting. Fund the cost modeling a national formula requires, and protect the Department of Education’s statutory functions from administrative dismantling. Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, 20 U.S.C. § 9501 et seq.; Department of Education Organization Act, 20 U.S.C. § 3401 et seq.; ESEA § 1111(h)(1)(C)(x), 20 U.S.C. § 6311(h)(1)(C)(x) (school-level per-pupil expenditure reporting). ↩︎

Data notes

Revenue figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances, FY 2024, Tables 1 and 19. Per-pupil federal revenue is federal revenue divided by FY 2024 enrollment; federal shares match Census Table 5. Note that Census Table 11 misreports Connecticut’s federal revenue per pupil (it repeats Alaska’s $4,604); the correct figure is $2,418.
Effort is FY 2024 state and local school revenue divided by calendar 2023 personal income (Census Table 19), the same pairing Census uses. DC is excluded from the effort table because, as a single city with much of its economy earned by commuters who live elsewhere, its revenue and income base aren’t comparable to a state’s. Political leaning is based on the statewide popular vote margin in the 2024 presidential election, from FEC certified results.
FY 2024 federal revenue still includes some pandemic relief (ESSER) funds, which may inflate federal shares relative to a typical year. Federal shares also reflect formula drivers such as child poverty, disability counts and federal or tribal land (Impact Aid), which partly explains Alaska, New Mexico and the Dakotas.
Baker, B. D., Di Carlo, M., & Weber, M. (2022). Ensuring Adequate Education Funding for All: A New Federal Foundation Aid Formula. Albert Shanker Institute.
Baker, B. D. (2026). Not the Mere Creature of Anyone: Parental Control, Public Money, and the Case for Children’s Educational Rights. School Finance 101 Working Paper. See also the posts Not the Mere Creature of Anyone and Experimenting With Our Children.
Baker, B. D. (2025). Equal Educational Opportunity for All: From Short Term Resistance to Project 2029. Working paper.

Abbott Elementary Is Entertaining. The Damage Is Real.

Actual vs. required spending per pupil, Philadelphia and suburbs, 2009–2023

Abbott Elementary plays it for laughs. Janine Teagues hunts for a working rug, a functioning copier, a single extra aide. Barbara Howard has seen every reform come and go. Gregory Eddie inherits a classroom with no curriculum. Melissa Schemmenti knows a guy who can get the supplies the district can’t.

The show is entertaining. The damage is real. Behind every running gag is a funding gap that has been measurable, year after year, for at least fifteen years, and that has landed on real children in real Philadelphia classrooms.

Philadelphia’s district schools have spent between a third and a half less than what it would cost to get their students to national-average outcomes in every year from 2009 to 2023. Over the same years, the 61 suburban districts in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties spent between half again and twice what their own students needed. We laugh at the broken boilers, missing counselors and teachers buying their own supplies. The kids living it don’t get a laugh track.

What follows walks from the money to the classroom: first the adequacy gap, then the simple “screwed city” picture, then teachers per child, teacher pay, and finally who is actually standing in front of the kids.

Fifteen years below the line

In 2022-23, the School District of Philadelphia spent $18,329 per pupil. Our National Education Cost Model estimates it would have needed $28,187 to give its students a shot at national-average test scores. That is a gap of $9,858 per child, or roughly $1.2 billion across 118,000 students, in a single year.

The suburbs face the mirror image. Their enrollment-weighted average spending was $20,059 against a required $13,298, a surplus of $6,761 per child. Same metro, same labor market, same state constitution.

This is not a recent dip. Philadelphia sat 33% below its adequacy target in 2009, sank to 50% below in 2015 in the wake of the “doomsday” budgets, and was still 35% short in 2023, even with federal pandemic aid in the mix. The suburbs started out spending more than double their target and have drifted down to about 51% above it. The rest of Pennsylvania sits in between, about a third above.

Percent above or below adequacy, Philadelphia, suburbs, and rest of Pennsylvania

The outcome side tells the same story. Philadelphia’s students scored roughly 0.8 standard deviations below the national average in 2022-23, while suburban students scored about 0.2 above. Abbott’s students are not falling short because nobody cares. They are falling short where the money falls short.

The simple version: a “screwed city”

You don’t need a cost model to see the problem. Divide Philadelphia by its suburbs. In 2022-23, the city had 3.2 times the suburban child poverty rate. Under the NECM, that translates into 2.1 times the cost of reaching national-average outcomes. And the city spent 0.91 times what the suburbs spent.

Philadelphia as a multiple of its suburbs: poverty, required spending, actual spending

That pattern has held every year since 2009. Philly’s poverty rate has run 3 to 5 times the suburban rate, its costs 2 to 2.7 times, and its spending has never once caught up to the suburbs, let alone exceeded them.

That is what it means to be a screwed city. Not just underfunded relative to need, but outspent outright by the comfortable districts a short SEPTA ride away.

Even in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia is not alone

Philadelphia is the biggest case, not the only one. Reading spent 46% below its adequacy target in 2022-23, while the rest of the Reading metro spent 53% above. Allentown was 17% short while its Lehigh Valley neighbors were 47% over. Harrisburg, York, Lebanon, Erie, Wilkes-Barre and Chester Upland tell the same story.

High-poverty Pennsylvania districts vs. the rest of their metro areas, percent above or below adequacy

The pattern reaches into Philly’s own suburbs. Chester Upland, Upper Darby, William Penn, Norristown and Pottstown are all below adequacy, surrounded by districts in the same four counties that spend about 71% above theirs.

Across the state, 56 of 497 districts spent below their adequacy targets in 2022-23. They enroll 23% of Pennsylvania’s students, but 67% of its Black students and 49% of its Hispanic students, compared to 8% of its white students. Philadelphia accounts for about a third of the students in those districts. Fixing Philly alone would not fix Pennsylvania.

This is the system the Commonwealth Court found unconstitutional in William Penn School District v. Pennsylvania Department of Education in February 2023. The state has since begun phasing in adequacy aid, including $565 million statewide in the 2025-26 budget (WHYY). The gaps above are what that aid is chasing.

From dollars to classrooms: fewer adults per child

School money is mostly people. When a district is short a third of what it needs, the shortfall shows up as fewer teachers, larger classes and missing specialists.

Philadelphia reported 11,103 teachers in 2009-10. By 2013-14 it had 7,645, a 31% cut, while enrollment fell only 17%. From 2012 through 2020, the district ran between 12% and 29% fewer teachers per 100 pupils than its suburbs. That is Gregory Eddie’s world: a full roster of kids, and not enough colleagues to share them with.

Teachers per 100 pupils, Philadelphia vs. suburbs, 2009–2024

The gap has nearly closed since 2021, to 7.3 teachers per 100 pupils in Philadelphia vs. 7.5 in the suburbs in 2023-24, helped by federal pandemic aid and new state money. But parity is not adequacy. A district whose students cost twice as much to serve, by the NECM’s estimate, does not get there with the same staffing ratio as Lower Merion.

Across Philadelphia and its suburbs, adequacy and staffing move together. Districts further above their adequacy targets employ more teachers per child (r = 0.49 in 2022-23). The fitted line implies that if Philadelphia were funded like the average suburb, it would have roughly 0.45 more teachers per 100 pupils, or about 500 more teachers, before accounting for its higher needs at all.

Adequacy vs. teachers per 100 pupils, Philadelphia and suburban districts, 2022-23

Teacher pay: same labor market, different paychecks

Philadelphia and its suburbs hire from the same pool of teachers, often the same graduating classes. So pay comparisons here need no regional cost adjustment. They are apples to apples.

In 2012-13, the average full-time Philadelphia district teacher earned $71,407, about 96% of the suburban average. Then came four years without a contract. By 2016-17, Philly’s average had actually fallen to $67,479 while the suburbs rose to $78,598, a gap of more than $11,000. The district has climbed back since, to $86,664 in 2025-26, but that is still about $7,200 behind the suburbs. Teachers in the city’s charter schools averaged $71,644, roughly three quarters of the suburban figure.

Average teacher salary, Philadelphia SD, Philadelphia charters, and suburbs, 2012-13 to 2025-26

The averages hide where the gap bites. Philadelphia’s current salary scale is competitive in the middle years. Teachers with 5 to 14 years of experience actually earn more than their suburban peers. But the scale flattens at $99,534 after about 15 years. Suburban veterans keep climbing, to a median of about $112,000. A 25-year Philly veteran makes roughly $12,500 less than one in the suburbs.

Median teacher salary by years of experience, 2024-25

That matters for who stays. Philadelphia district teachers average 13.7 years of experience, vs. 15.6 in the suburbs. Charter teachers average 8.9. Every school needs its Barbara Howards. An underfunded system has the hardest time keeping them.

Inside the building: who is actually in front of the kids

Pennsylvania’s own staff records let us look at who is actually in the classroom, through 2024-25. Janine is not the exception at Abbott. In 2024-25, 13.3% of district teachers were in their first or second year in education, vs. 8.8% in the suburbs. In the city’s charters it was 16.4%, and more than a third of charter teachers had been with their school system for two years or less.

The starkest gap is certification. Pennsylvania lets districts fill vacancies with long-term substitutes on emergency permits when they can’t hire a certified teacher. In 2024-25 the School District of Philadelphia held 22.5 of those permits for every 100 classroom teachers. Philly charters held 28.5. The suburbs held 2.7, and the rest of the state 4.3. Philadelphia’s rate jumped from about 2 to 19 per 100 between 2015-16 and 2017-18, during and right after the contract freeze, and has never come back down.

Long-term emergency permits per 100 classroom teachers, 2015-16 to 2024-25

Support staff tell a more complicated story. After the 2013 layoffs left many schools without counselors or nurses, the district rebuilt. In 2024-25 it reported more nurses and psychologists per 1,000 pupils than the suburbs, and nearly as many counselors (3.0 vs. 3.3). That is what recent money bought. But it is rough parity for students with three times the poverty, and some positions never came back. The district reported 9 social worker FTE and 1 librarian for about 120,000 students. The suburbs had about 148 social workers and 342 librarians for 325,000.

Novice teachers, emergency permits, and support staffing, 2024-25: Philadelphia district, Philadelphia charters, suburbs

Teachers are also absent more. In the most recent federal data with that measure, 2017-18, 46% of district teachers missed 10 or more days, vs. 38% in the suburbs.

The show is entertaining. The damage is real.

Abbott Elementary works because its teachers are heroic and funny and stubborn. Real Philadelphia teachers are too. But heroism is not a funding formula. Year after year, the data show the same chain: Pennsylvania’s system leaves Philadelphia, Reading, Allentown, Harrisburg and their peers far below what their students need. That shortfall becomes fewer teachers per child, a pay scale that stops rewarding veterans, more novices and uncertified teachers, and libraries with no librarians.

The Commonwealth Court said in 2023 that this system violates the state constitution. The new adequacy aid is a start, and the recent staffing gains show money does show up in classrooms when it arrives. But a district still roughly $10,000 per child short of adequacy in 2022-23 will not close that gap with a few hundred million dollars spread across the state.

Janine shouldn’t have to fix the copier herself. And the kids in her class shouldn’t have to be in a sitcom for anyone to notice.

Data notes and sources

Adequacy: School Finance Indicators Database, District Cost Database 2026 (v6), National Education Cost Model estimates of required spending to reach national-average outcomes. Spending is current spending per pupil, direct to elementary and secondary education, in current dollars. Years are school years (2023 = 2022-23).
Suburbs: the 61 regular school districts in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, enrollment-weighted unless noted. Metro comparisons for other Pennsylvania cities use Census CBSAs from the NCES Common Core of Data.
Staffing: teachers per pupil from the NCES Common Core of Data LEA universe; teacher absences from the Civil Rights Data Collection; both via the Urban Institute Education Data Portal. Philadelphia SD figures cover district-run schools; charters report separately.
Classroom staffing and certification: Pennsylvania Department of Education Professional Personnel Individual Staff Report 2024-25 (teacher experience; counselors, psychologists, nurses, social workers and librarians by FTE) and Detailed Emergency Permits by LEA, 2015-16 to 2024-25. Permit-rate method from Research for Action (2025).
Teacher pay: Pennsylvania Department of Education, Professional Staff Summary and Professional Personnel Individual Staff reports, full-time classroom teachers.
Caveats: NECM estimates are model-based and benchmarked to grade 3–8 math and reading outcomes. Emergency permit rates count long-term substitute permits (Types 01 and 04) per full-time classroom teacher, following Research for Action (2025); a permit is not an FTE, so read them as rates of reliance, not exact shares of classrooms. Teacher absences come from the 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection, the latest year with that item.
Related: Rachel Wessler’s earlier Shanker Institute reflection on the show, Heartwarming or Heartbreaking; state budget coverage from WHYY.

Human Capital Pays, If You Count the Cost: School Funding, State Growth, and a Diverging America

Three scatterplots of states with rising fitted lines: adequacy 2009-13 against 2019 grade 8 NAEP (+2.1 points per SD); 2003 grade 8 NAEP against the share of adults with a BA (+1.75 points per SD); BA share in 2009 against real income growth 1997-2024 (+0.21 points a year per SD). All adjusted for 1997 income.

Economists around the world treat schooling as an investment in human capital: the skills and knowledge that make people, and economies, productive. The international evidence that this investment pays is about as settled as anything in the field. Yet here in the U.S., we keep having the same argument about whether school money matters.

Here’s what I find across the 50 states. Count the school dollar the usual way, adjusted only for teacher wages, and it tells you nothing useful about economic growth since the 1990s. If anything, it points the wrong way. Count it against what it actually costs to build skills, given the kids a state serves, and the human capital chain appears: adequate funding goes with higher 8th-grade scores, higher scores with more college-educated adults, and more college-educated adults with faster income and GDP growth.

The numbers, per standard deviation across states, holding 1997 income constant:

Funding → skills: about +2 NAEP points in 8th grade (2019), +1.2 for low-income students, and a 1.5-point smaller gap between them and their peers.
Skills → degrees: +1.75 points more adults with a BA in states that scored higher in 2003.
Degrees → growth: +0.21 points a year faster real income growth and +0.43 points a year faster GDP per capita growth over 1997–2024.

Put the wage-adjusted dollar and the cost-adjusted dollar in the same model and they split: adequacy predicts +0.39 points a year faster income growth, wage-adjusted spending −0.31. Same states, same years, opposite answers. The difference is whether you counted cost.

Full policy paper (PDF, 24 pages), with complete data sources, variable definitions, model specifications and results: Investing in Human Capital: Does Long-Run K-12 Investment Fuel State Economic Growth?

Schools are a human capital investment, and the world knows it pays

Years of school pay. Harry Patrinos and George Psacharopoulos have spent decades compiling returns to schooling. Their 2018 review pulls together 1,120 estimates from 139 countries and finds an average private return of about 9% per year of schooling (Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, 2018). Their 2025 follow-up looks only at causal estimates, 182 of them from 55 countries, and the return goes up, to 9.7%, about 38% higher than the correlational estimates (Patrinos & Psacharopoulos, 2025).

Learning pays more. One standard deviation higher test scores raises earnings about 15%, roughly one and a half times the value of an extra year of school (Patrinos & Psacharopoulos, 2025). Among adults in 23 countries, a standard deviation of numeracy is worth 18% in wages, and the U.S. pays the most for skills, at 28% (Hanushek et al., 2015). With harmonized learning data for 164 countries, human capital explains one-fifth to one-half of income differences across countries (Angrist, Djankov, Goldberg & Patrinos, 2021).

Skills drive growth. Across countries, a standard deviation higher achievement goes with 1.3 to nearly 2 points faster annual growth over decades (Hanushek & Woessmann; Heller-Sahlgren & Jordahl, 2021). Across U.S. states, knowledge capital explains 20–30% of differences in GDP per capita (Hanushek, Ruhose & Woessmann, 2017).

And it can be lost. Pandemic closures cost students about 0.17 of a standard deviation, half a year of learning (Patrinos, Vegas & Carter-Rau, 2022). The World Bank’s new Human Capital Index Plus puts the U.S. at 252 out of 325, below the high-income average and well behind Australia’s 270 (World Bank, 2026).

Here’s the gap. This literature measures human capital outputs with great care. Its school inputs are usually just spending per pupil, adjusted at most for prices. If schooling is an investment, the right question is whether a state spends enough to produce a given level of skills with the students it actually has. That is a cost question.

Four ways to count a school dollar

There are four common ways to count a school dollar, each correcting for more than the last: nominal; inflation-adjusted; labor-cost-adjusted, using a wage index like NCES’s CWIFT; and fully cost-adjusted, comparing spending with what it would cost to reach a common outcome goal given wages, scale and, above all, student needs. Only the fourth asks whether the money is enough for the job. That is what the School Finance Indicators Database’s National Education Cost Model measures. I’ve made this case in Why “Cost” Matters and Efficiently Mediocre.

Brookings’s state-level report (Reber & Goodman, 2025) stops at number three. Student need goes in as a control variable, not as a cost. That treats a dollar spent on a high-poverty student body as worth the same as a dollar spent on a low-poverty one, then controls away the very poverty that makes those dollars unequal. (See Mark Weber’s NEPC review.)

Animated scatterplot of 48 states: against 2019 grade 8 NAEP, wage-adjusted spending shows a flat line (+0.5 points per SD, not significant); measured against the cost of U.S.-average outcomes, the line steepens to +2.1 points per SD. — Same states, same scores. Change how the dollar is counted. Both axes adjusted for 1997 income.

The human capital chain: investment → skills → degrees → growth

The setup is simple. Take state economic outcomes over 1997–2024 from BEA, and compare them with K-12 conditions earlier in the period: wage-adjusted spending from 1993–2002, NECM adequacy from 2009–13, NAEP from 2003, and adult BA attainment. Control for each state’s real income in 1997 so rich states don’t win just for starting rich. Everything is per standard deviation across states, with robust standard errors.

Link 1: investment → skills. A standard deviation of adequacy goes with about 2.1 NAEP points on the 2019 state average, +1.2 for low-income students, and a 1.5-point smaller gap. Wage-adjusted spending: +0.5, not significant. The adequacy link holds with the Northeast dropped (+2.2).

Link 2: skills → degrees. States whose 8th graders scored a standard deviation higher in 2003 have 1.75 points more adults with a BA today, and they added about half a point more BA holders between 2009 and 2024 as those kids grew up.

Link 3: human capital → growth. A standard deviation more BA holders in 2009 goes with 0.21 points a year faster real income growth and 0.43 points faster GDP per capita growth. Higher 2003 NAEP goes with +0.12 and +0.23. Low-income students’ scores predict growth just as well (+0.14 and +0.21), and those estimates survive dropping the energy and resource states.

Three scatterplots of states with rising fitted lines: adequacy against 2019 NAEP (+2.1 points per SD); 2003 NAEP against BA attainment (+1.75 points per SD); BA share in 2009 against real income growth 1997-2024 (+0.21 points a year per SD). — Each dot is a state. Both axes adjusted for 1997 income; lines are OLS fits.

How the state numbers stack up against the world

States differ far less than students do. A standard deviation across states on 2003 NAEP is 6.5 points, about a sixth (0.17) of a student-level standard deviation. Scale the international estimates by that and the state results land right where you’d expect:

	Global benchmark, per student SD	Implied for 1 state SD	What I find
Skills → GDP per capita growth	+1.3 to +1.86 pts/yr	+0.22 to +0.31 pts/yr	+0.23 pts/yr
Skills → earnings	+15% (Patrinos & Psacharopoulos); +28% in the U.S. (Hanushek et al.)	+2.5% to +4.6%	About +3.3% higher real income after 27 years
Dollars → skills	+0.032 SD per $1,000 for four years (Jackson & Mackevicius, 2024)	—	About +0.012 SD per $1,000 of adequacy

The growth estimate sits inside the range the cross-country studies predict; +0.23 points a year compounds to a GDP per capita level about 6% higher over 27 years. The funding estimate, per dollar, is about a third of the causal estimate from U.S. school finance evaluations: modest, not inflated. These are rough conversions across different tests, but nothing here is out of line with what the human capital literature would lead you to expect.

Diverging states, diverging futures

Here’s where I want to be blunt. The United States does not have one human capital system. It has fifty, and they are sorting into leaders and laggards.

Attainment is diverging. States with more college graduates in 2009 added more of them by 2024. The five most-educated states went from 36% to 46% of adults with a BA; the five least-educated went from 20% to 27%. The gap widened from 16 to 19 points.
The economic extremes are pulling apart. Massachusetts’s GDP per capita was 1.6 times Mississippi’s in 1997 and 2.2 times in 2024. For most of the twentieth century, poorer states caught up with richer ones; Ganong and Shoag show that convergence has slowed dramatically over the past three decades.
The skills gap between states is an international-scale gap. In the most recent state-by-country comparison, the 2011 NAEP–TIMSS linking study, Massachusetts’s 8th graders scored 561 in math, behind only five of 47 education systems, the closest being Japan. Alabama scored 466, statistically tied with Turkey and Armenia. That 95-point spread is close to a full international standard deviation, a gap that across countries goes with 1.3 to 1.9 points of annual growth.
The funding gaps behind it are persistent. States’ adequacy positions barely move over a decade (correlation 0.92). Mississippi spent about half of what its students needed in 2009–13 and was still $9,300 per pupil short in 2021–23, and $25,100 short in its highest-poverty districts.

Tile-grid map of states colored by spending as a share of the cost of reaching U.S.-average outcomes, 2009-13. The Northeast is dark blue (Connecticut 174%, New Jersey 170%, Massachusetts 157%, New York 150%); the South is mostly red (Mississippi 51%, Texas and California 69%, Florida 80%). — Actual spending as a share of the cost of reaching U.S.-average outcomes, 2009–13 (SFID National Education Cost Model).

The knowledge economy concentrates where human capital is. Research universities, technology industries and scientific talent cluster in states with deep pools of skilled workers, and those states draw more of them. If current funding patterns hold, the leading states will keep compounding that advantage. The lagging states will keep producing fewer skilled workers, attracting fewer knowledge industries, and losing many of the graduates they do produce.

Let me be precise about how far this goes. No state is about to become a developing country in income. Mississippi’s GDP per capita, $41,300 in 2024, is far above most of the world’s, propped up by a national labor market and federal transfers. But on skills, our lowest-performing states already score alongside upper-middle-income countries such as Turkey and Armenia, while our highest-performing states compete with Japan. Skills set the ceiling on what an economy can become. A country that draws its scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs from a handful of states is leaving most of its human capital on the table. Because states and localities supply most K-12 funding, the path forward for American economic and scientific development runs through state investment in human capital, measured against what it actually costs to build it.

A note on California. California sits near the bottom of the map above, which shows 2009–13, and it still falls short of adequate funding today, especially in its highest-poverty districts. But in my analyses, no state has improved more since 2009. As I showed in The Red State Miracle That Wasn’t, California’s highest-poverty districts went from 65% to 79% of adequate funding between 2009 and 2024, most of it after the Local Control Funding Formula began phasing in after 2013, though they remain about $5,600 per pupil short. In the state data behind this post, California climbed from 45th of 48 states on adequacy in 2009–13 to the middle of the pack by 2021–23. California is digging out of a very deep hole. The 1978 tax revolt, Proposition 13, capped property taxes at 1% of assessed value and gutted the local revenue that had supplied about two-thirds of school funding.

What this does and doesn’t show

These are cross-state associations, not causal estimates. College graduates move, so a state’s BA share partly reflects whom it attracts. Adequacy is measured in 2009–13, inside the growth window, so faster-growing states may simply have afforded better-funded schools. And required cost reflects student need, which also lowers scores. The paper documents each of these and the robustness checks behind them.

But the stronger designs point the same way. Jackson and Mackevicius (2024) pool U.S. school finance evaluations and find that $1,000 more per pupil for four years raises test scores by 0.032 SD and college-going by 2.8 points. Jackson, Johnson and Persico find that sustained spending increases raise adult wages. And the international lesson from Patrinos and Psacharopoulos is that causal returns to education run higher than correlational ones. If anything, cross-state associations like mine are more likely to understate the human capital return than to invent it.

The bottom line

Around the world, nobody serious doubts that human capital pays. A year of school is worth about 9–10% in earnings, a standard deviation of learning about 15%, and a country’s skills go a long way toward explaining its growth. The U.S. debate gets stuck because it measures the investment badly. Measure it against the cost of building skills, and the return shows up across the states just as it does across countries: funding to skills, skills to degrees, degrees to growth.

The states are not converging; at the top and bottom they are pulling apart. Whether America remains an economic and scientific leader depends on whether every state invests in the human capital of all its children, and especially the children who rely most on public schools, or whether we settle for a few states that lead and many that fall further behind.

Read the full policy paper (PDF): Investing in Human Capital: Does Long-Run K-12 Investment Fuel State Economic Growth? It includes all data sources, variable definitions, model specifications, robustness checks, a full table of results and replication details.

Data: BEA via FRED; School Finance Indicators Database (2026); NCES ACS-CWIFT; NAEP Data Service; ACS. International sources are listed in the paper.

Misinform, Not Inform: The Edunomics Graphs Have No Place in New Jersey’s School Funding Debate

New Jersey edition. Download the full brief: Misinform, Not Inform (PDF).

Two graphics from Marguerite Roza’s Edunomics Lab at Georgetown have been showing up in one state after another. Edunomics publishes a version of each for every state. One shows spending rising and NAEP scores falling since 2013. The other scatters every district by spending and test scores and finds no pattern. Wherever they land, they deliver the same message: the state has poured money into its schools and gotten nothing for it.

It’s only a matter of time before they show up in New Jersey. The New Jersey versions are already sitting on Edunomics’ website, ready to be dropped into testimony, op-eds and budget hearings. So here, in advance, is what’s wrong with them, using New Jersey’s own data.

Let me be blunt. Neither graph belongs in a serious policy conversation. Both are built so they cannot show anything other than “money doesn’t matter.” They are far more likely to misinform legislators, judges, school board members and the public than to inform them. Anyone who puts them in front of New Jersey policymakers as evidence about SFRA should be challenged, directly and publicly.

And none of this is new. I’ve been documenting the same moves in Roza’s work since 2009 (Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses). New logo. Same tricks.

Exhibit A: the “long-term trend”

Here’s Edunomics’ New Jersey trend graph (source). Spending up 44% to about $26,300 per pupil. Math and reading down.

Edunomics Lab graph: New Jersey change in spending and NAEP scores since 2013 — Edunomics Lab, “New Jersey: Change in Spending and Scores since 2013.” Reproduced for purposes of critique.

Every design choice in this graph pushes in one direction:

The starting year. The clock starts in 2013, the one year that all but guarantees spending up and scores down. More on why that’s deliberate in a moment.
Nominal dollars. The 44% is nominal. The graph’s own inflation line is up 35%. That leaves roughly 7% real growth over a decade, well under 1% a year, and spending tracks inflation almost exactly until the federal pandemic relief years of 2021–2023.
The wrong deflator, and no cost. The CPI is not the price of teachers in New Jersey’s labor market. Nothing here asks who the kids are or what their outcomes cost.
Mismatched years and scales. Spending stops in 2023, scores run through 2024, and percent growth and NAEP points share one axis at an arbitrary exchange rate. Rescale either one and the “divergence” grows or shrinks at will.
No comparison. NAEP fell nationwide after 2019, overwhelmingly in the pandemic years. One state’s spending next to a national decline tells you nothing about whether New Jersey’s dollars mattered.

Why 2013 is intentionally deceitful

“Deceitful” is a strong word. Here’s why it fits.

2013 is where the scores topped out. Anyone who works with NAEP knows 2013 is the point where scores nationally leveled off and started to turn down. Start there and almost any state shows flat or falling scores afterward, no matter what it spent.
2013 is where the spending cuts hit bottom. By 2013 the recession-era cuts had run their course and per-pupil spending sat near the bottom of the trough. Start there and almost any state shows spending “rising,” even when it’s just recovering lost ground and keeping up with inflation.
Put those together and the conclusion is built in. Top of the scores, bottom of the spending: the divergence is manufactured by the baseline. Edunomics’ tool makes this graph for every state, and it shows the same picture in nearly all of them. That’s the tell. The conclusion comes from the starting year, not from anything about New Jersey.
Earlier years were available and left out. State NAEP in reading and math goes back to 2003 for every state. Start in 2009 or 2011 and you’d see what happened first in New Jersey: spending fell from 132% to 111% of the estimated cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes in two years. A baseline that hides the cuts is a choice.
They’ve been told, repeatedly and in public. I’ve laid this out on social media, on this blog and in a video critique. The 2013 start stays. A misleading choice made once can be a mistake. Keeping it after being told exactly why it misleads is not.

Measure spending against what outcomes actually cost and the story flips. New Jersey’s spending fell from 115% of the estimated cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes in 2013 to 98% in 2024, and from 172% to 147% of the cost of national-average outcomes. The system got less progressive too: districts with 30% child poverty went from 18% more state and local revenue per pupil than districts with none to 9% more, and from 9% more teachers per pupil to 17% fewer.

New Jersey spending as a percent of the NECM estimated cost of national- and Massachusetts-average outcomes, 2009 to 2024, with 2013 marked — School Finance Indicators Database, NECM district data merged with SEDA outcomes, 449 New Jersey districts.

Exhibit B: the “clouds of doubt”

Edunomics’ New Jersey scatter plots each district’s 2024–25 per-pupil expenditure against 2024–25 NJSLA proficiency, crosshairs at the averages (source). Their companion worksheet tells users to go find the schools that spend more but get lower outcomes than similar peers.

Edunomics Lab scatterplot of New Jersey districts, FY24-25 expenditure vs. 4th grade proficiency — Edunomics Lab, “New Jersey Districts FY24-25 Expenditure vs SY24-25 4th Grade Proficiency” (Tableau Public). Reproduced for purposes of critique, with attribution as Edunomics requests.

Look at their own colors. The highest-poverty districts, in red and orange, cluster below average proficiency, many of them to the right of average spending. The graph literally displays the pattern that cost explains, then invites you to read it as waste.

Spending is what a school spends. Cost is what it would take to reach a given outcome with the kids it actually serves, in the labor market it actually hires from. Efficiency is the gap between the two. No cost, no efficiency claim. A raw scatter can’t tell you anything about waste (Efficiently Mediocre). What it does do is take the districts furthest below what their kids need and paint a target on them.

Nationally, same districts, same scores: raw spending and outcomes correlate at −0.08. Spending relative to the cost of national-average outcomes correlates at +0.59.

National districts: raw spending vs scores r = -0.08; spending relative to cost vs scores r = +0.59 — National Education Cost Model, 8,000+ districts in 38 states, 2022–2024.

New Jersey’s own school-level cost model shows the same reversal. In 2024, raw spending correlates with outcomes at −0.17. Spending relative to the cost of current statewide average outcomes correlates at +0.39.

New Jersey schools, 2024: raw spending vs outcomes and spending relative to cost vs outcomes — New Jersey state-specific school cost model, 2,310 schools, 2024. Blue: highest-poverty fifth of schools.

Here’s why. The highest-poverty fifth of New Jersey schools does spend the most per pupil, about $22,600 at the median. But getting those kids to today’s statewide average outcomes would cost about $28,000. They’re at 82% of cost. The lowest-poverty fifth spends about $20,400 against a cost of $17,700: 114%. Of the schools sitting in Edunomics’ “spends more, scores lower” corner, two-thirds spend less than their outcomes would cost, and their median low-income share is 55%, against 24% statewide.

What New Jersey’s evidence actually says

New Jersey's 449 districts, 2024: spending relative to the cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes vs outcomes, correlation 0.67 — School Finance Indicators Database, NECM district data merged with SEDA outcomes, 2024.

Across New Jersey’s 449 districts, spending relative to cost and outcomes move together (r = 0.67).
Money buys more in New Jersey, not less: within states, the payoff to spending relative to cost is about 1.2 in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, against 0.44 in Florida and 0.70 in Texas.
The highest-poverty fifth of districts spent 72% of the cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes in 2024, down from 91% in 2009. The lowest-poverty fifth spent 122%.
Two independent cost models, the NECM and New Jersey’s own school-level model (NJPP, 2025), agree at 0.72 on spending relative to cost and 0.95 on outcomes. Neither shows high-poverty districts swimming in excess resources.

Bottom line

These graphs do not inform New Jersey’s SFRA debate. They misinform it. They shouldn’t be cited in testimony, budget hearings, litigation or school board training. If someone puts them in front of you, ask two questions out loud: Why 2013? And where is the cost adjustment?

Further reading: Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses · Efficiently Mediocre (and the full paper) · Transcript of Video Critiquing Edunomics Graphs

Download the brief

Misinform, Not Inform: Why the Roza/Edunomics Spending Graphs Have No Place in New Jersey’s School Funding Debate (PDF)Download

An Economically Conservative Approach to Deciding Whether to Adopt or Expand Vouchers

Florida voucher spending of $5.0 billion compared with a $4.5 billion adequacy shortfall in the 37 highest-poverty districts, $8.3 billion in the higher-poverty half and $15.7 billion statewide; per student, public spending of $12,700, an average voucher of $7,250, and about $23,400 per student who actually switched.

Or: if you wouldn’t buy it with your own money, maybe don’t buy it with mine.

I keep hearing that vouchers are the fiscally conservative choice. Competition, markets, money following the child, all that. Fine. Let’s take that seriously. Let’s run vouchers through the same tests a fiscal conservative should apply to any other $5-billion-a-year government program. Not the bumper sticker version of conservatism. Not culture wars. Not anti-woke. The green-eyeshade, show-me-the-return, who-audits-this version.

Florida makes a good test case, because Florida went big, fast. The state spent about $3.9 billion on private school vouchers in 2024–25, up from 12% of its main K-12 funding formula three years earlier to 23%. For 2025–26, the Florida Policy Institute puts total voucher spending at about $5 billion: roughly $3.8 billion through the Family Empowerment Scholarship and another $1.1 billion or so in tax credits for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, serving more than half a million students.

Here are five questions any economically conservative legislator should ask before adopting or expanding a program like this.

1. What are we actually buying?

The first rule of spending other people’s money: don’t pay for something that was going to happen anyway. Economists call it a windfall, or an inframarginal subsidy. Conservatives used to call it waste.

According to Step Up for Students data reported by the Florida Policy Institute, 69% of students newly enrolled since Florida went universal in 2023 were already attending private school. For those families, the state isn’t buying a change in schooling. It’s buying a discount on a purchase they had already made.

Do the math on the average Family Empowerment Scholarship of roughly $7,250. If only 31 of every 100 new users actually switched schools, the state is paying about $23,400 for each student who actually changed sectors. Florida’s public schools spend about $12,700 per pupil. So the “efficient market alternative” costs nearly twice as much per child it actually moves as the “bloated government monopoly” it’s supposed to discipline.

And some share of what’s left gets eaten by price. 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. Hand a seller a subsidy for its customers and the seller raises the price. That isn’t a left-wing talking point. It’s Econ 101.

2. What’s the return?

Before a business scales a product, it wants evidence the product works. Here the evidence on large statewide voucher programs is not kind. Studies of statewide programs in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., found academic losses for students who used vouchers to switch to private schools. In Louisiana, math scores fell by about 0.4 standard deviations after one year. (I went through this research in more detail in Red State, Blue State, Round Two.)

In fairness, the best evidence for vouchers comes from Florida itself: the Urban Institute found that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, back when it was limited to low-income families, raised college enrollment by about 6 percentage points, mostly at community colleges, with little effect on degree completion. Notice what Florida did with that evidence. It took the one version with a plausible return, a targeted program for low-income kids, and turned it into an open-ended entitlement for families who were already paying tuition. That’s like running a pilot in one store, seeing modest results, and then opening 500 stores in neighborhoods where people already shop somewhere else.

3. What’s the next best use of the money?

This is the question that separates actual fiscal conservatives from people who just like vouchers. Every dollar has an opportunity cost. So what else could Florida buy with $5 billion a year?

Florida voucher spending of $5.0 billion compared with adequacy shortfalls, and per-student costs. — Left: Florida voucher spending in 2025–26 compared with 2024 adequacy shortfalls (cost of national-average outcomes minus current spending, summed across underfunded districts). Right: per-student dollars. Sources: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release); Florida Policy Institute.

By the National Education Cost Model, 64 of Florida’s 67 school districts spend less than it would cost to reach merely national-average outcomes. Statewide, Florida’s public schools fell about $15.7 billion short in 2024. The 37 districts serving the poorest fifth of Florida’s students, about 683,000 kids, were funded at about 65% of adequate and fell about $4.5 billion short.

So for roughly what Florida now spends on vouchers, it could fully fund every one of those 37 districts to adequacy and have about half a billion dollars left over. And these aren’t the places the voucher crowd likes to caricature. The list starts with Hamilton, Putnam, DeSoto, Dixie, Bradford, Gadsden, Suwannee and Madison: mostly small, rural north Florida and Heartland counties, most of which vote the way the legislature does. They’re funded at 52% to 81% of adequate. Their families mostly don’t have a private school down the road to spend a voucher at, anyway.

What’s the return on that alternative? Here we actually have good evidence. Kirabo Jackson and Claire Mackevicius pooled the rigorous studies of school spending and found that $1,000 more per pupil sustained for four years raises test scores by about 0.03 standard deviations and college-going by about 2.8 percentage points, with larger effects for lower-income students. Spread $5 billion across the districts serving Florida’s higher-poverty half of students (1.4 million kids) and that’s about $3,500 per pupil. If the effects scale anything like linearly, that’s on the order of a 10-point increase in college-going for those kids. Compare that to the voucher alternative: a discount for families already in private school, plus test score losses for many who switch.

4. Can we audit it?

A conservative doesn’t write a check without receipts. Florida’s own Auditor General, reviewing the 2024–25 school year, found the Department of Education had trouble tracking about $270 million in voucher funds, flagged possible overpayments for roughly 30,000 students, and noted that about $47 million had gone to families for private schools while their children were actually enrolled in public schools. Imagine the press release if a public school district couldn’t account for $270 million. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You’ve read it a hundred times.

5. Is the cost under control?

Vouchers in Florida went from 12% of the state’s main K-12 funding formula to about 24% in four years, and the cap on home-education scholarships is set to come off entirely in 2027. An uncapped, demand-driven entitlement whose fastest-growing users were already paying for the service themselves is not what most conservatives would call fiscal discipline. It’s what they’d call Medicare Part D.

The conservative decision rule

If I were advising a legislature in a state thinking about adopting or expanding vouchers, and I wanted to be as economically conservative as possible about it, I’d ask them to commit, in writing, to these before spending a dime:

Don’t pay for what’s already happening. Limit eligibility to students currently in public school, or you’re mostly buying windfalls.
Target where the evidence is. The only plausible positive evidence is for targeted, low-income programs. Universal eligibility has none.
Price the alternative. Before spending $X on vouchers, publish what $X would do in the state’s most underfunded public districts, using an actual cost model.
Require the same accountability. Same audits, same testing, same public reporting as public schools, or don’t call it accountability.
Cap it. A fixed appropriation, not an open-ended entitlement that grows by whatever demand turns out to be.

Florida fails all five. That doesn’t make it free-market. It makes it a very expensive subsidy with a free-market logo on it.

Closing: so show me the return

To be fair, voucher advocates do sometimes try to make the return-on-investment case. It just doesn’t survive contact with their own spreadsheets.

Take the Commonwealth Foundation’s 2020 report Unleashing Educational Opportunity, which claimed that expanding Pennsylvania’s tax credit scholarships by 10% a year could yield, at the high end, about $6 billion in lifetime earnings gains, another $2.1 billion from additional high school graduates and $228 million in reduced crime. As I explained in my NEPC review, the earnings estimate rested on a 2% of a standard deviation gain in reading, borrowed from a meta-analysis of charter schools, not vouchers. It ignored math entirely, and it ignored the negative results from statewide voucher programs in Indiana and Ohio. The crime savings came from the author’s own Milwaukee study, stretched to cover the entire Commonwealth. And the caveats that the estimates shouldn’t be added together, and came from other places, sat on page 9, well away from the executive summary. Swap in Indiana’s math effect of about −0.15 standard deviations and, using the report’s own formula, lifetime earnings fall by more than 16%. As I put it then, “applying the report’s own methods, it is more likely that Pennsylvania would suffer significant economic losses, not gains.” The presentation made “mountains of molehills.”

Four years later, the Foundation was back with Pennsylvania’s Education Tax Credit Scholarships, this time playing down the cost. It described the $630 million program as about 1.7% of the $37 billion spent on K-12 from all sources. Measured against the state’s own $8.16 billion contribution, which is the relevant comparison for a state tax expenditure, it’s about 7.7%, or one of every $13 the state spends on schools. As I noted in that review, the same $630 million spread across the public school students of Philadelphia, Allentown, York and Reading would come to nearly $4,000 per pupil, in districts that, as I’ve shown, have never been funded anywhere near adequate.

Now compare that to the evidence on the other side of the ledger. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson and Claudia Persico, following children through adulthood, found that a 10% increase in per-pupil spending sustained across all 12 school years led to about 0.31 more years of completed schooling, roughly 7% higher adult wages, and a 3.2 percentage point lower annual chance of adult poverty, with effects much more pronounced for children from low-income families. The pooled studies in Jackson and Mackevicius tell the same story: real, measurable returns, larger for lower-income students.

Emily Rauscher has made the return-on-investment case most directly, and in the language a fiscal conservative should appreciate. In “Progressive Spending Is Efficient” (with Yifan Shen, in the American Journal of Sociology), she uses a decade of county-level data to show that the achievement returns to school spending are highest where prior investment has been lowest, places that often serve large shares of Black students, and that returns diminish where spending is already high. Her conclusion is the one that matters here: progressive funding isn’t just the equitable choice, it’s the efficient one. In “When Money Matters Most” (with Greer Mellon, Susanna Loeb and Carolyn Abott), comparing districts where local school funding measures barely passed with those where they barely failed, she finds that extra operating dollars raise achievement, especially in math, with significantly larger gains in low-resource districts, and that spending on teacher salaries and counselors appears especially effective for Black and low-income students. In plain terms: the next dollar buys the most where the last dollar was scarcest. That’s diminishing marginal returns, not ideology.

That’s the point an honest economic conservative should take home. Returns to public school spending are highest exactly where Florida and Pennsylvania spend least relative to need: high-poverty districts funded well below adequate. Returns to universal vouchers are, on the best statewide evidence, zero to negative, and a large share of the money doesn’t change anyone’s schooling at all. If you’re going to sell vouchers as an investment, you have to show the return. The advocates’ own estimates, run honestly, point the other way. The money that pays off is the money that reaches Putnam County and Philadelphia, not the tuition bill at a school the family was already paying.

Data notes

Adequacy and shortfalls come from the School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release): district current spending per pupil compared with the modeled cost of national-average outcomes, with shortfalls summed as enrollment times the per-pupil gap across underfunded districts. The “poorest fifth” is the set of districts serving the 20% of public school students in the highest-poverty districts (Census SAIPE), and the “higher-poverty half” is defined the same way at 50%. Voucher spending and enrollment are from the Florida Policy Institute; the average scholarship is FES spending through the FEFP divided by FES enrollment for 2025–26. The cost per student who actually switched applies the 69% share of new post-2023 users already in private school to the average scholarship; it’s an illustration, not a program-wide estimate. Projected spending effects use the pooled estimates from Jackson and Mackevicius (2024) and assume linear scaling, which is a simplification.

Sources

School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).
Florida Policy Institute, growth in Florida’s private school vouchers and 2025–26 education budget analysis.
Florida Auditor General report 2026-046, as reported by Spectrum News 13 and the Florida Phoenix.
Jackson, C. K., & Mackevicius, C. L. (2024). What impacts can we expect from school spending policy? Evidence from evaluations in the United States. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 16(1), 412–446.
Chingos, M., & Kuehn, D. (2017). The effects of statewide private school choice on college enrollment and graduation (Urban Institute), as summarized by Chalkbeat.
Harris, D., & Olivier, G. working paper on voucher expansion and private school tuition, EdWorkingPapers.
Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R. C., & Persico, C. (2016). The effects of school spending on educational and economic outcomes: Evidence from school finance reforms. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(1), 157–218.
Rauscher, E., & Shen, Y. (2022). Variation in the relationship between school spending and achievement: Progressive spending is efficient. American Journal of Sociology, 128(1).
Rauscher, E., Mellon, G., Loeb, S., & Abott, C. (2024). When money matters most: Unpacking the effectiveness of school spending. EdWorkingPaper.
Baker, B. D. (2020). NEPC Review: Unleashing Educational Opportunity: The Untapped Potential of Expanded Tax Credit Scholarships (Commonwealth Foundation, August 2020). National Education Policy Center.
Baker, B. D. (2024). NEPC Review: Pennsylvania’s Education Tax Credit Scholarships: How EITC Serves Children and Families in the Commonwealth (Commonwealth Foundation, September 2024). National Education Policy Center.
Baker, B. D. (2026). Red State, Blue State, Round Two and A Philadelphia Story of Underfunding. School Finance 101.

Challenge Accepted: How Connecticut Became the Poster Child for Educational Inequality

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.

Bar chart of Connecticut funding adequacy by fifth of students grouped by district Black and Hispanic share, 2009 and 2024. — Funding adequacy for each fifth of Connecticut’s students, grouped by the Black and Hispanic share of their district’s enrollment, 2009 and 2024. Bars show the national-average-outcome standard; “MA” labels show the Massachusetts-average-outcome standard. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Horizontal bar chart ranking states by adequacy gap between whitest and most Black and Hispanic fifth of students; Connecticut first at 128 points. — Adequacy in each state’s whitest fifth of students minus its most Black and Hispanic fifth, 2024, under the national standard and [in brackets] the Massachusetts standard. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Scatter plot of Connecticut districts in 2024: Black and Hispanic share against funding adequacy. — Connecticut school districts, 2024. Each circle is a district, sized by enrollment. Red: below the national-average-outcome standard; orange: below the Massachusetts-average-outcome standard. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

District	Black & Hispanic	Child poverty	Spending per pupil	Cost: national avg.	Adequacy: national	Cost: MA avg.	Adequacy: MA
Bridgeport	87%	25%	$21,004	$34,195	61%	$51,172	41%
Hartford	85%	34%	$26,602	$39,752	67%	$59,488	45%
Waterbury	83%	33%	$20,824	$30,709	68%	$45,955	45%
New Haven	82%	24%	$23,235	$27,491	85%	$41,139	56%
Darien	8%	2%	$28,136	$14,167	199%	$21,200	133%
Greenwich	25%	5%	$31,563	$14,255	221%	$21,333	148%
Westport	10%	3%	$29,927	$12,761	235%	$19,097	157%
New Canaan	8%	3%	$29,555	$12,384	239%	$18,533	159%

Selected Connecticut districts, 2024. Spending is current spending per pupil; costs are the modeled costs of national-average and Massachusetts-average outcomes. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Line chart of funding progressiveness for Connecticut, Illinois, Pennsylvania and the median state, 1993 to 2024. — State and local revenue per pupil in a 30%-poverty district relative to a 0%-poverty district, 1993–2024, controlling for regional wages, district size and density. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, state panel.

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.

Three panels comparing lowest- and highest-poverty adequacy in Connecticut, Illinois and Pennsylvania, 2009 to 2024. — Funding adequacy in each state’s lowest- and highest-poverty fifth of students, 2009–2024, against the national-average-outcome standard and (purple) the Massachusetts-average-outcome standard. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release); NCES Common Core of Data; Census SAIPE.

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.

Three panels comparing adequacy in the least and most Black and Latino districts in Connecticut, Illinois and Pennsylvania, 2009 to 2024. — Funding adequacy in each state’s fifth of students in the least and most Black and Latino (Hispanic) districts, 2009–2024, against the national standard and (purple) the Massachusetts standard. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release); NCES Common Core of Data; Census SAIPE.

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.)

Share of white, Black and Latino students in districts spending less than the cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes, Connecticut 2009 to 2024 and Connecticut, Illinois and Pennsylvania in 2024. — Percent of students in districts spending less than the modeled cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes (solid lines, outer bars) and national-average outcomes (dashed lines, inner bars). Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release); district enrollment by race from NCES Common Core of Data via the Urban Institute Education Data Portal.

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.

Red State, Blue State, Round Two: Arizona & Florida vs. New Jersey & Massachusetts (and Where the Voucher Money Went)

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

	All districts, 2009 → 2024	Highest-poverty fifth, 2009 → 2024	Students in underfunded districts, 2024
New Jersey	178% → 136%	139% → 110%	11%
Massachusetts	174% → 133%	137% → 109%	12%
Arizona	87% → 72%	64% → 64%	98%
Florida	94% → 70%	83% → 63%	98%

Funding adequacy: current spending as a percent of the cost of national average outcomes. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Animated line chart: funding adequacy in highest-poverty districts in New Jersey and Massachusetts falls from about 138% to about 110%, staying above adequate, while Arizona stays near 64% and Florida falls from 83% to 63%. — Funding adequacy in each state’s highest-poverty fifth of districts, 2009–2024. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Animated U.S. map of funding adequacy in each state's highest-poverty districts, 2009 to 2024, with New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arizona and Florida outlined. — Funding adequacy in each state’s highest-poverty fifth of districts, all states, 2009–2024. Same color scale every year. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

Round 2: Spending and effort

Animated line chart of ECWI-adjusted spending per pupil: New Jersey and Massachusetts rise to about $22,500 by 2024 while Florida ($13,489) and Arizona ($12,445) stay flat. — Current spending per pupil adjusted for regional labor costs and inflation (ECWI), 2024 national-average dollars. Source: School Finance Indicators Database, National Education Cost Model (2024 release).

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.

Animated line chart of K-12 spending as a share of state GDP: New Jersey 4.76% in 2024, Massachusetts 2.77%, Florida 2.19%, Arizona 2.01%, all down from 2009. — State and local K-12 spending as a percent of gross state product, 2009–2024. Source: School Finance Indicators Database.

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

Animated line chart of NAEP 8th-grade math: Massachusetts 299 to 283, New Jersey 293 to 282, Arizona 277 to 270, Florida 279 to 267. — NAEP 8th-grade math, average scale score, all students, test years only (2009–2024).

	Math, 2009 → 2024	Change	Reading, 2009 → 2024	Change
Massachusetts	299 → 283	−15	274 → 268	−6
New Jersey	293 → 282	−11	273 → 266	−7
Arizona	277 → 270	−8	258 → 254	−3
Florida	279 → 267	−12	264 → 253	−12
Average state	282 → 273	−10	263 → 257	−6

NAEP 8th grade, all students. Average state = simple average of states and DC.

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?

Bar chart: Arizona ESA spending of about $1.0 billion equals 36% of a $2.8 billion adequacy shortfall in districts serving the higher-poverty half of students; Florida voucher spending of about $3.9 billion equals 47% of an $8.3 billion shortfall. — Annual voucher/ESA spending vs. the 2024 adequacy shortfall in districts serving the higher-poverty half of each state’s public school students. Shortfall is from NECM 2024; voucher costs are for 2024–25 (Florida) and the fiscal year beginning July 2025 (Arizona).

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.

	New Jersey	Massachusetts	Arizona	Florida
Public education
Adequacy, highest-poverty districts (2024)	110%	109%	64%	63%
Adjusted spending per pupil (2024)	$22,543	$22,513	$12,445	$13,489
NAEP 8th-grade math (2024)	282	283	270	267
State pre-K: share of 4-year-olds served, state $ per child (2024–25)	35% (21st); $18,848 (2nd)	30% (25th); $3,046 (43rd)	2% (last); $8,723	63% (7th); $2,946 (44th)
Children’s well-being and services
KIDS COUNT overall rank (2026)	6th (1st in education)	2nd	40th (50th in education)	35th
State paid family & medical leave	Yes, up to 12 weeks	Yes, up to 12 weeks	No	No
Children’s health
Uninsured children (2024)	4.7% (21st)	2.1% (1st)	9.3% (49th)	8.5% (45th)
Medicaid expansion	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Women’s health
Women’s health & reproductive care rank (2024)	19th	1st	44th	39th
Abortion access	Protected	Protected	Protected to viability (Prop 139, 2024)	Banned after 6 weeks
Quality of life, arts and culture
Life expectancy at birth (2022)	79.6 (3rd)	79.8 (2nd)	76.7 (30th)	77.9 (19th)
State arts agency funding per capita (FY2026)	$3.73 (7th)	$3.78 (6th)	$0.26 (47th)	$1.71 (19th)
Arts & culture share of state GDP (2023)	3.6% (11th)	4.0% (6th)	3.0% (19th)	3.2% (17th)
Safety and public health
Firearm deaths per 100,000 (2023)	4.6 (2nd lowest)	3.9 (lowest)	19.1 (38th)	14.4 (25th)
Violent crime per 100,000 (2024)	218	315	422	267
Measles cases, 2026 (through early October)	3	2	36	67
Kindergartners with vaccine exemptions (2025–26)	5.7%	1.8%	10.6%	5.9%

Sources: SFID/NECM; NAEP; NIEER State of Preschool 2025; Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDS COUNT 2026; American Community Survey via America’s Health Rankings; Commonwealth Fund 2024 State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care; CDC/NCHS U.S. State Life Tables 2022; NASAA FY2026 State Arts Agency Revenues; BEA Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account 2023; CDC WONDER via America’s Health Rankings; FBI Uniform Crime Reports; CDC and Johns Hopkins measles tracking; KFF/CDC kindergarten exemption data. Ranks are out of 50 states; pre-K ranks out of 45 states with programs.

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.

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Round 2: Names, not quintiles

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