Teaching in a school like mine, you get insulted a lot. Not by the students, who are (mostly) wonderful, but by conservative critics who judge and misjudge the performance of schools and districts that serve low-income, minority, and immigrant communities because they fail to look at our performance in context. Why would funding based on enrollment be more equitable? Because students of low socioeconomic status face many extra challenges, challenges that reduce attendance rates. When students are absent, their schools and districts lose funding for them, however, their costs remain almost the same, regardless of daily attendance. Most states have adopted an enrollment-based or partially enrollment-based system, but America's two largest states, California and Texas, are among a half dozen that still apportion school funding by ADA. In recent years, legislators in both states have tried unsuccessfully to change this. The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 76% of our students live in poverty, has been supportive of these legislative efforts. Kelly Gonez, a member of the LAUSD School Board, explains, “We lose about $200 million annually because of the difference between enrollment and average daily attendance.” Critics often prefer to ignore these schools’ extra challenges. Hess says funding based on school enrollment “rewards schools which aren’t doing their job,” and links the idea to supporters’ alleged “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Teacher union critic Lance Izumi asserts that under the proposed funding system, “poor-performing districts would have no incentive to address their deficiencies and poor performance.” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, lectures that “schools should reward success, not failure.” To be fair to Hess, Izumi, Coupal, and other advocates of attendance-based funding, it isn't unreasonable to believe that linking school funding to attendance leads to higher attendance, and that uncoupling attendance from funding leads to lower attendance. However, research does not indicate that such a connection exists. Education policy analysts Carrie Hahnel and Christina Baumgardner, authors of the 2022 report Student Count Options for School Funding, explain that “research on how state funding policies can drive attendance is scant and mixed.”