For school choice programs to succeed, state leaders need to account for whether their K-12 funding system has portable education funding, i.e., dollars that follow students to the school of their choice. Portable education funding is also often called “backpack funding,” but this term can refer to several things.
In a new Reason Foundation policy brief, Public Education Without Boundaries, our team analyzes how school finance systems can get in the way of dollars following students across school district boundaries. Advocates of backpack funding should also pay attention to how dollars follow students between individual public schools, between public and private
