Unpacking Racial Disparities in School Spending: Why “progressiveness” and “comparability” are not enough

Studies of racial and economic disparities in school funding typically rely on simple spending comparisons or "progressiveness" measures that ignore variation in the cost of achieving common educational outcomes. This article argues that such approaches essentially ignore how much it costs schools in order to provide students with an adequate opportunity to learn. Simplistic spending measures tend to mask the degree of inadequacy, or even reverse the true pattern of inequity. Using national district-level data from the School Finance Indicators Database and National Education Cost Model alongside school-level cost models from five states (New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Colorado, and Delaware), we compare nominal and cost-adjusted ("adequacy") measures of spending with respect to race and poverty. Nominal spending patterns appear modestly progressive with respect to child poverty and Black and Hispanic enrollment shares nationally and within most states. However, when spending is benchmarked against the cost of achieving common outcome goals, the pattern reverses: districts and schools serving larger shares of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are systematically further below adequate funding levels, and adequacy explains far more outcome variation than relative spending alone. Detailed case studies of large and midsized New York and New Jersey districts further show that between-district underfunding constrains the capacity of high-poverty districts to equalize resources across their own schools. We conclude that cost modeling is the more valid and policy-relevant method for evaluating equal educational opportunity, and that continued reliance on simpler comparability and progressiveness measures risks understating racial and economic disparities in school funding and misdirecting policy remedies.