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April 17, 2026

AUTHORS
Patrick Schumacher
Brian Backstrom

Executive Summary

School districts in New York State rely heavily on local revenue they raise from the assessment of property taxes. Because property wealth varies widely across districts, some districts can raise significant local revenue with relatively modest tax rates, while other districts with lower property wealth may struggle to raise comparable revenue even with higher tax rates.

This report examines two fundamental questions around this issue. For the state’s 668 school districts outside of the Big 5 (New York’s five most populous city school districts: New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers):

• Do districts with similar wealth make similar efforts to raise local revenue?
• Do those local tax efforts, and the allocation of equalizing state aid, result in similar per-pupil spending?

Findings include:

• The Foundation Aid formula—the state’s primary method for financing school districts, which allocates more state funding to districts with greater need—has largely reduced disparities in per pupil revenue across 80 percent of districts. The wealthiest 20 percent of districts, however, still use their large property tax wealth bases to generate significantly higher levels of per-pupil revenue than less wealthy districts, even accounting for need-based state aid allocations.
• Several policy changes could augment the existing school financing system to address these disparities. Some reforms could involve incremental adjustments to the Foundation Aid Formula, such as shifting some of the state aid currently available to districts with exceptionally high capacity for generating local revenue to lower-wealth districts; modifying the amount of required minimum local revenue contribution districts must make before state aid is triggered; or scaling back current Save Harmless provisions that prevent even the wealthiest school districts from receiving less Foundation Aid in the current year than it did in the prior year no matter how much their tax bases have grown.

Over a longer time horizon, more structural reforms could be considered as well that draw on approaches used in other states. These include recapturing and redistributing excess local revenue or even restructuring the boundaries of school districts.

Read the full report.