Money Is Necessary — But Not Sufficient
The research is clear that adequate funding improves outcomes. It is equally clear that money spent on the wrong things does not. Here's what Minnesota must do differently.
A recurring argument against increasing education funding goes like this: we've tried spending more money, and it hasn't worked. The achievement gap persists. What schools need is better leadership, better teaching, higher expectations — not more money.
There is a kernel of truth in this argument. The research does show that, without accountability and guidance on effective practices, new funding can be absorbed into programs and practices that don't meaningfully improve student outcomes. Simply adding money to a dysfunctional system doesn't automatically fix the dysfunction.
But the conclusion drawn from this observation — that money doesn't matter — is wrong. What the research actually shows is more nuanced: money matters, and it matters most when it is paired with evidence-based practices and accountability. The three elements — adequate funding, effective practices, and accountability — are interdependent. Remove any one of them, and the others become much less effective.
This post focuses on the middle element: what it means to ground school funding in evidence-based instructional practices, and how other states have done it.
What the Research Says About Money and Outcomes
The debate about whether money matters in education has been conducted for decades, and the evidence has become increasingly clear. Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, whose work is among the most cited in school finance research, summarizes it directly:
"On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes... In direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters."
A landmark 2015 study by researchers at Northwestern and Berkeley examined states where court-ordered funding reforms increased spending in underfunded schools and found that increasing per-pupil spending by 10% across all twelve school-age years increased the probability of high school graduation by 7 percentage points for all students, and by roughly 10 percentage points for low-income students. For low-income children, that additional spending also boosted adult wages by about 13%. These are large, sustained, real-world effects.
More recent research reinforces this finding. A 2018 study using national NAEP data found that school finance reforms that increased funding in low-income districts caused sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in student achievement. The effects phased in over several years following the reform — consistent with the reality that educational improvement is gradual — but they were real and substantial.
However, the same body of research also documents that money spent ineffectively can have little or no impact. The question is not whether to spend more — it is how to ensure that additional spending is directed toward practices that actually work.
Evidence-Based Funding: What It Means
The leading approach to connecting funding with effective practices is called Evidence-Based Funding (EBF). Developed and championed by school finance scholars Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus, EBF works as follows: rather than setting a funding level based on historical spending patterns or political negotiation, the state identifies the specific programs, staffing configurations, and services that research shows are effective, prices them out, and funds schools at the level required to implement them.
This approach does more than calculate a cost. It provides direct guidance on how money should be used — what teacher-student ratios are supported by research, what intervention programs have proven track records, what professional development structures lead to sustained improvement. It connects the dollar amount to the educational strategy.
EBF has been adopted, in various forms, in Illinois, Wyoming, Arkansas, New Jersey, and many other states. Each implementation is tailored to state-specific standards and conditions, but all share the core principle: funding levels are derived from an evidence-grounded analysis of what it costs to deliver effective education, not from what the Legislature happened to appropriate last year. None of these states have implemented evidence based systems fully, or perfectly. Minnesota could do it better, if we implemented it more faithfully. In some iterations, the evidence based funding system has failed to pair evidence based practices with promised increased funding. If Minnesota implemented EBF, we would have a head start over other states, because our finance system is closer to fair than most others.
I would like to be crystal clear: I'm not asserting that Wyoming, Illinois, or Arkansas have vaulted their educational systems to acceptable levels. Each has experienced major challenges and obstacles. Often they have failed to properly fund the evidence based practices that EBF has identified. The fundamental difference in these states worth studying, however, is that they start with identifying evidence based practices necessary to achieve educational goals and then proceeded to estimate the amount of funding required to fund those practices. This is completely foreign to Minnesota's approach. Indeed Minnesota has intentionally, wilfully, avoided any attempt to base funding on the educatonal practices and programs necessary to provide students with an adequate education that meets all state standards.
What Other States Have Done
Illinois enacted a historic Evidence-Based Funding reform in 2017. The Legislature created a Professional Review Panel — composed of practitioners, experts, legislative leaders, and advocates — to regularly review and recalibrate the funding model. The state also created a Balanced Accountability Measure Committee to develop recognition standards for student performance and school improvement across all districts. The reform has directed hundreds of millions of new dollars to the state's most underfunded districts, with the explicit requirement that those funds support evidence-based programs. Illinois publishes the research summaries underlying its EBF recommendations, so districts can understand not just what they are expected to do, but why.
Critics of Illinois implementation have argued that Illinois' Evidence-Based Funding (EBF) formula is significantly underfunded, with a gap of approximately $5.7 billion as of late 2025. Despite the 2017 law intending to provide adequate resources to schools, particularly high-poverty districts, consistent underfunding means roughly 3.3 million students attend schools that do not meet the mandated funding adequacy level.
Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future, enacted in 2021, committed $3.9 billion in additional K–12 funding over ten years — paired with explicit accountability provisions requiring that funds be used for evidence-based practices. The Blueprint includes guardrails to ensure that money designated for high-need students actually reaches high-need programs, not administrative overhead or programs without evidence of effectiveness. Maryland's approach also includes an independent oversight board (discussed more in the next post) with authority to require course corrections when implementation falls short.
Maryland's Blueprint for the Future has faced mounting fiscal and political headwinds as it works toward full implementation by 2032. When state financial officials determined in December 2024 that Maryland would face a roughly $3 billion deficit in fiscal year 2026, Governor Wes Moore proposed scaling back parts of the Blueprint, including temporary pauses on plans to give teachers more collaborative planning time, reduced funding for English learner programs, and a two-year freeze on community school funding. The resulting debate in the 2025 General Assembly session was among the sharpest of the year, with the governor and lawmakers — particularly the House — deeply divided over how much to cut. A compromise bill ultimately passed, but the relief is only temporary: while Blueprint spending is covered in the next two years, funding in subsequent years is set to shift to the state's general fund, where projected deficits could reach $3 billion by fiscal 2030. Critics and advocates alike have noted a pattern of legislative procrastination: each session, revenue solutions are proposed to close structural gaps, but lawmakers have done just enough to keep the program afloat for another year rather than securing long-term financing — leaving the Blueprint's ambitious goals chronically underfunded even as its 2032 deadline approaches.
Wyoming has contracted with a consulting team to recalibrate its Evidence-Based Funding model every five years since 2005 — making it one of the longest-running continuous adequacy and effectiveness review processes in the country. Each recalibration incorporates updated research on effective practices, revised cost estimates, and analysis of what has and hasn't worked in Wyoming's specific context. The process ensures that the state's funding system evolves with the evidence rather than calcifying around outdated assumptions.
The state has consistently ranked among the top ten to fifteen states nationally in per-pupil spending, though that figure is substantially inflated by Wyoming's small enrollment, vast geography, and historically strong mineral tax revenues rather than reflecting an unusually generous education policy. In recent years the gap between what the model recommends and what the legislature actually appropriates has become a flashpoint. During the 2025-26 recalibration cycle, the Select Committee on School Finance cut the consultants' recommended funding increase from roughly $100 million down to about $12 million, drawing sharp criticism from the governor, school districts, and educators who argued the legislature was using the recalibration process to cut education spending rather than honestly assess what a constitutionally adequate education actually costs.
State Mandated Effective Practices
Evidence based funding is an approach that ties funding to effective practices. There has been considerable resistence to state effective practices directive in Minnesota. However, our failure to address the literacy gap, and a corresponding concern with the lack of the adoption of science of reading principles ultimately led the legislature to adopt the Minnesota Read Act. A first nod towards mandating effective practices, but with no connection to funding based on cost. Whether Minnesota has the will systematically and robustly implement any effective practice mandate,and whether Minnesota will provide funding based on cost remains to be tested.
Early anecdotal results are encouraging, but the chances for cost based funding are not. Teachers across the state are being trained in a unified, evidence-based approach. Districts that had been using curricula misaligned with the science of reading are being required to change. The statewide focus has created momentum and shared purpose that fragmented, locally-determined approaches could not generate.
"Tens of thousands of public school teachers in Minnesota are on the same journey... Concerned about test scores showing a decline in the reading performance of Minnesota children since just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the state in 2023 passed the Read Act, requiring all Minnesota schools to train their teachers in the structured literacy approach... the initial results are encouraging."
The Read Act is not perfect. A 2024 report by Minnesota's Literacy Team found that 68% of districts reporting on their reading curriculum were still not using materials fully aligned to the Science of Reading. Full implementation will require sustained effort, monitoring, and support. But the model — state establishes evidence-based practice requirements, funds training, monitors implementation — is exactly right.
The 2026 legislative session shows a consistent pattern — complaints about the READ Act being an underfunded burden are coming primarily from Republicans and district administrators, while DFL legislators have tried to respond with supplemental appropriations. The tension between the mandate's ambitions and available funding has been a recurring theme throughout the session. Once again, Minnesota has utterly failed to determine the cost of implementation and fully fund it. Our failure to connect adequate funding, once again, threatens even this critical reform
The Accountability Connection
Evidence-based practices without accountability become suggestions. States like Maryland and Illinois have recognized this: they built guardrails into their funding reforms specifically to ensure that money designated for high-need students and effective programs actually gets used for those purposes.
Odden and Picus, whose school finance work is among the most widely cited in the field, put it plainly: it is critical that adequate funding be paired with an obligation by schools to implement effective practices. Funding without that obligation allows well-intentioned dollars to flow into activities that are comfortable and familiar but not necessarily effective.
This is not a criticism of educators. Most teachers and administrators are working hard and want their students to succeed. The problem is that without a structured framework connecting funding to specific evidence-based practices, schools default to what they already know — even when research points clearly toward something better.
The next post addresses accountability more directly. But the evidence-practice connection is worth stating here: the reason accountability matters is precisely because it enforces the link between the funding we provide and the practices we've determined are most likely to help students achieve.
A Note on What "Evidence-Based" Means
It is worth being clear about what evidence-based practices are and are not. They are not a single rigid curriculum or a top-down mandate that eliminates teacher professional judgment. They are an evidence-grounded framework — a set of instructional approaches, program designs, and organizational structures that research has shown to be effective across a range of settings.
Within that framework, there is substantial room for local adaptation, teacher creativity, and responsiveness to the specific needs of each school community. The science of reading, for example, establishes what the building blocks of effective literacy instruction are — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. It does not dictate how a teacher engages with a particular student on a particular day.
The goal is not uniformity. It is effectiveness — and effectiveness grounded in evidence rather than habit, tradition, or ideology.
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