- Currently, the BEP only allocated ~15% of its funding for high-need students.
- According to EdBuild, 40 states use a student-based funding formula, which is recommended by the organization as a best practice.
- A study from Dr. Marguerite Roza and the Georgetown University Edunomics Lab finds that districts adopt student-weighted funding formulas to increase equity (89%), flexibility (79%), and transparency (49%). However, they note that each student-based funding formula is tailored to the local context, so it is difficult to compare a formula’s impact to other contexts.
- Chamber et al. (2010) found that “for particular schooling levels, per-pupil spending became more responsive to student poverty and that the increase in responsiveness appears to have coincided with implementation of the WSF in the two districts.”
- Honig and Rainey (2012) found evidence to suggest that student-weighted funding can improve student attendance and graduation.
- Bryk et al. (2010) found that student-weighted funding enabled some schools to improve their performance when paired with other evidenced-based school improvement strategies.
