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On Friday, The Center on Reinventing Public Education and Education Sector released a new report detailing how federal, state and local school funding policies conspire to enrich schools that already have money and further impoverish schools that don't.

The report begins with a comparison of two elementary schools of similar size that enroll mostly low-income students: Cameron Elementary School in Virginia and Ponderosa Elementary in North Carolina. One crucial difference between the schools: Cameron receives approximately $14,040 in combined federal, state and local per-pupil funding, and Ponderosa receives only $6,773. Not surprisingly, Cameron teachers earn much more money than their counterparts at Ponderosa, Cameron attracts and retains many more experienced teachers, Cameron's average class size is substantially smaller, and Cameron's students fare far better on state assessments, meeting or exceeding state averages in mathematics and science.

Why the shocking disparities? As the authors write, "money follows money. At every level of government—federal, state, and local—policymakers give more resources to students who have more resources, and less to those who have less. These funding disparities accumulate as they cascade through layers of government, with the end result being massive disparities between otherwise similar schools." (See the report for the gory details.)

At the Learning First Alliance, we've also called on policymakers to overturn the perverse funding mechanisms that give to the rich and withhold from the poor. Still, I stopped short when, near the report's conclusion, the authors proposed a set of funding formulas that would increase Ponderosa's total per-pupil funding to $8320 while decreasing Cameron's to $10,711.

To be fair, the authors acknowledge that their solution is less than ideal: "The ideal solution is to bring schools like Ponderosa up to a sufficient funding level, not push more fortunate high-need schools down." That's for sure. Still, they cite the need for political and financial pragmatism in a time of famine.

Let's hope that, over the long term, advocates for equity and adequacy don't lose sight of the need for greater overall funding to support widespread adoption of the strategies that have made Cameron Elementary so successful.

(While we're on the topic of feasibility, the report's authors might need to revisit their suggestion that states enforce equity by "limit[ing] the ability of wealthy school districts to unilaterally raise funds.")