Segregation and School Funding: How Housing Discrimination Reproduces Unequal Opportunity

N

98

Racial Segregation; Ethnicity; Educational Finance; Racial Bias; Educational Equity (Finance); United States History; Housing; Socioeconomic Status; Taxes; Income; Elementary Secondary Education; Urban Areas; School Districts; Minority Group Students; African American Students; Hispanic American Students; White Students; Public Schools; Expenditure per Student; Residential Patterns; Neighborhoods; Government Role; Ownership; Desegregation Litigation; School Desegregation; Educational History; Zoning; Academic Achievement

Maryland (Baltimore); California; Alabama (Birmingham); Connecticut (Hartford); Kansas (Kansas City); Missouri (Kansas City); Texas (San Antonio); Minnesota (Minneapolis); Minnesota (Saint Paul); Wisconsin; California (Oakland); California (San Francisco)

It is difficult to overstate the importance of segregation for race- and ethnicity-based school funding disparities in the United States. In many respects, unequal educational opportunity depends existentially on segregation. Racial and ethnic disparities in wealth accumulation are perpetuated over generations, ensuring persistent segregation even after explicitly racist housing discrimination was outlawed. This process has had serious and lasting implications for many important outcomes, including modern school funding equity. The mutually dependent relationship between economic and racial/ethnic segregation simultaneously depresses revenue and increases costs in racially isolated districts, creating a self-sustaining cycle of unequal opportunity and unequal outcomes. The descriptive analysis presented in this report examines this process, both nationally and with a focus on seven metropolitan areas: Baltimore (Maryland), the Bay Area (California), Birmingham (Alabama), Hartford (Connecticut), Kansas City (Kansas/Missouri), San Antonio (Texas), and the Twin Cities (Minnesota/Wisconsin).

ERIC

2022

ED620896