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Excerpted from Poverty & Race, Volume 32, No.2 (April – July 2023)
Saba Bireda and Ary Amerikaner
Policies that allocate resources to schools and policies that assign children to schools are clearly and deeply interconnected. Brown v. Board of Education’s decree that separate is inherently unequal was premised on the idea that racial integration is a critical component to providing equal educational opportunities to all students. So long as schools are racially and socioeconomically segregated, the tangible and intangible resources and opportunities provided to historically marginalized populations will lag behind.
As we all know, Brown demanded the eradication of school assignment policies that kept children separated by race and kept Black children separated from the resources enjoyed by their white peers. The resulting impact for Black students cannot be overstated. Black students who experienced court-ordered school desegregation for 12 years of public schooling saw roughly a:
- 30 percent increase in likelihood of graduation;
- 30 percent increase in adult wages;
- 22 percent decrease in likelihood of incarceration; and
- 22 percent decrease in likelihood of poverty (Johnson & Nazaryan, 2019).
Mexican American students in California, too, experienced meaningful increases in educational attainment and graduation rates due to court-ordered school desegregation (Antman & Cortez, 2022). These gains only materialized when desegregation led to meaningful increases in school spending for Black and Hispanic students (Johnson & Nazaryan, 2019). Especially in the South, desegregation was one of the most effective school funding reforms in our nation’s history (Anstreicher et al., 2022).
The benefits of school desegregation extend beyond the opportunity to attend highly funded schools. Research that looks more broadly at the impact of a school’s socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) has found students from low-income backgrounds attending more affluent schools outperformed their peers attending high-poverty schools that received targeted funding (Schwartz, 2010). A consistent theory underlying the difference in performance is the impact of going to school with and forming social connections to peers from high-achieving and affluent families.
Despite the obvious benefits that accrued to Black and Hispanic students as a result of court-ordered desegregation, there has been a steady retreat away from desegregation as a strategy to achieve educational equity. This retreat, combined with white flight and an embrace of hyperlocalism in education policy, has permitted a rapid resegregation of America’s public schools (Black, 2023). This segregation is often most pronounced between districts, allowing school district boundaries to separate students of different backgrounds from each other and students of color and low-income students from the resources available in whiter and wealthier districts. And federal courts, once the locus of desegregation litigation, have become increasingly hostile to K-12 diversity efforts.
Efforts to achieve funding equity in the post-Brown era have been successful in many states leading to (sometimes) dramatic revisions of state school funding formulas to increase states’ contributions to poorer districts. These funding reforms have been impactful, especially for students living in poverty (Baker, 2016; Jackson & Mackevicius 2021). The success of school funding reforms, however, has been hampered by entrenched school segregation in many states. Even progressive school funding policies frequently cannot overcome the resource disparities caused by the school district borders that segregate and isolate by race and socioeconomic class.
It is important to recognize that neither increased school funding nor school desegregation are “silver bullets.” There are no silver bullets in education; how we teach, what we teach, who teaches, where we teach – every one of these things, and more, also matters (Alliance for Resource Equity, 2022). The country continues to struggle to ensure science-based reading strategies are taught, continues to work toward a more diverse teacher workforce, and continues to build cutting edge career and technical education programs aligned to the jobs of tomorrow. And it’s critical that students of color and students from low-income families benefit just as much as their peers from these critical efforts. Desegregated schools are an important safeguard to ensure that we all share in the fruits and costs of innovation collectively.
Today, unfortunately, school segregation is as rampant as it was in the late 1960s, and not surprisingly, schools and districts with high numbers of students of color and students living in poverty are under-funded, over-reliant on novice teachers, and less likely to provide rigorous coursework (McGrew, 2019; Morgan, 2022; Patrick et al., 2020). Across the country, many school district boundaries have been gerrymandered to reinforce patterns of segregation and inequality in resources. If we want to give students of color equal educational opportunity—and if we want to prepare students of every race to thrive in an increasingly diverse, interconnected world—children from all backgrounds need to learn together in excellent, well-resourced, diverse schools led by diverse educators. We must never stop advocating for more funding and resources in schools serving high concentrations of students living in poverty and students of color, but should also be tackling the broken borders, boundaries, and policies that create the concentrations of poverty and racial isolation in the first place. We founded Brown’s Promise to do just that.
The link between boundaries and resource inequity
District boundaries and school attendance lines undermine attempts to achieve resource equity. Examples of these segregative school boundaries can be found in every state. Let’s take Georgia’s Clayton County and Fayette County public schools, for example (see map above). These two counties are directly next to one another, just south of Atlanta. Pre-pandemic, Clayton County had a 24 percent poverty rate, and its student population was 98 percent non-white. The district’s median property value was $98,000. Meanwhile, neighboring district Fayette County had only a six percent poverty rate, a student population that was significantly less non-white (54 percent), and had a median property value nearly three times that of Clayton at $270,000. In a place like Georgia, where about 50 percent of education funding comes from local property tax revenue and the state funding is not sufficiently targeted to make up the difference, this means that Clayton spends substantially less per student than Fayette, even though Clayton serves students with four times the poverty. This difference in funding manifests in real differences in the resources offered in these two neighboring districts. To take just one example, Clayton’s nearly all Black and Hispanic students are exposed to novice teachers at a rate five times that of their peers in Fayette County.
Could Georgia fix this issue by just better targeting its dollars to Clayton County public schools, without tackling the borders themselves? It is true that there is significant room for improvement in Georgia’s funding formula, which is one of the very few in the country that has no additional funding for students living in poverty. But without addressing these segregating borders directly, leaders in Georgia and around the country will continue to struggle to achieve educational equity, because (1) it is more expensive to sufficiently fund schools mired by intense and segregated poverty; (2) a system funded largely by local property taxes requires a substantial (and politically unpopular) need to shift money from one district to another to achieve equal, much less equitable, funding; and (3) funding policy changes have not overcome patterns in which deeply segregated districts, schools, and classrooms serving students of color and low-income students are subjected to (e.g., the most teacher churn and fewest advanced courses). Indeed, in 2019, one only had to look a few miles north to Atlanta Public Schools to see that even spending $22,000 per student in a district with 31 percent poverty and 86 percent students of color often does not overcome the teacher churn problem – more than one in 10 teachers were in their first year in Atlanta, a rate of novice educators that is many times greater than the rates in other, less poverty-ridden, whiter districts carved out of the surrounding areas.
Strategies to address resource inequity have become siloed
Many litigators, advocates, and experts have dedicated their work to solving the problem of resource inequities in education in our country. However, those working on resource equity from a fair funding perspective tend to be significantly siloed from those working on resource equity from a school desegregation perspective, and vice versa.
Two Supreme Court cases in the mid-1970s helped to create this divergence in strategy. In 1973 the Supreme Court decided, in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez, that there was no federal constitutional right to a public education. Fair funding advocates responded by shifting to state court litigation, pursuing cases demanding better and more equitable resources for schools serving high concentrations of students of color and from low-income families based on state constitutional requirements to provide a public education. The following year, in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Court ruled that federal courts could not impose multidistrict, regional desegregation plans in the absence of any evidence that individual districts intentionally committed acts causing racial segregation. Integration advocates responded largely by pursuing federal court litigation and remedies focused on within-district desegregation. In the intervening 50 years, desegregation litigators and advocates have focused largely on federal courts and within-district desegregation strategies, while resource equity advocates have focused on state courts and between-district funding inequities.
These siloed strategies are reinforced by more than Supreme Court jurisprudence and litigation. For example, data availability has reinforced the division between researchers focused on school funding and those focused on integration. Student race and family income information is widely available at the school level, meaning that researchers can study and model levels of integration/segregation between schools within districts fairly easily – and they do. But until recently, there was no widespread data on per-pupil spending at the school level; the only way to assess funding inequities at scale was to analyze intradistrict spending patterns, which reinforced the idea that school funding work is about interdistrict lines. Moreover, integration was about school assignment boundaries within districts, and kept the two fields working in often parallel paths without building relationships, connections, and knowledge about the ways that these two issues so deeply impact one another.
For those reasons and more, today’s research, policy, legal, and advocacy landscape is striking. There are “school integration” organizations, researchers, and advocates that specifically dedicate time and attention to this issue. Yet the vast number of “education equity” organizations, researchers, advocates, and networks of changemakers who dedicate themselves to all types of resource equity – school funding, access to excellent educators, access to advanced coursework, school discipline inequities, social and emotional learning, STEM, arts, etc. – rarely discuss the role school segregation and integration play in hindering or advancing the work.
The work ahead
We can’t keep letting artificial school district and attendance boundaries separate students from opportunity—and from each other. We also must harness the energy and expertise from the often siloed fields of school finance and school desegregation into an integrated approach to education equity advocacy and litigation. We founded Brown’s Promise to catalyze a new wave of litigation, advocacy, and communications dedicated to supporting racially and socioeconomically diverse, well-resourced schools that are safe, affirming, and prepare each student for success. We will do this work in partnership with state and community-based advocates, ensuring that our strategies always seek to center the experiences of the students, families, and communities that have been historically foreclosed from opportunity in this country.
We are unlikely to overcome our country’s proclivity towards unequally distributing educational resources to students of color unless there is a significant movement towards school desegregation once again. As Nikole Hannah-Jones said, “Parents demanded integration only after they realized that in a country that does not value black children the same as white ones, black children will never get what white children get unless they sit where white children sit.” Past integration efforts were undoubtedly successful at advancing resource equity and the results are borne out in the data showing significant improvements in outcomes for Black and Hispanic students. And yet, today, efforts to advance educational equity (e.g., state court litigation, funding formula policy change, policy advocacy related to access to non-novice teachers, advanced coursework, and school funding) are almost universally silent on the need to tackle segregation and advance meaningful school integration as a step in this journey. Brown’s Promise will help to shine a light on the important intersection of school funding and school segregation, and work to create proof points from which we hope to drive a more national reform strategy to break down barriers between students and education opportunities.
References
Anstreicher, G. Fletcher, J. & Thompson, O. (2022). The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation, Working Paper No. 29926. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Antman, F. & Cortez, K. (2022). The Long Run Impacts of Mexican-American School Desegregation, Discussion Paper No. 15019. IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Baker, B. (2016). Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition. Albert Shanker Institute.
Black, D. W. (2023). Localism, Pretext, and the Color of School Dollars. Minnesota Law Review, 107, 1415.
Jackson, C. K. & Mackevicius, C. (2021). The Distribution of School Spending Impacts Working Paper No. 28517. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Patrick, K., Socol, A., & Morgan, I. (2020). Inequities in Advanced Coursework: What’s Driving Them and What Leaders Can Do. The Education Trust.
Morgan, I. (2022). Equal Is Not Good Enough, An Analysis of School Funding Equity Across the US and Within Each State. The Education Trust.
Johnson, R., & Nazaryan, A. (2019). Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. Basic Books and Russell Sage Foundation Press.
Alliance for Resource Equity. (2022). Dimensions of Equity (https://educationresourceequity.org/dimensions-of-equity/).
Schwartz, H. (2010). Housing Policy Is School Policy: Economically Integrative Housing Promotes Academic Success in Montgomery County, Maryland. The Century Foundation.
McGrew, W. (2019). U.S. School Segregation in the 21st Century: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions. Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Saba Bireda (saba.bireda@brownspromise.org) and Ary Amerikaner (ary.amerikaner@brownspromise.org) are Co-Founders of Brown’s Promise (www.brownspromise.org).
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