Examining the Nature and Magnitude of Intra-District Resource Disparities in Four Mid-Size New York State School Districts

Executive Summary While research on school finance equity has traditionally focused on disparities across school districts, recent years have witnessed increased attention to resource differences across individual schools, particularly within large school districts. With a majority of the existing evidence on intra-district equity coming from the nations largest districts, little is known about intra-district resource allocation in the nation's mid-size districts, or about the formulas and mechanisms that districts use to allocate resources across individual schools. These intra-district resource allocations are particularly important in the wake of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision, which is resulting in substantial new resources for urban districts in New York State. This study begins to fill this gap in the literature by examining the nature and extent of intra-district resource disparities in mid-sized New York State school districts. The existing studies on school-level resource disparities have often reached remarkably similar conclusions. First, the researchers often conclude that resource disparities found across schools may be as large as or larger than the more widely-recognized disparities across districts. Second, these disparities are generally not explained by student need differentials; on the contrary, schools with greater student needs often find themselves disadvantaged relative to other schools in the same district, particularly in terms of the quality of teacher resources. These patterns vary, though, by funding source and suggest a complex relationship between funding streams. Third, these patterns are not caused by the intentional targeting of resources to lower-need schools, but are frequently the result of position-based funding formulas, average cost budgeting practices, and teacher sorting patterns that allow higher paid teachers to systematically opt into lower-need schools without financial ramifications for the schools they transfer from or to. Virtually all of the available research on intra-district resource disparities has focused on large school districts, often comprised of hundreds of schools (or, in the case of New York City, over one thousand). Almost nothing is known, though, about intra-district resource allocation in the nation's mid-sized school districts, which we define as those with 10-50 elementary and middle schools. This paper begins to fill this gap in the literature by examining the distribution of teacher resources within four of the larger New York State school districts outside New York City. In the next section we describe our data and process for choosing school districts. We employ a purposive sampling methodology. The sample size was set at four districts in …