Equity: Interpretation

State-equalization effort: Education Week changed the way we graded the states on equity this year, based on the advice of the Quality Counts 2005 advisory board. We decided to focus our efforts in this section on outcome measures only. Thus, we no longer use the state-equalization effort to measure the equity of school finance systems. The wealth-neutrality score, the McLoone Index, and the coefficient of variation now each count for one-third of the grade.

Wealth-neutrality score: This score shows the degree to which state and local revenues are related to the property wealth of districts. This year, wealth-neutrality scores range from minus .251 to .312. A negative score means that, on average, poorer districts actually have more funding per weighted pupil than wealthy districts do. A positive score means the opposite: Wealthy districts have more funding per weighted pupil than poor districts do. Only 10 states have negative wealth-neutrality scores for the 2001-02 school year.

McLoone Index: The index is based on the assumption that if all students in the state were lined up according to the amount their districts spent on them, perfect equity would be achieved if every district spent at least as much as that spent on the pupil in the middle of the distribution, or the median. The McLoone Index is the ratio of the total amount spent on pupils below the median to the amount that would be needed to raise all students to the median per-pupil...