Report: White school districts receive more funds than non-white
11th March 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Widening wealth disparities within states and across individual school districts have caused significant gaps in funding between mostly white school districts and predominantly non-white districts, a new study has found.
According to a report recently released by EdBuild, a research and advocacy group dedicated to bringing common sense and fairness to the nation’s public-school funding system, mostly-white districts as a whole receive $23 billion more annually than do districts comprised mostly by non-white students.
The report stated that mostly-white communities and corresponding school districts tend to be wealthier and more well off economically than predominantly non-white communities and districts. Because the American school system is largely funded locally through property taxes, this discrepancy in wealth between largely-white and mostly-non-white results in the poorer, non-white school districts receiving less funding than mostly-white districts.
“Our economically and racially divided school districts have grown up out of the root of local funding,” the report said. “But for decades we’ve been solving for the inequities at the end of its branches. The co-mingling of the way districts are governed with the way that they are funded has led to an endlessly unfair system that is stacked against our most vulnerable children.
“We now have a system where wealth is preserved for the lucky – disproportionately fractured and locked away in racially concentrated white school districts. This is unlikely to change unless we finally commit to challenging the funding aspect of local control.”
EdBuild Chief Programs Officer Matt Richmond said that, sadly, such stark disparities, when quantified and analyzed, were not much of a shock to the researchers.
“We were not particularly surprised,” Richmond told The Louisiana Weekly. “Unfortunately, this is exactly what we expected. The fact that racial segregation causes the same results [as earlier studies] was not particularly shocking.”
Richmond said that EdBuild’s researchers were somewhat taken aback, however, by the starkness and size of the funding disparities.
“The scope of the problem and how clear the results were was a little surprising,” he said. “Usually, our study results are a little more ambiguous.”
Richmond said the decentralized operational model for the American public-school system almost necessarily brings with it a complex, locally-based funding method that, through local property taxes, is dependent on how wealthy and economically developed each individual school district is; the higher a community’s tax base, the more funding its school district can raise.
The contrasts become augmented when wealthier – and frequently mostly-white – communities intentionally and out of self-interest draw their school-district boundaries that further exclude poorer, non-white neighborhoods and, as a result, effectively segregates districts along both socioeconomic and racial lines.
“Because we do have a history of segregation – racial segregation and economic segregation – that allows communities with larger tax bases to segregate themselves from those with smaller tax bases, and the result is not good for school funding,” Richmond said.
“Wealthier districts use whatever means possible to draw a line between these mostly-white communities and those with a higher percentage of non-white residents,” he added.
Aside from adjusting the amount of state aid used to supplement each school district’s funding, perhaps the most practical and effective method for evening out the gap in local funding between disparate communities is to boost the tax bases of those poorer, mostly-non-white districts, Richmond said.
By recruiting more businesses to locate in such districts and encouraging local entrepreneurs to start or expand their own ventures – and as such attracting more residents to the area – communities can expand their tax bases, which would result in more local school funding via property taxes.
“That would play a large role in smoothing out these discrepancies in school funding,” he said.
However, assessing how much these discrepancies occur in Louisiana – and in the charter school-based Orleans Parish School Board system in particular – is somewhat tricky, Richmond said.
The new EdBuild study examined the nation’s roughly 130,000 individual school districts and found that about 7,600 of them featured student bodies that were more than 75 percent white, while there were about 1,200 districts with student populations that were more than 75 percent non-white.
The amount of total local tax funding for the non-white districts was $54 billion, or roughly $4,500 per student, compared to $77 billion, or about $7,000 per student, for white school districts.
However, the number of individual districts in Louisiana with more than 75 percent white student bodies totaled only seven, while only 10 were more than 75 percent non-white, making for small sample sizes and means that assessing the situation in Louisiana is “a little tricky,” Richmond said.
There were enough results to conclude that Louisiana was actually one of the 14 states in which largely non-white districts receive more funding than mostly white districts. However, because urban Orleans Parish has a large property tax base and a bigger population than smaller, more rural school districts, Orleans quite possible skews the funding discrepancies for the state as a whole, Richmond said.
That means that while the OPSB might have a relatively rosy school-funding situation, other districts in the state are quite possibly much worse off.
Beyond that, Richmond said, the overall school-funding picture for Louisiana is somewhat cloudier than in other states, and how the charter-school public-education system in Orleans Parish that was implemented on a wide scale after Hurricane Katrina effects the localized results of the EdBuild research is similarly tough to ascertain.
“It’s very important to contextualize the numbers in each state,” Richmond said. “Louisiana is a good example of that. What’s happening [specifically] in Orleans is really going to matter in terms of interpreting these results.”
This article originally published in the March 11, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
