Educational Equity Simulation

Funding Policy

Per-student budget $10.0k

Equity-weighted funding 0%

Structural capital gap 100%

Funding effectiveness 1.00×

Outcomes

Avg. achievement

Q5−Q1 gap

Equity index

Quintile	$/student	Score

How it works

Each of five income quintiles (Q1 = lowest-income families, Q5 = highest) starts with a baseline "community capital" score reflecting non-school advantages — parental education, health access, out-of-school enrichment. Achievement is modeled as a simplified education production function:

Score(q) = 0.5 · Capital(q) + 0.5 · Return(Funding(q))
Capital(q) = 55 + (Base(q) − 55) · capitalGap
Return(F)  = 100 · (1 − e^(−F / (16 / effectiveness)))

The Return() term has diminishing marginal returns to spending — the first few thousand dollars per student buy far more achievement than the next few thousand, a well-documented pattern in school-finance research. The budget is redistributed, not created: the equity-weighted funding slider shifts dollars from higher- toward lower-quintile schools while holding the district-wide average per-student budget fixed, so it isolates the effect of how a fixed pool of money is allocated.

Per-student budget — the average dollars spent per student, before any redistribution.
Equity-weighted funding — 0% spends the same amount at every school; 100% fully weights allocation by need (Q1 gets the most, Q5 the least), total spending unchanged.
Structural capital gap — how much of the historical socioeconomic gap in non-school capital still applies; 0% imagines it erased, 100% is the full modeled gap.
Funding effectiveness — how efficiently a dollar converts into achievement (smaller classes, better materials, more support staff).

Each glowing point in the scene is one sampled student from that quintile's cohort, scattered around the quintile's mean score — the spread shows that group averages hide real individual variation even as the towers show the aggregate gap.

Low achievement Mid achievement High achievement

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