by Dr. Matthew Ladner
Some Arizona school districts spend approximately five times as much per pupil the lowest funded Arizona school district. Arizona also schools within the same district spending five times as much as others in the district. While defenders of the current inequitable system have in the past claimed that state funding weights drive public school funding inequities, but an examination of the funding gap between district and charter schools reveals this claim to be greatly exaggerated. Arizona’s messy and inequitable system of local funding lies behind growing public school funding disparities.
Arizona uses a system of weights to fund public schools. These weights provide additional resources according to the student count for a variety of students- students with disabilities, English Learners (ELs), high-school students, K-3, students in sparsely populated schools and more. Some weights are rare but large – the top special education weight for instance produces almost eight times the normal state revenue. Others are smaller but more common. State lawmakers typically and appropriately fund schools with a weighted system to reflect equity concerns.
Arizona’s K-12 formula, with a growing irony, is called the “Equalization Formula,” an appropriate title in the 1980s when lawmakers avoided a constitutional challenge by creating the Equalization Formula which successfully equalized funding across the state. This was both appropriate and wise, but in many other states court challenges to funding systems backfired and created unintended consequences.
Defenders of the funding status-quo will sometimes assert that the funding weights themselves explain funding inequities. Intuitively this seems to make sense – only high-school students will generate those weights, other student populations generating weights will not necessarily be evenly distributed across schools.
However, funding calculations made by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC) explain that almost none of the statewide funding disparities between district and charter schools originates from the weights. For example, the per pupil difference in weighted funding between districts and charter schools in 2021 was $169 per pupil in favor of districts. In total public funding however, districts received $12,253 per pupil in Fiscal Year 2021, while charter schools received an average of $10,345. The total average per funding gap stood at $1,908 in Fiscal Year 2021 in favor of districts in 2021 with funding weights explaining less than 10% of the difference.
Two factors explain the modest role of weights in explaining funding gaps. First, the student populations between district and charter schools are more similar than often assumed, and secondly, funding weights tend to cancel each other out in the aggregate. Charter schools have a higher percentage of K-3 students than districts, while districts have a higher percentage of high-school students. When all students are counted and weights applied, the weights drive very little of the difference between district and charter schools.
The same is likely true regarding the large funding differences within the district system itself. State funding weights certainly explain some of the observed differences, but they cannot begin to explain the highest funded district spending five times as much per pupil as the lowest funded district, or a similar sized discrepancy between schools in the same district.
Today, local funding differences, such as bonds, overrides, and desegregation, serve as the primary drivers of funding inequity, just as they did before the 1980 funding equalization effort. The language in the Arizona Constitution that inspired lawmakers to equalize school funding still exists today, but the state’s inequitable system of funding has returned to brazenly violating it. All Arizonans pay their school taxes, and all students should receive an equitable level of funding.
