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Compounded Inequities: Assessing School Finance Equity For Low-Income English Language Learners, David S. Knight, Jesus E. Mendoza

Working Papers

School districts face different costs to produce the same level of educational opportunity because of differences in student population, geographical costs of living, and district size. However, in many states, the school finance system fails to take these factors into account when distributing funds to school districts. Most prior analyses of state school finance systems focus on the relationship between district funding and the percent of low-income students in that district or the percent of emergent bilinguals, who are typically classified as English language learners (ELLs).

We present the first longitudinal descriptive evidence of the extent to which state school …