At those levels, too, school funding is complicated and volatile, which means school district leaders will likely have to confront lots of unknowns for the 2026-27 school year, making planning difficult. At the same time, states’ public education funding formulas need continual reworking . But as the work of refining education investments continues, state revenue is tightening in many places . Indeed, pressures on property taxes—the foundation of local investments in the nation’s 13,000 public school systems—aren’t just coming from the local level. School districts are increasingly uncertain about whether they can rely on federal education funds, $7 billion of which were delayed for weeks last July, prompting a more conservative approach to budgeting in some places.