A District-by-District Accounting of the $6.2 Billion the U.S. Department of Education Has Held Back
By Zahava Stadler and Jordan Abbott
On July 1, American public school districts were expecting a payment: money from several federal grant programs, appropriated by Congress and transferred annually to school systems for use in paying educators and staff, running programs, and buying instructional materials. Just like waiting for a paycheck to arrive in the bank before paying your bills, school districts were keeping an eye on their accounts. But the expected funding did not arrive. In its place came an email from the U.S. Department of Education informing state governments that it was holding onto money from five important programs that support K–12 schools and students. The reason offered? That “decisions [had] not been made” about the grants–even though Congress had indeed decided to fund these programs, and the President had already signed into law the federal budget bill that officially allocates the money. Instead of honoring the law, the Department told state education agencies and school districts that the grants were being held back pending a review.
The five grants in question–Title I, Part C (funding for migrant education),Title II, Part A (grants for educator development), Title III, Part A (funds for English learners), Title IV, Part A (money for student support and enrichment programs), and Title IV, Part B (funding for 21st-century learning centers)–total $6.2 billion. (Additional withheld funds for adult learners bring the amount of education funding at risk up to $6.8 billion.) Districts were counting on these dollars as they hired and planned for the fall 2025 school year. The loss of these funds will significantly impact school communities, and the impact will be much greater on students and families in certain school districts–particularly high-need districts, often in Republican-leaning areas.
Federal data can tell us which districts and students will be affected the most if these funds aren’t released. By pairing these school districts with their overlapping Congressional districts, we can also see who represents these students and their families at the federal level. While district-level data is not available for all these grant programs, district-by-district funding amounts are reported for four of the programs (all of the above except Title I, Part C) across 46 states. (No program-specific figures are reported at the district level for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, or Wisconsin.) This data, as reported in 2022, reveals some suggestive and interesting patterns.
Impact by Political Party Representation
School districts represented by Republicans in Congress will lose more per-pupil dollars. Across these four programs, the average school district represented by a Republican stands to lose 1.6 times as much funding per pupil as the average school district represented by a Democrat. The 100 school districts that would see the worst losses per pupil are heavily concentrated in Republican-represented Congressional districts (91, compared with nine in Democrat-represented Congressional districts).
Impact by Geographic Distribution
The average school district will lose almost a quarter-million dollars in funding ($220,289), but many will lose several million, and a few will be shortchanged by tens of millions. School districts that will see particularly big cuts are scattered across the country, but of the 100 districts that will lose the most total funding, more than half are in just four states. 20 are in California, 15 are in West Virginia, 12 are in Florida, and 10 are in Georgia.
Disparate Student Impact
Students from low-income backgrounds are especially at risk of losing education resources. Districts serving high-poverty student populations (those where over 25 percent of children live in poverty) will lose over five times as much funding per pupil as low-poverty school districts (those where fewer than 10 percent of children live in poverty). The 100 school districts facing the biggest cuts on a per-pupil basis have an average child poverty rate of 24.4 percent, much higher than the national average of 15.3 percent.
Unsurprisingly, given that the holdback specifically targets funding for English learners, these students will see particularly harmful cuts. The 100 school districts facing the highest total losses enroll about double the proportion of English learners as the average district.
Students of color also stand to lose more. The average school district enrolling majority students of color will see 50 percent bigger cuts than the average majority-white school district.
School Districts Most At Risk
The following tables show the 100 school districts (across the 46 states for which data was available) that will lose the most funding if this money isn’t distributed as Congress intended. Table 1 shows the districts that would see the biggest cuts in total dollars, and Table 2 shows the districts that would lose the most in per-pupil funding.
Funding Risk by Congressional District
We also examined the potential funding loss by Congressional district. Multiple school districts can overlap with one Congressional district, but by piecing things together—i.e. If a Congressional district includes 30 percent of one school district, we credit 30 percent of that district’s losses to the Congressional district–we can arrive at an estimate of how much schools in each Representative’s district would lose if the U.S. Department of Education refuses to hand over the funds that have been appropriated for these four programs. Table 3 below shows these estimates for every Congressional district for which data was available in 2023. Use the search box to find your district and see the local impact of this decision to withhold funds.