Sign up for PRRAC’s biweekly newsletter here.
Excerpted from Poverty & Race, Volume 32, No.2 (April – July 2023)
Ann Owens
School segregation contributes to inequalities in educational and later life outcomes. Because of the long legacy of structural racism and income inequality in the United States, children from different backgrounds bring unequal economic, social, and political resources to their schools. Scholars should focus on documenting the specific inequalities that segregation creates, rather than simply positing that separate schools are unequal. To be clear—separate nearly always means unequal in the U.S., but evidence on the resource inequities that segregation creates and the mechanisms through which segregation leads to unequal outcomes is needed to develop specific policy solutions.
Segregation between school districts is particularly consequential because districts administer school funding, one key resource for children’s educational success. Racial/ethnic segregation between school districts in the U.S. is so high that in 2021, 90 percent of students of color attended school in just 15 percent of districts (author’s calculations). That is, the vast majority of the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts serve only a trivial number of non-white students. Similarly, about 70 percent of total economic segregation is due to segregation between districts, rather than between schools in the same districts (Owens et al., 2022). Scholarly and popular narratives about why school segregation matters often focus on inequality in school funding, stating that because public schools are funded in part by local property taxes, high levels of residential segregation mean that white and higher-income children live in wealthier districts with better-funded schools. Local property taxes do play a role in school funding—on average, nearly half of K-12 school district revenues come from local sources, mainly local property taxes (though the share varies considerably across states) (Baker et al., 2023). State and federal funding, however, offset disparities in local property values between districts in most places. State-level school finance reforms and federal programs like Title I have resulted in a convergence in total per-pupil revenues, on average, among high- and low-income districts over the past few decades (Bischoff & Owens, 2019; Lafortune et al., 2018).
Today, there are not large disparities in total per-pupil expenditures in the schools of students of different racial/ethnic identities (Bischoff & Owens, 2019; Owens, 2020; Sosina & Weathers, 2019). Despite high levels of segregation between districts, public school per-pupil expenditures are near equal between the districts of students from different racial/ethnic or economic backgrounds, or even progressive or compensatory toward historically disadvantaged groups (additional resources available through nonprofits and other privately-funded organizations may be more unequal). These averages, however, mask variation produced by segregation between school districts. From 1990 to 2007, school spending was increasingly progressive in states with high levels of income segregation between districts—that is, in highly segregated states, expenditures were higher in the average low-income child’s district than in the average high-income child’s district, and increasingly so over time. However, the trend reversed from 2007 to 2014 – perhaps due to state budget crises caused by the 2008 financial crisis that limited their ability to offset local inequalities – school spending became less progressive in highly segregated states (Bischoff & Owens, 2019). With respect to racial/ethnic segregation, per-pupil expenditures became less compensatory toward Black students’ districts in states with rising segregation of Black and white students between districts from 1999 to 2013 (Sosina & Weathers, 2019).
Despite these troubling trends away from progressive spending, school finance policies appear to have reduced or eliminated large inequalities in total expenditures by students’ race/ethnicity or income in most states, compensating for unequal property taxes caused by residential segregation. However, equal funding is not sufficient to produce equal outcomes, given the large racial/ethnic and income inequalities that exist in neighborhoods and family resources (created, in part, by the multigenerational effects of residential and school segregation). School funding must be progressive, and it is in many states, following a second wave of school finance reform over the last 30 years focused on providing the resources necessary for every child to have an adequate education (Baker et al., 2019). A key challenge, though, is to determine how progressive funding must be to account for the higher cost of adequately educating a student from a historically disadvantaged background, who may have greater needs. Estimates of the required progressivity levels vary widely. For example, Verstegen (2011) found that, among states that used weights in funding formulas in 2007, weights reflecting how much additional funding was required to educate a low-income student ranged from an additional five percent in Mississippi to an additional 100 percent in Minnesota.
Moreover, the higher costs of adequately educating a single higher-needs student are exacerbated by segregation between school districts and the concentration of many higher-needs students in some districts. Drawing on a national cost model that estimates per-pupil funding levels adequate to achieve test scores at the national average, Bruce Baker and colleagues find that the typical white student’s district provides more than adequate funding, while the typical Black and Hispanic student’s district provides inadequate funding (Baker et al., 2022). Racial/ ethnic gaps in adequate funding are larger in places where segregation between school districts is greater. One additional consideration is what per-pupil expenditures are buying. Administrative, infrastructure, instructional, and social service needs likely vary across schools depending on the number of high-needs students, and certain categories may require more progressive spending than others.
Scholars, journalists, and policymakers should turn away from the simplistic claim that socially advantaged children attend school in districts with higher expenditures than the districts of lower-income and racially-minoritized children. This is not borne out in research. Those concerned with the (very real) deleterious effects of segregation should document the specific inequalities in opportunities and outcomes that segregation creates via a wide range of mechanisms, including school spending. In terms of funding, this requires a nuanced analysis of the costs of producing educational equity, which requires progressive, not equal, school funding.
References
Baker, B. D., Di Carlo, M., & Green III, P. C. (2022). Segregation and School Funding: How Housing Discrimination Reproduces Unequal Opportunity. Albert Shanker Institute.
Baker, B. D., Di Carlo, M., & Oberfield, Z. W. (2023). The Source Code: Revenue Composition and the Adequacy, Equity, and Stability of K-12 School Spending. Albert Shanker Institute.
Baker, B. D., Di Carlo, M., & Weber, M. (2019). The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems. Albert Shanker Institute.
Bischoff, K., & Owens, A. (2019). The Segregation of Opportunity: Social and Financial Resources in the Educational Contexts of Lower- and Higher-Income Children, 1990–2014. Demography, 56 (5).
Lafortune, J., Rothstein, J., & Schanzenbach, D. W. (2018). School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10 (2), 1–26.
Owens, A. (2020). Unequal Opportunity: School and Neighborhood Segregation in the USA. Race and Social Problems, 12 (1), 29–41.
Owens, A., Reardon, S. F., Kalogrides, D., Jang, H., & Tom, T. (2022). Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Economic School Segregation, 1991-2020. The Segregation Index.
Sosina, V. E., & Weathers, E. S. (2019). Pathways to Inequality: Between-District Segregation and Racial Disparities in School District Expenditures. AERA Open, 5 (3).
Verstegen, D. A. (2011). Public Education Finance Systems in the United States and Funding Policies for Populations with Special Educational Needs. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 19, 1–30.
Ann Owens (annowens@usc.edu) is Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Public Policy and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California.
