Although the relative tax effort of poor and wealthy districts greatly affects the funding gaps between these districts, higher implicit foundation levels can help reduce the gaps. Therefore, states can further reduce the funding gaps by increasing their targeting effort to poor districts, increasing the state share of total funding, or increasing both. In this report, we refer to total funding as all revenue from local and state sources, including funds used for capital expenditures and debt service. This excludes federal funding. Unless otherwise noted, the figures in this report are in real dollars adjusted for cost and student need differences within a state.
V provides information on how to adjust each state's figures to make accurate national comparisons.
To account for differences in student need by district, disabled students were assigned a weight of 2.3 and poor students a weight of 1.2. For reporting purposes, we grouped the student population of each state into five groups. These groups were determined by ranking the districts within a state according to increasing district income and then dividing these districts into five groups, each with about the same student population. We defined poor districts as those in the first group and wealthy districts as those in the fifth group. Normally, each group consisted of about 20 percent of the student population.