Happy birthday to my wife of 39 years! Today is her big day. Happy Birthday sweetie!
According to a new study covered in a recent article by The 74, although low-performing districts have received more money when it comes to per pupil expenditures, the additional money funded did not make a difference when it came to narrowing the country’s long-standing achievement gap.
“Over the past decade, more than a dozen states have overhauled their K-12 finance systems to make them fairer for low-income families, students with disabilities and those learning English. Given that a disproportionate number of those students are Black and Hispanic, many see changing the way states fund schools as a tenet of racial justice – a change to chip away at generations of systemic racism that’s kept students of color from accessing a quality education.”
“But new research suggests that in an attempt to right these inequities, those reforms often got it wrong.”
“State school finance policies designed to close funding gaps between high- and low-income districts did not reduce racial and ethnic funding inequities and in some cases increased them, according to a study published…by the American Educational Research Association.”
“’I was quite surprised. And depressed frankly,’ said Emily Rauscher, lead co-author and professor at Brown University. ‘My guess going into the study was that these income based school finance reforms that worked to reduce inequality of funding by income would also at least slightly help reduce racial inequality of funding.’”
“The U.S. is unique in that school district budgets are tethered to property taxes, meaning schools in wealthier communities automatically start with a larger pot of local funding. Since school desegregation efforts slowed after the 1980s, civil-rights minded policymakers have tried fixing this discrepancy between low-income districts that serve lots of students of color and rich districts that serve lots of white students by directing more money to districts with more low-income kids.”
“State funds are typically distributed through a formula, or set of formulas, that send money to districts. From there, districts send it to schools. Each state uses different criteria in their formulas, but most try to target at least a portion of their funds to school districts that enroll lots of students with greater needs and those that struggle to raise funds from property taxes. Sometimes, courts make them do it.”
“According to the Education Law Center, the number of states with so-called ‘progressive’ funding systems – where high-poverty districts receive more per-student funding than low-poverty districts – more than doubled, from 13 states in 2012 to 28 in 2022. States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, California, and Colorado saw some of the largest gains in funding equity during this period. As it stands, more than half of the 48 states studies have at least a modestly progressive distribution of state and local funding, providing at least 5% additional funding to high-poverty districts. That is twice as many states as a decade ago.”
“But Raucher and co-author Jeremy Fiel, a professor at Rice University, found that while these reforms narrowed funding gaps by income, they did not lessen – and sometimes widened – disparities by race and ethnicity.”
“Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers examined the effects of school finance reforms across the U.S. from 1990 to 2022. They found that such policies reduced school spending gaps between the highest and lowest-income districts by over $1,300 per pupil on average. However, the reforms also increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students – by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.”
“Reforms were more effective at reducing racial disparities in states where those inequities were already relatively modest. In contrast, reforms were less effective, or even regressive, in states with high levels of racial and economic segregation between school districts. In these more segregated states, reforms not only exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities but also failed to narrow economic gaps.”
“While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and pollical processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. May court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that state must target racial and ethnic inequality.”
“Notably, the funding reforms worked best at directing money to historically marginalized students in districts that were less segregated, likely a reflection of separate policies aimed at supporting students of color, low-income students and their families, Rauscher said. Moreover, the study showed that the biggest inequities exist between states – not within them.”
“Rauscher offered that it’s likely not random that states funding their education systems the least are also the ones with the highest concentration of students of color. And that’s exactly why, she said, the federal government needs to step up to fix it.”
…
“’You’re never going to have a funding formula that says we’re going to add x hundreds of dollars per Black student in each state, because that’s just not a viable policy,’ says Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. ‘We’ve had these differences all along, and there’s no way that you’re going to suddenly get the federal government stepping in on overall spending differences between states.’”
Hanushek is right, especially since the federal government seems disinterested in providing education equity for public school students moving forward. Witness the serious cuts in funding and manpower at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the department who historically has been responsible for such work.
I’ve told this story before, but it bears repeating here. Jerry Weast, then superintendent of Montgomery County schools, a suburb of Washington D.C., led impressive reading and math increased back in the early part of this century. When asked how the district achieved such results – if it was outstanding teaching, creative leadership, improved curriculum, or high-stakes testing – Weast answered that it was none of that. The reason Montgomery County saw their kids become smarter and stronger in reading, writing, and problem-solving was because of housing policy changes throughout the county. In effect, the country integrated itself racially and ethnically based on housing policy changes made. The “Montgomery County Miracle” had nothing to do with what was going to educationally in their schools. The difference was where they were going to draw lines so that poor families and rich families started to live together in the same neighborhoods again.
Now how many municipal leaders are going to vote to make that type of decision in 2025?
Few, if any.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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