Children throughout the United States are affected by the quality of their education. Impoverished children, who make up about 11 million of the 75 million children living in this nation as of 2023, are often attending schools of high poverty. And of the children attending school, 1,094,595 children were homeless in 2021. This means that while these children didn't have a stable shelter to come home to, they still chose to make the journey to school. These children want to end the cycle of poverty. They want to make a future for themselves. And while challenging the adversity of not having a roof over their head, they are faced with an obstacle they can't conquer themselves: their schools are inexcusably underfunded.   

Their schools have less qualified teachers, less enriching courses, and higher dropout rates. The funding for schools is 43% from local taxes, such as property taxes. For example, “According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2016, 72.0% of all local government tax revenues were from property taxes” (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45827.pdf And, historically, school districts have been the deciding factors in which schools get more money. School districts raise property taxes each year to pay for school curriculums, teacher wages, and building maintenance, amongst other things, which impacts homeowners nationwide. However, property taxes vary according to their property value, and those properties with higher values tend to come from families with higher socioeconomic status, which significantly impacts the schools nearest them, leaving behind the children from lower income homes. 

School districts use a funding formula to decide which schools get more funding, such as student enrollment, attendance, and student achievement. The criteria used for funding disbursement are disadvantageous to children experiencing poverty because research has shown that due to the challenges high-poverty children face in their home lives, they tend to perform worse on standardized testing, have displayed worse school grades over time, and have higher rates of absenteeism. 

If things don't change, the lower funding that high-poverty schools receive will continue to attract less qualified teachers and contribute to the inequality in a child’s educational opportunities. Children will generationally be caught in a cycle of poverty until something is done. 

 Working class homeowners will continue to face higher property taxes each year to support high-poverty schools and the children in them that the state failed to adequately support through other funding. To ensure schools are adequately provided for and the children from low-income households are supported, action needs to take place. School districts need to be held accountable for failing to provide an environment where any child can thrive, no matter the background. Article 9 of Washington's Constitution which stipulates, "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, colour, caste, or sex," needs to be implemented in every state and every school district should be checked for their success in this. Funding needs to be disbursed first to high-poverty schools to ensure they can meet the basic educational necessities of the children in their classrooms. Then, funding needs to be systematically distributed throughout the schools equally. Following, if schools need more funding to afford special needs programs, such as tutoring, they should be qualified for the grants they need. No child should be left behind. 

Children are the future, but without providing them an education system in the present, they may never reach their future potentials.