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Excerpted from Poverty & Race, Volume 32, No.2 (April – July 2023)
Osamudia James
In September 2021, The New York Times Magazine featured a story about school reform. The article, “The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools,” considered population loss and government disinvestment as central to school reform. Featured in the story was Holmes County Consolidated School District, a rural school district in Mississippi that lacked the tax base to provide its children with an adequate education. The impact of race in creating funding challenges was implied, although not directly engaged. All but 12 of Holmes County’s 3,000 students were Black. A featured student and new superintendent, James Henderson, both attempting to make changes, were Black. White parents seemed to have abandoned the district’s public schools. In detailing the failed school bond initiative that the new superintendent believed would have improved educational outcomes for district students, the article included a series of key observations: a white woman offered to pay a Black person to record a radio advertisement opposing the bond, a white man told a Black woman he wouldn’t support “that bond for a colored school,” and Superintendent Henderson did not spot a single white person voting on election day.
Inequality in the American school system is increasingly framed as a function of class. In response to education law doctrine hostile to race-conscious remedies, K-12 schools as well as institutions of higher education embrace “race-neutral” policies that consider socioeconomic status rather than racial or ethnic identity. Racial segregation, if acknowledged, is no longer understood as the product of intentional policies that trap and isolate students of color and their families in underserved communities and school districts. Rather, racial concentration and isolation are products of individual “choices.” Against this backdrop of race-neutral education inequality, school finance disparities are presented as simply the unfortunate outcome of the more limited resources of communities of color. When race is addressed, racial disparities in school finance and school finance reform litigation are framed as a reflection—and a sometimes unconscious one, at that—of broader social attitudes regarding race, without interrogating how deeply race is embedded in funding decisions and policy itself. The only way to ensure equal educational opportunity, however, is by reckoning directly with race. Addressing educational funding disparities, then, requires a more clear-eyed assessment of the ways in which school finance is informed by a history of racial subordination, and continues to work today as a tool of racial subordination.
Our current school financing system, for example, is anchored in the notion of local control. That is, school districts control the resources they raise for their school system through property taxes. In the South, however, it was only racism that made local school property taxes palatable. Indeed, in some Southern states prior to disenfranchisement, local school taxes were constitutionally limited or prohibited at the discretion of the electorate. While wealthy landowners opposed school taxes believing that they received limited benefits therefrom, middle-class white parents also opposed higher school taxes believing it to be a boon to Black residents who owned less taxable wealth. Disenfranchisement, however, dampened opposition. After decimation of the Black electorate, state constitutions in Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina all amended their state constitutions to permit the levy of school taxes.
As the country approached the late nineteenth century, school finance continued to develop as a tool for upholding racial privilege. States circumvented equal funding by apportioning school funding by the taxes paid by Black and white taxpayers. The proceeds of these taxes were placed under the control of white local officials who were given discretion over the allocation of funds. Other localities used the “cash value” of Black students to fund white schools. Since state funds were allocated to counties on the basis of the total school-age population, white school boards in control of counties in which the Black population was high simply diverted funds from Black schools to white schools, yielding a significant return when using those funds for a considerably lower number of white students. At other times, insufficient funding was deemed a legitimate reason to close Black schools altogether while maintaining schools for white students.
During the mid-20th century, school finance, in the form of tax policy, facilitated white abandonment of Black schools. To be sure, courts have affirmed the right of parents to make private educational decisions for their children. That “right,” however, informed the creation of tax-exempt segregation academies in response to desegregation. It is tempting to think about this link between school finance and racism as a relic, if not a thing of the past. As the argument would go, segregation academies no longer exist, and even if they did, they would surely be denied tax-exempt status today. The segregation academies that opened as a symbol of white resistance to racial equality, however, are still in operation today, enrolling students absent a formal commitment to segregation. Their overwhelmingly white student bodies reflect an ongoing exclusion of non-white students and their families, however informal that exclusion may be. And, increasingly, education savings accounts, tax credits, and voucher programs provide parents with public money to send their children to private institutions that help carry the legacy of white supremacy forward.
In the public realm, the right of white people to avoid people of color in schools is still affirmed through doctrine that prevents states from reaching across school district lines to integrate school systems absent showings of explicit segregation. School finance policies prioritize local control, prohibiting cross-district resource sharing to a particularly racialized effect given the reality of inter-district segregation in the United States. The increasing trend of school district succession fights only further highlights how racial exclusion is anchored in school finance (seceded districts tend to have larger shares of white families and are more affluent than the districts from which they seceded). Finally, research suggests that white taxpayers are more likely to vote for school funding when they believe they can maintain control over how it is spent.
These tendencies work alongside beliefs that higher spending is simply “wasted” on Black school districts because increased expenditures simply don’t work. School finance decisions, then, are used as cover for hostility toward communities of color. And this intentional behavior is driven by white taxpayer and voter consciousness, a mental frame that positions whites as “makers” and non-whites as “takers,” and to which finance and taxing policy cater. As these dynamics illustrate, racial disparities in school finance are not abstract structural problems, nor are they merely an unfortunate reflection of racial isolation and segregation in schools. Rather, racial disparities in school finance continue to function as a form of resistance to Black freedom.
This resistance, however, is a bigger problem than just finance. In Holmes County, Mississippi, although white families there abandoned the County’s Black schools, they still retain the power to vote down the bond initiatives that would improve educational outcomes for the students they left behind. With their departure to private schools and former segregation academies legitimated by doctrine, they are further permitted to exercise a veto regarding the future of the students that doctrine did not protect. Absent explicit racial animus, courts are both unable and unwilling to reach the “private” schooling decisions of individuals in public school systems. School finance, then, is not only a tool of racial exclusion but the manifestation of democratic defects.
In their influential article on school finance published in 1970, authors Coons, Clune, and Sugarman warned against turning school finance into a racial issue: “There will surely be enough upset over [school finance] on social and economic grounds without evoking all the furies of racism.” The authors, however, were wrong. Despite the anxieties that claims about race raise, understanding the ways in which school finance functions as both a reflection of larger patterns of racism and as an explicit tool of racial subordination is exactly how school finance must be engaged. From tax exemptions for schools that formerly functioned as segregation academies, to the legally protected patterns of white flight that deepen segregation while further embedding racially disparate school financing, to bond voting that denies people of color democratic participation and representation, school finance is deeply implicated in contemporary racial subordination.
References
Coons, J. E., Clune III, W. H., & Sugarman, S. D. (1970). Private Wealth and Public Education. Harvard University Press. James, O. (2014).
Opt-out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination. Iowa Law Review, 99, 1083. Parks, C. (2021).
“The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools.” The New York Times Magazine.
Osamudia James (ojames@unc.edu) is Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
