#1 Education Revenue Growth - 50 State Comparison

July 15, 2025

Michigan is no longer the last in the nation in funding growth since Proposal A!

When I first created this figure back in 2018, I was frankly shocked at the result. While I understood at that point that funding for education in Michigan had eroded substantially since the early 2000’s, I had no idea it would be such an outlier.

The figure above was first made public in the 2019 Crossroads report (section 4, page 34 of the PDF) and then again in the 2023 District Adequacy report (page 5 of the PDF). Both of those reports showed that Michigan was last in the nation, 50 out of 50, in revenue growth since 1995.

Since the low point in FY 2014, Michigan has maintained a steady, albeit slow, march upwards while total education funding in West Virginia has continued to deteriorate. FY 2022 was the first year since I started creating this figure in which Michigan no longer maintained the largest decline in education funding since 1995. Now, the updated statistics are:

  • Since the adoption of Proposal A, funding has declined more in Michigan than every other state except for West Virginia.

  • After adjusting for inflation, there are only two states that have had a decline in total funding since 1995, Michigan and West Virginia.

Better is good, but not good enough.

Reading the Figure

This figure shows changes in total inflation adjusted revenue, not total revenue. That is, the Y-axis reports the percent of of funding relative to that state’s funding in 1995. For example, if a line went straight across the at “100%” on the Y-axis (the dashed line), that state would show no change in total education funding. Consequently, data above the 100% dashed line represent increases in inflation adjusted revenue and lines below the dashed line show real declines in revenue.

Data and Methods

The data for this figure come from the federal government’s Common Core of Data (CCD) F-33 finance files. Unfortunately, the F-33 data set always has a pretty substantial lag with the FY 2022 data being the most up to date data as of July 2025. Still, the F-33 is essentially the only way to compare the education finance systems between states with any real internal validity.

The state revenue data was adjusted for inflation using the State and Local Implicit Price Deflator (S&L IPD). The S&L IPD is created by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, but I typically access the measure through the St. Louis Federal Reserve because it has a really handy API that makes accessing the data very easy in R.