Oct 7, 2026 · 36 min · 8 segments
Kevin Shafer, president of City Fund, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss efforts to expand access to high-quality public schools across the country. Speaking on his experience with…
Mike PetrilliHost
Kevin ShaferGuest
Amber NorthernDavid GriffithHost
I feel like we've talked about this before on the podcast, but we've never had, like, a study that actually kind of shows this descriptively.
It's tracking how revenues, expenditures, and per pupil resources changed across nearly all US school districts as their enrollments grew or shrank over two decades.
So anyway, it literally is, like, not even off the press yet, but anyway, interesting stuff coming in AEFP.
Comes, data come from NCES Common Core data, so we know this sort of bread and butter data set.
It covers 12,000 traditional public school districts across 47 states and DC.
As you can tell, it predates COVID and ESSER, those influx of dollars, so we don't know whether these patterns persist into the 2020s.
But regardless, it tracks each district against its own history, and the study design basically allows the shrinking and growing districts to follow different patterns rather than assuming that the pattern works the same way in both of those growing and declining districts, okay? So I'm not gonna get into all the specifics around that, but it's a appropriate methodology.
The authors look at one year, four year, and 20 year enrollment changes to capture both short run adjustments and long r- long term trends.
So key finding number one, declining districts saw significantly larger increases in per pupil revenues than the growing districts did, and this held across all three time periods.
The property taxes and other local sources, they don't fall proportionally when students leave.
Property values don't drop because, you know, fewer kids are enrolled, so the tax base largely stays in place.
Federal dollars also enhance this effect because federal aid is tied to school-age child counts from the census, not district enrollment.
So when kids move to home schools or private schools, for instance, the federal dollars largely stay behind as well.
And then the state revenues showed an advantage as well for the declining districts too, partly because states have these hold harmless provisions which protect districts, and the a-advantage though was smaller because those provisions do tend to be temporary, like one to three years.
Number two, on the resource side, declining districts saw much larger increases in staff and teachers per one hundred students.
Over twenty years, districts with long run enrollment declines spent roughly seventeen hundred dollars more per pupil than the growing districts did, and they employ two point two five-- two point five five more staff per one hundred students than the growing districts.
I feel like we've talked about this before on the podcast, but we've never had, like, a study that actually kind of shows this descriptively.
It's tracking how revenues, expenditures, and per pupil resources changed across nearly all US school districts as their enrollments grew or shrank over two decades.
So anyway, it literally is, like, not even off the press yet, but anyway, interesting stuff coming in AEFP.
Comes, data come from NCES Common Core data, so we know this sort of bread and butter data set.
It covers 12,000 traditional public school districts across 47 states and DC.
As you can tell, it predates COVID and ESSER, those influx of dollars, so we don't know whether these patterns persist into the 2020s.
But regardless, it tracks each district against its own history, and the study design basically allows the shrinking and growing districts to follow different patterns rather than assuming that the pattern works the same way in both of those growing and declining districts, okay? So I'm not gonna get into all the specifics around that, but it's a appropriate methodology.
The authors look at one year, four year, and 20 year enrollment changes to capture both short run adjustments and long r- long term trends.
So key finding number one, declining districts saw significantly larger increases in per pupil revenues than the growing districts did, and this held across all three time periods.
The property taxes and other local sources, they don't fall proportionally when students leave.
Property values don't drop because, you know, fewer kids are enrolled, so the tax base largely stays in place.
Federal dollars also enhance this effect because federal aid is tied to school-age child counts from the census, not district enrollment.
So when kids move to home schools or private schools, for instance, the federal dollars largely stay behind as well.
And then the state revenues showed an advantage as well for the declining districts too, partly because states have these hold harmless provisions which protect districts, and the a-advantage though was smaller because those provisions do tend to be temporary, like one to three years.
Number two, on the resource side, declining districts saw much larger increases in staff and teachers per one hundred students.
Over twenty years, districts with long run enrollment declines spent roughly seventeen hundred dollars more per pupil than the growing districts did, and they employ two point two five-- two point five five more staff per one hundred students than the growing districts.
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